Public Authority of the Church in English Reformation Theology

The paper expounds the centrality of the church's public authority to the project of constructing a radical theological criticism of the Western tradition of liberal natural rights and a theological alternative to it. Key to this centrality is the profound dialectical tension between the church's two interdependent modes of public authority: namely, its essential authority of evangelical proclamation and its alien authority of coercive jurisdiction. The authority of the church's proclamatory practices belongs to Christ's direct, saving rule through the Spirit among his people, whereas the authority of the church's jurisdictional practices belong to Christ's indirect, preserving rule through the Spirit over sinful society, so that the latter is teleologically ordered to the former. The liberal political tradition of natural rights in its modern phase denies publicity to (i.e., privatizes) both modes of the church's authority and inverts the proper theological ordering of juridical to proclamatory authority in the church as well as throughout the institutions and associations of civil society. The public theology of the English Reformation both identifies these deficiencies and contributes to rectifying them.