Never commit suicide; you may regret it later. - Churchill

All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy - Spike Miligan

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is extinguishing the lamp because the dawn has come. - Rabindranath Tagore

... what is the relationship of the Church to the state? Here, again, is a
highly controversial subject. The Roman Catholic idea was that the Church was the state and controlled everything in the state and, as I reminded you at the beginning, the Church did that. At the opposite extreme is the so-called ‘Erastian’ view, an idea first propounded by a man called Erastus, who, I regret to say, was a medical man. I feel I must, on some occasion, give you thehistory of the unfortunate interventions of medical men in the doctrinal history of the Church! Erastus, unfortunately, was the man who started the pernicious doctrine that the Church is a branch of the state. Now that is, of course, the view in England with regard to the Anglican Church....
Erastianism, I repeat, is the belief that the Church is a kind of department of
state, and that it is ruled and governed by the state, so that the head of the
state appoints bishops and other dignitaries and functionaries in the Church....
There, then, are the Roman Catholic and the Erastian views of Church and state. But over against these, surely, we must agree, if we go carefully through the Scriptures, that there is a third view which can be described as ‘the two estates’. People who hold this view believe that God owns everything. God is the Lord of the universe, as well as the Lord of the Church. God has ordained the state: ‘The powers that be,’ says Paul, ‘are ordained of God’ (Rom. 13:1).
Magistrates and other types of rulers were not made by man but were ordained by God. Yes, but there is this other estate, the Church, and the two exist side by side. The one does not control the other. They are both separate and they are both under God.
That, I suggest to you, is the picture given by the New Testament. There is no indication at all of anything coming anywhere near a state Church. The first believers were independent of governments. They met under the lordship and in the presence of Christ. And outside was the great state to which they belonged. While still citizens of that state, they had entered into a realm which, in a sense, had nothing at all to do with the state. And throughout the centuries that has been the Reformed view of the relationship between the state and the Church.
In exactly the same way, we cannot find in the Scriptures such a thing as a
‘national’ Church, surely quite the reverse. Paul writes, ‘There is neither
Greek nor Jew … Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free’ (Col. 3:11). The Church is something different, consisting of those people who have been born again and have spiritual life, who are, as we have seen, members of the mystical body of Christ, and gather together in their local assembly—church— call it what you will, with Christ as the head.-Lloyd-Jones, D. M. (1998). The church and the last things (11–12). Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books.





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