The year was 1926. The issue was Prohibition. J. Gresham Machen, assistant professor of New Testament at Princeton Seminary, had just voted against a motion in his presbytery to support the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, the federal legislation that made illegal the sale and distribution of alcohol between 1918 and 1933. Machen's denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. was vehemently supportive of Prohibition. And yet Machen voted against the motion, not because, as some alleged, his family money came from running bootleg gin. Instead he believed the church's support for this specific legislation violated the church's legitimate authority.
Machen's reasons went as follows:
No one has a greater horror of the evils of drunkenness than I or a greater detestation of any corrupt traffic which has sought to make profit out of this terrible sin. It is clearly the duty of the church to combat this evil.
With regard to the exact form, however in which the power of the civil government is to be used in this battle, there may be difference of opinion. Zeal for temperance, for example, would hardly justify an order that all drunkards be summarily butchered. The end in that case would not justify the means. Some men hold that the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act are not a wise method of dealing with the problem of intemperance, and that indeed those measures, in the effort to accomplish moral good, are really causing moral harm. I am not expressing any opinion on this question now, and did not do so by my vote in [Presbytery]. But I do maintain that those who hold the view that I have just mentioned have a perfect right to their opinion, so far as the law of our church is concerned, and should not be coerced in any way by ecclesiastical authority. The church has a right to exercise discipline where authority for condemnation of an act can be found in Scripture, but it has no such right in other cases. And certainly Scripture authority cannot be found in the particular matter of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act.
This case and Machen's justification for his actions represent a good example of the different responsibilities that church members have as citizens and that the church as an institution has to society. As Machen argued (in good Reformed fashion), the church's power is limited to what Scripture clearly teaches, that is, salvation in all its aspects. Because the Bible does not establish a specific form of government or prescribe public policies, the church has no authority to speak on political matters. The only exceptions are when the government solicits the opinion of the church or in extraordinary cases where church officials believe laws or policies will prevent church members from carrying out their Christian duties. In other words, the church's power is spiritual and moral-she has no weapons other than preaching and church discipline (the keys of the kingdom). At the same time, the church's power is ministerial and declarative-her sole task is to proclaim the salvation available through Jesus Christ.
Individual Christians, as citizens, have a different set of obligations. These involve deciding upon matters about which Scripture is silent, such as the rights of the federal government versus state governments, tax rates, or energy policy. To make these decisions Christians should seek counsel from the general truths of the Bible and from the wisdom that comes through the study of history and society. But because the truths about politics, economics, and international relations are much more ambiguous than the way of salvation revealed in Scripture, Christians, as Machen admitted, will likely disagree. And if the church corporately tries to require a specific political outcome, she has overstepped her legitimate authority to minister God's Word.
The political passivism implicit in Machen's understanding of the church, however, must not be rendered a justification for Christian escapism (something charged against the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms also). Machen himself was active in politics precisely because he knew the church should not be. Christians who look to the church to engage in political reforms invariably fail to explore other means by which they as citizens, along with believers and nonbelievers, may engage in the political process. In other words, to say the church has no responsibility for politics is very different from describing what duties Christians themselves have as citizens and neighbors. As they are called, Christians have a duty to seek the welfare of the city (Jer. 29:7). What Machen's example teaches is that Christians have no right to expect the church as a corporate body to seek the city's welfare other than through the spiritual means of proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ.
