Hello and welcome to Generations. My name is Dave Buhner, filling in for Kevin Swanson today. Today, we have a special show lined up for you. But as we get going here, I want to talk about the issue of authority. What's authority? Not power, not the power of a government to do something, which is the ability to compel you to do something, but authority. What is authority? Well, authority, of course, is God giving some of his authority to another. But what is God's authority? But it's his moral prerogative. his ethical prerogative. Because he is a creator, he has authority over all of his creation. He can create it for whatever purpose he wants. And he gives authority. He establishes jurisdictions of authority in different places. He gives authority to families. He gives authority to Churches, he gives authority to civil magistrates, we would call these three different jurisdictions. And by the way, he gives authority to individuals to be self governed. And these would be the four classic governments that we would talk about. And they all start with the idea of authority. To understand authority, we need to understand what was God's purpose. What did God give authority to the individual to do? Well, that was to fear Him and worship Him. What did He give authority to the family to do? Well, He gave the dominion mandate. In Genesis 1 and Genesis 9, and then he repeats it in Ephesians 6, a family is to create more members of the family, that is to fill the earth and to take dominion and subdue it. Economics. Economics belong in the jurisdiction of the family. The church is not to become corporations that build widgets and sell them in the marketplace. And by the way, now there's the governments. The state government of Colorado is not to be making widgets and selling them, and now there's the federal government. When a government makes widgets and tries to sell them, it's either communism or fascism, depending on one layer of ownership. But what is then the authorized purpose of the civil magistrate? Well, the purpose of the civil magistrate is given to us in Romans chapter 13. In Romans chapter 13, Paul is very explicit and clear that the government, the civil magistrate government, the thing that meets in Washington and in this state, in Denver, exists as God's minister. It cannot be secular. Anybody who claims that the government is a secular government is writing contra Paul, against what Paul says, because Paul says in Romans 13, that every soul should be subject to the governing authorities. Now it hasn't said civil magistrate here. It could be the governing authorities of a house, a household, a church or a magistrate who says there is no authority except from God. It tells us that all authority flows from the Creator and the authorities exist and are appointed by God. Whoever resists authority, resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. So if you don't honor your father and you disobey him, you're going to bring judgment. Of course, we hear that in the fifth commandment that you will not receive blessings, but rather you'll receive curses if you break the fifth commandment. And likewise, if you're not obeying and not honoring the elders of the church, We're told in the book of Hebrews that this would be bad for you. This would not go well for you. And likewise, the civil magistrates, if you do not obey the civil magistrate, the government over the civic realm, then it will be bad for you. Because he says in verse 3 of Romans 13, for the rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. And here we see one of the first purposes. The civil magistrate is to be a terror. to evil. Now, what is evil? Well, evil has to be defined by the law of God. You can't define evil any other way, otherwise you might call good evil and evil good, and this is one of the curses of not using lawful authority. Lawful authority, then, is God giving some men, civil magistrates, his authority to be a terror to what he defines as evil. That's their role and not too good so that you're not to be afraid because he does not bear the sword in vain. And this tells us how the civil magistrate is to operate. He bears the sword and the sword is an instrument of death and execution. Now he can use the sharp end of the sword and remove your head and kill you and stab you. Or he can use the blunt end and more like spank you kind of thing. It's not the only way. that the magistrate might be involved, the civil magistrate might get involved by the word of God, by the law of God, by restoring something that is stolen. So a thief is told that he has to return what he stole plus four times that value. And the civil magistrate can enforce that. And if a man cannot repay it, he might go into servitude, for instance. That would be part of the blunt end of the sword. so to speak. Well, that's the authority that's given to the civil magistrate, the authority that's given to the church, we might see in Matthew 28. And in Matthew 28, we see that the authority is to go and make disciples of all nations by teaching them whatsoever things God has commanded. So one of the purposes of the church is teaching. And it goes on in Matthew 20, it said, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And from there, we understand that the other function of the church is a teaching ministry. It's also a ministry of the sacraments. And the sacraments, the baptizing, and the Lord's Supper are given to those who are in covenant with God. And what is the mission of the family? The dominion mandate. And what is the mission of the individual? But to fear God and keep his commandments. Well, this is the authority that God has given. But what happens when the church gets confused with what the state is supposed to do and starts taking over that, or the state starts taking over from the church? Well, in just a moment, we're going to talk to an author of a brand new book, one of the co-authors. We're going to talk to Lael Weinberger about his book, A Tale of Two Governments, when the church and the state Get real confused about who's who. Be back in just a moment. My name is Dave Buhner, Programs Generations. I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom. and the fear of God was the end of wisdom. The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing. Belief is the death of intelligence. If thou trustest to the book called the scriptures, thou trustest to the rotting staff of fables and falsehood. Faith is believing what you know ain't so. Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is in sight. The fool believes his own ideas to be wisdom, but those who fear God and search for understanding find true wisdom. To lead your family in the pursuit of godliness, pick up a copy of the Proverbs Study Guide at GenerationsWithVision.com Okay, we're back on the Generations Radio program here. Dave Buhner filling in for Kevin Swanson today. And on the phone is a special guest, Lyle Weinberger. He is the co-author of a brand new book called The Tale of Two Governments. The Tale of Two Governments. It's a little bit reminiscent of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Lyle, welcome to the program. Hey, thanks so much for having me. So is this A Tale of Two Cities? Well, not quite. But with that title, we were really trying to get across the idea that the church and the state, the ecclesial sphere and the civil sphere, are both governments. And we often think, too often think, just of the civil government when we say the word government here. So by saying two governments, and by using the cover image that we used where you've got a church building, and a government building facing each other, then you really get part of a sense that we're trying to make people think there are two governments. There's at least two governments. I open up the program talking about four governments, which is kind of classical reform theology. We have the government of the individual. You have to govern yourself. And I contend that if there isn't self-government, you can never have liberty in civil government. You have family governments. You know, dad is the head and mom is the second in command. They've been given the task of nurturing and admonishing the children, even disciplining the children. Children are given a responsibility to honor their mother and father's instructions. And then you have a church government, which is instituted by Christ himself. He's the head of that. It has its own purposes, largely to do with a teaching ministry, teaching whatsoever things I've commanded you, administering the sacraments, the Lord's Supper and the baptism. And there's things that we'll talk about are involved with that. And then you have the civil magistrate. And Paul makes clear in Romans 13, that God is the authority that authorizes the civil magistrates. So civil magistrates are something that God instituted himself, and they are giving the task of the sword to be a terror to evil. So we really have four governments. But in history, there's two of them that have done a lot of battle with each other, the church, And especially in the Middle Ages, we see the church sort of usurping the the civil magistrate. And now we see the civil magistrate usurping the authority in the jurisdiction of the church. How did all this happen? How did we get in such a mess? Well, I don't I certainly agree with you on the description of war government. And, and you're right in this book, we are just telling a story about two of them. And we're not trying to imply that there are that the other governments are any less important. But you're absolutely right. These two governments, church and state, have had a long and complicated and contentious relationship throughout church history. And it goes all the way back to the first few centuries of church history, where you see the Roman Empire falling. Augustine is writing his great work, The City of God, to try to explain what is going on in society. He writes about the fact that there are two cities. He calls them the City of Man and the City of God. And in that, there's a lot more to it than just church and state encompassed in that. And we can't really unpack Augustine's whole theology. But from that seed of thought of City of God, City of Man, you start tracing forward a lot of lines of thought. And the early establishment of elements of the Roman Catholic Church still recognized both government, both church and state, as legitimate. And Pope Galatius was one of the popes in about the 6th century who wrote about there being two swords. And we might quibble with his imagery here. But he said there's a sword for the church and a sword for the state or the emperor. This theory, though, that you've got sort of two co-equal powers is basically biblical, even though he may have picked the wrong picture of two swords. Paul gives the sword to the civil magistrate. Now, I want to back you up, and maybe it predates your book a little bit, but it seems to me, as an amateur historian and as a pastor, that this mess, we're going along through the time of the apostles, and we have a wicked civil magistrate by and large. We have the Roman Empire, which is pagan to its core, and along comes Constantine. And Constantine, at the Edict of Milan, not only makes it so that the church won't be persecuted, but it becomes favored. And at that point, it seems to me that the civil magistrate, through Constantine, is giving an endorsement of a sort of official state religion, so that the civil magistrate is choosing the faith of the people. Now, I'm not opposed to that necessarily, because a civil magistrate has to have faith commitments and you have to have a worldview. You have to have understand where your authority flows from. It either flows from Yahweh or it flows from the fact that you can beat up everybody else. So I'm not opposed to that. But by the time we get to Augustine, which seems to be where you started tracing here, The empire that Constantine was presiding over, especially in the West, in Rome, not so much in Constantinople, is falling down all around him. And Augustine is struggling. with the fall of Christendom, but the rise of Christianity, to coin two words, Christendom, being sort of a outward cultural acceptance of Christianity, but not really the power thereof. Jesus would have said, they have the the appearance of it, but not the power thereof. And that seems to be what Constantine is dealing with. Is he dealing with two jurisdictions or is he dealing with a culture and an inward reality? Well, Augustine is dealing primarily with, primarily talking about there is, yes, there's culture and there is a, as you said, an inward reality or, I might say, more of a spiritual reality. So, you do have some of these issues that come up later about, is this a nature-race dichotomy? I don't think Augustine would have been fully comfortable with going straight out nature-race dichotomy, but I think that when he talked about the city of man, and he was referring to the state as part of that, then talking about a city of God, he is talking also about, I think, a community of believers, and there is something that's not the centerpiece of Augustine's writing, but definitely had an influence. Okay, so after Rome falls, post-Augustine, events conspire and the church is able to grab a lot of power. Now, I might mention that just prior to Augustine, Augustine had a pastor himself who led him to the Lord Ambrose. Ambrose is very important in historical discussion because Ambrose, who is a pastor, the pastor bishop of Milan, actually excommunicates the emperor of the Roman Empire, Theodosius. And that's a place where we see the church. Now, he doesn't execute him, he doesn't stone him, he just forbids him from the Lord's Supper, meets him out in front of the church steps and tells him he's not going to take the Lord's Supper because there's blood on his hands. He restores him to communion. This is the emperor now of the Roman Empire. So at that little glimpse we see the church at least having a separate jurisdiction over the emperor. But in the Middle Ages, then the church gains a lot more power over the emperors, and the pope becomes the ultimate authority in Europe. How does that happen? Right. So we have this idea of two co-equal governments that kind of exist as the Roman Empire is splitting between East and West. Then, the big turning point really happened with Pope Gregory VII. He abandoned the doctrine of distinct spheres of authority for certain states in the most dramatic way. He was actually the pope, one of the popes that was formerly most strongly disliked. Calvin has some choice words of describing Gregory VII, but Gregory VII was the second piece of what's called the Papal Revolution, and he asserted church authority over the state, and other popes following immediately after him followed along with this. How does he do that? I mean, the Emperor has guards and armies, and the Pope has priests. How does he get the superior position? How does he accomplish this? Well, remember that across Europe, this gets back to the issue of church discipline, and what we might describe as the misuse of church discipline. The sacraments central to the understanding of faith and of religion and what the Church is fundamentally about, people across Europe. Because, remember, this is a point when the Scriptures are not in the vernacular. They're not in the common language. People don't have the Scriptures. Their contact with God is mediated, as they see it, through the Church, and their most direct contact comes through the sacrament. So, in a sense, through the Middle Ages, people have a view of the sacraments, the Lord's Table, that is much more important to them than what it is to us today. They view it, and they have a very high respect for it, but they have almost mystical veneration for it. So, when the Pope has the ability to excommunicate emperors, the Pope can really wield that as a way of saying, The emperor is cut off from the grace of God. He does not follow my instructions. And that happened in one case with Emperor Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, who opposed Gregory VII. And in 1076, Henry ignored the Pope's edict about church offices. Well, there are a lot of things that are wrong here. But the Pope then threatens to excommunicate Henry. When Henry tries to call the Pope's bluff, the Pope actually does excommunicate him. And to kind of enforce his power, to emphasize this, he requires Henry that if you want to be put back into good standing with the Church, then you have to come make a pilgrimage and do penance before me. And if you don't do that, really all of your immediate subjects under you, the other nobility, they're going to fall under spiritual sanction as well if they continue to help you stay in power. So basically, Henry has this choice. He has to submit to the Pope in all things or else the Pope, by virtue of his spiritual sanction, can tell all of the other members of government that uh... if you're if you're a big trouble for sticking up for recovery so henry classic thing he makes uh... winter journey to keep the pope he arrived in january the pope keeps him waiting for three days uh... according to the story henry's waiting there barefoot in the snow before painting mercy and absolution from the pope so gregory with this as kind of his is making an abject lesson out of uh... out of Henry the Emperor, Gregory has dramatically established the supremacy of church over the state. So there's all sorts of problems here. Of course, with the relationship of church and state, Henry hardly had the right idea. He was trying to appoint by government fiat people to church offices, which is also a terribly messed up relationship of church and state. But this kind of heavy-handed I'm going to set the policy attitude from Gregory really redoes the relationship with Churchill State that lasts to varying degrees until the Reformation. Right. It's almost like there was a big gambit that was played. And Henry IV, he called chicken first, and he got out of the way, and not only became an object lesson, but he became an abject lesson as well. We get to the Reformation. In the Reformation, of course, we have Luther standing up against the emperor. and the emperor's Roman Catholicism. And that creates a wedge for the German princes to move out from under the authority of the emperor at the time. But how does that work with the church? I mean, what's happening with Luther and church authority? Well, Luther and the church – Luther's perspective on the church is that very much an Augustinian perspective, trying to restore the idea of two spheres. But he's following Augustine also in some sense of making the city of man, the civil jurisdiction, somewhat separated from the domain of the church more strongly than later Calvinists might do. But the basic principle is there are two kingdoms. Luther talks about two kingdoms. There's the spiritual and the temporal. Not that one is higher than the other. The church is not over the state. The state is not over the church. But they're co-equal. They have different domains and different responsibilities. Okay, today we hear about two kingdoms as well, and I think they're meaning something else. Now, in Luther's view, were these two kingdoms, did they serve the same king? Were they under the same set of laws? Did they have the same goals? They did not have the same goal, but they were under the same ultimate authority, the authority of God. Their goal, Luther would say, were distinct, that there was more of a, again, natured race, a bit of this distinction that's still continued in Lutheran thought. The state has duties to all people, whereas the church has a duty to only the Christian believers. And the church is a ministry of grace, and the state is a minister of law and of order. Does that mean if the church is a ministry of grace, it does not engage in church discipline? Well, he emphatically believes in church discipline. What you might be a bit uncomfortable with, with overmuch church activism and trying to influence the affairs of those who are outside the church. So you mentioned there are different ideas of what two kingdoms is. So let me just see if I can sketch this in a really, really rough, overly simplistic way. But there are two versions. So there's the institutional version. Two kingdoms means church and state are separate and distinct, both under God. So we can use it that way. But then there's another version. Two kingdoms are really this, it's sort of the nature of grace thing again. We have this world, in some sense, which is operating on kind of the natural plane. God is over it, in some sense. But the Christian's primary responsibility in living out the life of the gospel is really living in this kingdom, this God-kingdom life. And there is this rather sharper distinction. Now, I, as a Kuyperian, Abraham Kuyper was an important Christian writer and theorist who talked about the importance of a Christian taking the principles of God's Word into all of life. So I would be uncomfortable with the second half of the two kingdoms theory. Now, I do want to say, in our book we don't take a particular, this isn't the issue we're arguing about in our book. So I think people, and there are people who I respect who hold to various versions of two kingdoms theory, I think everyone can get something out of our book and we're not really arguing this issue in the book. Okay, so we go from Luther and he introduces the language of two kingdoms. He may have meant something different than is being taught out in certain seminaries right now. But from there we go to John Calvin, a very important person in distinguishing two kingdoms and his disciples, people like Bucer and Verre and so forth. What is it that Calvin is doing that's different than Luther? Well, Kelvin developed a much more thorough social theory. Luther, the whole ambiguity and the reason that it's difficult to answer the question about what Luther meant about the kingdom, because Luther wasn't, he wasn't personally forced to put a lot of meat on the bones of his theory of church-state relations. And so sometimes it's hard to tell where he's going with it. On the other hand, he had ongoing conflict in his own ministry and his own life with civil authorities over the issue of church-state relations very specifically. So he fleshed out his theory over the course of his life in much more detail. So Calvin, he talks about the authority of the church and the authority of the state being distinct. So with Calvin, we really get to the heart of what we're talking about in our book, The Tale of Two Governments. Church and state, under God, distinct jurisdictions, distinct but complementary responsibilities. And Calvin lived this. There is kind of this stereotype of Calvin that he was the dictator of Geneva. Not true. He ended up, at various points, he had a lot of influence in the running of the Geneva But he never held a civil government post. He was occasionally on the other side with the civil government mad at him and essentially running him out of the city. So he was by no means this kind of dictatorial figure. He had all sorts of conflicts. He had to deal with these issues in really concrete ways. And in fact, the city council banished him at one point. It's hard to do that if you're the theocrat that he's sometimes characterized as. But he wasn't a theocrat. But I think what it shows is that there was a healthy relationship between the church and the state, that the church was advising the state, even though the state was responsible and culpable for carrying out the rules, the law of God that applies to it, and yet the state had a relationship that protected the church in Geneva as well, because, you know, at that time, being a reformed community wasn't necessarily the most popular thing in Europe. Absolutely true. I think it's constructive to look at Geneva compared against Zwingli's experience. Zwingli was another early reformer He's committed more of the pendulum swing. You know, when we're at an extreme for a few hundred years in the Middle Ages, with the church being strongly over the state, where the Pope is kind of the highest person, you know, it's a very hierarchical view with the Pope at the top of the pegging order. Zingley, an early reformer, he went to the opposite extreme and basically said, the state is the key authority structure. He said, the Christian man is nothing other than the faithful and good citizen. The Christian city is nothing other than the Christian church. He made this equation really strongly and he put church and state rights together. Calvin emphatically rejected that view. Calvin established a very different trajectory, and that trajectory, then, is what we focus on for the rest of the book, because it's the Calvin trajectory of church and state that goes to England, to the Puritan, goes to Scotland, to the Scottish Covenanters, and then it eventually makes its way into the United States. Right. Right. It goes through from Geneva. It's carried by people like Bootser and Knox up into Scotland and England, and they add their parts to it. And along comes people like Samuel Rutherford, who writes Lex Rex, who justifies biblically not only that the king is authorized by God, but where that jurisdiction might end. And consequently, that the king is limited by law. He's not over the law. That's why it's Lex Rex and not Rex Lex, arguing against a unlimited jurisdiction of the king or what we'd call a tyranny, but where the king was over the law, the divine right of kings. And that thinking brings the Puritans to America. and especially Puritan New England, there was still some confusion as the Puritans in the Boston Colony, for instance, you had to be a member of the church in order to be part of elected office. And that meant that the church, by managing its roles, could keep people out of office. And so that seems to be a little bit of a confusion that makes its way across the Atlantic. You want to say anything about that? Yeah, well, let me just say that there is a confusion that you see a lot of overlap between church and state. in Geneva, throughout the Puritan experience. It doesn't, and a lot of people see that and say, well, how could we ever link the idea of a separation of church and state to the Puritan or to Pelican? And I think that misses the point, because what the Puritans held to, theoretically, was that the church and the state are separate. You can't have the church telling the state how to run into business, and the state telling the church how to run into business. But they are both answering to God, and because the church is the mouthpiece for God, in some sense, where the pastor is to preach the word of God and to hold people accountable, which is a very difficult act to do. Absolutely correct. The Puritans then just decided that, well, the safe way to do this is to really have voting requirements, sort of membership in church and membership in the civil community kind of as overlapping definitional elements, which, yes, it isn't what we might think of as a separation, a jurisdictional separation between church and state. But it doesn't negate the fact that they were still, they still made distinctions. So this is something that carries forward and it's always a changing thing. It's always a thing that's debated and we don't see it lived out perfectly. Okay, I want to get to today, and we're running out of time, so let me run through a whole bunch of history real quick, and if I say anything wrong, go ahead and correct me. From the time of the pilgrims coming over the Atlantic, especially Puritan New England, to the time of the framers of our Constitution, there's a lot happening. For one thing, The framers are reading Locke and Montesquieu. They're getting new and fresh ideas. And they deal a lot more with some of these distinctions. Also, there's an immigration of Baptists and Anglicans. And by the time the framers are coming together, there's 13 distinct little governments. We call them colonies, but they were very different. They were different in their founding. They were different in their character. Oftentimes they're different in their denomination or their religion. You had Providence, Rhode Island was a place where many Baptists who did not feel comfortable in New England ended up settling and they welcomed Quakers and so forth. So there was many various expressions of the greater Christian faith by time the framers come in. When the framers are making the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, They write the very First Amendment, and the First Amendment includes many rights, including the freedom of speech, but it includes both a positive and a negative prohibition of religion, and it's those positive and negative prohibitions of religion that we summarize by saying the separation of church and state. Namely, that Congress shall make no laws authorizing or forming a religion, a church. And we understand that they meant a denomination, that they weren't going to have an Anglican Church of America. There wasn't going to be one particular church. And yet, In the different colonies, there was a denomination, but it was for that local colony. If you didn't like that one, you could go to the next colony. And the other was that there would be a freedom of worship. The federal government, the covenanting government, would not interfere with their worship. Is that how you understand it? That's basically what happened. The Baptists did play a big role. You mentioned the states, the early states, the early colonies before them. Many of them had established religions. Not all of them. That is, established particular denominations. In the period immediately following the American Revolution, there are many churches. Many states are beginning to disestablish their established churches. Virginia is the most famous example. And that does feed into this concern. Then when we create a stronger national government under the Constitution, how are we going to protect ourselves from the nation, the national government, trying to solidify power by creating a national church? So DAPTES leads the opposition in many states to establishment. And from that, we do get the First Amendment, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the three exercises thereof. Go ahead. I just want to say, a lot of Christians today hear the phrase separation of church and state and they get an allergic reaction. Because really, what that phrase has come to mean today, we typically think of, we'll think of Michael Newdow, the atheist activist, the person who brings law to trying to say we don't want We don't want prayer at the presidential inaugurations, for example. We don't want any references to God or to religion in public life. We don't want God in the public square. That's the separation of church and faith. That's the separation of God and the public square. He wants to make the Establishment Clause eclipse the Free Exercise Clause so that if God recognized it all, he wants to call that an establishment of something because, of course, he wants to establish an atheistic secular republic. So he views that as an establishment, and if there's any free exercise in the public square, he objects. And I think the court gave sanction to that when they quoted Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists, and they talked about a wall of separation that wasn't semi-permeable, but kept the church all the way on one side of the wall, never to interfere or interact with the civil magistrate on the other side. But the— That's an important thing to notice here, though. And this is something that we're actually coming up against in our book, that the biggest and most famous cases involving religion and the First Amendment are these cases where people are taking down Ten Commandments monuments, or they're removing prayers from public schools, or things of that nature. And it's this idea of separating God from government. That's what we think of when we think of what's happening in the courts today. But in a very real sense, Those cases, those are the big showpiece cases. But that isn't where most of the religious liberty stuff is really at stake. Now, there are all sorts of reasons to criticize what the courts have done with the public expression of religion over the last 60 years. But the major point of our book is that at the real heart of religious liberty, even more important than these other things which are important, even more important is the question of can the church be the church? Can the church manage its own affairs, or is the government going to be able to come in and tell the church how to run its own business? And that's what's at issue when churches are exercising church discipline. And this is how we got started on the book. We saw cases, more and more cases, where churches are following biblical principles of exercising church discipline. They're getting sued. But the good news is the courts are recognizing that The First Amendment prohibits the government from telling churches how to run their own affairs. So there's pretty robust protections still remaining for churches, and that's good news. How about parachurches? So you're a parachurch organization. You're focused on the family down in Colorado Springs. You want to make a hiring decision. Now, your hiring decision is based on biblical criteria, but it happens to offend the sensibilities of the EEOC. Do you have protection? limited. It does become a lot more complicated when you aren't a church, when you're a character organization. There are cases that have protected organizations. They've protected private Christian schools, Jewish schools. They've protected private religious universities. And so within a certain range, you still will be protected if your organization has got very clear religious criteria of what you're doing, they're not going to force you to hire somebody who is completely opposed to that. At this point, you've still got some precedent to use as protection there. The churches are the ones that have the clearest protection. But that begs the question, what does the court recognize as a church? Does a church need to become incorporated in order, I mean, isn't it a violation of the idea of separate jurisdictions if the government, if the civil magistrate recognizes what is a church and what is not a church? I as a pastor can't go around and say who is the governor and who's not the governor. How in the world could they come along and say who's a pastor and who's not a pastor? That is actually the weak underbelly of the whole case law here. It's a vulnerable part. Because up to this point, there has not been an extremely well-developed principle that the courts have articulated on how they recognize that. And as you noted, this is an area where if the government can say what's a church and what's not a church, well, that's pretty tricky. Yeah, that does pretty much come close to establishing a religion. Now, there are parallel cases in kind of the general pre-exercise cases about sham religious beliefs, where people are basically saying, you know, I have a religious conviction against serving the military, trying to get out of draft. But why is that a sham? It's obviously a fabrication. So then the question is, well, how do you know it was an obvious fabrication? Well, there's no easy answer. And the reason that this hasn't come up so much yet is because, for the most part, nobody's questioned that these are churches. But let's go to some of those gray areas. What if my church has, my denomination has a statement, we'll write it out, we'll put it on the website, you know, it's passed, it's gone through the church government, and we come out against women being drafted. We think that the Protection of the country belongs only to men. We come out for spanking, quoting biblical precedent. We're against giving any monies that can be used for abortion, including Obamacare, or hiring homosexuals. Do we have protection? So, that's a complicated question. So, for the draft, that's going to be the easier part. If you already have a written document, So, let me just say one thing. If you just assemble a group of people, say the draft law just went out, and you assemble a group of people, you declare, we are a church. And one of the reasons we're forming is because we don't like the new draft law. We're forming as a church, and we're going to say that one of our basic fundamental beliefs is that women should not be drafted. Okay, so that is going to look pretty suspect form for this one sole isolated purpose of opposing the draft. You're probably going to have some problems. On the other hand, you're an already existing church. You have, and you put together a statement that you don't believe the draft is in compliance with your understanding of scripture. you can use, you will then be able to use that in a much more legitimate way to go for conscientious protector status. Let me ask this a different way, and I think this goes a little bit more to the heart of the book. If I have a member of my church, my Christ church, and I'm one of the elders of this church, and this member is participating in an activity that we deem as sinful and wrong. Perhaps they're writing books against spanking children, which God commands, or they're working in an abortion clinic. Do I have the right to excommunicate them from my church? You do. There's where the answer is easy. You do have a very robust freedom and robust legal protection or exercising church discipline, saying, who's in, who's out of the church, based on your biblical and religious beliefs. Now, the caveat here is you still have to do it right, because there's all sorts of ways to mess this up. And I think this is one of the reasons that the church discipline is a controversial subject. It's not an easy subject. And a lot of people in the broader American church who would self-identify as Christians today would be very uncomfortable with the Christian system because there are a lot of ways to mess it up. So, it has to be done right. The church has to be very careful to not be seen as doing something in an arbitrary, capricious way that's just the whim of a church leader. So, it's important that whatever you do as a church, then you can actually explain the biblical reasoning behind it in a clear and well-articulated way. So if you have a book of church discipline, like so many Presbyterian denominations do, I imagine others do too, and you can appeal to that, and that book is well thought out, then you're doing pretty well. you are doing very well. Go ahead. That requires churches to have membership. Not all people who call themselves church today have membership. They think that's unbiblical. But more than that, let's say that Joe is having an affair, and Joe's been attending my church, and me and the elders get together. We have a trial. We have two, three witnesses. We go through the whole go-to-him-first. with multiple people. We do the whole Matthew 18 thing, finally bring it to the church, and we say, you are unrepentant, therefore, you are no longer a member of the body of Christ. And Joe just says, well, you know, I think I'm going to go down the street here, because there's a Methodist church that's more gracy, and they'll let me in, and maybe even make me a member if they have membership. Doesn't that undercut the whole ability of the church to have government? It does. That is a big problem. Not one that we can not one that directly affects the legal system, but no, that is the central problem, the central challenge facing the church today. If we're going to take holiness, fidelity to scripture, seriously, that is a big problem. And it happens all the time. And what is the answer to that? I don't think there is any easy answer. The short version is churches need to be educated about the biblical foundations of church discipline. And I think churches need to then be able to, well, first of all, they just need to think about how they recognize proceedings in other churches. And I think the doctrine of membership, again, as you brought up, a very important point. If we don't have a concept of membership, there is no way to really handle these issues. It's like having a government without citizens. There has been some great work that has been done recently on the subject of church membership and why it's physically essential. We've referenced some of that in our book, Hail to Government. The book is A Tale of Two Governments, and this is the co-author Lyle Weinberger. Lyle, we went long, but it's a huge topic. It involves two jurisdictions, the relationship between them, and something that's been violated very often. Thank you so much for being on the Generations radio program. Thanks very much. And Lyle, where's the book available? Well, go to twogovernment.com. That's T-W-O, government. And you'll find links if you get on Amazon and So it's available at all the regular places to buy books Amazon and Barnes & Noble and So forth. So the name of the book again is a tale of two governments written by Bob Renaud and Lyle Weinberger Lyle once again, thanks for being on the program. Thanks, babe authority All authority has been given by God all authority, than is authorized by God. all authority is limited by God. And that's what we're trying to say here on this program today, that the state is limited by the authority God has given it. And the church is limited by the authority that God has given it. But not only is it limited, it has a duty to execute that authority that God has given it. The civil magistrate must be a terror to evil. Otherwise, it's not exercising God's authority, but it cannot become The body that appoints pastors and elders and does church discipline that is Going beyond its jurisdictional authority likewise the church has been given authority It should administer the sacraments. It should have membership. It should be teaching the Word of God and but it cannot be about the business of hanging the murderer on Saturday. Authority flows from God, and when Americans and the American church go back and start living out the word of God, examining the law of God, let it be our meditation all the day long, let it be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path, then we'll be blessed with prosperity and the blessings of liberty under the grace of God. And if we don't do that, we'll be living under the curse of God. Remember, a covenant has both a blessing and a curse, depending on whether you keep it or whether you break it. Hey, I'm Dave Buhner, filling in for Generations. If you want to interact with this program, feel free to do so. Please email us at generationswithvision.com. And won't you join us again next time as we cast a vision for the next generation. you