It seems to me that Christian advocates of an über-Jeffersonian separationism with respect to “church” and “state,” which usually in such a view are taken to mean not quite “church” and “state,” but something more like “religion” and “political order,” need to be able to answer coherently the following syllogism:
P1. Man’s chief temporal end is to glorify and serve God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
P2. But the ends of political communities are the same as the ends of individual men (Aristotle, Politics 7, inter alia).
Conclusion: Therefore, the chief end of political communities is to glorify and serve God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
My suspicion is that the premise most open to challenge would apparently be P2, though it is more difficult to refute than it might seem at first glance (at least if you hold to a classical understanding of politics).
And just to clear the way of breathless worries and irresponsible accusations about “theonomy,” it should be obvious that this syllogism has nothing whatsoever to do with it. It has only to do with natural law, or general revelation, and reason. To see that this is so, we could easily rewrite it as:
P1. Man’s chief temporal end is to glorify and serve God or the gods.
P2. But the ends of political communities are the same as the ends of individual men (Aristotle, Politics 7, inter alia).
Conclusion: Therefore, the chief end of political communities is to glorify and serve God or the gods.
But since this post is addressed to Christians, and since I assume that Christians have a good handle on who this “God” is, I have written it as I did above.
(For more on this theme, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
2 replies on “A Syllogism on Religion and the State”
Hence the problem with natural religion. God the Creator is revealed in nature, not Jesus Christ. He is however revealed in the Law.
P1: Man’s chief temporal end is glorify and serve God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
P2: God is only revealed in Jesus Christ in the Scriptures.
Conclusion 1: Therefore men can only glorify and serve God as revealed in Jesus Christ from the Scriptures.
P3: But the ends of political communities are the same as the ends of individual men (Aristotle, Politics 7, inter alia).
Conclusion: Therefore, the chief end of political communities is to glorify and serve God as revealed in Jesus Christ from the Scriptures.
Now, I am not an advocate of Reconstructionism, but I am not an advocate of natural religion and reason independent of Scripture.
As much as I enjoy following your posts, the problem with the syllogism, vis a vis Jefferson anyway, is with P1. No humanistic way to prove P1. Also, and because of that, P2 becomes a real problem as well. If the political machinery is to advance individual purposes where individuals don’t agree as to those purposes, then thise who accept P1 must dominate by force those who do not … I.e., a paternalistic domination of children believed to be too ignorant or immature to know their own purposes. How do you distinguish such domination by a religion from domination by some other ‘non-religious’ ideology?
Separation of church and state while protections for free choice in religion and in expression provides that balance, does it not?
Just saying.
– E