Church and State as Seen in the Formation of ChristendomAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Religion
Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Church and state; Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600; Religion and state
to consult it and obey it, not only in the things of God, but in the
chief civil acts which regard the nation. The outcome of this work is the
creation of a people whose function is to bear on the worship of the one
true God and faith in the Redeemer to come, a royal, prophetic, and
priestly nation, the special domain of the promised Messias.
I have no need here to follow this people through the trials, revolts,
chastisements, and humiliations of 1500 years. It is sufficient to
observe the result at the coming of Christ. The nation at length, as the
fruit it would seem of captivity and suffering, has accepted with one
mind and heart the doctrine and worship of one God; the Jewish
priesthood, uncorrupted in its essence by any of the abominations of
polytheism, offers the daily morning and evening sacrifice, which
typified the Lamb of God, in the spirit of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and
Moses. The power of the State had indeed just passed to a Roman lord, but
it left the rites and practices and doctrines of the Jewish faith
untouched in the hands of the High Priest and the Great Council, which
sat in this respect in the chair of Moses,—a great and manifest
distinction, perhaps, from the condition in this respect of the whole
Gentile world. In Rome, at least, the worship "of the Immortal Gods,"
though blended with the whole growth of the State, and seated
triumphantly in the Capitol, was simply subservient to the Civil Power:
in Judea, a small and despised province of Rome, the religion was the
life of the people, which had been made a people that it might be God's
domain, and, with all its divisions, was filled from the highest to the
lowest with an universal expectation of the promised Christ, who was to
be Prophet, Priest, and King.
In the relation between the two Powers, Gentilism required a total
reconstruction, in order that the priesthood, existing in it from the
beginning, might be completely purified, derived afresh from God, and
receive from Him an independence which it had lost from the moment that
it lost its fidelity to the One Creator,—and such a gift would be a token
of divine power. Judaism, on the contrary, made, after the programme of
God, an image in the nation of what the Christian people was to be in the
world, required only to acknowledge in the Christ the purpose for which
it was appointed, that the law might go forth from Sion and the word of
the Lord from Jerusalem.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] St. Aug. cont. Faustum, 22, 17. Antiqua enim res est prænuntiativa
immolatio sanguinis, futuram passionem Mediatoris ab initio generis
humani testificans; hanc enim primus Abel obtulisse in sacris litteris
invenitur.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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