The final collapse of Christendom and the last vestiges of the state enforcing the Christian religion ended in 2015, a church historian argued last month at a Lancaster County church.
W. Robert Godfrey, chairman of Ligonier Ministries and resident of California, presented two lectures at a mini-conference entitled “The End of Christendom” held at Zeltenreich Reformed Church in New Holland, Pennsylvania, on October 28, 2023. (Godfrey’s son, also named Robert Godfrey, serves as the pastor at Zeltenreich.)
Godfrey’s first lecture provided an overview of the spread of Christianity in the West and Godfrey’s conclusion that “Christians became used to being the dominant point of view, the dominant power, [and] having strong support from the state.”
For over 1,000 years of history the civil government in the West used its coercive power to enforce aspects of the Christian religion, Godfrey argued, but now that run has come to an end.
When did it end? Godfrey posited the year 2015 as the end of Christendom. In that year, Godfrey argued, it was not a legal decision that marked the end, but rather the popular reaction to the pro-homosexual Supreme Court ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges, that revealed there were “no longer Christian moral values that unite us.” The collapse of Christendom has left us “confused” and “uncertain,” with “no great cultural consensus anymore,” Godfrey said.
Godfrey ended his first lecture by declaring that the current “divide [in America] really is between those who don’t see that Christendom has collapsed and still think as if it were in place and those who not only are glad Christendom has collapsed but they’re celebrating and they’re pushing it.”
Godfrey said he believes there is “something liberating about the end of Christendom,” noting that Christians can now “seek to be persuasive,” rather than coercive. Godfrey believes this is more in-line with Christianity, noting that in his reading of the Gospel accounts, he does not “see a coercive bone in Jesus’ body.”
However, in Mark chapter 11, Jesus is presented as entering the temple, driving out those who were doing business, and overturning the tables of the money-changers.
Later Godfrey praised coercion when he described an experience he had as a junior high student seeing the vice principal use physical force against a student looking “cross eyed” at the vice principal.
“He picked the student up and jammed him against the wall,” Godfrey said. “I’m so old and so bad, I think that’s a thing of beauty. It’s a different world, isn’t it – that vice principal would go to prison today.”
In his second lecture, Godfrey presented several potential responses to the “end of Christendom.” He referenced Amish and Mennonite communities as examples of the extreme “withdraw” response. Godfrey then described Christian nationalism as another “extreme” position made up of those who “want – maybe even violently – to restore Christendom.” He described Christian nationalists as often angry people “perfectly willing to be coercive.”
Godfrey posited his recommended response by referencing Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch Calvinist who called for the application of Christ’s kingship to every sphere of life.
Kuyper, who served as the Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905, called for a distinction between the institutions of the family, church, and civil government. Each sphere is separate, but still responsible to God. Such a view is sometimes referred to as “sphere sovereignty.”
However, Kuyperian sphere sovereignty is a position championed by many who would, perhaps with qualifications, accept the Christian nationalist moniker. The central thesis is that each sphere is still responsible to obey and honor Jesus Christ. For example, the late Greg Bahnsen, wrote that “church and state can be separated with respect to function, instrument, and scope and yet both be responsible to God. The Lord rules not only His church but also His world.”
Near the end of his final lecture, Godfrey asked his audience an important question: “Where do we make a distinction between what we call sin and what we want to see labelled as crime?”
“We know what we want in the church,” Godfrey said, “but do we know what we want as a matter of public policy? What are we willing to ask the state to be coercive about?”
Commenting on the issue of laws against divorce, and what sort of laws we ought to have, Godfrey said he did not know what the answer is.
“I think we as Christians have to think about these things in ways we never had to think about them before,” Godfrey said, “because a hundred years ago we just sort of thought what the church says is what we ought to have in civil law.”
Godfrey did not take a position on legal “gay marriage,” but rather said we “have to think this through.”
However, for generations Christians have been thinking through the distinction between sins and crimes. The scholarship of men like R.J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen, and Gary North, among others, is full of analysis of the question Godfrey says “we never had to think about” before. And Godfrey is aware of those works, as he helped to edit Theonomy: A Reformed Critique, a response to the position advocated by Bahnsen, published in 1990. (Bahnsen and others responded in 1991 with Theonomy: An Informed Response.)
Godfrey’s lectures at times conflated the influence of Christianity on culture and the state’s use of coercion in the name of Christianity – a conflation that made his presentation ambiguous at several points.
Responding to Godfrey’s lectures, Joel Saint, pastor of Independence Reformed Bible Church, publicly invited Godfrey to clarify his points by participating in a moderated debate at next year’s Future of Christendom Conference.
Don’t you think the “but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” (U.S. Constitution, Article Vi) effectively opened the door for the unregenerate pagans to not only come into positions of authority and power in the United States government but to effectively make up the majority of those in government office?
How can unregenerate men and women in seats of authority and power in the federal government be encouraged to enact man-made laws that are based on God’s Law when God’s Law is foolishness to them?
Even the Amendments to the Constitution had to be forced on those who drafted the Constitution and now these amendments are under attack. What exists today is a bankrupt government de facto.
God’s people are called out of the secular humanistic body politic and into the Kingdom of Heaven on earth as manifest in the body of Christ. God’s people belong to God, not to the secular federal government. We are strangers and sojourners living in a foreign land. Our permanent home is in the better heavenly country in the Kingdom of Heaven. We are “fellow citizens with the saints and [members] of the household of God not “members of the secular political community.” We are living in the secular community but we are not members “of” it.
We are now soldiers for Christ warring for God and as Ambassadors for Christ, we proclaim the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and call the pagans to come out and be separated from the secular political community and be reconciled to God. At the point of regeneration, our “status” or “standing” in relation to the civil government and other unregenerate citizens in the political community was forever changed. God’s people are now “transient foreigners” to the forum state.
Since no one has replied to my first comment above. I have decided to add an additional comment for the reader’s consideration.
A good topic for a future podcast would be to discuss how God’s people as soldiers for Jesus Christ are to use the sword of the Word of Truth in warring against the enemies of God who are in positions of civil authority and power.
God’s people cannot be neutral when it comes to whom they pledge their absolute allegiance and fidelity. One cannot serve two sovereigns or masters and everyone must CHOOSE whom they will serve. We will either choose to serve the secular humanistic pagan state or choose to serve King Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven. What we cannot do is serve both sovereigns thus the necessity to choose one or the other.
How exactly does King Jesus want us to war against evil and darkness in high places is the question to which we must find the truthful answer.
One of the most important things a soldier needs to comprehend is the necessity for him to KNOW his enemy well. To find the enemy’s “center of gravity” so to speak. That is where the enemy is the most vulnerable and the point where he best can be knocked off balance. So, where is the enemy’s most vulnerable center of gravity?
I want to suggest to you that the enemies of God and King Jesus are the most vulnerable in that they simply have no defense against the light of God’s TRUTH.
God’s people are the most vulnerable in that they do not use the sword of the Word of TRUTH in doing battle with the forces of darkness effectively. They weaken their ability to use the Word of Truth in battle by voluntarily subjecting themselves to the secular civil government as “citizens” in the body politic which places them under the dominion of a de facto bankrupt civil government
This presents a problem for the soldier of King Jesus because he or she cannot be a member of the Kingdom of Heaven community and at the same time be a member of the enemy’s pagan political community. Nor can a soldier for King Jesus pledge allegiance and fidelity to both King Jesus and the secular state.
The civil government courts use the idea of the “civil or social compact” or “civil contract” to establish civil or municipal jurisdiction over God’s people. All civil societies are based on “compact” or “contract.”
The U.S. Supreme Court held that citizenship is the effect of a compact [contract] and it may be RELINQUISHED [because we have the right to choose with whom we associate] The doctrine is, that allegiance CANNOT be due to two sovereigns; and the taking an oath of allegiance to a new sovereign [like King Jesus perhaps], is the strongest evidence of withdrawing allegiance from a previous sovereign [like the U.S. Federal government]. You can find the above In the syllabus of Talbot v. Janson, 3 U.S. 133 (1795).
The Spirit of God without our permission changed us from an unregenerate natural man who knoweth not the things of the Spirit of God into a regenerate spiritual man of God and in so doing gave us the “mind of Christ” so that the things of the Spirit of God would no longer be foolishness to us as they are to the unregenerate people in the secular society or body politic who simply cannot know the things of the Spirit of God. (1 Cor. 2:14-16).
Now, as regenerate spiritual men and women of God we have a choice as to whom we will serve, either we serve God in King Jesus or we serve some earthly king or president. But, we simply cannot serve both sovereigns or masters. Both the Law of God and the U.S. Supreme Court recognize this fact.
Our “status” or “standing” in relation to the civil government and the unregenerate pagans in the political community was changed at the point in which we were born anew. We now relate to the earthly citizens as strangers and sojourners just passing through this earthly country.
While we are present on King Jesus’ earth we relate to the civil government as foreign Ambassadors for King Jesus of the Kingdom of Heaven. We are now sojourning on the earth as Ambassadors for King Jesus and we are here to protect or look out for the interests of our King and His land. Our earthly tent or home is located on Holy ground that belongs to our Lord and our dwelling functions as a Kingdom of Heaven embassy under the jurisdiction of King Jesus.
God’s people as Ambassadors have diplomatic immunity while in the service of their King in a foreign country. Ambassadors never establish their domicile in a foreign land nor do they voluntarily become citizens of or in the foreign country to which they have been sent by their sovereign to be ambassadors.
We have the Creator-given right of association and therefore the civil government cannot force us to associate with any particular earthly political community.
I think I have provided enough material in the above comments to generate a good discussion in one of your future podcasts. Please correct any errors in any of the above points I have made so we may establish the truth regarding the comprehensive nature of being born anew and how being adopted into the family of God changes our citizenship status and standing in relation to the civil government and the other unregenerate pagans in the political community – i.e. body politic.
There is no neutral ground here and we all have a choice as to whom we will serve.
I am seeking the truth and looking forward to your discussing our inability to serve two sovereigns or two masters and how we may lawfully make this choice.
Thanks for the opportunity to comment.
Matthew 20:20-22
People think since we are no longer under Christianity we are under nothing.
We are under full blown Talmudic Judaism. If you think not, you haven’t looked into it.
Congrats to all the Christians who completely supported Jews and Israel. Those that murdered Christ. Remember the Liberty.