Where Does “Separation of Church and State” Come From and What Does It Really Mean?

A good brief summary from Princeton’s Robert P. George:

The best resource I know on this question is Daniel Dreisbach’s Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York University Press, 2003).

For a good summary of this history and analysis, see his online piece, “The Mythical ‘Wall of Separation’: How a Misused Metaphor Changed Church-State Law, Policy, and Discourse.”

Professor Dresibach begins by observing:

No metaphor in American letters has had a more profound influence on law and policy than Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state.” Today, this figure of speech is accepted by many Americans as a pithy description of the constitutionally prescribed church-state arrangement, and it has become the sacred icon of a strict separationist dogma that champions a secular polity in which religious influences are systematically and coercively stripped from public life.

In our own time, the judiciary has embraced this figurative phrase as a virtual rule of constitutional law and as the organizing theme of church-state jurisprudence, even though the metaphor is nowhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution.

Dresibach sets out “to challenge the conventional, secular myth that Thomas Jefferson, or the constitutional architects, erected a high wall between religion and the civil government.”

“Although today,” he writes, “Jefferson’s Danbury letter is thought of as a principled statement on the prudential and constitutional relationship between church and state, it was in fact a political statement written to reassure pious Baptist constituents that Jefferson was indeed a friend of religion and to strike back at the Federalist-Congregationalist establishment in Connecticut for shamelessly vilifying him as an infidel and atheist in the recent campaign.”

It’s not uncommon for advocates of the “high and impregnable wall” misunderstanding of the metaphor to suggest that Jefferson’s own policies were incompatible with his own principles (e.g., endorsement of federal funds to build churches, support of Christian missionaries among the Native Americans, etc.). But Dresibach shows that in Jefferson’s own thinking, the wall was not a separation between church and all civil government, but rather a wall between the national and state governments on matters related to religion.

Does the Bible really teach that there is no such thing as chance?

Visitor: Does the Bible really teach that there is no such thing as chance? My version still says that "time and chance happen to all."

If everything - absolutely everything mind you - was decided before that first "let their be" then Ryle's last paragraph simply makes no sense. All that talk about what we should seek and strive to do and believe is advice impossible to follow because what I believe as well as what I do were, apparently, fully and finally established before the foundation of the earth. Radical Calvinists will vehemently disagree with me about my ability to make any choice - however trivial - but only because God decided some time ago that they would. Nothing to do with them though, just grace that they back the right horse. Me though? Apparently there is a God in Romans who makes things he hates and will eventually destroy. Weird though, don't you think, not to mention any of that in Genesis 1, where things are only "good" and "very good"?

Response:
The Bible teaches that God is all-seeing (Psalm 33:13-15), never-sleeping (Psalm 121:3-4) and cares deeply about His people (Romans 8:38-39). He assures us that "you are of more value than many sparrows" (Luke 12:6-7).

The text and all of Ecclestiastes is speaking from a human perspective, so time and chance refers to man who does not know his time. Read the text in context:

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. For man does not know his time. Ecclesiastes 9:11-12

The text is saying that man's steps are all decided in heaven by God. It is neither might nor weakness that determines the outcome, but God alone. Chance is not some entity working out there in opposition to God, but refers to what happens to man, without his cooperation. Everyone is subject to chance because each person does not know his time or what might befall him from above.

A false, untenable, absurd result follows from your denial. Your view would have us believe that God doesn't pay attention to us or does not care. If your view were true then you must affirm that there are some things that take God by surprise. If so then you have made chance a greater or more powerful entity or phenomena than God Himself and you would thus dethrone Him.

Instead why not simply read and yield to the Scripture rather than philosophize?

The Bible teaches that men are fully responsible for their sin even though God ordains that all things, including that sin, infallibly come to pass. See the following texts:

"...you yourselves know this Jesus, delivered up according to the DEFINITE PLAN and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. Acts 2:22-24

"for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do WHATEVER YOU HAND AND YOUR PLAN had PREDESTINED to take place." Acts 4:27-28

Your view simply cannot account for these texts apart from some serious acrobatics. I would encourage you to yield to the Text and stop kicking against the goads and Scripture.

View the original article here

Relentlessly Call Abortion What It Really Is

 Abortion is rarely talked about.

I’m not talking about the word “abortion.” We hear this word a lot it in the public square. But we rarely hear about it. Abortion almost always refers to something else. We hear that abortion is fundamentally about a woman’s right to reproductive freedom. Or abortion is a litmus test for judicial nominees. Or abortion is symptomatic of what’s wrong with the social discourse in America.

But none of those things is what abortion really is. Abortion is the intentional killing of unborn children.

Proverbs 18:21 says, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Abortion is a clear example of this truth.

The killing of children can be tolerated and even championed as a social good so long as we don’t call it what it is. Call abortion an individual’s right to privacy and you can write it into the legal code. Call abortion a compassionate choice offered to a frightened girl to save her future or to save a child from an undesirable quality of life and you can swing popular opinion. Call abortion a liberation of women from the social and economic oppression of male dominance and passionate people will march on capitols chanting demands to preserve the human right of abortion on-demand.

But you won’t hear the street marchers chant, “We will fight for the right to kill our children!” Because calling abortion what it is might awaken uneasy consciences out of a euphemistic stupor to realize that millions of the most defenseless human beings on the planet are being denied the self-evident, Creator-endowed human right to life.

Death is in the power of logic contradicting, term redefining, and deceptively clinical tongues. We have allowed legal child-killing on-demand for 41 years because we’ve called it something else.

That’s why Christians, the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world” (Matthew 5:13–14) must keep speaking the truth about what abortion is with relentless clarity. “We destroy arguments” (2 Corinthians 10:5) by not yielding the ground of clear truth. Because life is in the power of truth-speaking tongues.

Therefore, we will keep saying:

Abortion kills children and we all know this.

Our legal code demonstrates that we know this because it grants an unborn child the rights of personhood in areas such as tort, criminal, and property law, making legalized abortion a schizophrenic, arbitrary, and tragically defective legal ruling.

Abortion is mercilessly violent. Children with heartbeats, brainwaves, and a nervous system that allows them to feel pain are literally torn to pieces.

“93% of all abortions [in the United States] are performed on healthy mothers, with healthy babies . . . Less than 1% are performed because of rape or incest.” (Abort73)

The number of children killed by abortion every year dwarfs the Holocaust and other homicidal horrors of history.

Approximately 3,300 children are killed by abortion every day in the United States. Americans kill 1.2 million unborn children every year.

The World Health Organization estimates between 40 and 50 million children are killed around the world by abortion, approximately 125,000 every day.

Unborn girls are killed at a higher rate than unborn boys. Estimates are as high as 163 million unborn girls have been intentionally killed since the 1970’s because they were girls, resulting in what some are now calling a “gendercide” (see Abuse of Discretion, 334).

And we will speak many, many more clear truths (here are 15 more) until abortion on-demand is ended.

Here’s the point: truthful tongues save lives. Legalized abortion is an evil that occurs and is tolerated because of deceptive words. And it’s truthful words that are required to clear the fatal fog with clarity.

I don’t know if our speaking truth will succeed in helping to change the abortion laws. World Magazine reports encouraging developments. But as John Piper says, “We are not called to win; we are called to witness.”

However, history does show that the faithful, relentless, prophetic witness of the saints over many years results in the remarkable spread of the gospel and the end of thousands of horrible social evils from the individual to the national levels.

So we must keep speaking. We must call abortion what it is: the killing of children and a vicious established legalized evil and injustice.

Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we just remembered because of his relentless truth-telling in the face of established, legalized racial evil, once said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.”

We dare not be guilty of this. The Lord who said, “Rescue those who are being taken away to death” will not accept the excuse, “Behold, we did not know this” (Proverbs 24:11–12).

May life be in the power of our truthful tongues.

A Reason to Be Really Offended

Our message is not you can do it.

It’s not you’re good enough, smart enough, and people like you.

What we preach is that you are a glorious creature gone tragically bad, that you have rebelled against the God who made you, but that he did the most difficult thing imaginable to win you back and lavish you with his eternal goodness.

It is wondrously good news. But unavoidable is the offense, that insulting supposition, that bad news that sets up the good. Did you catch it? You’ve gone tragically bad. You’re a foolhardy rebel against the most powerful person in the universe. There’s nothing you can do to save yourself, earn God’s favor, or get yourself out of the cosmic pit you’re in — the pit you dug and can’t climb out of.

The offense is that the magnitude of God’s solution — the slaughter of his own Son — shows the magnitude of our wickedness and frailty and utter inability. Yes, the gospel says you’re more loved than you ever could have dreamed, but as Jack Miller and Tim Keller have noted, at the same time it says you’re more sinful than you ever imagined. And that’s repugnant to the natural palate.

If you’ve never tasted the cross as offensive, you’ve missed something essential.

Talking about the cross as an “offense” comes from Galatians 5:11: “If I, brothers, still preach circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed.” Why it is that the cross would be seen as an offense? What’s offensive about the crucifixion?

The cross declares how dire is our condition apart from Jesus. It announces how deep the sin goes, how profound the rebellion is, how impossible is our plight apart from Help from the outside. There’s nothing we can do, no effort we can exert, no law we can follow.

The message of Christ crucified says you’re an absolute failure in relation to what’s most important. The horror of killing the Son of God points to the horror of our condition. The badness of Good Friday is a tribute to the badness in us.

The cross embodies some of the most offensive things possible you could say about someone in relation to God and eternity. This gruesome death Jesus died, you earned it. The hell Jesus endured, you deserved it, forever. The shame he underwent, the scorn, the disrespect, the hurt — all these are as suitable to us sinners as they’re unsuitable to the sinless one.

And it’s not that it just turned out this way, but God planned it. He designed the offense. Seven hundred years before Jesus, the prophet Isaiah called it — he will be “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense” (Isaiah 8:14). And such he was, and continues to be. Both Peter and Paul pick up on the theme (Romans 9:32–33; 1 Peter 2:7–8).

Jesus himself, in John 6, challenges his disciples with the offense. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). You can’t do it. You’re not good enough or smart enough. And perhaps most offensive of all: You are lifeless. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).

The offense is not mainly his mention of eating flesh and drinking blood, but the accusation of deep depravity and spiritual inability. As the crowds retreat at his forthrightness, Jesus asks his disciples, “Do you take offense at this?” (John 6:61). More unnerving than taking his plainly figurative language in a literal sense is hearing that you are powerless and lifeless where it matters most. This is as offensive as it gets.

Typically we get antsy about speaking the gospel to someone who doesn’t already believe. Some of our fear, of course, is unwarranted. But some of it is for good reason. In communicating the gospel, one of the essential things we must at least imply, if not make explicit, is the most offensive truth possible: you are powerless precisely where it matters most. You are dead to what truly is life.

Don’t take it too far. We don’t gloat in giving offense. We labor to remove every possible barrier. May the offense not be our personality or carelessness or quirkiness or arrogance. Like Paul, let’s “endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:12; 2 Corinthians 6:3). Let’s strain to “become all things to all people, that by all means [we] might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). Let’s do everything in our power to “give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God” (1 Corinthians 10:32).

But this one offense — the offense of the cross — we cannot remove. We dare not.

Responding to the “Do You Really Want to Go to Leviticus?” Argument

Michael Horton responds to a clever open letter to Laura Schlesinger, who appeals to Leviticus 18:22 for why she believes homosexuality is an abomination. Here were the satirical questions:

Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of Menstrual uncleanliness – Lev15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination, Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this? Are there ‘degrees’ of abomination?Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

 

Probably Really Good

For those following the recent blog posts, there has been a goodish bit of interaction on the subject of Eastern Orthodoxy here and here.

It all began with a brief clip from CanonWIRED. In that clip I recommended a book on EO that I had not read -- Through Western Eyes by Robert Letham. I recommended it because I had read other stuff by Letham, which really was top drawer, and I assumed this would be the same. But, as a result of the hubbub, I went back and read his section on icons and prayer, which I really can't recommend. He doesn't give away the store entirely, but he does give away a good portion of the inventory. So here is my retraction. I still like Letham's other stuff, but this was not so hot.

While on this personal note, in the comments section of those posts I have been pressed to reveal what I had or had not read in preparation for my column in that infamous edition of Credenda way back then -- back in the days of the early church. To this point I have not replied to those demands, not because I wanted to look coy, or dig arabesques in the carpet with my shoe, but because I honestly had no idea. That column was written sometime prior to 1994, about 17 years ago.

This is not a retraction at all -- just a little sharing time. I have before had someone point at a book on my shelf and ask if I have read it. To my shame, I do not know. I pick it up and look through it, and my blue highlighter is all through it. Heh. I have sometimes thumbed through books I know I have read, and read some comment with blue exclamation marks beside it. The only problem is that I don't recall ever reading such a sentiment before in my life.

Now seventeen years from this time (2028), I will no doubt be assailed by a young man for my podunk reading schedule during these, the lazy days of his fourth grade year. And I will no doubt not be able to remember, aided in that lack of remembrance by the weight of seventy five winters. But I will say this, for this is how I operate -- I know I must have been reading something right about now. And boy, I bet it was good.