LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1998, Page 320

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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

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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.