Caesar’s Coin: How Should Church And State Interact?

Faculty of Theology and Philosophy

School of Theology

Caesars Coin.pdf (PDF, 257KB)

Editor's Comment

Archbishop Roland Minnerath, Archbishop of Dijon, was in Australia last July for the Helder Camara Lecture Series. As a former professor of Church history at the University of Stasbourg, he was also the chaplain to the Catholic members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg for whom he wrote Pour une ethique sociale universelle. La proposition Catholique (Paris: Cerf, 2004). He has collaborated for over twenty years with the Washington-based International Religious Freedom Association, and been a member of the International Theological Commission for nearly ten years. The following is an edited version of the text of his lecture in Melbourne.

Our topic is the evolution of State-Church relations. Clearly, legal norms governing religious freedom and the relations between State and religious organizations are widely inspired by the experience of the Christian churches along the last two centuries.

The words of Jesus about Caesar's coin, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's" (Mt 22, 15-22), suggest one of the principles that shape our modern understanding of Church-State relations, namely their mutual autonomy. When these words were proffered, they conveyed a rather new vision of how religion and society should relate, and of the role of political power with respect to religion. The community around Jesus is made up of men and women from all conditions, religious background, cultures, and nations. In his time, each religion was identified with a specific people, even with a city, or an ethnic group. Religion was the common link of a given society. With the early Christian experience, the religious community does not simply overlap with the political community. Yet Christians claimed to be loyal citizens even if they refused to take part in the official worship of the gods of the city—or the Empire. At the same time, Christians expected from their respective city to be allowed to worship according to their conscience.

The words of Jesus imply that Church and State encompass two different domains. The same person can belong to each of these, even though in a differentiated kind of membership. The domain ruled by the State implies a compulsory membership; while the domain of the Church is based on free membership. The first governs all needs of temporal life. The latter addresses human conscience and the transcendent destiny of the human person grounded in a sense of the ultimate meaning of life, history, and of the universe itself.

The early Christians had to pay a high price for their commitment to this new conception of religion. The Roman Empire, coherent with its understanding of civic religion, persecuted Christians for their beliefs. But at the beginning of the 4th century, the emperors Constantine and Licinius recognized for the first time a right to religious freedom for all citizens with the so-called Edict of Milan in 313. This was the answer to a typically Christian request. This situation of freedom lasted for a short time, only seven decades. In 381, the edict of Thessalonica marked the beginning of Christianity as official religion the Roman Empire. This represented a return to the former traditional use of religion as compulsory social link of society.

The legal framework of present-day Church-State relationships owes a great deal to the history of the Christian experience. Question regarding the distinction or non-distinction between the religious and political spheres have hugely influenced the shaping the history of our societies.

Today, we have reached, at least in that part of the world marked by Christianity, a wide consensus on how both institutions should interact. This consensus is not shared by countries with other cultural and religious backgrounds.

"Autonomy" is in a way a rediscovered principle. It has lain concealed for a long period of time. From the 4th to the 18th century, Christianity had become everywhere a State Religion. In the East, the Byzantine experience has survived in the Orthodox model of the national Churches strongly controlled by the political power. In the West, the Catholic Church struggled over the centuries to maintain the distinction between the two "swords", namely, the spiritual and the temporal sphere. While the Lutheran and reformed Churches were put under the supreme authority of their respective sovereigns, the non-conformist movements in the 17th century for the first time set up churches without State control. The first immigrants to North America were non-conformists, and gave birth to a radically new experiment in matters of Church – State relations. They wanted no established Church. They wanted the freedom to worship according to their conscience.

Allow me to present the following remarks under three headings:

• The re-emerging of the principle of autonomy
• Church and State searching for a common understanding
• Different models and common principles

• Previous:
• Next: I. The re-emerging of the principle of autonomy