GENEALOGY · CHURCH AND CONSENT

This Liberty of the People

The liberal presupposition of Reformed church government

The Reformed confessions teach that authority comes down from God. God binds children in their fathers and posterity in its covenant heads, and he ordains magistrates “to be under him, over the people.” Reformed church government admitted a different premise. Calvin required the people’s consent before a minister was set over them, and he called that consent “this liberty of the people,” which “should on no account be diminished.” The confession held that consent back for a time, the way a dam holds water. This paper traces where the premise started, how its logic moved, and why the Reformed presuppositions could not hold it once their own heirs worked the logic out.

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01

The question

This is not a paper about the Reformed doctrine of salvation, and nothing in it depends on a verdict about that doctrine. Nor do we claim that the Reformed invented the idea we are tracing. Sir Robert Filmer, who wrote against it, said that the opinion that men are born free and may choose their government “was first hatched in the schools,” and that “the divines, also, of the Reformed Churches have entertained it.” The question here is narrower. We ask where that idea entered Reformed theology, and whether the rest of Reformed theology could keep it from spreading.

By liberal we do not mean the political left. We mean the premise both American parties share, that the right to rule comes from the people ruled. John Locke gave it its classic form in 1689: men being “by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent” (Second Treatise §95). The Declaration of Independence wrote it into the nation’s founding, that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Reformed confessions deny that premise, and they deny it in more than one place. “God, the Supreme Lord and King of all the world, hath ordained civil magistrates to be under him, over the people” (Westminster Confession 23.1). By father and mother the fifth commandment means “not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts; and especially such as, by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth” (Larger Catechism 124). The first covenant promised life “to Adam, and in him to his posterity” (7.2), and the children of believers belong to the visible church before they can consent to anything (25.2, 28.4). In each of these places God binds men under an authority they never chose. On the source of authority, the Reformed confession and the liberal premise contradict each other.

The premise entered elsewhere, through the government of the church. Calvin taught that no minister may be set over a people without their consent, and he called that consent a liberty. A consent that may refuse every candidate is a share in choosing, and a liberty held against officers recognizes no officer it did not accept. Within a century the Congregationalists of England and New England held that a company of believers is “a church before they have officers,” that a minister’s call “consists in the election of the church,” and that ordination installs a man “like the installing of a magistrate in the commonwealth.” Their commonwealths were built on the same order. The confession was a dam, and consent was the water behind it.

We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth was twisted to produce it, and where it leads. Our companion paper on Baptist theology, A Free Church in a Free State, put them to the voluntary church. Here we put them to the Reformed doctrine of the people’s consent in the call of a minister, and we let the Reformed speak for themselves at every step. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

02

Where it started

Calvin set out the Reformed doctrine of the call in the fourth book of the Institutes. A minister, he wrote, is lawfully called according to the word of God when men found fit are chosen “on the consent and approbation of the people.” He read Luke’s account of Paul and Barnabas in Acts 14:23 as a popular vote, in which “the whole body, as was the custom of the Greeks in elections, declared by a show of hands” (IV.3.15).

He set limits on it in the same breath. “Other pastors, however, ought to preside over the election,” so that the multitude would not go wrong, and ordination belonged to the ministers: “it was not the whole people, but only pastors, who laid hands on ministers” (IV.3.16). The people consented, the pastors presided, and the pastors ordained. Had Calvin said nothing more, his doctrine would fit the pattern Scripture gives, in which the people select and the one already holding authority appoints.

Geneva did not go even that far. The Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541, which Calvin drafted and the magistrates amended, gave the choice of ministers to the ministers. They chose first, the Council approved, and only then was the man presented in a sermon so that he might be “received by the common consent of the faithful.” The elders were not chosen by the people at all. They were drawn from the city’s councils, “two elected from the ‘council of 24’, four from the ‘council of 60’ and six from the ‘council of 200’,” nominated by the 24 after consulting the ministers, approved by the 200, and reviewed each year “after the elections to the council.” In Geneva’s practice the people consented to ministers already chosen and had no part in choosing the elders.

Calvin’s doctrine went further than his practice in one word. Defending the people’s part, he gathered the precedents of the early church: the Council of Antioch, the letter of the Council of Constantinople at the ordination of Nectarius, and the letters of Leo the Great, among them Leo’s rule, “Let him who is to preside over all be elected by all.” His conclusion followed: “So careful were the holy fathers that this liberty of the people should on no account be diminished” (IV.4.11). The fathers had spoken of consent, testimony, and approval. Calvin called it a liberty, and a liberty belongs to the one who holds it.

The rule Calvin took from Leo deserves a closer look. Leo wrote it against Hilary of Arles, who had ordained a bishop for a see whose bishop was still alive, without the consent of its clergy and citizens, and had used armed men to force ordinations. Leo used the case to assert the jurisdiction of the Roman see over Gaul, and in the same passage he assigned the parts: “The consent of the clergy, the testimony of those held in honour, the approval of the orders and the laity should be required. He who is to govern all, should be chosen by all.” Calvin printed another of Leo’s rules that keeps the same order: “Let him be elected who is chosen by the clergy, and called by the people, and let him be consecrated by the provincials with the judgment of the metropolitan.” In Leo the clergy choose, the leading men testify, the people approve and call for the man, and the bishops consecrate. A rule written to defend an order of offices became, in Calvin’s summary, a liberty held by the people.

The early church did give the people a real part. Cyprian of Carthage, writing in the 250s to churches in Spain about two unworthy bishops, said the people “have the power either of choosing worthy priests, or of rejecting unworthy ones,” and that a bishop “should be chosen in the presence of the people under the eyes of all.” But in Cyprian, too, “all the neighbouring bishops of the same province should assemble with that people” to ordain. The people chose or refused, and the bishops made the bishop. That is the pattern Calvin received. What he added was the name.

Calvin’s doctrine of the state did not start from consent, but it leaned toward it. He bound the private man to obey all princes, “by whatever means they have so become, although there is nothing they less perform than the duty of princes” (IV.20.25). Yet he wrote that “the best condition of the people” is “when they can choose, by common consent, their own shepherds,” and that “when men become kings by hereditary right, it seems not consistent with liberty” (Commentary on Micah 5:5). He ranked aristocracy “either pure or modified by popular government” above the other forms (IV.20.8), and he allowed that where “popular magistrates have been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings,” they may act “officially to check the undue license of kings” (IV.20.31). In the state Calvin kept obedience and preferred consent. In the church he made consent a condition. The difference between the two spheres is the difference between a preference and a requirement.

03

The liberty of the church

The phrase “the liberty of the church” is older than the Reformation, and it meant something else. In the first clause of Magna Carta (1215), King John granted that “the English Church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and her liberties inviolate,” and he named the chief of those liberties: “the freedom of elections, which is reckoned most important and very essential to the English Church.” The liberty belonged to the church as an order, and it guarded the church’s elections against the crown.

The Scottish Reformers kept the word and turned it around. The First Book of Discipline (1560) declared, “It appertains to the people, and to every several congregation, to elect their minister,” and forbade that any man be “violently intruded or thrust in upon any congregation.” Elders and deacons were to be chosen by vote, their names “publicly read to the whole kirk” so that “every man may give his vote freely,” and the vote was to be taken again each year: “The election of elders and deacons ought to be used every year once … lest that by long continuance of such officers, men presume upon the liberty of the church.” The danger to the church’s liberty was no longer the crown. It was the church’s own officers, and the remedy was the people’s vote, renewed every year.

The Second Book of Discipline (1578) pulled back. It made the elder’s office “perpetual,” since “Elders once lawfully called to the office, and having gifts of God meet to exercise the same, may not leave it again” (6.2), and it put election in “the judgment of the eldership and consent of the congregation” (3.4). But it kept the people inside the church’s liberty. It asked that “the liberty of the election of persons called to the ecclesiastical functions,” which it said was “observed without interruption so long as the kirk was not corrupted by Antichrist,” be “restored and retained within this realm,” so that “none be intruded upon any congregation, either by the prince or any inferior person, without lawful election and the assent of the people over whom the person is placed” (12.9). The word had passed from the church as an order to the people as its members.

An error that lasts is built from a truth, and this one is built from two. The first is that no man may take a charge God has not given him. Hosea said of Israel, “They have made kings for themselves, but not by me” (Hos. 8:4), and a minister thrust on a parish by a patron for his own ends is a real wrong. The second is that officers are servants and not lords. Peter told the elders to rule “Neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock” (1 Pet. 5:3), and Paul wrote, “Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy” (2 Cor. 1:24). Both truths limit the officer. Neither gives the people a share in rule. The twist was to answer the abuse of office with the people’s liberty, when Scripture answers it with the officer’s account to God.

04

The reason given

The Reformed gave a reason for dividing rule, and the reason was the sin of rulers. Calvin ranked aristocracy above monarchy because, “owing, therefore, to the vices or defects of men, it is safer and more tolerable when several bear rule, that they may thus mutually assist, instruct, and admonish each other,” so that if one goes too far, “the others are censors and masters to curb his excess” (IV.20.8). The Second Book grounded the parity of ministers in Christ’s will and named its purpose: “To take away all occasion of tyranny, he will that they should rule with mutual consent of brethren, and equality of power” (2.4). The First Book gave its annual elections the same purpose, to keep officers from presuming “upon the liberty of the church.”

That reason cannot stop where the Reformed stopped it. Sin is universal, so it cannot by itself favor many rulers over one. The many are sinners too, and the law warned Israel against them: “Thou shalt not associate with the multitude for evil; thou shalt not join thyself with a multitude to turn aside with the majority so as to shut out judgment” (Exod. 23:2). To prefer the many, the argument needs a second premise, that sinners restrain one another when power is divided among them. That premise is a mechanism, not a moral ground, and nothing in it stops at the magistrate or the minister. If one ruler must be curbed by others because he is a sinner, the others must be curbed in turn, and the last check falls to each man’s own judgment. Distrust of rulers that is not also distrust of the ruled ends with the man who answers to no one he did not choose.

Calvin saw part of this. He had pastors preside over elections so that the multitude would not err, and he forbade the private man to resist even a tyrant. His heirs kept the distrust aimed at rulers and dropped the distrust aimed at the people. The First Book’s reason runs in one direction only. It guards the church’s liberty against its officers and says nothing of guarding the church against the multitude.

Scripture gives plural rule a different ground. When Jethro saw Moses judging the people alone, he did not warn him that he could not be trusted. He told him the work was too heavy: “this thing is hard, thou wilt not be able to endure it thyself alone” (Exod. 18:18). The judges were to “relieve thee and help thee” (18:22), and “Moses chose out able men out of all Israel, and he made them captains” (18:25). When Moses said, “I shall not be able to bear this people alone” (Num. 11:14), God answered, “I will take of the spirit that is upon thee, and will put it upon them; and they shall bear together with thee the burden of the people, and thou shalt not bear them alone” (11:17). The seventy received from Moses and served under him. That plurality helps the head and takes its authority from him. Calvin’s plurality checks the head. The first belongs in a household and a kingdom. The second, once accepted, has to be applied to both.

Where the second leads can be seen in Locke. Having grounded political power in consent, he turned to the family and asked whether “paternal power” might not be “more properly called parental power,” since the mother “hath an equal title” (§52), and he called a parent’s rule “but a temporary one” (§55). The Reformed never turned their distrust on the father. They kept his headship in the catechism and in the covenant. But a reason for dividing rule that rests on the sin of the one who rules applies to a father as much as to a minister, and the men who came after the Reformed applied it there. We have given the end of that road its name in an earlier paper: “the belief that all authority is suspect” (What Do We Do?).

05

A dam of consent

The Reformed held two things at once. Their confession said authority comes down. Christ “hath therein appointed a government in the hand of Church officers” (Westminster Confession 30.1); “To these officers the keys of the kingdom of heaven are committed” (30.2); “Ordination is the act of a presbytery” (Form of Presbyterial Church-Government, 1645). Their church order said that authority could not be received without the people’s leave. “No man is to be ordained a minister for a particular congregation, if they of that congregation can show just cause of exception against him,” and the Directory for the Ordination of Ministers has the presbytery ordain once “the people give their consent.” The confession was the wall, and the people’s consent was the water behind it. Three things about that consent made the wall impossible to hold.

A consent that can refuse every candidate is a share in choosing. A congregation that may reject any man put before it decides, by elimination, who will serve it. Scotland moved back and forth across that line for nearly three centuries without finding a principle that fixed it. The First Book gave the people election in 1560. The Second Book gave them consent in 1578. In 1834 the General Assembly passed the Veto Act, which gave a veto over a patron’s nominee to the “male heads of families, being members of the congregation, and in full communion with the Church.” Election, consent, and veto were treated as procedures for the same liberty, and the procedure changed with the times. The liberty that made each of them necessary did not.

Everything turns on what consent means, and the Reformed never fixed it. Westminster allowed the people to show “just cause of exception,” and the presbytery judged whether the cause was just. That is a wall: the people may object, and the officers decide. The Second Book forbade intrusion “contrary to the will of the congregation” (3.5), which makes the people’s will the test and not their reasons. Where the will of the governed decides, an authority prevails only when they agree with it, and in every contested case they govern it.

A condition defended as a liberty becomes a right, and a right has a holder. Calvin did not say the people’s consent was useful or customary. He said it was a liberty the fathers had guarded so that it “should on no account be diminished.” A liberty of the people against their officers belongs to the people before any officer is chosen, or the officers could define it away. Once that is granted, the question of who holds the church’s power has been answered in principle, whatever the confession says about the keys. The Reformed did not draw that conclusion. Their heirs did.

06

The keys

The dispute came to rest on two texts. Christ gave Peter “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16:19) and told the disciples, “tell it unto the church” (Matt. 18:17). Whoever holds the keys holds the church’s power. The Westminster divines gave them to the officers: “To these officers the keys of the kingdom of heaven are committed” (30.2). On that reading the members’ liberty is the one the Confession describes in chapter 20, freedom from “the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to his Word, or beside it, in matters of faith or worship” (20.2). It limits the officers and gives the members no share in rule.

John Cotton of Boston gave the other answer in The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644). He divided the keys of order in two, “a key of power, or interest,” and a key of authority, and he named the first: “The first of these is termed in the Scriptures, Liberty.” In the elders the church’s power “is properly Authority; but in the people is a priviledge or power,” and “The Church of Brethren hath the power, priviledges and liberty to choose their officers.” He rested the division on a maxim he credited to Martin Bucer: Potestas penes omnem Ecclesiam est; Authoritas ministerii penes Presbyteros & Episcopos, power lies with the whole church, and the authority of the ministry with the presbyters and bishops. Cotton denied the brethren authority in so many words: “The Gospel alloweth no Church authority (or rule properly so called) to the Brethren.” But he gave them power, and he called it liberty.

Four years later the synod at Cambridge in Massachusetts set down the platform of the New England churches, and the General Court endorsed it as a description of their practice. A company of believers is “a church before they have officers and without them,” and “subordinate church power under Christ delegated unto them by him doth belong unto them” (10.2). The government of the church is mixed. In respect of Christ “it is a Monarchy,” in respect of the presbytery “it is an Aristocracy,” and “In respect of the body, or Brotherhood of the church, and power from Christ granted unto them, it resembleth a democracy” (10.3).

The English Congregationalists said the same at the Savoy in 1658. A pastor is to be chosen “by the common suffrage of the church itself” (§11). “The essence of this call of a pastor, teacher or elder unto office, consists in the election of the church,” and men so chosen, “though not set apart by imposition of hands, are rightly constituted ministers of Jesus Christ” (§12). “Ordination alone without election or precedent consent of the church” does not “constitute any person a church officer, or communicate office power unto him” (§15). The Particular Baptists copied the formula into their confession of 1677, reissued in 1689: officers are chosen “by the common suffrage of the Church it self” (26.9).

Here the dam broke inside the church. Calvin made the people’s consent a condition and called it a liberty. Cotton made the liberty a key. The Cambridge Platform made the church exist before its officers and made ordination the installation of a man who already had the right by election. That is the order Locke gave the commonwealth forty years later: the society first, then the offices it confers. Theodore Beza had already given it to peoples and kings, that peoples “were anterior to their rulers.”

07

From church to commonwealth

The Congregationalists who made consent the source of office in the church made it the source of office in the commonwealth. In 1620 the Separatists bound for Plymouth agreed, before they landed, to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick.” In 1631 the General Court of Massachusetts ordered, “To the end the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and good men,” that no man be admitted a freeman of the colony unless he was a member of one of its churches. The rule stood until 1664. For thirty-three years the voter in Massachusetts was the church member, and the church member was a man who had entered his church by covenant and consent.

Thomas Hooker, who had led his congregation from Massachusetts to Hartford, preached in 1638, as Connecticut framed its first government, that “The foundation of authority is laid firstly in the free consent of people.” The Fundamental Orders adopted the next year made the inhabitants “one Public State or Commonwealth” and had them “enter into Combination and Confederation together, to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel,” “as also, the discipline of the Churches.” A commonwealth made by the consent of its members was formed to preserve churches made by the consent of theirs. Hooker’s sentence and the Cambridge Platform’s tenth chapter say the same thing about two societies.

The steps this argument needs are these.

08

The strict exception

One branch of the Reformed refused the conclusion inside the church, and it deserves to be stated at full strength. The national synods of the French Reformed churches condemned Jean Morély’s doctrine of a general right of voting in church elections at Orléans in 1562 and again at Nîmes in 1572, and at Nîmes Beza “was specially charged with the refutation of the opponents to the established discipline.” Antoine de la Roche Chandieu defended the consistory against Morély in La confirmation de la discipline ecclésiastique (1566). The Second Book of Discipline made the elder’s office perpetual. The Westminster divines kept the keys with the officers and ordination with the presbytery. Inside the church, strict Presbyterianism held the wall.

It did not hold the wall in the state. Two years after Nîmes, Beza published The Right of Magistrates (1574). There he wrote that “peoples were not created for the sake of rulers, but on the contrary the rulers for the sake of the people,” that peoples “were anterior to their rulers,” and that “no nation has either elected or approved kings without laying down specific conditions.” The man charged with keeping the general vote out of the consistory put the people before the king.

In America the wall came down in the church as well. In 1788, the year the Synod of New York and Philadelphia rewrote the Westminster Confession’s chapter on the magistrate, it prefixed to its Form of Government a set of Preliminary Principles “generally recognized as having been authored by the Rev. John Witherspoon,” who twelve years earlier had signed the Declaration of Independence. The first declares that “they consider the rights of private judgment, in all matters that respect religion, as universal, and unalienable,” and that “they do not even wish to see any religious constitution aided by the civil power.” The sixth holds that while the authority of church officers is laid down in Scripture, “the election of the persons to the exercise of this authority, in any particular society, is in that society.” The Orthodox Presbyterian Church adopted the principles in 1936, and the Presbyterian Church in America still calls the rights of private judgment “universal and inalienable.” The Southern Presbyterians’ draft constitution of 1867 provided that “when a majority of the electors cast their votes for a candidate, he shall be considered elected.”

The Reformed came to claim the result as their own. Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch Reformed theologian who later served as prime minister of the Netherlands, set Calvinism against the French Revolution’s aim “to emancipate the creature from the Creator,” and in the same address he claimed constitutional liberty for it: “Hence the origin of our liberty is found in Calvinism.”

The strict exception is real, and it is the strongest part of the Reformed tradition. But it held only inside the church, and only for a time. Its own divines taught the people’s priority in the state, and its American heirs wrote the Declaration’s language into their constitution. The exception shows where the dam stood. It does not show that the dam held.

09

Seven objections

“Consent is not conferral. The people name the man and the presbytery makes him a minister.” This is the strongest objection, and our own earlier paper grants the distinction it rests on. Where “the people select and the one already holding authority appoints,” the people’s choice confers nothing (None Gives What He Has Not, §10). Calvin’s doctrine and the Westminster Form fit that pattern in their structure. The objection fails on the reason and on the result. The reason the Reformed gave for the people’s part was not designation but liberty, and a liberty has a holder. The result was that within a century Reformed churches made election “the essence of this call” and ordination an installation “like the installing of a magistrate in the commonwealth.” A distinction that its own heirs abandoned as soon as they pressed its reason was not bearing the weight.

“The early church chose its bishops with the people.” It did, and Cyprian and Leo are real witnesses. But in both, the people chose, approved, or refused a man, and the bishops made him a bishop. Leo spelled out the parts: “The consent of the clergy, the testimony of those held in honour, the approval of the orders and the laity.” Leo wrote his maxim to defend that order against Hilary of Arles and to assert the jurisdiction of the Roman see. The Reformed kept the fathers’ forms and changed their reason. Calvin called the people’s part “this liberty of the people,” and the heirs built on that word, not on the fathers’ practice.

“Acts 6 and Acts 14 show popular election.” Acts 6 shows the people selecting and the apostles appointing: “look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business” (Acts 6:3), and the seven were set “before the apostles: and when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them” (6:6). On any reading of Acts 14:23, Paul and Barnabas presided and ordained: “when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord.” Moses did the same: “Take to yourselves wise and understanding and prudent men for your tribes, and I will set your leaders over you” (Deut. 1:13). In every case the one already holding authority makes the officer.

“Parity rests on Christ’s command, not on distrust.” The Second Book grounds parity in Christ’s will and names tyranny as its purpose: “To take away all occasion of tyranny, he will that they should rule with mutual consent of brethren, and equality of power.” We grant the ground and press the purpose. A rule adopted to take away “all occasion of tyranny” must keep finding occasions, and the First Book found them in officers who served longer than a year. The text usually given, “it shall not be so among you” (Matt. 20:26), forbids rule after the manner of “the princes of the Gentiles” (20:25). It speaks to the manner of rule and not the number of rulers, and Christ’s answer is service, “let him be your minister,” not a vote.

“Strict Presbyterianism refused it, so ‘presupposition’ overstates.” Section 08 grants the exception. It held inside the church while its own divines taught the people’s priority in the state, and in America its heirs adopted the people’s election as a principle. Our claim is not that every Reformed church fell at once. It is that the Reformed made the people’s consent a condition defended as a liberty, and that a condition defended that way could not stay a condition. The exception is the wall. Sections 06 through 08 show that it did not hold.

“Calvin’s doctrine of the state was from above, and the church is a separate sphere.” Calvin kept obedience in the state, not the source. He called the people’s free choice of their rulers their “best condition” and said hereditary kingship “seems not consistent with liberty.” The same preference ran through both spheres. In the state he forbade the private man to act on it. In the church he made it a condition of every lawful call.

“The covenant binds posterity, so the Reformed were the enemies of consent.” In their doctrine of the covenant they were, and we said so in the first section. A child is born into the covenant and the church before he can consent, and the Solemn League and Covenant bound “we, and our posterity after us.” That is why the consent the Reformed admitted was held behind a dam and did not come in as a flood. But the covenant governed membership, and the people’s liberty governed office. The Reformed held the first against consent and conceded the second to it, and the second decided who would rule.

10

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not say the Reformed invented the premise. Filmer traced it to the schools, and the Reformed, in his words, “entertained it.”

It does not touch the Reformed doctrine of salvation. Its subject is the government of the church and what that government taught the commonwealth.

It does not condemn the people’s part in recognizing a minister. Scripture gives the people a voice when God’s choice is made known: “Have ye seen whom the Lord has chosen to himself … And all the people took notice, and said, Let the king live!” (1 Kgdms. 10:24). It condemns turning that voice into a liberty held against officers, and then into the source of their office.

It does not say every Reformed church fell. Geneva’s practice, the Second Book, and Westminster resisted. It says their resistance could not hold the reason they had admitted.

It is not a judgment on the faith of Reformed Christians, most of whom were never taught to examine the premise in their church order.

It stands or falls on one premise. If a consent defended as a liberty against officers could remain a mere condition, the conclusion fails. A reader who rejects the conclusion should show where the Reformed stopped that logic by principle and not by procedure, and why their heirs did not stop there.

11

The plain truth

The Reformed confession says that Christ rules his church through officers he appoints and that those officers answer to him. The Reformed church order said that no officer may take his charge without the people’s leave, and it called that leave a liberty. The confession could not survive the church order. Once the people’s liberty was granted, the logic ran from the congregation that refuses a minister, to the congregation that elects one, to the congregation that exists before its officers and makes them, and from that church to a commonwealth made the same way. The Reformed did not invent the premise of liberalism. Their Puritan heirs gave it a church, and that church gave it a commonwealth.

The answer is not to silence the people but to restore the direction of authority. Officers receive their charge from those already in office, and they answer to God for the souls committed to them. The people owe them what Scripture says they owe. A church that has learned to choose its pastors by majority vote has learned the commonwealth’s lesson, and it cannot teach the commonwealth a different one.

SOURCES

Texts and editions

SCRIPTURE

The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London, 1844), with its numbering.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

CONFESSIONS AND CHURCH ORDERS

Ecclesiastical Ordinances of Geneva (1541).

The First Book of Discipline (1560), heads 4 and 8; The Second Book of Discipline (1578), 2.4, 3.4–5, 6.2, 12.9. Text: Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

The Solemn League and Covenant (1643).

The Form of Presbyterial Church-Government and Directory for the Ordination of Ministers (1645).

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), 7.2, 20.2, 23.1, 25.2, 28.4, 30.1–2; The Larger Catechism, Q. 124.

A Platform of Church Discipline (Cambridge, 1648), 9.2, 10.2–3.

The Savoy Declaration (1658), “Of the Institution of Churches,” §§11–12, 15.

The Second London Baptist Confession (1677; reissued 1689), 26.9.

Synod of New York and Philadelphia, Preliminary Principles (1788), I and VI; draft Form of Government of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (1867); Presbyterian Church in America, Book of Church Order, Preface II.1.

General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Veto Act (1834).

PRIMARY

Cyprian, Epistle 67 (250s), in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5.

Leo the Great, Letter 10, to the bishops of the province of Vienne, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 12.

Magna Carta (1215), c. 1.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), trans. Henry Beveridge (1845), IV.3.15–16, IV.4.11, IV.20.8, 25, 31; Commentary on Micah, 5:5.

Theodore Beza, The Right of Magistrates (1574), trans. Henry-Louis Gonin, ed. Patrick S. Poole, QQ. 5–6.

Antoine de la Roche Chandieu, La confirmation de la discipline ecclésiastique (Geneva, 1566).

The Mayflower Compact (1620).

Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, ed. N. B. Shurtleff, vol. 1, p. 87 (order of 18 May 1631).

Thomas Hooker, sermon of 31 May 1638, from the shorthand notes of Henry Wolcott Jr.

The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639).

John Cotton, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (London, 1644).

Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (written 1630s–1640s; printed 1680), ch. 1.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §§52, 55, 95.

Declaration of Independence (1776).

Abraham Kuyper, “Calvinism: The Origin and Safeguard of Our Constitutional Liberties,” trans. J. Hendrik de Vries, Bibliotheca Sacra 52 (1895).

HISTORIES

Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 8, on Beza at the synods of La Rochelle and Nîmes.

A. Hastings Ross, “Church and State in New England,” Bibliotheca Sacra 49 (1892), on the freeman law of 1631 and its repeal in 1664.

PCA Historical Center, on the authorship and later texts of the Preliminary Principles.

OUR OWN WORK

None Gives What He Has Not; A Free Church in a Free State; What Do We Do?

Published by Beyond Left and Right. The Old Testament is quoted from Brenton’s Septuagint with its numbering, and the New Testament from the King James Version. Calvin is quoted in Beveridge’s translation, Leo and Cyprian in the Nicene and Ante-Nicene editions, and Beza in Gonin’s translation. The Cambridge Platform is quoted from the manuscript transcription published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, in modern spelling, and Cotton in the spelling of 1644. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com