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A Jewish Perspective on Church and State
| Article
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19109 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
5,944 Words |
| Author
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Gershon Weiler
Gershon Weiler is professor of religion at Tel Aviv
University. |
The subject of this article is deeply paradoxical. While on the theoretical level, nothing could be more inappropriate than to think of Judaism in terms of church and state, on the practical level, church-state conflict seems an accurate description of much of what is occurring is Israel today. It is the purpose of this article to illuminate this paradox.
The designation of certain conflicts of political supremacy as "church-state" has roots in the history of Christendom, where both church and state have their own specialized domains of legitimacy. The reason is simple enough. It can never be disputed that, historically, the newcomer on the scene was the church--the empire was there before the Coming. Thus, no matter how passionate the struggle between secular and religious authority, there has never been a suggestion by either side that the other was not legitimate.
In perhaps the earliest document of this struggle for power, the admonition of Pope Gelasius to Emperor Anasthasius I in the year 494, the pope opens his argument by recognizing the legitimacy of his adversary: "There are indeed two power ... by which this world is ruled; the sacred authority of the popes and the royal power."
The point of conflict lies in determining the right relationship between these two authorities. It is not disputed that, in truth, there are two [powers] by which this world is chiefly ruled. Recognizing the legitimacy of secular power is never absent from Christian clerical polemics, not even from the UnamSanctam of Boniface VIII. A late champion of church supremacy, the Spanish Jesuit Ludovico Molina (1535-1600), in his De justitia et jure, argues for subordination of secular power to the church. There two powers are not two different governments, but they are subordinate in turn.
In order to be subordinate, secular power must be, of course, different in a meaningful way. While the secular political power has the task of securing the bonum commune temporale (temporal common good), the church is entrusted with safeguarding the far superior interest, the bonum commune spirituale (spiritual common good). This division of labor was not disputed until the rise of radical political secularism, which denied that the church could be good from a political point of view. Thus Thomas Hobbes, the greatest representative of secular politics, is consistent when he rejects the assumption, common to both adversaries in the preceding age, that politics is part of theology. At the opening of Chapter XI of Leviathan, this point is made perfectly
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