The Thirty-Nine Articles “are interested in two kinds of authority only, as exercised in two different social contexts. They are interested in the authority of true speech which persuades minds and instills convictions; and they are interested in the authority of legitimate command, which orders and directs the conduct of social life. Broadly speaking, they maintain the position that the Church, as 'the witness and a keeper of Holy Writ', exercises the former authority in society, and the monarch the latter.” (page 99)
“In the social orders which prevail until the coming of Christ, the authority of truth and the authority of command had better be kept explicitly distinct, since in practice any attempt to embody the whole truth in a political order must lead to disillusionment. For this reason Western Christian thought has tended to favour the development of a 'liberal' theory, which separates the authorities, rather than of an ideological totalitarianism.” (page 100)
“But it is a matter of some difficulty for the modern reader to grasp that this division of authorities does not imply the distinction of what we call 'church and state'...The very word 'state'...is used ambiguously by moderns with two distinct meanings: it sometimes represents the Greek politeia and the Latin respublica, which mean the politically organized community as a whole; but it is also, and more commonly, used to mean the distinctly political structures within the community, as opposed to all other aspects of the community's life...Now, this modern conception of the state as a department of society was not known to the Tudors and begins to make its appearance (in English thought at least) only in the seventeenth century. The Tudors did not conceive of society as divided (in Althusian fashion) into self-governing departments, each with its own proper area of concern. Thus they did not draw what might seem to us to be the obvious conclusion from the principle of twofold authority: that the monarch should not interfere with the affairs of the church, and that the church should not interfere with the affairs of the state.” (pp.100-101)
“The authority of the ruler extended over the whole of society 'whether...ecclesiastical or civil'. But then, so did the authority of God's word extend over the whole of society...In the next century...[the latter] drops out of sight, and seventeenth-century Anglicanism is marked by the growth of an absolutists theory of monarchical authority, reflecting, like the negative of a photograph, the absolutist conceptions of popular sovereignty which were steadily gaining ground throughout Europe.” (page 101)
