Charles Hodge Quotes
Our second remark is, that the office is of divine appointment, not merely in the sense in which the civil powers are ordained of God, but in the sense that ministers derive their authority from Christ, and not from the people.
Hodge, Charles. What is Presbyterianism? Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1855, p. 46.
It is you who have called us unto this office; but being thus called we have our authority from God;
Then the Deputy Governor, Winthrop had been attacked as being too authoritarian. The conceptual struggle with democracy, divine right, and religion had begun in America long before the American Revolution. There is an interesting parallel with the current debate over Islamic attacks on democracy by an Islamic party being elected, but then responsible to God and not only the people who elected them.
This concept is not terribly different from the concept of the theocracy of the Islamic government of Iran in the 21st century. There is a civil government but it serves and is “under the direction of the spiritual power.”
Justinian, like many civil political leaders before and after him, took great pains to minimize the civil authority of the church. Separation of church and state is not a modern notion, though it was harder to accomplish in antiquity. Rulers would want to coopt the religion to help legitimize their rule, but tried to keep the church as weak as they could unless another religion was challenging for supremecy.
i.e., a clergyman representing a congregation The theory of this particular expulsion applied not to clergy in general, but to clergy who represented a Congregation. In the absence of strict separation of church and state, clergy representing congregations had representative and legal roles in other aspects of the government and therefore represented a problem of separation of powers within the government. The same logic, for example prohibited Sheriffs and Tax Officials from the House of Commons as well as Judges sitting in the Lords. With strict separation of church and state however, the separation of powers argument does not hold, and hence there is no such current prohibition. However, at the end of the 20th century, the Roman Catholic and some other religious institutions had reached the conclusion that clerics serving as elected representatives to various civil legislative bodies potentially had an inherent conflict of interest and divided loyalty and banned the practice from the religious end although the civil laws did not preclude it.
New York State was so concerned about the separation of church and state that they would not allow any religious cleric or official, to serve in any position of the state militia or government. Delaware had earlier placed the same prohibition against clerics serving in any branch of the government. See {621428} The Bill of Rights did not go that far, but there are a few religions that also support this notion. Perhaps the most dramatic example was Pope John Paul’s prohibition of Priests running for elective office.
The clergy of the colonies were split on the American Revolution, but those clergy who supported the revolution made a huge contribution to the individual American’s intellectual view of the legitimacy of Parliament’s making laws governing the American Colonies. The anti-British clerics called for action while other forces of colonial America urged caution.
Charles Hodge was a Presbyterian theologian and principal of Princeton Theological Seminary between 1851 and 1878.
