Politics & Power Quote by Charles Hodge

Hodge is drawing a bright jurisdictional line, and he does it with the cool certainty of someone who knows that boundary fights are never merely theoretical. Calling the Church a "self-governing society" isn’t pious ornament; it’s a claim to institutional adulthood. The phrasing borrows the vocabulary of constitutional order - officers, laws, administrative government - to insist that the Church is not just a spiritual mood or a voluntary club but a real polity with internal authority that cannot be dissolved into the State’s machinery.

The intent is defensive and strategic. Mid-19th-century America was awash in debates over disestablishment, denominational pluralism, and the uneasy romance between Protestant moral authority and democratic politics. Hodge, a Princeton theologian and a pillar of Presbyterian confessionalism, is protecting ecclesiastical governance from both directions: from state intrusion (the State appointing, regulating, or disciplining clergy) and from the era’s populist impulse to treat churches as consumer institutions answerable only to congregational whim.

Subtext: the Church’s legitimacy does not come from political recognition; it comes from its own source of law, which in Hodge’s system is ultimately divine. That "therefore" is doing heavy lifting. If the Church has its own laws and officers, then it possesses a competence the State lacks: the right to define doctrine, administer sacraments, and discipline members. It’s a quiet rebuke to any government tempted to arbitrate spiritual life - and to any believer tempted to outsource moral formation to politics. Hodge is arguing for separation, yes, but also for sovereignty: two governments, two ends, one society learning to live with both.