Was Bullinger Erastian?

The following is an extended extract from Jean-Marc Berthoud’s celebrated lecture of 2004 :

“Let us here remove some unnecessary misunderstandings as to Bullinger´s position on the relation of the Church to the State. As a defender of Chalcedon he refused any confusion between the spiritual and the temporal orders. The Magistrate was not to usurp the proper spiritual function of the Church: the preaching of the Word and the celebration of the sacraments. The Church, on the other hand, was not to pretend to any kind of rule over the Magistrate, as was the case with the Roman theocratic system. But one must add that the absence, for political and theological reasons, in the Zurich arrangement of 1531-1532 of that clear institutional distinction between Church and State, for which Calvin was later to fight so strenuously in Geneva, made the balance between the spiritual and temporal powers in Zurich unduly (and dangerously) dependent on the stature both of the Magistrates and of the Pastors. Once Bullinger was gone, and with him his great spiritual and political authority, the State would increasingly be tempted to dominate the Church. Nothing on the institutional level would then hinder this growing appetite for the usurped authority of the State in the spiritual sphere. This historical fact "“ that of the ulterior Erastian subordination of the Church to the State "“ may in part explain why Bullinger, the historical representative of the faithful Zurich Church, has today become so utterly unknown, even in his native canton. The institutionalisation by Calvin of a clear distinction between Church and State was certainly more biblical (and less dangerous) than Bullinger´s political accommodation and, in the long run, certainly more productive both spiritually and politically.

But it is best here to let Bullinger speak for himself. An important part of his Decades is given to a detailed exposition of the Ten Commandments. The sixth commandment "“ Thou shalt commit no murder "“ is separated into its two aspects: the interdiction of homicide and the description of the function of the Magistrate. In passing, it is interesting to point out that the duties of the Magistrate are usually dealt with under the fifth commandment, that ordering children to honour their parents. On this question of the biblical teaching on homicide and on civil authority, Bullinger devotes no less than four sermons in the first volume of the Parker Society edition of the Decades, some 95 pages in all. The titles of each of these sermons in the Second Decade merit attention.

* Sixth sermon: Of the second precept of the second table, which is in order the sixth of the ten commandments, thou shalt not kill and of the magistrate.
* Seventh sermon: Of the office of the magistrate, whether the care of religion appertain to him or no, and whether he may make laws and ordinances in cases of religion.
* Eighth sermon: Of judgement, and the office of the judge; that Christians are not forbidden to judge; of revengement and punishment; whether it be lawful for a magistrate to kill the guilty; wherefore, when, how, and what a magistrate must punish; whether he may punish offenders in religion or no.
* Ninth sermon: Of war; whether it be lawful for a magistrate to make war. What the Scripture teacheth touching war. Whether a Christian man may bear the office of a magistrate and of the duty of subjects.

He explains his position, and that of the Zurich Church, in no uncertain terms.

For I know that many are of the opinion that the things of religion and their ordering belong to the bishops alone and not to the kings, princes and other magistrates. But the catholic truth teaches that the things of religion especially belong to the magistracy and that the same not only may but also should and ought to order and promote religion.23

After quoting a number of examples from the Old Testament, he adds:

Who is ignorant, that the magistrate´s especial care ought to be to keep the commonweal in safeguard and prosperity? Which undoubtedly he cannot do, unless he provide to have the word of God preached to his people, and cause them to be taught the true worship of God, by that means making himself, as it were, the minister of true religion.24

Now the exaggeration of this teaching was to lead to what later was to be known as Erastianism and it is known, through Bullinger´s unprinted correspondence with Thomas Erastus in the Palatinate, that the Zurich Reformer played an important role in the formulation of this position.25 But in Bullinger´s mind this by no means implied the subordination of the Church to the Magistrate. It was implicit in his view of the comprehensive character of the Christian faith that the totality of the Commonwealth was included in any truly biblical perception of reality. It is also to be noted that it was his recognition of the necessary and beneficent role of the godly magistrate in affairs of religion that so strongly favoured the great influence Bullinger exercised in the establishment of the Reformation in England, this of course in the context of the English Monarch as the Head of the Church.

For Bullinger, there existed a relation of mutual dependence between the faithful Church and the godly Magistrate. Pamela Biel comments on the need for the Magistrate to hear and heed the preaching of God´s Word, when she writes of the 17th Sermon of the Decades26

Bullinger expends the remainder of the sermon on demonstrating that, as the discernment of right religion is a complicated process, the magistrates ought to seek help in the right ordering of the church. The ministers, as the expert interpreters of God´s word and will, assisted the magistrates in keeping the territory on the path of right religion. The magistrate, for his part, retained the exercise of power such that he still stood as an authority over the minister in all things save the interpretation of Scripture.27

What was important for Bullinger "“ and here we again find his constant aim of attaining to a truly comprehensive faith "“ was not the exact definition of the particular rights and duties of Church and State as separate or even opposed institutions, but what Biel rightly calls "˜the reciprocal relationship between the minister and the magistrate´.28 Is it necessary here to add that his comprehensive way of thinking about every aspect of reality "“ a logic of "˜both and´ - does not function in fields where error and sin are involved. There rules supreme the antithesis "“ "˜either or´ "” the necessary choice between truth and error, good and evil. But Bullinger´s general strain of thought, strongly founded as it was on the original perfect coherence of the unfallen creation, viewed reality in terms of reciprocity, of the logic of "˜both and´, of coherence and complementarity. His words speak for themselves:

To the magistrate is commanded [by God] that he hear the servants of the Church. On the other hand, the servant of the church should follow the magistrate in all these things which the law commands. So the magistrate is not made subject by God to the priests or servants of the church as lords but as servants of the Lord God. Thus the servants of the church as much as the magistrates must be submissive to God in himself and his law. For if a single one of the priests does not speak the word of God, and he is priest only in name, no one of the common people should hold him before their eyes [as a model to follow]; I will be silent about a prince or a magistrate.29

Elsewhere he explicitly affirms with the apostles that, faced with an iniquitous political power, the Christian must "˜Obey God rather than men´.

This priority given to the monarch in the work of the Reformation of the Church comes out very clearly in his 1538 dedication of his book Concerning Sacred Scripture to Henry VIII. There he exhorts the king to take in hand the liberation of what later became the Anglican Church from the errors of Rome. For Bullinger, as Biel puts it,

Henry has the ultimate power and responsibility for the fate of the Church in his land. The potential for positive change in England through Henry dictates Bullinger´s position.30

Bullinger was aware that politics, the art of the possible "“ here the advancement of the Reformation in Britain "“ depended on the wise and prudent use of the historically established powers and institutions of the time. In the 16th Century, without the conversion of those in political authority, there was little hope for the free proclamation of the Word, a ministry without which no Reformation whatever was possible. Biel qualifies what we can call the Erastian tendency of Bullinger´s thinking as follows:

Bullinger did not, however, believe that the king ought to be left to his own devices when it came to matters of religion. Most of Concerning Sacred Scripture argued for the priority of the Bible in all matters of religion and specifically for the position of the ministers as interpreters of Scripture. "¦ The bishops help the king to understand what exactly God wants from him.31

For Bullinger the function of the Christian Magistrate was utterly subsumed under God´s own justice: he was under God´s law and to establish himself as his own law "“ as is the case for all forms of modern democracy "“ was to claim for himself the title of Tyrant or, as we would say today, of totalitarian power. For Bullinger,

The prince, indeed, is the living law, if his mind obey the written laws, and square [separate] not from the law of nature. Power and authority, therefore, is subject unto laws; for unless the prince in his heart agree with the law, in his breast do write the law, and in his deeds express the law [ie God´s law], he is not worthy to be called a good man, much less a prince.32

But Bullinger´s comprehensive mind adds the following caveat to his massive affirmation, showing how necessary a jurisprudential application of the law is essential to true equity, to the exercise of justice.

Again, a good prince and magistrate hath power over the law, and is master of the laws, not that they may turn, put out, undo, make and unmake, them as they list [wish], at their pleasure; but that he may put them into practice among the people, apply them to the necessity of the state, and attemper their interpretation to the meaning of their maker.33

And he continues:

Among all men, at all times and of all ages, the meaning and substance of the laws touching honesty, justice and public peace, is kept inviolable. If change is to be made, it is in the circumstances and the law is interpreted as the case requireth, according to justice and a good end. "¦ It is apparently evident that laws are good and not to be broken, and how far forth they do admit the prince´s epieikeion (Aristotle, Ethics, Lib. V, cp 10), that is the prince´s moderation, interpretation, limitation, or dispensation, lest peradventure that old and accustomed proverb be rightly applied unto them, Law with extremity is extreme injury.34

And he gives as example the necessary difference in treatment, by a judge attentive to equity, of accidental homicide and premeditated murder, even though both acts end up in the killing of a person.

As to the content of the laws applied by the Magistrate, Bullinger speaks in no uncertain terms:

The apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ did bind or burden no man with the laws of Moses [here he of course means not all the laws of Moses but, as Aquinas teaches, only those laws of the Torah specific to the vocation of the Old Testament Israelite nation]; they never condemned good laws of the heathen, nor commended to any man naughty [evil] laws of the Gentiles, but left the laws, with the use and free choice of them, for the saints to use as they thought good. But therewithal they ceased not most diligently to beat into men´s heads the fear of God, faith, charity, justice and temperance; because they knew that they in whose hearts those virtues were settled, can either easily make good laws themselves, or pick and choose out of the best of those which other men make. For it maketh no matter whether the magistrate pick out of Moses´ Jewish laws, or out of the allowable laws of the heathen, sufficient laws for him and his countrymen, or else do keep still the old and accustomed laws which have before been used in his country, so that he have an eye to cut off such wicked, unjust and lawless laws, as one found to be thrust in among the better sort. "¦

For civil and politic laws, I add this much, and say, that those seem to be the best laws, which according to the circumstances of every place, person, state, and time, do come nearest to the precepts of the ten commandments and the rule of charity, not having in them any spot and iniquity, licentious liberty, or shameless dishonesty. Let them moreover, be brief and short, not stretched out beyond measure, and wrapped in with many expositions; let them have a full respect to the matter whereto they are directed, and not be frivolous and of no effect.35

To conclude these quotations drawn from Bullinger´s treatment of the Sixth Commandment in the Decades let us add that our Zurich Antistes in no way condoned any kind of confusion between the spiritual and temporal orders, a confusion leading either to the spiritual tyranny of the Church over the Magistrate or, contrariwise (as is much more common today), the accumulation of all power, both spiritual and temporal, in the hands of the Providential Welfare State. In this 17th sermon, which contains much of his teaching on these matters, Bullinger writes:

But our disputation tendeth not to the confounding of the offices and duties of the magistrates and ministers of the church, as that we would have the king to preach, to baptize and to minister the Lord´s Supper; or the priest, on the other side, to sit in the judgement seat, and give judgement against a murderer, or by pronouncing sentence to take on matters of strife. The church of Christ hath, and retaineth, several and distinguished [distinct] offices; and God is a God of order, not of confusion.36

To characterise Bullinger´s complementary vision of the mutually supportive reciprocal relationship between the temporal and spiritual orders, a distinction which excluded both inchoate confusion and absolute separation, I can do no better, in closing this part of my lecture, than to refer to an astonishing text written in 1941 by a Serbian Orthodox theologian, Nicholas Velimirovitch, at the very moment Hitler launched his divisions in a massive onslaught on the Yugoslav Monarchy. This citation drawn from Velimirovitch´s short theological and historical study, Theodouly: The Serbian people as the Servant of God will, I hope, help us better understand Bullinger´s comprehensive understanding of the mutually dependent relationship, within the wider Commonwealth, of a faithful Church and a God-fearing Magistracy.

What then differentiates Theocracy from Theodouly? It is the difference between an imposed master and a voluntary servant. Theocracy can be of two kinds: clerical or lay. We only know clerical theocracy [ie the clerical tyranny of the Papacy] and it is profoundly despised in Europe; however lay theocracy is well known in the Muslim world, where Caliph and Sheikh or Shah holds a divine authority.37

Of course our modern world knows a kind of "˜atheistic theocracy´ with the total sovereignty of a political power become god, a law unto itself and its own end, its own finality, in the modern totalitarian and democratic state. Speaking of the Patron Saint of the Serbian nation, Velimirovitch continues:

St Sava (1174-1235) by his example instituted and consolidated the reality of the public service of God in such a way that the Archbishop of Serbia became the principal servant of Christ in the spiritual sphere and the King of Serbia the first servant of Christ in the civil sphere. Thus, if the archbishop was the servant of Christ, all the clergy were also constituted servants of Christ; and if the King was also the servant of Christ, then all constituted powers, civil and military were equally established as servants of Christ.

The whole spiritual hierarchy was expected to serve Christ and likewise the whole civil and military hierarchy was also expected to be in Christ´s service. Thus it was not only expected of the Church that it be enrolled under the banner of the service of Jesus Christ, but also the State: the State, no less than the Church, and the King no less than the Archbishop. Theodouly, the service of God, was the way and the purpose of both the Church and the State, each in the entirety of their respective functions.38

Such a comprehensive Orthodox view of the relation of harmony and reciprocal dependence between the godly magistrate and the faithful church would no doubt have found considerable sympathy with the Antistes of Zurich. But such a harmony between Church and State is difficult for us to understand today, confronted as we are with an antinomian and impious State (the Beast of biblical symbolism) and a prostituted spiritual power. The latter is not the Church, become largely spiritually and politically insignificant, but the general relativistic and ideological culture "“ "˜culture´ comes from "˜cult´, worship"“ a revolutionary civilisation establishing in all fields false and destructive norms, radically opposed both to God and to his Commandments.”