The Christian Church

The Christian Church is imagined as the society’s governing moral community, not a private institution confined to a corner of the State. In the debate over jurisdiction and criminal punishment, its decisive function is to awaken the offender’s conscience, bind wrongdoing to responsibility toward others, and make restoration possible. The proposal moves beyond compromise between Church and State: it makes the Church’s eventual transformation of society the chief aim of Christian social development.

Nature and Place in Society

The argument begins from a lasting confusion between the essential principles of Church and State. Their mixture, the speaker contends, cannot yield consistent or normal results because it is false at its foundation; jurisdiction is one of the questions on which a genuine compromise is impossible. The opposing position gives the Church a precise, defined place within the State. Against that limited arrangement, the alternative is that the Church should include the whole State rather than occupy only a corner of it. If that cannot yet be realized, it should nonetheless be established as the direct and principal aim of future Christian society.

This is not simply a claim to greater institutional territory. It recasts the direction of political development: instead of treating the Church as one authority alongside the State, the debate proposes a society whose public life would be remade according to Christian responsibility. The distinction matters because the argument rejects an arrangement that leaves the two principles in unresolved competition and calls instead for a transformation of the social order itself.

Criminal Justice and Conscience

The Church’s social role becomes concrete in the discussion of crime. The elder argues that without the Church of Christ there would be nothing to restrain a criminal from wrongdoing and no genuine chastisement afterward, beyond the mechanical punishment already under discussion. State punishment can remove an offender from society, but physical exclusion alone does not explain how the person might recognize the wrong or be changed by it.

The Church’s proposed response rests on conscience and membership. Its law speaks within the criminal’s conscience; by recognizing the wrongdoing as that of a son of Christian society, the offender can understand it as a sin against society understood as the Church. This shifts the meaning of punishment from an externally imposed consequence to an acknowledgment of moral relation. The offender is not merely an unwanted member to be cut off, but someone whose recognition of responsibility may make regeneration possible.

Exclusion, Restoration, and the Future

The debate contrasts mechanical expulsion with moral recovery. An obnoxious member may be cut off and sent far away, yet another criminal can take his place at once, sometimes two. Removal thus leaves the underlying social problem untouched. The Church, by contrast, is said to preserve society, restrain those who plan evil, restore the excluded, and regenerate those who have fallen. Its response is both preventive and restorative: it seeks to restrain future wrongdoing while also changing the relationship between the offender and the community.

The proposal is acknowledged to be incomplete in the present. Christian society is described as not yet ready for its full realization and as resting on only some seven righteous people; nevertheless, these are never absent. Their persistence allows the community to continue, unshaken, in expectation of transformation from a society almost heathen in character into one universal and powerful. The Church’s significance therefore lies at once in present moral action and in a future social ideal: it offers a form of responsibility that State punishment alone cannot provide, while treating the conversion of society into a Christian community as a continuing historical task.