Introduction
I’m going to play with a couple of Latin words here because each has a peculiar angle on a root word I want to ricochet off. And since Latin is a dead language I don’t think it will mind if I dissect and sew a couple of meanings together.
If you were a fishmonger’s wife back in the height of the Roman empire wanting to know the latest scuttlebutt, you would make your way down to the bustling street corner where news poured in from all corners of the empire and eddied in this busy thoroughfare. In the pockets of the street corners, goods were bought and sold and news was exchanged. The Latin word for this concept is trivial, literally the “three ways” referring to the common information that everybody knows. “Hey Cassius, did you hear Julius Caesar just crossed the Rubicon?” “Yes, Felix, everybody knows that.” It was trivial knowledge, common knowledge. So Monday night trivia at your local watering hole questions the players in common knowledge – the stuff everyone knows or has access to. Often we take the word to mean unimportant or insignificant, but the original understanding was something ordinary, commonly known, every day type stuff.
Where trivial focused on the common knowledge amongst the common folk, trivium means “the place where three roads meet”, with an emphasis on the “meeting” part – the intersection. In classical education, the trivium describes the learning stages children mature through – grammar, logic and rhetoric. It comprises the foundational three of the seven fields of liberal arts. Grammar is used in logic which is used in rhetoric, each building on the other as the child grows and is readied for interaction with the outside world and buttressed with a gapless perception of it.
What I would like to do here is describe another trivium, the Three Spheres of Sovereignty, with a focus on their intersection under God. This is a concept so important, that if it were a question during trivia night at the Drunk Monkey, every louse and sop in the place ought to consider it a gimme and be that much closer to winning a free pitcher of Natty Lite. Though the Spheres may be a foreign concept, it is one you fraternize with many times a day, one that you will have myriad opportunities to reference and maintain in the future. And though this is a Christian concept, it should be met by all creeds and colors with as much joyful glad-handing as any son of the Kingdom.
So What’s the Big Deal?
Why should you spend your hard earned time on this? It is important for several reasons. First, whenever God makes boundaries we should pay attention to where He draws them and abide accordingly. Boundaries designate the square acres of optimal function humans are mean to graze within. Secondly, it assigns responsibility, which performs the double duty of assigning accountability and relieving all those meddling busybodies of their duty to be in someone else’s business. Any man who wants to be able to stand before a State and say with authority “You are out of line” needs to be able to give reasons for why this is so, and those reasons have to transcend both himself and the State. When the Boston archdiocese assures a local clergyman from Lowell that the priests indiscretion with the altar boy will be handled swiftly in house, he needs some clout to call the cops. And not to put too fine a point on it, when a local government tells the pastor he must shutter the doors of his church to his flock due to a super duper bad virus, while the line of deadbeats stretches around the corner for the weed dispensary, he needs some cement in his britches to stand his ground. So thats why.
The emergence of these spheres comes from the mists of antiquity as relationships were hammered out over the past two thousand years. As the Kingdom of God advanced on the world, all kinds old rotten things were done away with. But since they were done away with by people still walking uphill through history, this did not mean all was set right instantly. The equation of progress is history minus mistakes, and so looking at the past couple millennia from a pigeon’s viewpoint, there has been a slow and steady rise. Right about the Reformation things started to make some sense as to how the power dynamics ought to work and which sluggers should not be on the same softball team. The Three Spheres of Sovereignty is how the teams should be divvied up and they are the Church, the State and the Family. And if capitalization of words the author deems important bothers you, you ain’t seen nothin yet.
Why are they spheres and not circles or cubes? I do not know. Probably because it sounds cool. Nobody wants to talk about the Three Polygons of Sovereignty. Anyway, these Spheres God speaks to and demarcates in His word the specific boundaries and responsibilities of each. All the other examples of governance – CEOs of hospitals, superintendents, the captain of your geriatric bull riding team – are lawful and good to keep things in order, but are non-essential for the function of humanity. We have Dutch theologians to thank for these observations, particularly Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) who really put a fine edge on these ideas.
What all these Spheres have in common is that they are instituted by God who laid out the responsibilities and boundaries circumscribed by a thick black line just so each knows where their proud waves halt. One of the jobs God did not give to the Spheres is determining what belongs to the spheres. Pastors qualifications and duties are laid out in livid detail in Paul’s letters to Timothy. Dad’s are given instructions on how to love their families and imitate Christ in daily death. Jesus and Paul have some words for the endless line of Caesars in history. The family’s father, the head of the state and the bishop of the church all report directly to God and are responsible to Him for their stewardship of their Sphere. Because of this position of authority, they are dealt with more strictly than those under them and subject to sharper rebukes and disciplines (James 3:1).
So what I would like to do here is less of an organized treatise on each and more of a smattering of observations to whet the mind to begin thinking in these terms. I am interested in what boundaries each Sphere has and what happens to the other when one shoves its way to the front of the line. If, while reading this, you remark something like “Man, this sounds pretty idealistic” then you are correct. Not only is it impossible to trace every bump, carie and contingency of this massive topic, it is exhausting and boring. Plus, my therapist says I need to be more assertive. Accompanying each will be a high fidelity diagram that I made in Microsoft Paint while I was at work. If you like the diagrams and want me to make some bespoke diagrams for your personal needs, I am available for hire at exorbitant price.
Family
The oldest Sphere founded in Genesis chapter 2 when God gave Eve to Adam as a wife and established a hierarchy within the family. The father is the head of the family and bears primary responsibility to God for the actions and outcome of his charge. Paul hashes this out in some more detail in his letters to various churches (Ephesians 5:22; 1 Corinthians 11:3), inserting the headship of man over the woman in the family just under the man’s subservience’s to Christ, who is Himself under God. Because we live in the 21st century, I have been informed by my PR team that I need to add ‘headship’ doesn’t imply inequality or hierarchy of value.
The Family sphere is unique in that it is the smallest indivisible unit of society. Even though our country is drooping under the weight of fractures families, this does not change the fact that God made the Family to be an indivisible unit. Family is predicated on marriage and marriage is predicated on sexual roles and sexual roles are predicated on the gender that God assigns when a human is conceived. A man and woman in marriage is the most complete picture of the image of God on the earth. When they come together in marriage, this union is the seed of the family of which children are a natural and expected happy result. Family is where people are made; they are people factories. People can be smart or dumb, foolish or wise, miserly or generous, obedient or surly, and they become this way largely but not exclusively, from how they were parented. If the Family is not submissive to God, people become misshapen. These misshapen people will then continue on to be absorbed in the State machinery or become free radicals to burden it.
Both the Church and the State are made up of families. What is a Church but a bundle of families worshipping God? And a State is a caboodle of families living on a confined geographic location. Given this fact, it is clear that the Church and State have some buy in as to the health of this Sphere. Rotten families are a burden to the State, requiring from it more resources to keep radical individuals in prison and off the streets. Broken families contribute to poverty, low education and higher crime rates. Healthy families bless their nation and seek its good. They are productive, contribute to the general welfare and govern themselves preempting the need for the State to swing the sword.
The Church ministers to the Family, strengthening it and equipping it to honor God and bless its nation by teaching wives to respect their husbands (Ephesians 5:33) and love their children (Titus 2:4), instructing fathers to love their wives (Ephesians 5:25) and raise their children in the paideia of God (Ephesians 6:4), and for children to obey their parents (Ephesians 6:1). Included in this Sphere is the responsibility of academic education, whether that is teaching in a homeschool setting or subcontracting this role out to professional teachers. Regardless of how this happens, it is the Family that bears the responsibility. That is why when we send our kids to government schools and they come back parroting government imbecilities, that is on the parents, and more specifically, on the father. If the kids attend a Roman school come home worshipping Caesar, you can have lots of indignation, but it ought not be a surprised indignation.
Since the father is head of the Family, and the closest representation to our Heavenly Father of the three Spheres, when the Family is dissolved there is a cultural famine of fatherhood. Antics ensue. Sometimes this degradation of the Family is endorsed by the State in order to destabilize society so that it can vacuum up the fatherless disaffected to use as revolutionary fodder. This is currently happening in America. When healthy, the Family is the strongest antidote to totalitarianism, producing wise, savvy, well loved adults who are aware of their own sinful inclinations and therefore dubious of big States.
Family possesses the powers of persuasion, love and coercion, since all three are present in varying degree in raising children. A mother coerces her toddler through discipline to make him submissive to authority. She loves and accepts him which grows a deep taproot of identity impervious from the frost of the secular world. She persuades him as a teenager, teaching him the wisdom of self-restraint and the logic of joy. Not only can the Family employ these three tactics, it is required to do so by God (Titus 2:4, Proverbs 1:1-the whole book, Ephesians 6:4).
It is more difficult for the Family to go bad in a way that attempts to eat the other two spheres, but if it did it may look something like anarchy, tribalism or perhaps some warlord action. Nepotism can be an okay thing when you give your son a job sweeping floors in your factory, but a bad thing when highly competent non-family members are passed up for CFO for the sake of getting little Jonny a corner office his first year out of Stanford. Empires have fallen because family ties are honored over the good of the people, and the pedophilic sex scandals of the Catholic church, though primarily due to mold within, can also be from a “we protect our own” Family canker.
State
Next, when you have a bunch of families living in the same spot there needs to be some rules of engagement for how to live in accord in a given geographic area. Primarily this was tribal, but as tribes got bigger and glommed together into larger communities different forms of State governance emerged. Permutations of this State sphere have manifested and morphed greatly over time and with varying degrees of success. Monarchies, socialist states, parliamentary and legislative democracies are all examples of State governance. Because of these variations, the head of the state can be a president, a king, a parliament, chief or fuhrer. This person or persons answer to God, are put into place by Him and are accountable to Him (Romans 13:1-2; Daniel 2:21; John 19:11). These heads of state are…well, the Heads of State.
To the State God gave the sword (Romans 13:4) so that it can punish those who do wrong and commend those who do right (1 Peter 2:14). When it does this well it restrains the operation of sin (Proverbs 29:2, 4). They uphold impartial standards of justice and keep the other spheres in check to maximize the liberty of those under its charge by mitigating the tresspassages of its citizenry. “It takes liberties from those who take liberties,” as Chesterton said. This presupposes the State has functional categories of what constitutes right and wrong, which in some circumstances is a presupposition that is doing a lot of work. Categories can be twisted, evil can be called good and good evil, and this has happened not a few times in the State’s history (Isaiah 5:20). When this happens, the only rectification is destruction of the that State by implosion from within, destruction from without, or repentance after hearing the prophetic voice of the Church.
The State is derivative of families and cannot exist without them; you will never find a State governing nobody. Even the government of a State is made up of members of the family units found within, and its health is directly proportional to those units that make it up. This is important, since it has no mechanism for putting families back together once they lyse; the State cannot heal, cannot love, only coerce. This is a feature, not a bug. The moment the State grows a bosom and turns to comfort and provide for its citizens, it has trespassed into the Family and Church Spheres and is going the right way to totalitarianism. At a minimum, the healthy State would acknowledge their authority is granted by the Almighty God and act with the proper amount of solemnity.
Jesus told us all the law and prophets boils down to two commandments – “Love the Lord you God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love you neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). These are the Big Two. The State has no business enforcing the first one, as loving God must come from faith which can never be coerced. However, the laws of a nation are the second commandment with legs. Speed limits, zoning laws, water rights and building codes are “loving your neighbor” via general equity legislation. It achieves this through coercion – the sword – and carries increasingly stiff penalties for those who ignore dictates.
The laws of a nation are right or wrong, righteous or just, depending on how they line up with the character of God. In America, the case law which makes up our legal code is based on English common law, which grew out of Alfred the Great’s legal reforms in the 800s, which he took directly from the Mosaic code and the Christian teachings. This was a good move on our part. So anyone who thinks the limited government, due process and Bill of Rights that we have in America are pretty swell so long as we can keep the whole God thing separate, are like bakers who love cakes so long as the flour, sugar, eggs and baking soda are on the side. This includes Christians who huff and puff whenever theonomy is mentioned. They must explain what other system of righteousness they would like to enforce, and what other source of justice they will be referencing other than God’s.
Given that the State is made of men and men are inherently sinful, it behooves those architects of the State to mitigate its power and influence. Governors must govern others and then turn around and govern themselves by those same standards. Libertarians tirelessly quote Lord Acton, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” and there is a direct correlation between a people’s familiarity with their own sin and the limitations they insist being in place for those in power over them. This is why the American founding documents can be summarized, “Never trust an American,” as Doug Wilson quipped. Therefore, power was smeared thinly over three branches of government so that no one person or faction could gather enough power chips to win the game. Thankfully, there exists a Sphere that reminds the State it cannot rise above human nature and thus must tie its own hands and hobble its ankles.
The first step towards a State rotting is denying it was given authority by God. If there is no God above the State, the State becomes God. With that usurped office comes god-like delusions. It becomes the head of all spheres – father, savior and king all wrapped up in one cancerous nougat. A peculiarly odious discovery made in the past few hundred years is that the State can smash the Family by targeting the family’s head, the father, which results in disconnected individual atomic units. It is therefore in the interest of the rogue State to destroy the molecular family structure and grease up all the individual atoms to they can never form any meaningful shape in them selves other than whatever shape the State wants. Individuals from the broken Family sphere are the Legos the State uses to build an empire in its own image.
To a corrupt State, the biggest threat to its demise is not an armed public, but masculinity and femininity in situ. Masculinity is found in its most potent form in men who are leading their families. Luckily for the State, masculinity can be castrated by free love (porn), diffused by escapism (video games and entertainment), dampened by mind altering substances (marijuana, psilocybins), or paid off (welfare). If any masculinity escapes this gauntlet it can be socially marginalized by calling it toxic. Femininity glows with power when it is building new humans in a home and glorifying everything it touches. The State has learned that whatever it steals from masculinity it can throw to femininity and the destruction is equal. As mentioned above, this smashes the Family and orphans the future into a barren landscape where they are homeless and thirsty for a father, whom the State is more than happy to adopt in exchange for power.
When Herod was enjoying his brother’s wife John the Baptist called him out, which was bold and needful. Eventually Herod got around to lopping his head off. Corrupt states often try to stamp out the Church, which historically never works – the Church is composted with the blood of martyrs. Instead, savvy States do not resist the Church but allow them to exist under certain conditions. The Chinese Communist Party permits the church to function so long as the Party can heavily redact or alter God’s word. Other governments dictate to the Church they are a non-essential and therefore cannot meet to worship God. When the Church goes along complacently, this is the serpentine State flexing and wondering what it can get away with next.
Church
Lastly, the Church was established by God to both be and bring the Kingdom of God into this world. Officially it was established when the Holy Spirit tongue lapped the disciples at Pentecost, but the idea of a representative on God’s behalf has existed since creation, with the eventual Israelites carrying the torch before it was handed off to the Church. Pastors, or bishops, are the overseers of this sphere, are raised up by God and receive a double responsibility as the teachers of God’s word. These are the heads of church. (True, Christ is the head of the church (Ephesians 5:23) but here I am using the term “head” as the human leader responsible to God for those under his care.)
Christianity is a religion of world conquest initiated by Christ’s death and resurrection and will be carried to its near fullness through the working of the Holy Spirit through history. Manifesting the Kingdom of God on the earth is the primary role of this Sphere and it does so by the proclamation of the the gospel, baptizing nations and teaching them the mechanics of the kingdom through discipleship (Matthew 28:16-20). Being raised from death to life is the work of repentance and confession that Jesus is Lord, which begins the spreading of resurrection power into every area of one’s life. Inward change begets external change and that change has measurable effects on history as individual raindrops each contribute their part of a flooding river spilling its banks.
The Church makes the States job easier by moralizing the population. Moral people steal, kill and perjure less as a general rule. As the Church reaches into families and teaches the men to protect and provide for their families, women to love their husbands and kids, and children to obey their parents, life gets better and people are healthier and more productive. The Church cannot coerce people but it can persuade and love and discipline members of the Family in accordance with the God’s word. Unlike the State, the Church is a healing mechanism which can mend Families; father wounds can be healed by the the leaves of this tree. To the Church was entrusted the words of God to preach and to practice true religion, which is described as releasing the bonds of the oppressed, caring for the poor, alleviating suffering, and teaching how to avoid being polluted by the world.
To Her was given the prophetic proclamations of God. If this Sphere runs out from under its Head, disaster ensues. As the eye is the lamp of the body, the Church is the lamp of the world; She is the conscience of the world. If it is healthy, the whole world will have light, but if she is bad then the world will be filled with darkness (Matthew 6:22-23). When the Church goes bad, it is often because she has whored herself out to mammon and recruits the State as her pimp.
Illustrations
Based on the Spheres described above, here are some illustrations I made to visualize how they can interact, starting with the presumed ideal secular state and ending with the trivium I am very much wishing will become trivial.
The ideal secular state. Three Spheres with clear lines of demarcation and no intrusion of one on the other, and no recognition that God has any authority over any. In the middle is the neutral zone, the Marketplace, secular society, which according to the directions that came in the box, allows each of us to interact respectfully while respecting other’s religions and traditions. In America, this is not what the founding fathers had in mind, probably, but is a structure like what many today think is actually attainable. And it is perfectly attainable, so long as nobody moves, breathes or interacts with any other human ever. Another way of saying this is it is not attainable. Nature abhors a vacuum and that is exactly what that white area in the middle is – a vacuous vacant vacuum. However, most American citizens, including Christians, think it is the best of all possible worlds. It is not. There is no such thing as a neutral secular state because secularism is a religion with a strong leaning towards not God. What is thought of as a neutral zone is the World cleverly disguised. It is the belief that mankind does not need God and is doing a pretty swell job with existing all on their own. In place of God’s law, Reason will be the guiding principle. This would be fantastic, if only for the fact that man’s every desire is sinful and selfish from sunup to sundown, and Reason can play in dark minds just as well as enlightened ones. The question is not whether we have a religious society, but which religion will call the shots in our society. Picture these three Spheres instead as water columns; there must exist some force keeping them from sloshing into one another, that has the power to keep their boundaries. That power must transcend all Spheres and belong to none. So when you a set up like this with no transcendent Power keeping the Spheres in their assigned boundaries, you are free to think “this ought to be interesting…“
Family Tumors. Okay, so I didn’t make an image for this one because using Microsoft Paint is tedious. Can’t really use the word totalitarianism here, since the family is self limiting in size, but the best illustration for Family gone bad are like numerous tumors in an organ. Each tumor is at the same time interrupting the function of the organ and working to divert resources to itself. Blood feuds, for example, are an exponential evil of one-upsmanship. A Hatfield kills a son of the McCoys and the McCoys retaliate by killing two Hatfields and a puppy, and so on, disregarding the commands of God or the laws of the State. One time a retired sheriff of Knox County, Maine told me a story of an islander off the coast of Maine who threatened his life for arresting a fellow islander for drunk driving. “He was breaking the law, Russel” the sheriff said. “Don’t you know there’s no law east of breakwater?” replied the looming man breathing booze and fish stink. This kind of tribalism is the Family sphere gone wild. For further examples, watch Yellowstone or The Sopranos. No nation or church can be maintained when this Sphere does not submit or self limit, and tribal sympathies are paramount.
Religious totalitarianism. History has seen prolonged affairs between the Church and the State. Currently this situation still exists in some parts of the world, mostly in the Middle East, which is technically not the Church, but close enough to get a glimpse of what it would be like. Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale is probably closer to a modern day cancerous ChurchState. We are not currently at risk of this happening, though many LGBTQ individuals are convinced of this awful reality if any Republican is voted to any public office, even if that office is County Gator Wrangler of Backwater, Arkansas. In reality, though, any country with a population rapidly converting to Christianity, of which there are a few, are going to be faced with this possibility as power shifts, and must have their theological ducks in a row before they get there. Because America is currently in a steep decline that makes the Roman Empire’s look like the graceful slope of a wheelchair ramp outside the VFW, we need to know when to submit to the State and when to practice civil disobedience. Also, since I am an optimist, I believe America will once again be conquered by Christianity, so for posterity’s sake we need to know when to say no to State power offered to us, even when it tingles in our fingertips.
State Totalitarianism. This one is self-evident. The state wields the sword and when they disavow God, they will use that sword to threaten the lives of the people. This can be done by physical, economic or social machinations. Totalitarians states cannot suffer dissent and therefore will try to undermine the Family’s role of moral training and education – they can’t have people remembering or having value which transcend their own. Simultaneously, it will attempt to win over or discredit the Church to silence the prophetic voice and eliminate community. The antidote to this is an educated, moral population rooted in strong families who know that there are things that gnaw at a man worse than dying, and who practice loving their neighbors by standing up against the regime for the sake of their freedoms, though it may cost their lives, because they have an eternal one waiting just the other side of death.
Intersected Sphere sovereignty. The integral aspect of Spheres staying in their lanes is the acknowledgement that there is a God above them that keeps them in check. God is the trivium, the intersection where the roads meet. When each understands it is subject to a Higher authority which has laid out the boundaries for them, things go smoother. This is not hard for the Church, most of the time. Family is a mixed bag. When States neglect their tether to God, it is largely because the Families that have also neglected that tether have flocked to the State and take an active part in snipping that string. Notice, when each sphere is behaving, a natural overlap emerges. The Church maintains a prophetic voice and positions itself to sanctify the Family through body life which has the secondary effect of making a happier, productive citizenry for the State, as well as speaking truth to authority when they act wickedly. The Family raises educated, moral offspring to be productive members of society. The State maintains unbiased laws of justice, punishing evil and rewarding good, protecting private property incentivizing industry, and has jurisdiction to do so in the Church and in the Family when that righteous law is abused (ie: child abuse). This is what we need to be shooting for; this is the goal. As the Kingdom of God expands on the earth and nations are discipled and taught to obey Jesus, these are the horizontals that need to be hashed out.
Practical Conclusion
Interestingly, as I was writing this, two women I work with (both in their sixties, grey, and named Bev) asked what I was writing and so I told them. It produced instant disagreement. How would an atheist find freedom of thought under this Christian paradigm? One of the Bevs said she does not go to church and is somewhere on the infinite shoreline between Buddhist and atheist, so what relevance do these three Spheres have for her? It is a good question. So I sez to her you would be hard pressed for find an atheist who is not in favor of separation of Church and State; indeed, nowadays they are the ones championing the idea. And just because a person may not agree that these three Spheres are the only boundaries that need hashing out, or even the most important ones, you can’t disagree that these three are clearly present, like it or not, and need some definitional boundaries.
But where the practical point of the Spheres came into the conversation was when she disclosed that she has certain beliefs which run against the grain of Christian thought, particularly around gay marriage, and so how could she live in such a society? Very true. Poll a hundred people and you will find a rather flat bell curve revealing the diverse opinions in our country. The real question is, however, what kind of society would allow dissent from an established center? Freedom of dissent will not be found in totalitarian States, this much is obvious. And history has taught us of the inquisitorial nature of nations where the Church sphere encroaches into the State and uses its sword to dispel controversial beliefs. The only scenario where someone like her would be allowed to both privately and publicly believe what she does is in a nation where each Sphere is leashed and consciously under the authority of the God who both invented the Spheres and defined their jurisdictions. Freedom of speech is a Christian invention and the way to get more of it is to allow godly wisdom to carve out these boundaries in any given society. If these Spheres are going to work together towards human flourishing, the trivium must become trivial, which means we got some homework to do.
Thought Butter 