“I’m shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED, that regularly reciting the Nicene Creed and even enshrining a church-state establishment weren’t enough to inoculate against the corrosive trajectories of theological liberalism. Stay frosty and stay Baptist, friends.”
Dr. Andrew T. Walker
Professor – Theology
SBTS
Here Walker is responding to the fact that a woman (Sarah Mullally) was approved by King Charles III as the 106th archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the world’s 85 million Anglicans. Walker’s point, being a Baptist, is that Erastian Church-State relations don’t stop the “corrosive trajectories of theological liberalism.” Walker’s other implied point is that countries that practice a separation of Church and State are obviously superior to Erastian type Church-State relations. Of course both points are bogus.
We might want to take a gander at the British American cousins across the pond to see that the sacred Baptist principle of separation of Church and State has not fared so well in terms of the corrosive trajectories of theological liberalism. Dr. Stephen Wolfe nails this point in responding to Dr. Walker;
I’d like to point that every degeneracy of our time–everything you protect your kids from–arose without church establishment but under the secular conditions affirmed by Walker. If church establishment necessarily leads to apostasy, then “baptist” secular politics necessarily leads to degeneracy. The track record of Walker’s “contestation” liberalism is not good.
Next, we have to understand, that Walker’s supposed separation of Church and State has always been a mirage. There is never a time when the Church and State don’t work hand in glove. The only difference between England and ourselves is that England was open about its Erastianism while America has cloaked it in the language of “separation of Church and State,” all the while establishing the State Church in the Institution of the Government schools. America is every bit as Erastian as England. We just hide it from ourselves. It is natural for Walker to defend “anti-Erastian” arrangement since with anti-Erastian arrangements his preferred Baptist Erastianism can continue going forward. Since neutrality is impossible there is no such thing as separation of Church and State. Now, one may correctly speak about distinctions between Church and State but separation never exists.
The fact that separation never exists is seen in the fact that the current state is now a bonafide Humanist organization with the intent of persecuting above all those Biblical Christians and Churches who defy the Humanist State. The State must do this because it desires to prioritize the theological teachings of the Humanist Church as it is located in the Government schools and Universities.
Next, we would have to say that it is the “staying of being Baptist” that has brought us to the place we are now at in the US. How have the non-establishment Baptists slowed the cultural decline? For Pete’s sake, the non-establishment Baptists have not even been able to rescue their own denominations from the “corrosive trajectories of theological liberalism.” Talk about the pot calling the kettle, “black.”
Indeed, I think one could argue that it is the Baptist refusal to see linkage between church and state that has led to creating the vacuum that was filled by humanism as being the religion of the State and of most Churches in the former Christian West. Walker’s proposed solution (more Baptist thinking) is the problem that brought us to the place we are at.
It may be true that Christian Erastianism has slain its thousands, but it is even more true that Baptist “separation of Christian Church and Christian State” thinking as slain its hundreds of thousands.
By the way … this kind of Baptist thinking fits well with the Radical Two Kingdom theology that we now find so current in Covenant Reformed pulpits. R2K fanboys would be, on this point, cheek by jowl with the Baptists. The point for both is, “No affirmations of the Christian faith in the public square by political personages in their roles as political personages.”
A pox upon all of their houses.
