I’m posting here my notes/outline for the Declamation I gave for my Thesis paper. You’ll probably see references to the Powerpoint presentation slides I used, so to see all of those go here. For those of you who wish to read my full paper, I’ll be posting that in sections over the next couple of days.

I chose to write my paper on the Separation of Church and State, and what the correct view on that is.
I have, in my paper, three main sub-divisions of that main topic, and those are The Biblical Understanding of it—“What does Scripture say?”, a discussion of what the real separation should look like in practical application, and a discussion of the fact that Scripture should have more bearing with us, as Christians, than do civil laws.
BIBLICAL UNDERSTANDING
I had several passages that I used in my paper—you see here a few of them…
In Romans 13 we see, beyond a doubt, that God has in fact instituted these different jurisdictions and that they are in fact
accountable to him. We see in Scripture that God does not deal kindly with those who disobey his law, but indeed he doesdeal with them—not discriminating his judgment on account of the fact that someone is in the civil sphere or not.
In 1 Samuel 13, God rejects Saul, the king of Israel whom He anointed, because Saul assumed the priestly offices, sacrificing to the Lord. In a similar instance documented in 2 Chronicles, King Uzziah was actually struck with leprosy for growing proud and presuming to violate the same jurisdictional laws.
What is seen in practical examples in 1 Samuel and 2 Chronicles is given in general commands in the Psalms. I put down Psalms 2 and 148, but I am sure there are a score of others. God commands that the heads of the State “serve the LORD with fear and rejoice with trembling” (Psalm 2:8, 11) demanding that they embrace Him and Him only lest they be destroyed (vs. 12). In Psalm 148, likewise, everyone is ordered to praise the LORD in succession, including the “kings of the earth and all people; [the] princes and all rulers of the earth.” (Psalm 148:1, 11)
Finally, we see in Jeremiah 32:27 that “God is the God of all flesh and all people”, thus being in a place of authority over them and demanding their alleigiance.
THE REAL SEPARATION
As we see in Romans 13, the State bears the sword (vs. 4), and their responsibility in bearing that sword is to discipline civil offenders and to repress civil offences. In contrast, the job of the Church government is to discipline ecclesial offenders and to repress offences in it’s jurisdiction.
In dissimilarity to that view is the one that states that the Church and State should have no contact, and the members of each realm should not exhort, rebuke, or discipline the members of the other realm in any way. Not only is that not biblical, but it also does not stand up to the test of consistency. Matthew 12:30 states that, in Christ Jesus’ words, “he who is not with me is against me”, and therefore there can be no “neutrality.” Also, if this view were to be put both ways (the State could not exhort, discipline its members in the ecclesial sphere) then the members of the Church jurisdiction would be immune of punishment for any civil offence.
The true meaning of the Separation of Church and State is not that there cannot be (or are not) inter-sphere/jurisdiction relationships or morals, but that there is not switching of the holders of that accountability.
There are, in fact, many examples in Scripture that support the idea of interjurisdictionary exhortation. In 1 Kings, Elijah confronts Ahab of Israel on account of his wrong doing, saying that there would be a punishment from the LORD. (1 Kings 16:31; 17:1) In the book of Haggai, the prophet exhorts Joshua the High Priest and Zerubbabel the governor of Judah concerning how they had failed to rebuild the Temple of God. (Haggai 1:3-8) In Mark, John the Baptists rebukes Herod because he had immorally taken his brother’s wife (Mark 6:18), and in Acts 26 Paul reasons with King Agrippa in regards to Christianity. So you can see, the biblical precedent for separation between governments is vastly, even radically, different from how it is viewed by those who wish to push God and all accountability out of public life, and sadly even by our nation as a whole and its government.
SCRIPTURE AS MORE IMPORTANT THAN CIVIL LAWS
Why do people want to completely remove God from any public life? The answer is simple enough—because Man is fallen and, while still perishing in the flesh, does not want any accountability to check the fulfilling of the desires of the flesh. No matter what type of government is created by Man, then, it will have flaws because the men who created it have flaws themselves. Such is true of our government and our Constitution. Even with the best form of government and governing, it will only be as good as the people who are in it, with the ultimate example being that of the Old Covenant. God designed the governing system, yet the people fell into sin and apostasy time and time again because of their sin natures. Our Constitution is then, filled with flaws and even contradictions like everything else created by mortal man.
We need, than, to look past the State for our standard. We need to look to the Word of God. The LORD is our Creator, as well as the institutor of all spheres (including State). Therefore, He has the higher claim on our allegiance than do any civil officials, judges, rulers, or laws. There cannot be any such thing as a conflict of duty in this case, for ours is to God alone. What there is of our duty to the Civil government, is not duty to Civil government at all, but rather a sub-duty of our one duty to our Lord.
Therefore if the First Amendment says, as some say it does; I don’t agree, but for the sake of discussion, that Congress cannot establish a religion and that the State should be secular and “neutral”, than we should not just “take that in” because Scripture states the opposite! God’s commands are much higher on the accountability scale that those of any civil official, be he who he may. Besides the fact that this view on the First Amendment is contrary to Scripture, it is also not possible to fulfill consistently. You cannot have a secular State that supports no religions, yet all religions. The religion of Christianity cannot live side by side peaceably with the religion of Islam, which advocates ji’hadic holy war. It just doesn’t work that well.
WHY ALL OF THIS MATTERS
So why does all of this matter? The answer is fairly simple: if you don’t have a standard, than anything can go. If you don’t have an ultimate standard to determine all moral and ethical law, than the government, or anyone else can do anything—abortion, euthanasia, murder, and genocide—all of these things are the result of a state-god with no appeal beyond itself. The only way to regain a correct understanding is to judge everything by the truly ultimate standard: God’s Word.