Hi there,
What is separation of Church and state? Scientifically? Evolutionarily?
If not able, as a statement of science believed as procedure: as something necessarily to be repeated?
In context being because of objective considered "objective" being reconsidered and questioned? For some end result, of some sort?
(Scientifically)
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Without the possibility of it being a return of any single religion to government, without being followed by Jesus?
Thomas Jefferson during his time as President received a letter from the Danbury Baptists who were concerned that there would be a Federal Church. Jefferson tells them, speaking in their own theological language and reflecting on the First amendment tells them such a thing was impossible because there had been erected a 'wall of separation' between the government and religion. It's the concept of the ancient Hebrew garden wall and was an apt metaphor used by many Protestant to describe protections of religion from government and preventions of what the Founding Fathers sometimes described as Priestcraft, or using a religious authority to make inroads to government office and power.
"Builders, who, if they see a breach in a wall, instantly and carefully repair it: they are like gardeners who do not allow either a field or vineyard to be exposed to wild beasts. (John Calvin)
There is an abundance of evidence that the
'seperation of church and state' originated in Christian theology known historically as disenters or seperatists. Roger Williams was one of the first and perhaps the most vocal opponante of establishing clerical civil authority:
"Roger Williams adopted the wall of separation as an image of the purity he sought in religion. Yet what Hooker dipicted as an unrealistic assumption of the dissenters and what other Protestants employed as a poetic image of the regenerate church, Williams took allmost literally. So far did Williams pursue a spiritual purity and a separation from the corruptions of this world tha he separated himself from all of his contemporaries. (Roger Williams and the Foundations of Religious Liberty,: Boston Univ. Law Review 1991)
In the summer of 1787 Congress revisited the issue of religion in the new western territories and passed, July 13, 1787, the famous Northwest Ordinance. Article 3 of the Ordinance contained the following language: "Religion, Morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged."
"The wall separating church and state was built upon the remains of an earlier wall, which separated the garden from the wilderness. This metaphor of a wall separating the garden was applied in many ways but always in a manner that suggested the purity of the church. Whether the wall represented the separation of the church from the world, the separation of the regenerate from the unregenerate, or the separation of particular "gathered" churches from a national church, it consistently depicted the church set apart from the taint of worldly things." (P. Hamburger, Separation of Church and State)
