Augustine and the Covenanters W.H. Chellis We ar…

W.H. Chellis

Augustine and the Covenanters
W.H. Chellis

We are sons of Augustine. No doubt about it. Yet, the question is ever present, which Augustine do you mean? If there is an Augustine who taught something akin to Rodger Williams, or who taught that submission to Christ’s reign should be relegated to the Church… I am afraid I have not read him.

I do, however, stand with a fellow named Augustine who wrote a little book called the City of God. This book does help me to distinguish between the city of God and the city of man, but I am not sure that this can simply be understood as a seperation of church and state. That Augustine wrote:

” For neither do we say that certain Christian emperors were therefore happy because they ruled a long time, or, dying a peaceful death, left their sons to succeed in the empire… These and other gifts or comforts of this sorrowful life even certain worshippers of demons have merited to recieve, who do not belong to the kingdom of God to which these belong… but we say that they are happy if they rule justly; if they are not lifted up amid the praises of those who pay them sublime honours, and the obsequiousness of those who salute them with excessive humility, but remember that they are men; if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship; if they fear, love, worship God; if more than their own they love that kingdom in which they are not afraid to have partners… if they prefer to govern depraved desires rather than any nation whatever; and if they do all these things, not through ardent desire of empty glory, but through love of eternal felicity, not neglecting to offer to the true God, who is their God, for their sins, the sacrifices of humility, contrition, and prayer. Such Christian emperors, we say, are happy in the present time by hope, and are destined to be so in the enjoyment of the reality itself, when that which we wait for shall be arrived.”

The City of God, Book V:24

Here, it seems to me, Augustine distinguishes Church and State while recognizing the benefit of the State bowing the knee before the throne of Divine Kingship.

Covenanters have owned the Augustine’s two kingdom approach to Christ’s kingship understanding that both kingdom’s are included in His soverign reign. Andrew Melville made sure of it. His Second Book of Disicipline is the paradigm for a Covenanter understanding of the two kingdoms in submission to Christ. Who could forget the Melville’s rebuke to King James in 1596:

“There are two Kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and His Kingdom the Kirk, who subject King James the Sixth is, and of whose Kingdom he is not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member.”