‘Of the Civil Magistrate’: How Presbyterians Shifted on Church-State Relations

Abstract: In 1788, American Presbyterians meeting in Philadelphia approved a revised version of the Westminster Confession of Faith. The most significant change to the original 1646 version concerned the doctrine of the civil magistrate in chapter 23. In the century and a half following the Westminster Assembly, many Presbyterians grew wary of granting coercive powers to the civil magistrate and were drawn to more robust notions of religious liberty. In revising the Westminster Confession, Presbyterians in America rejected an older, European model of church-state relations whereby the magistrate was obligated to suppress heresies, reform the church, and provide for church establishments. As new debates about the proper relationship between church and state continue to multiply, it’s important to recognize that the two versions of WCF 23:3 represent two different and irreconcilable views of the civil magistrate.

The version of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) used by most Presbyterians in America isn’t identical with the version approved by the Westminster Assembly in 1646. Most of the differences between the historic text and the text used by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) and the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) are small—a change related to marrying the relative of a deceased spouse, a softened stance toward swearing oaths, and the removal of a reference to the pope as the antichrist. The most substantial changes—really, the only substantial changes—have to do with the relationship between church and state.

When the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America adopted the Westminster Standards in 1788, they amended the Standards in four places: WCF 20:4, 23:3, 31:3; Westminster Larger Catechism 109. The most significant change is in chapter 23, where the third article was almost completely rewritten, reflecting a new understanding of church and state that allowed for more toleration and gave much less power to the magistrate over the realm of religion.

The purpose of this article is to show what changed in the American revision of WCF 23:3 and why the changes were made. In exploring these changes, it’ll become clear the two versions of WCF 23:3, though overlapping in some areas, are, in significant ways, contradictory. In addition to examining the historical record, this article aims to make a point of contemporary relevance: that there’s more than one Reformed view of the civil magistrate and that those who want to subscribe to the Westminster Confession—either in general spirit or in an official capacity—should think carefully about which version they believe is correct.

A church officer in the OPC or PCA, for example, who subscribes without exception to his denomination’s version (the American version) of WCF 23:3 is implicitly rejecting the view that the civil magistrate has the duty to purify the church, to suppress heresies, and to call ecclesiastical synods. He is, instead, affirming a different view of the civil magistrate that does much more to restrict the magistrate’s power and gives members of the commonwealth much more freedom and liberty in the realm of religion (even to the point of practicing no religion at all).

In short, what the Westminster Assembly confessed in London about the civil magistrate in 1646 is not what American Presbyterians confessed in Philadelphia in 1788. The two versions of the Westminster Confession don’t say the same thing, and they cannot both be right.

1. What Didn’t Change

We can see what changed and what didn’t change by looking at a side-by-side comparison of the two versions of WCF 23:3. What’s bolded is the same in both versions (except moving from singular to plural); everything else was a change from 1646 to 1788.

As we can see, the first sentence of the revised version is unchanged from the historic text up until the word “or.” The Westminster divines and their 18th-century American counterparts agreed that “civil magistrates may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments,” and that they mustn’t exercise “the power of the keys” in the courts of the church. The Confession rejected any species of Erastianism—named after the Swiss physician and theologian Thomas Erastus (1524–83)—that insisted on the state’s authority in ecclesiastical affairs. The Westminster divines may have thought the magistrate was afforded a power about religion (circa sacra), but he wasn’t to exercise power in religion (in sacris).

The Scottish commissioner George Gillespie figured prominently in this debate. True, the lore surrounding Gillespie’s role at the Assembly is sometimes more legend than fact. The 19th-century historian William Hetherington has Gillespie single-handedly vanquishing Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Thomas Coleman, and John Lightfoot; toppling John Selden in a single speech; and thoroughly demolishing Erastianism for all time with Aaron’s Rod Blossoming (1646).

At the same time, it’s true that Gillespie, the youngest member of the Assembly, was an intellectual prodigy and one of the most frequent speakers and most effective debaters. In print, Gillespie argued that while the civil and ecclesiastical powers agreed in many respects (e.g., both are from God, both must obey God’s commandments, both ought to be honored, both can issue censures and correction), they differed in “their causes, effects, objects, adjuncts, correlations, executions, and ultimate terminations.” As he wrote several pages later, “The Magistrate himself may not assume the administration of the keys, nor the dispensing of Church-censures; he can but punish the external man with external punishments.” In short, the church was to be the object of the magistrate’s care but not of his operation.

Gillespie’s views on the civil magistrate, if not entirely convincing to every member of the Assembly, represented the kind of two-kingdom thinking that had been dominant in Scotland for three-quarters of a century. In 1578, the General Assembly in Scotland approved a brief manual on church government called the Second Book of Discipline, what has since been called “the first explicit statement of Scottish Presbyterianism.” A central theme throughout the document is that the Kirk (i.e., the Church of Scotland) and the civil magistrate may work toward some of the same ends but “always without confounding the one jurisdiction with the other.”

The magistrate can only deal with external matters; he cannot make laws that demand affections or compel the conscience to believe certain things. Crucially, the Second Book of Discipline also stipulated that the “magistrate neither ought to preach, minister the sacraments, nor execute the censures of the kirk, nor yet prescribe any rule how it should be done.”

Unlike its neighbor to the south, Scotland insisted the head of the church and the head of the state weren’t the same. When Reformed and Presbyterian pastors make a declaration in the name of “Jesus Christ, the only King and Head of his Church,” they’re denying not only the authority of the pope but also the authority of any earthly monarch over the church.

The Westminster Confession stands in the same tradition, believing the civil realm and the ecclesiastical realm are both under God’s authority but with different officers, different responsibilities, and different aims. As Calvin put it, “Whoever knows how to distinguish between body and soul, between this present fleeting life and that future eternal life, will without difficulty know that Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct.”

2. Civil Magistrate as Guardian and Avenger

Of course, “completely distinct” didn’t mean for Calvin, or for the Second Book of Discipline, or for Gillespie, or for the Westminster divines that the civil magistrate had no role to play in the establishment, defense, and promotion of true religion. On the contrary, they all believed the civil magistrate was responsible for enforcing both tables of the law. These responsibilities didn’t mean the state was ushering in Christ’s kingdom. That was the work of the gospel and the church. But the magistrate did have a responsibility to reform the church, to suppress false teaching, and to ensure the moral law was honored by all.

Until recently, most Reformed Christians, especially in America, would have quickly dismissed the historic text as tragically mistaken and embraced the 1788 revision as obviously correct. In recent years, however, as republican virtue has waned and as the democratic-liberal consensus has broken down, some Christians have wondered anew if the magisterial reformers and the confessional documents from the 16th and 17th centuries may have been right after all.

Stephen Wolfe, for example, has argued for a “Christian prince” in our day to do the following: “If the ministry degrades, he should reform it. He should correct the lazy and erring pastor but not perform the duties of pastor. He should protect the church from heretics and disturbers of ecclesiastical peace, ensuring tranquil spiritual administration.”

Wolfe insists the Christian prince “has the power to call synods in order to resolve doctrinal conflicts and to moderate the proceedings. Following the proceedings, he can confirm or deny their theological judgments; and in confirming them, they become the settled doctrine of the land.” According to Wolfe, the prince may look to pastors for theological advice as a father seeks advice from his son, but the prince “still retains his superiority.”

The Westminster divines thought about the relationship between church and state in the way most Reformed Christians did at the time: the civil magistrate has a duty to keep the church pure, to suppress blasphemies and heresies, to ensure the church’s worship and discipline are properly reformed, to maintain a settled church establishment, to call for church synods, and (like Constantine of old) to provide for them if necessary.

The Belgic Confession (1561), for example, declared that the “government’s task is not limited to caring for and watching over the public domain, but extends to upholding the sacred ministry, with a view to removing and destroying all idolatry and false worship of the Antichrist; to promoting the kingdom of Jesus Christ; and to furthering the preaching of the gospel everywhere; to the end that God may be honored and served by everyone, as he requires in his Word.”

Sixty years later, the Dutch theologians were still staying the same thing. The Synopsis of a Purer Theology—often called the Leiden Synopsis because it originated in 1624 as a series of disputations among faculty members at the University of Leiden—argued the civil magistrate’s duties fell into two broad categories: (1) the magistrate must make sure the civil laws are in agreement with the law of nature and with the recorded moral law; (2) the magistrate should establish and keep pure the worship of God in his region, reform what has become corrupt in the church, and “as far as he is able” go against heterodox teachers and those who block the way of progress of true religion.

While the Synopsis does espouse a basic two-kingdoms philosophy, it also argues for “the greatest possible harmony . . . between the two administrations, i.e., the political and ecclesiastical one.” The civil magistrate is lauded as nothing less than the “guardian and avenger of both tables of the Law.”

Given this broad consensus about magistrate’s role, it’s little wonder that when the Westminster Assembly met on September 10, 1644, to investigate the sins that could be provoking God’s wrath in the current conflict with the king, they listed among the sins of Parliament that it was “not active in suppressing Anabaptists and Antinomians,” it was “not seeking religion in the first place,” and “it was “not suppressing stage plays, taverns, profaneness, and scoffing of ministers.”

It should be clear from even this brief sampling of Reformed opinion that the American revision of 1788 represents a substantial change from the doctrinal assumptions of the 16th century and first half of the 17th century. Those who want to argue for a single Reformed view of church and state don’t have the facts on their side.

The American Presbyterians in 1788 were not saying the same thing the Assembly had said in 1646. It will not do to say(anachronistically) that “both are basically Kuyperian, although they are obviously leaning in different directions.” Gone from WCF 23:3 in the American revision are any references to the civil magistrate’s role in suppressing heresies and blasphemies, in reforming the church, in maintaining a church establishment, and in calling and providing for synods.

In its place, the American revision lists four basic functions for the civil magistrate relative to the church: (1) protect the church so its ministry and assemblies aren’t disturbed, (2) give no preference to any denominations of Christians above the rest, (3) ensure no law infringes on the free exercise and free association of Christians, and (4) protect all people so no one is injured or maligned based on his or her religion or lack of religion.

The civil magistrate in the American revision is still accountable to God (note the language of “our common Lord”), but he’s now a “nursing father” (see Isa. 49:23) who provides parental protection for the church to flourish rather than a “a guardian and avenger of both tables of the Law.” The phrase “nursing father” was a common designation for kings and other magistrates, going back centuries in Protestant political thought. The label could encompass many different functions, but the general idea was that the magistrate would have a supportive role to play relative to true religion.

Here that role is described as protecting the church so she’s free to perform her ministry without hindrance. Crucially, in the American edition of the Standards, “erroneous opinions or practices” are no longer to be “proceeded against” by the civil magistrate’s power (as the original wording of WCF 20:4 put it), and the sins forbidden in the second commandment no longer include “tolerating a false religion” (as the original wording of WLC 109 put it).

Moreover, the establishment principle has been removed in favor of the voluntary principle of church membership. If the burden of the historic text is to assert the authority and duty of the civil magistrate to overthrow idolatry among his people and to reform the church, the burden of the revised text is to assert the civil magistrate has noauthority to punish his people based on religion (or irreligion) and must not “in the least, interfere in matters of faith” (WCF 23:3). These are two different conceptions of what the civil magistrate should (and shouldn’t) do, not simply the same idea leaning in two different directions.

3. Of Toleration, Oaths, and Patronage

The fact that the 1788 version of WCF 23:3 was an almost complete revision of the 1646 text is well known (or should be). What’s less well known, and has been much less explored, is why the Presbyterians gathering in Philadelphia in 1788 considered, without any controversy, the original version so strikingly untenable and the amended version of their beloved Confession such a marked improvement. What happened from 1646 to 1788 that led most American Presbyterians to conclude that a thorough rethinking of the relationship between church and state was necessary?

The first answer we must give is to make clear the rethinking happened long before 1788. The vision of the civil magistrate in the Confession was never successfully implemented in England and only frustratingly implemented in Scotland. Protestant social thought wasn’t static. By the end of the 17th century, leading Protestant moral philosophers and natural law thinkers were already reconsidering the effectiveness of enforced religious uniformity. They also questioned whether the biblical justification for giving the magistrate such far-reaching power in the area of religion was truly warranted, seeing as how most of the biblical rationale came from Israel’s example in the Old Testament.

In 1687, in his work Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society, Samuel Pufendorf argued the state wasn’t founded for the sake of religion and that religion, as a part of natural human freedom, couldn’t be delegated to the sovereign. According to Pufendorf, the magistrate’s chief duty wasn’t the heavenly ordering of his society but the safety and security of his people. That was the end for which civil government was instituted.

To be sure, Pufendorf didn’t argue for disestablishment, and he didn’t think the sovereign had to tolerate every kind of religious deviation, but he pushed the Protestant world toward toleration and tried to make the case (rooted in hundreds of biblical texts) that the civil magistrate shouldn’t enforce anything more than the basics of natural religion.

Pufendorf was far from the only thinker moving in this direction. In 1689, John Locke argued in his famous Letter Concerning Tolerationthat the magistrate was permitted to tolerate false religion. Locke asked the question, “What if a Church be idolatrous, is that also to be tolerated by the magistrate?” His answer proved influential: “What power can be given to the magistrate for the suppression of an idolatrous Church, which may not in time and place be made use of to the ruin of an orthodox one?”

Both Pufendorf and Locke were writing in response to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), which forced French Huguenots to convert to Catholicism, face life in prison, or flee the country. Toleration looked better and more conducive to Christianity’s aims than giving the sovereign final say over the church’s teaching and worship. The move away from the strict enforcement of religious nationalism was promoted most powerfully not by free thinkers and atheists but by committed Protestants. There’s a reason Thomas Aikenhead, the 20-year-old student who died by hanging in 1697, was the last person to be executed for blasphemy in Great Britain. Increasingly, Protestants believed there was a better way for diverse religious populations to coexist.

Colonial Presbyterians had already broken with their Westminster forefathers in the matter of church-state relations by the time of the Adopting Act in 1729. When the ministers of the Synod of Philadelphia adopted the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms to be “the Confession of their faith” on September 19, 1729, they did so

excepting only some Clauses in the 20 and 23 Chapters, concerning which Clauses, the Synod do unanimously declare, that they do not receive those Articles in any such sense as to suppose the civil Magistrate hath a controlling Power over Synods with Respect to the Exercise of their ministerial Authority; or power to persecute any for their Religion, or in any sense contrary to the Protestant succession to the Throne of Great-Britain.

At the first moment that confessional subscription became an official reality in American Presbyterianism, Westminster’s doctrine of the civil magistrate had already been rendered null and void.

Given that colonial Presbyterians were usually Scottish or Scotch-Irish, it shouldn’t be surprising they were instinctively wary of governmental intrusion into the life of the church and nervous about the government’s authority to suppress dissent. In explaining his reasons for dissenting from the established Church in Ireland, William Tennent explained to the Synod of Philadelphia in 1718 that the episcopal system of church government he had left was “wholly anti-scriptural” and that the involvement of “Surrogates and Chancellors in their Courts Ecclesiastic [is] without a foundation in the word of God.” Likewise, in 1722 the Synod declared the affairs of church government, including the “mere circumstantials of church discipline,” belong to the church and its officers.

The reference in the Adopting Act to “the Protestant succession to Throne of Great Britain” deserves careful attention. This curious phrase is almost certainly an allusion to the Abjuration Oath (1715), which had been a major source of heartache and division over the previous decade and a half in Scotland.

In 1707, the Act of Union brought together England and Scotland under the name of Great Britain. Many Presbyterians opposed the union as inconsistent with the principles celebrated in the National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) and as undermining the Revolution Settlement (1690), which restored Presbyterian government to the Established Church in Scotland.

More concerning than the union of 1707 was the legislation passed by the British Parliament in 1712. Not only did this new legislation reintroduce the practice of patronage, but it also required that all Scottish ministers swear an oath abjuring (i.e., solemnly denouncing) the claim of the Stuarts to the British throne and approving the Hanoverian succession. Around one-third of the Presbyterian ministers refused to take the oath, earning the label “nonjurors” (from the Latin jurare, meaning “to swear”).

The divisions in Scotland were especially strong in the southwest, where separatist groups threatened the Kirk’s unity. Lay members often looked down on jurors, believing their pastors to have compromised with English episcopalian culture and betrayed the ideals set forth in the national Covenants.

The issue for most clergy in the Kirk wasn’t that they were clandestine Jacobites pining for the return of the Old Pretender (the Catholic monarch James Francis Edward Stuart). The new king, George I, came from the Lutheran House of Hanover, so at least he was a Protestant. The problem was that the Abjuration Oath also stipulated the British monarch should be in communication with the Church of England and swear the Coronation Oath in its defense. What’s more, the amended Coronation Oath included a promise to “maintain and preserve inviolably the said settlement of the Church of England and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof.” Many Presbyterians took this language as an affront to Presbyterianism itself.

Robert Wodrow, the Kirk minister and voluminous letter writer, probably spoke for many when he explained his stance toward the Abjuration Oath in a letter dated December 6, 1715:

I came to determine myself so far as to state my sufferings anew, if the Lord order them out upon a refusal of the Abjuration in this new form of it. And in yours you point out what is indeed my real strait, not to evade the penalties which, with much more, I cheerfully leave to Providence; but how to give real and sufficient evidences of loyalty to King George, for want of which my heart does not reproach me, and to distinguish myself from the refusers upon a Jacobite lay, and yet to manage both so as I may not be involved in approbation of what I reckon sinful.

Later, writing in 1720, Wodrow reiterated this position:

That which is most grievous to me, and such as are in my circumstances hereabouts, is that we have no opportunity to distinguish ourselves (since public praying, and acting upon all occasions for his Majesty and the Protestant Succession, are not reckoned much upon) from those who decline the oaths, upon principles we loathe and abhor, in the event of our being called upon to suffer upon what we reckon matter of conscience.

The Abjuration Oath required Presbyterian ministers to profess allegiance to King George and support the Protestant succession to the throne of Great Britain. Most ministers were happy to swear to these things. What many couldn’t abide was any notion, implicit or explicit, that they were in favor of episcopacy and approved of the British monarch never again being a Presbyterian.

The reference in the Adopting Act to the Protestant succession was likely a way for the transplanted Scots to make the same distinctions Wodrow tried to make in Scotland. While colonial Presbyterians were willing to support the Hanoverians and foreswear any loyalty to Catholic monarchs, they felt obliged to make clear they didn’t believe the civil magistrate had any right to impose what amounted to a religious oath.

In their minds, if the original wording of the Westminster Confession could be construed as giving Parliament the authority to make Presbyterians commit themselves to the principles of Anglicanism, then the Confession needed to be changed. They reckoned that the power given to the civil magistrate by the Westminster divines was too great and too dangerous. Perhaps the Westminster divines didn’t rid themselves of Erastianism as fully as they thought?

The other disappointment with Parliament’s legislation of 1712 is that it restored “the Patrons to their ancient rights of presenting Ministers to the churches vacant in that part of Great Britain called Scotland.” In essence, this meant wealthy landowners and noblemen would have a significant say—sometimes the decisive vote over against the congregation—in filling pastoral vacancies. The Assembly debated the issue of patronage but without any clear resolution. The Assembly certainly didn’t condemn the practice as the Scottish commissioners would have liked. In 1649, the Scottish Parliament abolished patronage, only for it to be reintroduced during the Restoration in 1660, then abolished again in 1690, and finally reintroduced for good in 1712.

As problematic as the Abjuration Oath proved in the short term, the reintroduction of patronage inflicted a blow on the Church of Scotland from which it has never recovered. Virtually every schism—from the Seceders in 1733, to the Relief Church in 1761, to the Disruption of 1843—was prompted by dissatisfaction with lay patronage.

The division between the Moderate Party and the Popular Party in the Kirk in the middle part of the 18th century was also a division owing in large part to patronage. Moderates accepted patronage, believing it was part of good order and social cohesion, while the evangelicals in the Popular Party opposed it as grievous intrusion into the church’s affairs and congregations’ rights to choose their own ministers. Patronage’s significance in the American context isn’t that colonial Presbyterians were subject to it but that they all knew of it and wanted it—and every entanglement like it—kept far from them.

 4. What Hath Witherspoon Wrought?

John Witherspoon (1723–94) may be most remembered as the president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) and as one of the Founding Fathers (famously, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence), but he was also the most important leader in the American Presbyterian church in the second half of the 18th century.

According to Ashbel Green, Witherspoon’s protégé and first biographer, Witherspoon’s influence in the courts of the church was greater than any other member. It’s hard to argue with Green’s assessment.

Witherspoon served on every important committee (and at times, it seems, almost every committee), including the one charged with drafting a Plan of Government and Discipline for the soon-to-be-formed Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Witherspoon drew up the eight Preliminary Principles that continue to serve several Presbyterian denominations to the present day. He preached the opening sermon at the first General Assembly in 1789, and of the 188 ministers at that assembly, 52 had been personally taught by Witherspoon. Green even records that after Witherspoon joined the American Presbyterians in 1769, the published acts of the Synod came mostly from the Scotsman’s pen.

It’s not insignificant that the architect of the national Presbyterian church in America made his name in his native country as the most formidable opponent of the Moderate Party and of patronage. For as well respected as Witherspoon was among evangelicals in Scotland, he was often a pariah to the power brokers in the Kirk. His traditional Calvinism, his political maneuverings against patronage (usually unsuccessful), and his satirical writings directed against Moderate men and the Edinburgh literati made him the object of frequent derision and attack.

Witherspoon may have loved the Kirk, but he was under no illusion that an established church, even a Presbyterian one, would bring about the civil and ecclesiastical purity the Westminster divines longed for. And patronage was a big part of the problem. Surely, it wasn’t lost on Witherspoon that all his ecclesiastical opponents had either been supported or promoted according to the patronage of the impious and massively influential Duke of Argyll. When Witherspoon landed in America in 1768, he may not have abandoned the establishment principle in his head, but he’d already experienced firsthand the meddling influence and high handedness of the state into the church’s affairs.

In 1776, the New Jersey Provincial Congress, which included John Witherspoon, approved a new state constitution. While the constitution restricted office-holding to Protestants, it vigorously defended religious freedom and opposed religious establishments. Article XVIII of the constitution they approved prohibited church establishments:

That no person shall ever within this colony be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshipping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; nor under any pretence whatsoever compelled to attend any place of worship, contrary to his own faith and judgment; nor shall any person within this colony ever be obliged to pay titles, taxes, or any other rates, for the purpose of building or repairing any church or churches, place or places of worship, or for the maintenance of any ministry or ministry, contrary to what he believes to be right or has deliberately or voluntarily engaged to perform.

Of the 10 men responsible for drafting the New Jersey constitution, seven were Presbyterians, with the leadership falling to the prominent Presbyterian pastor Jacob Green. If the Presbyterians in New Jersey were representative of the whole (and there’s every reason to think they were), then the Westminster-subscribing Presbyterians in America clearly believed in a different relationship between church and state than had been assumed at the Assembly a century earlier.

Witherspoon was no mere proceduralist when it came to church-state relations. Neither he nor his fellow Presbyterians in America conceived of an entirely neutral magistrate who presided over a secular people and considered all religions equally appropriate. The magistrate was to give no preference to any denomination of Christians even as he protected the rights of all persons, religious or irreligious (WCF 23:3).

In his Lectures on Moral Philosophy, modeled after the basic outline established by Protestant moral philosophers like Pufendorf and Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Witherspoon gave attention to issues like jurisprudence, civil society, and the “law of nature and nations.” Regarding the duties of the civil magistrate, Witherspoon argued that “we ought in general to guard against persecution on a religion account as much as possible,” that people are more dangerous “when they are oppressed,” and that even “Papists are tolerated in Holland without danger to liberty.”

Witherspoon allowed that the magistrate could enact laws to punish acts of profanity and impiety. He further allowed that there were good reasons some people believed the magistrate ought to make public provision for the worship of God. In the end, Witherspoon said the magistrate was like a parent with a right to instruct but not to constrain.

We should always be careful in leaning too heavily on Witherspoon’s moral philosophy lectures. He didn’t want them published, and the copies we have are from student notes published after his death. They’re class outlines rather than fully formed written treatises. On one subject after another, Witherspoon quickly surveys various views, usually looking for as much common ground as possible and often without offering a definitive opinion himself.

But insofar as we have the basic contours of Witherspoon’s thought from these lectures, we can see he didn’t want a government that was prohibited from being an aid to the church and a friend to Christianity. Along with his fellow Presbyterians, Witherspoon was eager to see the United States built on a Christian foundation and become increasingly Christianized. He presumed that in America, Protestant Christianity would be a kind of public truth and that the government would be generally supportive of religion’s place in society.

At the same time, there’s no doubt Witherspoon’s public words and public actions represent a significant shift in the way many Protestants (at least in America) viewed the civil magistrate’s role. There isn’t a straight line of continuity from the Westminster Assembly to the New England Puritans to the American founders.

When the General Assembly of 1789 presented a fawning address to the president of the United States (an address drafted by a three-person committee with Witherspoon as the head), they didn’t laud George Washington as the reformer of the church or the avenger of both tables of the law. Instead, they “esteem[ed] it a peculiar happiness to behold in [their] chief magistrate, a steady, uniform, avowed friend of the Christian religion; who has commenced his administration in rational and exalted sentiments of piety; and who, in his private conduct adorns the doctrines of the gospel of Christ; and, on the most public and solemn occasions devoutly acknowledges the government of divine Providence.”

The Assembly commended Washington for his character and example but then added that “to the forces of imitation, we [meaning the church] will endeavor to add the wholesome instructions of religion.”

Or consider, as another example, this remarkable section from a “Pastoral Letter”—again, written by Witherspoon—that the Synod of New York and Philadelphia issued in 1775 to the congregations under their care:

If it is undeniable, that universal profligacy makes a nation ripe for divine judgments, and as the natural means of bringing them to ruin, reformation of manners is of the utmost necessity in our present distress. At the same time, as it has been observed by many eminent writers, that the censorial power, which had for its object the manners of the public in the ancient free states, was absolutely necessary to their continuance, we cannot help being of the opinion that the only thing which we have now to supply the place of this is religious discipline of the several sects with respect to their own members; so that the denomination or profession which shall take the most effectual care of the instruction of its members, and maintain its discipline in the fullest vigor, will do the most essential service to the whole body. For the very same reason the greatest service which magistrates or persons in authority can do with respect to the religion or morals of the people, is to defend and secure the rights of conscience in the most equal and impartial terms.

This is a far cry from the opinion of the Westminster divines that the civil magistrate should suppress blasphemy and heresy. The American Presbyterians, instead, believed the task of reforming the people’s character belonged to the church and that the magistrate’s duty, therefore, was to secure the rights of conscience—equally and impartially—so the church can freely exercise its own discipline and discipleship.

Witherspoon’s chief concern—both politically and ecclesiastically—was the threat of tyranny. He believed civil liberty and religious liberty always went hand in hand; lose one and you’ll lose the other. As he said in “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men”—his famous sermon from May 1776 that paved the way for independence—“I do not wish to oppose anybody’s religion, but everybody’s wickedness.”

It was based on this conviction that Witherspoon, two months later, joined with other Presbyterians and evangelical Protestants, along with Latitudinarians, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Deists, Quakers, and one Catholic, in signing the Declaration of Independence. In so doing, the most influential Presbyterian pastor in America linked arms with a religiously diverse group of patriots to form a new nation, bound together not by an ecclesiastical creed but by a document that was an amalgamation of civic republicanism, Lockean liberalism, and Protestant natural law and moral philosophy.

This was a situation the Westminster divines, let alone the Covenanters, couldn’t have envisioned and wouldn’t have countenanced. But Presbyterians in America saw the relationship between the church and the state in different terms, and they revised the Westminster Confession accordingly.

5. Implications for Today

We live in a time where many voices across the political spectrum are questioning the wisdom of the democratic liberal order we’ve had in much of the West for the past 200 years. As Christians grieve what has been lost of their former cultural influence (and fear what lies ahead), there have been new discussions and new discoveries about what political arrangement can best serve our nation and our world.

Some of these discussions have been more heat than light, but many have been welcome forays into a deeper understanding of political theology. The ongoing theological and historical retrieval has the potential to bear good fruit. But we must allow the past to speak for itself before we recruit it to speak for us. Even if we’re anchored in a specific tradition, we must allow that the tradition, especially if it spans centuries and continents, doesn’t always say the same thing.

An important case in point, as I’ve tried to show, is the way the doctrine of the civil magistrate changed over time. John Coffey’s conclusion is apt: “With the exception of the Reformed Presbyterian Covenanters and some Seceders, eighteenth-century Presbyterians found ways of distancing themselves from the Westminster Assembly’s teaching on the coercive powers of the godly magistrate in matters of religion. . . . In every part of the English-speaking world, Lockean ideas of religious liberty looked increasingly attractive to Presbyterians who feared Anglican hegemony or saw little prospect of becoming the dominant majority.”

As a minister in the PCA, and as one who takes vows to uphold the revised version of the Westminster Confession, I think the changes were for the better. But my aim in this article hasn’t been so much to prove the changes were better as it has been to show the changes are significant and that they represent two different and irreconcilable views of the civil magistrate.

American Presbyterians still assumed Christianity would have a privileged place in their new nation. They preached and prayed and labored for a godly American republic. But they didn’t believe what the Westminster divines believed about the civil magistrate. They rejected an older, European model whereby the magistrate ensured only the right religion (his religion) was practiced in the land. If American Presbyterians in particular want to look to their confessional past for a model of church-state relations, they’ll have to determine if they’re going back to London or back to Philadelphia. They cannot be in both places at the same time.

This article appeared in the August 2024 issue of Themelios.