Church and State

I

Introduction

Church and State, relationship between the organized church and the government of a country, especially with regard to the extent of their powers within each other's sphere of activity.

The problem of church and state has come into relatively sharp focus in the tradition of Western Christianity, although the phrase designates a basic issue potentially present in many societies and religious traditions. At root is the tension between different authorities, one representing claims made in the name of political regimes, the other representing claims made by religious institutions. This pattern of dual authority structures, and the variety of relationships between them, have been explored more fully in Western Christian history than elsewhere.

II

In the Roman Empire

Christianity developed slowly as a distinctive movement. As a Jewish splinter group, it existed uneasily within the Roman Empire. When its independence from Judaism was established, its claim to be the only means of salvation brought it into sporadic conflict with imperial authority. For several centuries, as the Christian movement grew throughout the empire, regional churches were periodically persecuted, and individual Christians suffered martyrdom. Finally, about 313, with the Edict of Milan, Christians gained full rights of religion under the empire. During the reign of Constantine the Great, a decade later, the church gained privileged status. Accordingly, in its first three centuries, the Christian movement was preoccupied with retaining religious identity and securing social integrity. Thereafter, the church, which had suffered at the hands of the state, was united with it. At this point the relationship between church and state developed differently in the chief branches of the empire.

III

In the Byzantine Empire

In the East, centered in Constantinople (present-day İstanbul), Christians developed a posture of relative subordination to the state. As long as the church was free to pursue its interest in eternal salvation, it could maintain the integrity of its religious position. At the same time, however, the church supported the emperor, who also claimed to represent divine authority. By accepting these claims, the church in turn endorsed Caesaropapism, that is, subordination of the church to the religious claims of the dominant political order. This pattern was most fully evident at the height of Byzantine rule at the end of the 1st millennium of Christian history.

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IV

In Western Europe

A significantly different pattern emerged in Western Christianity. Because of the decline of Western imperial authority, culminating in the Fall of Rome in the 5th century, the church became a relatively independent authority in temporal and eternal matters. Thus, in the Western Christian tradition, a framework existed that would support a great variety of relationships between church and state—or ecclesiastical structures and political ones—throughout the course of European history.

At the beginning of this period, the “two swords” doctrine (spiritual and temporal) was enunciated by Pope Gelasius I. According to this doctrine, the church and the state were coequal in status. By the 13th century Pope Innocent III made extreme claims to the effect that the Holy Roman emperor (state) was subordinate to the pope (church) because of the relative significance of the different jurisdictions given the two institutions. Whereas temporal power was concerned with physical bodies, the church, and specifically the pope, was concerned with souls. Shortly after this high point of claims on behalf of the church, however, several emperors and kings dominated the papacy. In the development of Western Christianity, high theoretical claims made by either church or state did not necessarily reflect actual power relationships.

The decline of centralized imperial authority in Western European society was related to the emergence of new nation-states, which asserted political independence within, and finally from, the Holy Roman Empire. In this process, repeated struggles pitted centrifugal national interests against the centralized claims of the Roman church led by the pope. See Investiture Controversy; Papacy.

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