In our current public discourse, there are growing concerns about the relationship between church and state. The extreme versions on the right and left either supplant religion for other moral preferences or hope to return to some golden age of Christian Nationalism or Integralism. Living in a pagan world, the early church walked a different path, maintaining a positive vision of the civil authorities, but defending their right of the virtuous expression of religious activity. The following excerpt is from my book: Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church, that looks back to the political theology of the early church, before the rise of Constantine and the age of Christendom.

With such a high view of divine providence, the early church had a positive view of the state even amid persecution. God’s sovereignty and providence had delegated some authority to earthly rulers for a purpose. The early church operated by a persistent conviction that God had granted authority to the state and that Christians ought to submit to the just rule of earthly kings. As Polycarp said to the proconsul, “You I might have considered worthy of a reply, for we have been taught to pay proper respect to rulers and authorities appointed by God, as long as it does us no harm.” … Given their situation, it is most striking that early Christians were not anti-imperial. Yet the early church did not remain idle when the actions of the state or its representatives lacked virtue. Nor did they regularly pass glowing praises of the state’s actions or laws. They performed civil disobedience and critiqued the laws with the good rhetorical flourishes they had learned from their classical education. When the state promoted unrighteousness, they proclaimed, with the apostles, that Rome was Babylon (1 Pet 5:13). But even then they did not forget the apostles’ other injunctions and regard the state as wholly evil.

Living within a pagan empire, the church understood the primary functions of the state to be promoting peace and security, enacting just laws to curb sin, and allowing the free exercise of religion for the promotion of virtue. If there was no authority except that which comes from God, and if God in his sovereignty had empowered the state to provide for the security and safety of its citizens, then the state had been granted the sword to bring peace and security. Many in the early church believed that the “sword was the state’s real vocation … dialectically link[ing] Roman submission to emperor and Christian submission to God.” Alluding to Romans 13:4–6 and related passages, Irenaeus observes that “earthly rule” has been “appointed by God for the benefit of nations, and not by the devil, who is never at rest at all, nay, who does not love to see even nations conducting themselves after a quiet manner.” Like Irenaeus, the apologist Athenagoras, writing to the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, states that we Christians “are of all men most piously and righteously disposed toward the Deity and towards your government.” Tertullian puts it simply: “we respect in the emperors the will of God, who has made them rulers of the nations.” Even the prayer of 1 Clement teaches that God gives “to sons of men glory and honor and authority over those upon the earth.” The Epistle of Barnabas taught, “You shall be subject to the Lord, and to [other] masters as the image of God, with modesty and fear.” At the same time, “You shall seek out every day the faces of the saints, either by word examining them, and going to exhort them,” and, “You shall remember the day of judgment, night and day.” Even when they struggled with it, early Christians heard a constant refrain to respect the state’s authority.

Besides providing safety and security for its citizens, the state was ordained to impose laws to suppress lawlessness, limit sin, and thereby promote virtue in its citizens and justice in society. Early Christian theologians such as Origen saw continuity between civil laws and the divine law. He reasoned that since the Scriptures did not list out every vice covered by the civil law, therefore “all the crimes that God wants to be punished, he has willed that they be punished not through the priests and leaders of the churches, but through the worldly judge. And aware of this, Paul rightly names him a minister of God and an avenger of the one who does what is evil.” For Origen, these associations between the just rule of God and earthly rulers were remarkable. Pondering the claim of Romans 13:4 that the emperor is “God’s servant,” he writes, “Paul troubles [me] by these words, that he calls the secular authority and the worldly judgment a minister of God; and he does this not merely one time, but he even repeats it a second and a third time.” Further exploring the connection, Origen reasoned that the apostles only concerned themselves with divine laws because the civil laws were already sufficient to regulate general crimes. The apostles had to stipulate avoiding meat sacrificed to idols (Acts 15:29) but not various other commands concerning murder, adultery, and so on, because these things were already covered by civil law. In this way, Origen argued, a “worldly judge fulfills the greatest part of God’s law.” There is no spiritual partitioning in this kind of reasoning; the church was to obey civil laws as a way of revering and respecting “God’s servant,” God’s chosen leader.

Early Christian theologians well knew that political power could be abused, even though it was meant to curb sin. Not all civil leaders are virtuous, and, in the Lord’s providence, people experience different types of political governance. Some rules, Irenaeus observes, “are given for the correction and the benefit of their subjects, and for the preservation of justice; but others, for the purposes of fear and punishment and rebuke; others, as [the subjects] deserve it, are for deception, disgrace, and pride; while the just judgment of God … passes equally upon all.” Origen likewise saw both the benefit and the exploitations of political power. Just as the senses of sight, hearing, and touch are natural inclinations given to the body, so is the authority bestowed upon human rulers a gift of God. Power, though, just like the natural senses, might be used for either good or evil purposes. God bestows power, but “the judgment of God will be just in respect to those who govern the authority they have received in accordance with their own impieties and not in accordance with God’s laws.” Like a tool that can be used for both constructive and malicious purposes, the state is not inherently evil but can be used to promote virtue or vice. In sum, to the early church, the state was essential to the work of God and the unfolding of God’s redemption. The church was not rebellious or cynical toward the state and agreed with its pagan neighbors that those who rebel against the king and dissolve public order should be justly punished.

Third, the church argued for the free exercise of religion so that it might promote public virtue. The two went hand in hand. When the church engaged political authorities, it stressed the need for virtuous rulers to administer justice and honor the conscience by recognizing religious liberty. The people of God held the state accountable to the virtue assumed in the natural law, and to the normative arrangement of justice given by divine command in Scripture. It hoped that as the state provided for the safety and security of its citizens, it would not curtail religious activity. It worried about the various ways that the state might compromise the purity and liberty of the church. Following the reign of Constantine and the rise of a cultural Christianity, this became less a serious concern. In the pre-Constantinian period, however, the freedom to worship according to conscience was the bigger issue. As the Martyrdom of Polycarp testifies, that freedom was not observed consistently among the populace or by government officials. To be a Roman citizen was to worship the gods, and rebellion against that seemed tantamount to treason and insurrection.

Christians living in the first few centuries were the first to articulate the importance of religious freedom and the injustice of coercing the conscience. They rejected any state that hopes “to build only in this world a kingdom of definitive happiness or in absolutist fashion seeks to force religion into a legal system that alone has full jurisdiction.” Tertullian warns hostile authorities, “see that you do not give a further ground for the charge of irreligion, by taking away religious liberty, and forbidding free choice of deity, so that I may no longer worship according to my inclination, but am compelled to worship against it.” He complained that while the Egyptians worshiped “gods of birds and beasts,” and while Syria, Arabia, Africa, and other Roman provinces had their own gods, both denied Christians opportunity to worship according to their conscience. Ironically, “liberty is given to worship any god but the true God, as though He were not rather the God all should worship, to whom all belong.” Hippolytus makes a similar point in his commentary on Daniel. The faithful “ought not dissemble or fear the powerful, especially those who use power for evil. If they are compelled to do something opposed to their belief, their better choice is death rather than submission.” Then, treating the injunction of Paul in Romans 13:1, he commented, “the words of the apostle—to obey the authorities that are over us—enjoin us not to obey human commands against our belief and God’s law, but to avoid doing evil while respecting authority in order to escape punishment as lawbreakers.” In the second century, Justin Martyr was not shy about condemning Roman authorities for their treatment of Christians. On one occasion, he criticized the way Roman authorities handled the case of a female convert to Christianity who divorced her pagan husband because of his excessive immorality. Urbicus, the prefect of Rome, had condemned the woman’s pastor, Ptolemaeus, to death simply for being a Christian. Justin’s public censures did not go unnoticed. At some point, he, too, was arrested, dragged before the authorities, and ultimately martyred.

These three—promoting peace and security, enacting just laws that curb sin, and allowing the free exercise of religion—were not the only functions of the state envisioned by the early church, but they did frame their political theology. The church continually cycled back to these points and challenged political figures when they did not uphold them. When the state neglected them, moved beyond them, or imposed upon religious conscience, they encouraged the faithful not to submit to the state. The early church recognized that these functions, well performed, allowed for the church to live virtuously and get on with the good work of ministry.

Editor’s Note: Excerpted from Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church by Stephen O. Presley ©2024 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.