An Argument For Religious Establishment by Rev. Benjamin Glaser

 

To start out today I am going to make you read all of this:

“That all Kings and Princes at their coronation, and reception of their princely authority, shall make their faithful promise by their solemn oath, in the presence of the eternal God, that, enduring the whole time of their lives, they shall serve the same eternal God, to the uttermost of their power, according as he hath required in His most holy Word, contained in the Old and New Testament; and according to the same Word shall maintain the true religion of Christ Jesus, the preaching of His holy Word, the due and right ministration of the sacraments now received and preached within this realm, (according to the Confession of Faith immediately preceding) and shall abolish and [withstand] all false religion contrary to the same; and shall rule the people committed to their charge, according to the will and command of God revealed in His foresaid Word, and according to the laudable laws and constitutions received in this realm, nowise repugnant to the said will of the eternal God; and shall procure, to the uttermost of their power, to the kirk of God, and whole Christian people, true and perfect peace in all time coming: and that they shall be careful to root out of their empire all heretics and enemies to the true worship of God, who shall be convicted by the true kirk of God of the foresaid crimes”.

If you made it this far, I commend you.

In a just and good world we would have heard King Charles III in recent days repeat the above, but not seeking to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good I’ll take the language we have heard from the newest head royal of Britain and others including the Honorable MP, Prime Minister Liz Truss in the past couple of weeks since the death of her majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Now, I am a red-blooded American, a Marine Corps vet, and the descendant of a veteran of the Battles of King’s Mountain and Cowpens and certainly hold no personal love for the British Crown. I am a Republican (not necessarily in the party sense of that word) through and through.

…HOWEVER…

What we have been witnessing is one of the blessings of Religious Establishment. The otherwise non-religiously bound have been forced because of the nature of the Established Church to use religiously pleasant language to report the death of the Queen. That’s a good thing, and has nothing to do with what form of government you happen to have. Samuel Rutherford laid the groundwork for the American Revolution when he penned Lex, Rex. In that book our forefather in the faith who had the intestinal fortitude to die in his bed rather than be executed by tyrants gave rise to the whole idea of the Constitution, rather than the King or the State, being the law of the land. Of course in the United Kingdom that concept goes all the way back to Magna Carta.

The reason I mention all of that is because in a Covenanted nation with an Established Church even rank unbelievers are made to give homage to the very word of the living God, for it is the rule of faith and practice. An aside worth exploring here is the way in which frontier Finneyism has obliterated a right understanding of faith. Like 12^th Century mystics evangelicals have hoodwinked the world into thinking that Christianity is a personal religion, an individual thing between you and God. Yet, when one examines Scripture and church history you see that reducing the religion of Jesus into Buddhism is baloney. While we certainly believe in regeneration of the particular human being through the proclamation of the word there is sense in which Baptism, for an example, and the signs of the Covenant, and the Table, point to something far more important than Tom and Jane Believer. As I say all the time when teaching on Baptism we don’t Baptize people into nothing. It’s why you can’t just take someone down to the lake at camp and throw water on them and act like they’ve fulfilled all righteousness. It is a corporate act encompassing a corporate representative applying the corporate sign of membership into the corporate body. I know some people will get the vapors when I say this, but Christianity is a Nationalistic Religion. When our Lord speaks of unity in John 17 He means it. All the world is to be Christian, it was never meant to be, and never should be, one option out of dozens. Everyone should be a Christian. We certainly don’t get there by the sword, but we won’t get there being all namby pamby about it either. There is nothing wrong with being Sectarian when your sect is the right one.

The heresy of rugged individualism might be popular in Westerns (peace be upon them), but you need to prepare yourself to fall over and pass out at what I am getting ready to say.

A Catholic Pope was right about something.

Pope Pius IX writing in the 1860s condemned what he called “Americanism”. Without getting too deep into the weeds here what he meant by that was the growing trend, largely found among American bishops, of an interest in defending disestablishmentarianism, or for those lacking google, the separation of Church and State. The Antichrist actually has a point. What he was rightly noting, while doing so from a position of grossness, was the way in which Modernism had taken the idea of identity and filleted it like a fish, reinventing how people saw themselves. As a kid I always thought it silly to tell my classmates that they could be whatever they wanted to be when they grew up. I wasn’t going to be an Astronaut no matter how much I willed it. I was blind as a bat, unable to do basic math, and claustrophobic. That ain’t happening. According to what Pope Pius IX was on about it was just as moronic to think the two sons of oil (Zech. 4:14) could function separately from one another. The Church and the State are both under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and to act like one can just kind of “exist” separate from the other is philosophically untenable. As Establishment was undermined in Germany, France, and Spain the Church went with it. It wasn’t just Schleiermacher’s feel good religion that gutted the Church on the Continent, it was the people being told by their leaders that the priests of bureaucracy, politicians, etc.. were to be the source of identity and hope.

How’d that work out? Seems like we had a century of hundreds of millions of deaths.

As I wrap up on this the big picture question is who is going to be the god of the State, because they are going to have one. The United States is no different. Don’t be fooled. No one can actually be disestablished. Some deity will take over the masthead which alone belongs to Jesus Christ. The State is not an amoral being. They will teach some religion to their citizens.

The question is will we, as ‘Merica, have our politicians and statesmen speaking the words of eternal life, or eternal death. What is going to be our Book of Common Prayer? The Solemn League and Covenant or Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals? Karl Marx or the Apostle Paul?

Have a great Lord’s Day and enjoy your Sabbath Rest.