Distinguish between supremacy of the church and state
Answers
A brief treatment of church and state follows. For full treatment, see Christianity: Church and state.
Before the advent of Christianity, separate religious and political orders were not clearly defined in most civilizations. People worshipped the gods of the particular state in which they lived, religion in such cases being but a department of the state. In the case of the Jewish people, the revealed Law of the Scripture constituted the Law of Israel. The Christian concept of the secular and the spiritual is founded on the words of Jesus: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). Two distinct, but not altogether separate, areas of human life and activity had to be distinguished; hence, a theory of two powers came to form the basis of Christian thought and teaching from earliest times.
During the 1st century AD the Apostles, living under a pagan empire, taught respect for and obedience to the governing powers so long as such obedience did not violate the higher, or divine, law, which superseded political jurisdiction. Among the Church Fathers, who lived in a period when Christianity had become the religion of the empire, the emphasis on the primacy of the spiritual was even stronger. They insisted upon the independence of the church and the right of the church to judge the actions of the secular ruler.
With the decline of the Roman Empire in the West, civil authority fell into the hands of the only educated class that remained—the churchmen. The church, which formed the only organized institution, became the seat of temporal as well as spiritual power. In the East the civil authorities, centred in Constantinople, dominated the ecclesiastical throughout the Byzantine period.