# LCMS Convention Workbook_St. Louis Missouri_1998_S322 # Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration) 320 THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS Render unto Caesar... and unto God A Lutheran View of Church and State A Report of the Commission on Theology and Church Relations of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod September 1995 Render unto Caesar... and unto God A Lutheran View of Church and State Prolog: The American Crisis This study is designed to examine historic Christian teaching regard- ing Christians and government and to propose constructive ways in which American Lutherans can participate in the creation of an appropriate pub- lic philosophy and a viable American democracy. The evidence of serious problems in the relationship between Ameri- cans and their government is all around us. In fact, sociologist James Davi- son Hunter has argued that these problems reflect an underlying “culture war": America is in the midst of a culture war that has had and will continue to have reverberations not only within public policy but within the lives of ordinary Americans everywhere. I define cultural conflict very simply as political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding. The end to which these hostilities tend is the domination of one cultural and moral! ethos over all others. Let it be clear, the principles and ideals that mark these competing systems of moral understanding are by no' means trifling but always have a character of ultimacy to them. They are not merely attitudes that can change ona whim but basic commitments and beliefs that provide a source of identity, purpose, and togetherness for the people who live by them. It is for precisely this reason that political action rooted in these prin- ciples and ideals tends to be so passionate.’ What is new about this, argues Hunter, is that in the past American politics took place within a generally biblical framework while today that frame- work is self-consciously secular. As a result, according to Hunter, “the older agreements have unraveled. The divisions of political consequence today ‘James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 34; 42. CONTENTS Prolog: The American Crisis ..... I. God and Caesar Revisited ... A. What the Bible Says... . The Church: From Persecuted to Persecuting .... . The Protestant Reformation ..............c0000 . Holy War and Religious Toleration.......... . The American “Experiment” .. . Is There a Moral to This Story? II. A Lutheran Two-Kingdom Perspective A. Interpretive Models of Church and State B. Luther and the Lutheran Confessions C, American Lutherans and the Missouri Synod ... D. Is There Really a Lutheran Perspective? .... III. Practicing What We Preach A. The Failure of Two Extremes. B. Moral Authority without Political Partisanship C, For Example. Epilog: “Who Speaks for the Church?” ..... Copyright © 1995 The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod 1333 South Kirkwood Road, St. Louis, MO 63122-7295 Manufactured in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of The Lutheran Church— Missouri Synod Write to Library for the Blind, 13335. Kirkwood Road, St. Louis, MO 63122-7295, to obtain in braille or in lange type for the visually impaired. Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyrighted 1946, 1952, © 1971, 1973. Used by permission. The quotations from the Lutheran Confessions in this publication are from The Boak of Concord: The Confessions of the Ev. Lutheran Church, ed. by Theodore G. Tappert, Fortress Press © 1959. Used by permission of the publisher. are ... the result of differing worldviews.” What is at stake, he concludes, are “our most fundamental and cherished assumptions about how to order our lives—our own lives and our lives together in this society. Our most fundamental ideas about who we are as Americans are now at odds.”? Os Guinness also believes that a deep-seated cultural upheaval is now occurring in America, and he calls it “A Crisis of the Mandate of Heaven”: The reason for this sober examinaton is that, despite its historic political and economic triumphs, the American republic is entering its own time of reckoning, an hour of truth that will not be delayed. It is nearing the cli- max of a generation-long cultural revolution, or crisis of cultural authori- ty. Under the impact of modernity, the beliefs, ideals, and traditions that have been central to Americans and to American democracy——whether religious, such as Jewish and Christian beliefs, or civic, such as American- ism—are losing their compelling cultural power. This crisis is not a crisis of legitimacy, like that of the Soviet Union, but a crisis of vitality that goes to the heart of America’s character and strength. It therefore threatens to pose questions not only for America’s continuing success and world dom- ination, but for the vitality of democracy in America itself.’ Like Hunter, Guinness aims to navigate between the two extremes of the culture war: the “reimposers” (who merely want to reimpose traditional Evangelical Protestant hegemony) and the “removers” (who simply want to cleanse Christian faith completely from American public life).t For Guin- ness and Hunter the goal is not reimposing or removing Christianity but creating common ground in the public square. Because, as Guinness notes, “Democratic liberty ... is neither self- derived nor self-sustaining’* and because American democracy has been closely associated with biblical principles of liberty and justice, Christians have an important stake in America’s cultural crisis. More is involved here than religion, narrowly defined. At stake is the matter of a public philoso- phy that both promotes religious liberty and draws its strength from it. Yet such a widely-shared public philosophy is not even on the horizon. Thus, its creation is both a challenge and question mark for thoughtful Christians. These challenges are not entirely new. Problems in the relationship between Christianity and the civil government have existed throughout American history. In fact, they have existed throughout the history of the Mhid., 42. Richard John Neuhaus agrees: “Our present moment and the decades ahead, it is reasonable to think, may best be described as a Kulturkampf over the defining of the Amer- ican experiment.” “From Providence to Privacy: Religion and the Redefinition of America,” in Unsecular America, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 60 “Os Guinness, The American Hour: A Trme of Reckoning and the Once and Future Rote of Faith (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 4 *Pid., 20. “Beid., 19.