Reformed Covenanter
Cancelled Commissioner
... If the expression does not ascribe to the Church any control over the State, it still more clearly forbids the idea that the State may exercise control over the Church. This, indeed, if it were at all permitted, would be to reverse the statement of the text, and to make out the line of duty to be, not that nations should serve the Church, but that the Church should serve the nations of the earth.
Whatever subjection the Church, both collectively and in her individual members, may give the State in civil things, she is not only free from this subjection in spiritual matters — that is, in all those things in which she is a church — in all those matters in which her being as a Church consists — but is warranted to expect and to claim the service of the State. Not only will the fulfilment of the prediction in the text “make an end of the Erastian controversy,” [George Gillespie] — the mere announcement should have prevented its rise. ...
For more, see James Lumsden on Isaiah 60:12 and Erastianism.
Whatever subjection the Church, both collectively and in her individual members, may give the State in civil things, she is not only free from this subjection in spiritual matters — that is, in all those things in which she is a church — in all those matters in which her being as a Church consists — but is warranted to expect and to claim the service of the State. Not only will the fulfilment of the prediction in the text “make an end of the Erastian controversy,” [George Gillespie] — the mere announcement should have prevented its rise. ...
For more, see James Lumsden on Isaiah 60:12 and Erastianism.
