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Nevertheless, the prince, even as a mediator of divine civil rule, is an instrument for eternal life.
For the latter, the prince is the instrument by which natural law becomes human law.
The prince enlivens laws not as an agent of coercion but as the divinely sanctioned vicar of God who binds conscience to just applications of natural law, as one who directs public reason.
As a result, Western nations are leading themselves into decline (especially demographically) as feminine empathy, which is suitable for the domestic sphere, enacts gynocratic contradictions and self-destructive inclusivist civil policies.39
The Christian prince is a civil ruler (as divinely ordained in nature) who possesses and uses powers (both civil and interpersonal) to order his people to commodious temporal life and to eternal life in Christ.
Furthermore, this definition reflects the relationship of nature and grace: If the prince must order his people to eternal life (by natural duty) and eternal life is attained only in Christ (as revealed by grace), then the prince ought to order his people to eternal life in Christ.40
Having civil power, he can directly command actions as civil law, as I’ve said. But he also can shape the people’s cultural Christianity.
He can also use his personality—as the first man of the people, an image of their ideal—to persuade, admonish, and encourage righteousness and piety.
He can touch the heart—as a father touches the hearts of his children.
Your duty, most serene Prince, is not to shut either your ears or mind against a cause involving such mighty interests as these: how the glory of God is to be maintained on the earth inviolate, how the truth of God is to preserve its dignity, how the kingdom of Christ is to continue amongst us compact and secure. The cause is worthy of your ear, worthy of your investigation, worthy of your throne. The characteristic of a true sovereign, is to acknowledge that, in the administration
of his kingdom, he is a minister of God.
The whole of civil life can and ought to be adorned and perfected in this way.
Along related lines, the prince should devote himself to public aesthetics.
Public works endure across generations, connecting them through gift and affection.
They bring that “eternal society” of the dead, living, and unborn to memory; as fixed and venerable points of reference, they make int...
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“architecture has its political use; public buildings being the ornament of a county; it establishes a nation, draws people and commerce; makes the people love their native country, which passion is...
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Public works should be designed and arranged for the good and affections of the nation, built with confidence that one’s people will endure and that God will continue to bless it with true religion.
This may be false in fact, but it will never be true unless the present generation projects that truth upon the future. The future is secured by hope in action—in civilizational confidence.
for true membership is a matter of internal faith and piety,
Church ministers are instruments of the spiritual kingdom in their formal capacity as ministers of Christ, and so in this capacity and in the proper exercise thereof, they are outside civil jurisdiction,56 but as men they are subject to civil authorities as any other man.
But anything that pertains exclusively to its species of association is outside direct civil jurisdiction. That is, because it is a divine order, those things in it that are divine (e.g., the preaching of the Word, the administration of the Sacraments, exercising the keys, etc.) are outside civil jurisdiction.
Men and women are members of the spiritual kingdom as co-equal objects of spiritual administration, each having full and equal rights to the Word and Sacrament. But they remain men and women according to the standards of nature, even when in the walls of a local church, and they continue to be under the civil kingdom and the natural order when in the pews.
external means
“When a man preaches, although we may perceive him to be as we are, and of no great repute or refinement, nevertheless Jesus Christ is present and has His royal throne there.”
Although Christ as God does indeed reign over the nations, Christ’s spiritual reign does not extend directly into matters suitable to civil power.
The civil kingdom, by its nature, is obligated to order the people to the things of eternal life, and the things of eternal life are found only in Christ’s spiritual kingdom.
Thus, indirectly Christ’s spiritual reign extends to the civil kingdom, for Christ as spiritual Head of his church has instituted what the civil kingdom ought to order itself to.
But according to the fullness of life and the complete set of goods possible for man, the civil realm is not merely useful; it is not only ancillary to the highest end but also essential for man’s complete good.
the visible church and the people of God are co-extensive—both are predicated of the same people—but “people of God” refers to Christians as they are redeemed and sanctified for a complete life, and the “visible church” refers to the same people as under Christ the mediator pursuing the highest good of that complete life.
A Christian as a Christian is oriented not merely around the highest good manifested in the visible church but also, being a man of God, around the goods of this life.
these kingdoms have the same King,
Everything the prince has is from Christ.
The prince is, as George Gillespie said, “Christ’s deputy, as Christ is God.”
the prince’s reign does not extend directly to the visible kingdom of Christ.
The prince should also fund the ministry of the Word and provide schools for theological education.
While the people ought to obey their civil leaders “for conscience sake” (Rom. 13:5) in things concerning the civil kingdom, it doesn’t follow that civil leaders can bind their people’s conscience to participate in sacred ceremonies not commanded in Scripture.
A prince may require the elevation of the pulpit above the Lord’s Table in church construction, for example. This follows a natural principle of order, signifying that the dependent element is beneath the thing upon which it depends (viz., the preaching of the Word goes before the administration of the Lord’s Supper).
When we, in the present age, intake a distinction of days, we do not represent them as necessary, and thus lay a snare for the conscience; we do not reckon one day to be more holy than another; we do not make days to be the same thing with religion and the worship of God; but merely attend to the preservation of order and harmony.
The observance of days among us is a free service, and void of all superstition.
Far from demanding a dry and flat calendar, the classical Protestant view of civil-religious observances permits an organic civil-religious life in which the people can claim these special days collectively as theirs, since they’ve arisen from them.
The fourth commandment, instructing us to keep the Sabbath holy, is a moral (or natural) command to set aside a day in seven for special holy use—to minimize the concerns of this world and worship and contemplate God.
The prince’s duty in relation to the fourth commandment is not to enforce the command in itself, for the command does not fundamentally concern a bare outward observance but a matter of the heart, and the prince cannot command anything of the heart.
Sabbath laws train people in virtue; they are pedagogical. The imposed earthly constraints declare the day holy and thereby instruct the heart and remind people of their duty, and they witness to outsiders both that the land is Christian and that they are committed to God’s worship.
forces at work both in the West and in Christian churches. But things change quickly, and the prospects of continued domestic peace in the future is becoming unlikely.
An explosion of energy might disclose to us the possibilities of Christian civil order.
or capture; and inspire a love of one’s Christian country. In a word, pray that God would bring about, through a Christian prince, a great renewal.
family are important, if not vital, for the Christian life. That is, each of the natural orders of life—civil, familial, ecclesiastical—has its distinct powers for our good, and together they constitute a holistic ordering of man to the complete good. Today, the civil sphere is given a subordinate status in Christian thought, shut off from cognizance of eternal things, and we are conditioned to believe this is normal and good. But the result is a deadening of our sense towards impropriety and impiety. Open blasphemy in our public square is shrugged off as “to be expected” or part of the
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We have settled into a posture of passive defense, bunkered behind the artificial walls of churches and the porous borders separating the family from society.
But we do not have to live like this.
Revolution is the forcible reclamation of civil power by the people in order to transfer that power on just and more suitable political arrangements.
