I appreciate Jim taking the time to respond to my chapter in Hell Shall Not Prevail and essay for Theopolis – and indeed inviting my chapter and co-editing the volume. Jim is the best thinker I know well – I believe I’ve cited or linked to his work in just about everything I’ve written since we met – and I, too, consider him a very good friend, and a mentor. It’s been a privilege to be in conversation with him about all manner of thing for the past several years.

I also appreciate Jim’s kind words about and sharp summary of my analysis of a prominent form of liberalism. I do not think he is raising a quibble or unimportant objection; while our agreement far outweighs our disagreement in the question of the posture of the church toward nonbelievers and what the church asks of the civil magistrate, Christian political and legal thinkers should debate the question of the proper role and extent of civil authority with regard to moral and spiritual matters. I am grateful for Jim’s willingness to reply and the opportunity to reflect on the issue and continue the conversation.

As I read it, Jim’s contention is that the New Testament allows for a broader permissible range for the civil power to promote moral and spiritual good than I do in advocating a form of ecclesiocentric liberalism. Whereas I write, “the idea that the civil magistrate or a church official should execute a person for blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy in relation to the new covenant established by Christ has no direct root in the New Testament,” Jim rejoins: “I think it important to insist, in this day and age particularly, that the New Testament does provide a ‘direct root’ for civil authority to seek to advance the common good in prudentially calibrated cases by sharing jurisdiction with the church over aspects of moral and spiritual life.” The civil authority’s sharing in jurisdiction over aspects of moral and spiritual life does not require maximal penalties like the death penalty for blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy, but might include them as part of a spectrum of benefits for honoring God and promoting the moral and spiritual good, and penalties for detracting from the common good in these matters.

My basic response is that I agree the New Testament allows for civil authority to advance the common good, including the moral and spiritual good, and that it shares jurisdiction with the church in these areas. Yet, I insist it also suggests principled, in addition to prudential, limits on the ways the civil authority should do so. Those limits especially pertain to the role of the civil authority in advancing the spread of the gospel and promoting adherence to it, and they include respecting the freedom to respond, or not, to the gospel invitation, which is to be freely chosen to the degree possible. We may recognize a legitimate interest and role for the civil authority in promoting moral and spiritual good, subordinate to but sharing in the church’s jurisdiction in these matters, while respecting limits to that role and respecting freedom of conscience when it comes to accepting and persevering in the gospel or another religion.

Among several arguments he makes for a broader permissible role of the civil authority, Jim points to the wording used in the famous Romans 13 passage on civil government: when Paul says the civil ruler is “God’s servant for [our] good” (v. 4), he uses the word agathos, which can encompass moral and spiritual good, not just keeping the peace or preventing bodily harm to persons. Such authority – and this should not be strange, given Paul’s teaching that civil authority is from God (see also Jesus’ statement in John 19:10-11) – may punish wrongs against God.

As Brad East has pointed out, the idea that the civil government shares jurisdiction with the church over moral and spiritual matters accords with the view shared by many thinkers in the Christian tradition, including Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. As Jim once pointed out to me, in Chapter 20 of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin discusses the role of the civil magistrate:

But as we lately taught that that [civil government] is distinct from the spiritual and internal kingdom of Christ, so we ought to know that they are not adverse to each other…

The duty of magistrates, its nature, as described by the word of God, and the things in which it consists, I will here indicate in passing. That it extends to both tables of the law, did Scripture not teach, we might learn from profane writers; for no man has discoursed of the duty of magistrates, the enacting of laws, and the common weal, without beginning with religion and divine worship.

Thus all have confessed that no polity can be successfully established unless piety be its first care, and that those laws are absurd which disregard the rights of God, and consult only for men. Seeing then that among philosophers religion holds the first place, and that the same thing has always been observed with the universal consent of nations, Christian princes and magistrates may be ashamed of their heartlessness if they make it not their care. We have already shown that this office is specially assigned them by God, and indeed it is right that they exert themselves in asserting and defending the honour of him whose vicegerents they are, and by whose favour they rule.

Please bear with the long quotations – Jim often chides me for quoting too much. The recognition of civil magistrates’ appropriate concern for piety and duties toward God has a home in reflection on the American constitutional system as well. In his Commentaries on the Constitution, discussing the First Amendment, the great nineteenth century jurist Joseph Story wrote something similar:

The right and the duty of the interference of government, in matters of religion, have been maintained by many distinguished authors, as well those, who were the warmest advocates of free government, as those, who were attached to governments of a more arbitrary character. Indeed, the right of a society or government to interfere in matters of religion will hardly be contested by any persons, who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well being of the state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice. The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being, and attributes, and providence of one Almighty God; the responsibility to him for all our actions, founded upon moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues; – these never can be a matter of indifference in any well ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive, how any civilized society can well exist without them. And at all events, it is impossible for those, who believe in the truth of Christianity, as a divine revelation, to doubt, that it is the especial duty of government to foster, and encourage it among all the citizens and subjects. This is a point wholly distinct from that of the right of private judgment in matters of religion, and of the freedom of public worship according to the dictates of one’s conscience.

Note Story’s point at the end, that religious liberty may coexist with a role of civil authority in promoting the moral and spiritual good.

Jim takes me to task for unduly constraining the role of the civil authority in promoting the common good, including its moral and spiritual aspects. Yet, Jim takes my claim in the passage he identifies more broadly than I mean it. Perhaps it is tendentious of me, but the claim he pushes back on relates to the death penalty for blasphemy, heresy, or apostasy. I don’t think that precludes the use of civil power to promote the moral and spiritual common good. Indeed, the chapter and essay argue against versions of liberalism that rule out advocacy for exercising civil authority in that way. Elsewhere, I discuss what I call the “telic vision” that is clearly a significant part of the Christian tradition of reflection on political and legal matters.

Yet, to suggest the civil magistrate plays such a role and accepts such responsibilities in a Christian or church-responsive polity is not to say it does so in an unconstrained way. As Jim points out, the death penalty is a maximal penalty even in the Old Testament, the new covenant fundamentally alters our relationship to the death penalty, and there are prudential limits to the civil authority’s jurisdiction over moral and spiritual matters. I would also stress there are principled limits to the jurisdiction and exercise of civil authority in this way, limits that relate to religious toleration and liberty.

My suggestion is that, in general, the invitation to the lost to accept the gospel and the preservation of the church’s membership in adherence to the gospel are not to be pursued through the power of the sword. Jesus says his kingdom is “not of this world” (John 18:36). If it were, his disciples would fight to preserve his position. The advance of Jesus’ kingdom does not depend on the sword. As Dignitatis humanae puts it, “Not by force of blows does His rule assert its claims. It is established by witnessing to the truth and by hearing the truth, and it extends its dominion by the love whereby Christ, lifted up on the cross, draws all men to Himself.” As Jim points out, the power the church wields, delegated from God, is much greater than the power civil authorities can muster, backed in the last resort by the power of the sword.

It seems to me Paul and Peter write the passages in Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-15 with a government whose agents emphatically do not aim to advance God’s kingdom or promote the moral and spiritual good of the citizens, at least not rightly construed, in mind. The apostles explain to Christians that this government, like all civil authorities, is nevertheless instituted by God, nevertheless worthy of obedience and respect as a general rule. So, I will concede the words used for “good” in these passages allow for a broader sense of the common good that a Christian or church-responsive magistrate might promote than mere civil peace. But the main thrust of the passages, that we should respect civil governmental authority as a God-ordained institution even when it is not especially attuned to the moral and spiritual good in its fullness, does not firmly and clearly promote Christian or church-responsive regime instituting maximal civil penalties for heresy, blasphemy, or apostasy. I’d say the support that the New Testament provides for including the institution of such penalties in the spectrum of means the civil authority employs in its legitimate role promoting the moral and spiritual good is pretty indirect.

I do agree the New Testament does not exhaust the resources the Christian political and legal theorist can draw on in crafting a Christian vision for civil government, and I realize I’m pushing slightly against Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin here, not just Jim – probably more than I am pushing against Jim. Maybe that makes me a liberal of some sort. But there is a liberality to the Christian faith, not the liberality of unbounded autonomy or the liberalism of fear, but the liberality of love and trust in God’s final justice.

So, the areas of agreement between Jim and myself are wide, but there does perhaps remain a point of difference, at least in emphasis, about the permissible set of Christian or church-responsive arrangements for civil authority. Where Jim and I agree, I think, is that the liberality essential to Christian reflection on civil politics and law is grounded on the example of the savior who endured the cross to save sinners, on the truth of God’s love displayed in Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, on the enduring lovingkindness and faithfulness of God. The church may express that liberality in a variety of institutional arrangements from situations like the time of the New Testament where the church was a marginal and occasionally persecuted minority, to some form of establishment or church-responsive polity, as Jim points out. But I maintain the New Testament suggests that liberality should constrain to some degree the manner in which the civil authority promotes the moral and spiritual good and the rights of God, and those constraints especially pertain to the freedom to accept the gospel and Jesus’ lordship, the freedom to be part of the church, or not.

Ben Peterson is an assistant professor of political science at Abilene Christian University and a member of Civitas, hosted at Theopolis Institute.