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Updated: June 8, 2025
Historically, the argument of Wake was irrefutable; but what mostly impressed the Church was the uncompromising Erastianism of his tone. Princes, he said, "may make what laws or constitutions they think fit for the Church.... a canon is but as matter prepared for the royal stamp." In this view, obviously, the Church is more than a department of the State.
Act approving Eight general Heads of Doctrine against the Tenets of Erastianism, Independency, and Liberty of Conscience, asserted in the One Hundred and Eleven Propositions, which are to be examined against the next Assembly.
That the above conduct of the state, without regarding the church in her assemblies, either past or future, is gross Erastianism, and what does not belong, at first instance, to the civil magistrate, but to the church representative, to whom the Lord has committed the management of the affairs of his spiritual kingdom, may appear from these few sacred texts, besides many others, namely, Numb. i, 50, 51: "But thou shalt appoint the Levites over the tabernacle of testimony, and over all the vessels thereof, and over all the things that belong to it: they shall bear the tabernacle and all the vessels thereof, and they shall minister unto it, and shall encamp round about the tabernacle; and when the tabernacle setteth forward, the Levites shall take it down, and when the tabernacle is to be pitched, the Levites shall set it up, and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death."
A defence of Becket against Henry, of the Church against the State, from the pen of a competent writer, would have been as interesting and as important a contribution as Froude's own papers to the great issue between Sacerdotalism and Erastianism.
The celebrated Hundred and Eleven Propositions were prepared before he left London, and laid before the General Assembly on his return to Scotland in the summer of 1647. Perhaps it is not possible to obtain a clear conception of Erastianism better than by the study of these propositions. They have been reprinted several times, yet were rarely to be obtained.
The Erastianism in these acts is so manifest at first sight, that it is needless to illustrate the same; only it may be remarked, that, by these acts, the civil magistrate prescribes new ministerial qualifications, viz., the oaths of allegiance and assurance; and these imposed instead of an oath of allegiance to Zion's King, viz., the oaths of the covenants.
Whence both ministers and people have been involved in the sins of Prelacy, Indulgence, Toleration, Erastianism, subjecting the government of the church to the secular and civil authority; while they thought these only to be the sins of Prelates, or of wicked and usurping rulers; they in the meantime yielding all the conformity with, submission unto, and approbation of them, that was by wicked laws required.
This Erastianism is illustrated by no one more signally than by the Pontifex Maximus of Prussian Protestantism, His Excellency Wirklicher Geheimrath Adolf von Harnack. Harnack has earned world-wide fame as a bold interpreter of the Scriptures, but he has refused to countenance those ministers who were discharged merely because they acted on his teachings.
'Whisht, gudewife; is this a time or is this a day to be singing your ranting fule sangs in? a time when the wine of wrath is poured out without mixture in the cup of indignation, and a day when the land should give testimony against popery, and prelacy, and quakerism, and independency, and supremacy, and erastianism, and antinomianism, and a' the errors of the church?
The opponents of Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making. They saw that a Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth their head.
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