Not so in Christianity. The reason is spelled out in the church father Augustine’s great work The City of God. Augustine argued that during our time here on earth, the Christian inhabits two realms, the earthly city and the heavenly city. (Only at the end of time will God integrate these two into a single majestic kingdom ruled by Him.) To each of these realms the Christian citizen has duties, but they are not the same duties. Yes, the Christian gives his ultimate devotion to the heavenly city. But some remarkable conclusions follow from this primary allegiance. It means that the earthly city need not concern itself with the question of man’s final or ultimate destiny. It also implies that the claims of the earthly city are limited, that there is a sanctuary of conscience inside every person that is protected from political control, and that kings and emperors, howevergrand, cannot usurp authority that rightly belongs only to-God.
Here we see, in its embryo, the idea of limited government. This idea derives from the Christian notion that the ruler’s realm is circumscribed and there are limits beyond which he simply must not go. Those limits were originally set by the church competing with the state and establishing its own realm of authority. Let’s remember that the church was not simply a spiritual institution—holding services and administering sacraments—but was also a temporal power, possessing huge properties and in some cases even commanding armies. For centuries the kings and the church fought over how to draw the legitimate dividing line between the two spheres, but both sides agreed that there was a dividing line. The kings have now been replaced by democratic government, but the Christian idea persists that there are some things even elected governments cannot control.
Our modern idea of limited government takes the Christian notion of space that is off- limits to state control and extends it to the whole private sphere. This is the crucial distinction we see in the West between the spheres of state and society. “Society” encompasses the whole range of people’s activities, while “state” refers to the specific and delineated sphere of government authority. The state may trespass on territory that has been previously reserved for the private realm, but it cannot take over the private realm altogether. Even an elected government cannot arbitrarily force you to move out of your house or turn over your property to the government. Even a government with 99 percent of the popular support does not have the right to tell the remaining 1 percent of the people that they must all become Republicans, vegetarians, or even Christians. If it does, then legitimate government has become tyrannical government, and the people have the right to oppose and replace it.
If the domain of government is to be limited in this manner, so is the domain of the church. As Christ put it, “My kingdom is not of this world.” God has chosen to exercise a limited domain over earthly rule, not because He is limited, but because He has turned over part of His kingdom to humans for earthly supervision. This Christian notion would have been utterly unintelligible not only to an ancient Athenian or Roman but also to an ancient Israelite. In the new framework of Christian universalism, the same God rules over the whole universe, but each country retains its own laws and its own culture.
