Sounding Like Machen
Stuart Robinson's great work on the church
The Gospel includes the provision (and preservation) of the church—the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. We need apologists for the church. One such apologist was Southern Presbyterian minister Stuart Robinson, portions of whose important 1858 work could be mistaken for the last chapter of Machen’s 1923 work Christianity and Liberalism.
The officers, the ordinances, and the courts of the Church have, as we have seen, a very definite and a single end in view—viz: the evangelization of the world and the calling and gathering out of it the elect of God. Hence, the too-common conception of the Church as a power to be used directly for the promotion of mere humanly devised reforms (however desirable in themselves considered) and as being important to men (as men and citizens) to effect such reforms, or the conception, of the ordinance of the word preached as an instrumentality to rectify wrong public opinion, wrong moral views of social and civil affairs; or the conception of the courts of the Church as agencies through which to reach directly and reform civil evils and to arraign the State on national wrongdoing, is inconsistent with the fundamental nature of the Church itself, and must ultimately work out only confusion and corruption. This kingdom, in its administration, contemplates men only in relation to Jesus the Mediator. It ignores all strifes and parties of the kingdom of Caesar. It knows men only as friends or enemies of the King1 and knows no parties but the parties of Christ and of Antichrist.
— p. 123 &124 of The Church of God an Essential Element of the Gospel (Some spelling, punctuation, and usage modernized, here and below)
Earlier in the book, in tracing church history, he implies the church-state relations depicted in the American revisions of the Westminster Confession are an improvement over those in Scotland. He never mentions the idea of a “National Covenant” and does not seem to desire one. Christ’s “covenant” is with the non-national, non-established Church.
Next, after a thousand years of repose and silence in the Church, the third was developed (Soteriology) through the labors of Luther and Calvin, proclaiming salvation as by grace through faith, leaving the fourth, Ecclesiology, yet to be developed. Do not the providences of God toward the American Church in freeing her from the civil domination which, by violence or seduction, silenced the martyr-voice of her Scotch mother when she would testify for Christ's crown and covenant, and in placing the Church here in a position (for the first time, perhaps, since the apostles) to actualize fully and without hindrance her true nature and functions as a spiritual commonwealth—do not all seem to indicate that the time has fully come for the final development of the visible Church as a governmental power on earth, yet a kingdom not of this world, a people not reckoned among the nations? (p. 28)
In fact, Robinson makes much of distinctions between church and state, and these distinctions concern more than formal establishment.
These distinctions, therefore, are of a nature to forbid all idea of any concurrent jurisdiction and to render certain the corruption and final apostasy of any part of the Church which shall persist in the attempt to exist as a governmental power concurrent with the State—it matters not whether as superior, inferior, or equal. They are the two great powers that be, and are ordained of God to serve two distinct ends in the great scheme devised for man as fallen. The one is set up, in the mercy and forbearance of the Author of nature toward the apostate race at large, to hold in check the outworking of that devilish nature consequent upon the apostasy, and to furnish a platform,2 as it were, on which to carry on another and more amazing scheme of mercy (the propagation of the Gospel by the church) toward a part of mankind (the elect). The other is designed to constitute of the families of earth that call upon his name, and into the hearts of which his grace has put enmity toward Satan and his seed, a nation of priests, a peculiar nation, not reckoned among the nations, of whom Jehovah is the God and they are his people. That not only the utter disregard of this distinction in the formal union of the Church and State—either merging the Church in the State or the State in the Church—is destructive of the Church, but that, also, any degree of confusion in respect of this distinction is proportionably dangerous and corrupting, the history of the Reformed Churches generally, and in particular of the Church of Scotland, is a most striking illustration. Nay, the entire history of the Church, from its first organization, testifies that his people must render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, as distinct from rendering to God the things that are God's, or the Church suffers. (p. 87 & 84)
Read The Church of God as an Essential Element of the Gospel at the Internet Archive
Meaning the church regards men and believers or unbelievers and ministers to them accordingly. This is not the Schmittian political “friend-enemy distinction,” which regards enemies as those who exist only to be crushed.
This platform, we take it, is a society furnished with law, order, and religious freedom. Some will argue the “Christian Prince” may punish heresy, pay ministers, etc., but we do not believe Robinson would approve of this, seeing such as a “degree of confusion in respect of this distinction (that) is proportionably dangerous and corrupting.”