The Magistrate as Nursing Father

Essay VII of Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square
Isaiah 49:23 and the American revision of Westminster 23.3

In late Protestant memory, the role of the civil magistrate has diminished. He keeps the peace, punishes obvious crime, and otherwise leaves households alone. That picture has a certain modern usefulness but it is not the picture the Reformed churches inherited.

Isaiah promised Zion that “kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers.”[1] The American churches did not discard the phrase when they revised the Westminster Confession. They relocated it. They stripped the magistrate of the power to suppress heresy and call synods, and then they wrote the older image back in: “as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the church of our common Lord.”[2] The office remained paternal, yet ceased to be sacerdotal.

My goal here is to recover that image. I do so because a merely negative account of government cannot tell a Christian people what to do with power they already have. A nursing father is not a night watchman. He is charged to nourish what is good, to protect what is weak, and to aim at maturity rather than permanent dependence. What that requires, and what it does not require, is the work of the pages that follow.

I. The Image and Its Reception

The sentence is strange on purpose. In a patriarchal world the nurse is a woman. Isaiah gives the work to kings. “Nursing father” is not a slip of translation. The Hebrew אֹמְנַיִךְ (from אָמַן, to support, stay, be firm) names those who carry, feed, and bring up a child.[3] Kings are set over another household. The child is the church. The wage is the office itself.

The surrounding lines make the posture clearer. The same rulers “shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet.” This is not the church kneeling to the state. It is the state lowering itself before the people of God. The promise is eschatological and concrete at once. Commentators have long marked a first fulfillment when Persian kings sent the exiles home and paid for the rebuilding, and a further fulfillment when Christian emperors ceased to hunt the church and began to shelter it.[4] The Confession’s use of the text assumes that the promise still instructs Christian rulers. Whenever the scepter is in the hand of a man who fears God, the church may ask him to nourish rather than to neglect.

Calvin heard the demand as more than private piety. Commenting on the verse, he wrote that kings and queens “shall supply everything that is necessary for nourishing the offspring of the Church.” They are not praised for a bare profession of faith. “Something remarkable is here demanded from princes, besides an ordinary profession of faith; for the Lord has bestowed on them authority and power to defend the Church and to promote the glory of God.” The duty belongs to every Christian. Kings owe more of it, “in proportion as their power is greater.” Psalm 2 is the companion text: be wise, serve the Lord, kiss the Son. Calvin’s point against the Anabaptist refusal of office follows at once. A king does not have to lay the crown down in order to become a Christian. Under the gospel he may keep the crown and spend it as a guardian of the church. That, Calvin says, is a higher rank than ordinary dominion.[5]

The original Westminster Confession of 1647 pressed the office further than most American Presbyterians will now follow. The magistrate was to preserve unity in the church, keep the truth entire, suppress blasphemy and heresy, and reform corrupt worship. He might call synods and see that their acts agreed with the mind of God. Isaiah 49:23 stood among the proof texts of that paragraph.[6] The American revision of 1788 cut the establishmentarian duties. The magistrate may not administer Word or sacrament, may not wield the keys, and may not “in the least, interfere in matters of faith.”[7] That is the American settlement, and I do not propose to unwind it.

What the revisers did next is the part usually forgotten. They did not leave the magistrate a blank. They added the nursing-father clause:

Yet, as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger.[8]

The same paragraph requires him to protect the person and good name of all the people, so that no one may injure another “upon pretense of religion or of infidelity,” and to see that assemblies meet without molestation. Two sentences earlier, in 23.2, the Confession had already said that a Christian in office “ought especially to maintain piety, justice, and peace, according to the wholesome laws of each commonwealth.”[9]

Read together, the American texts give a magistrate who is neither pope nor policeman only. He does not adjudicate doctrine. He does protect the church’s liberty to be the church. He does maintain piety, justice, and peace as public goods. He is a father to the people in the ordinary sense of the fifth commandment. The Larger Catechism asks who is meant by father and mother in that commandment, and answers: “not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts; and especially such as, by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth.” The proof text given for the commonwealth is Isaiah 49:23.[10] Paternal language for rulers is not a medieval leftover. It is the Confession’s own grammar.

Two clarifications follow, or the image will be made to do work it cannot do.

First, the primary object in Isaiah and in WCF 23.3 is the church, not the household as such. Kings nurse Zion. They do not become a second husband to every wife or a second father to every child. The later sections will argue that the household belongs to the public good the magistrate is already sworn to maintain. That is an inference from piety, justice, and peace. It is not a smuggling of the church’s unique promise into every family policy. The inference must be argued, not assumed.

Second, nursing aims at growth. A nurse who keeps the child weak in order to remain necessary has ceased to nurse and has begun to own. The Reformed use of the image always included protection against enemies and provision for worship and ministry. It did not include a permanent tutelage in which the people never learn to stand. Samuel Rutherford, arguing against a magistrate who offers the church only “approbation and submission to truth,” insisted that Isaiah “giveth a paternal and fatherly power to the King in Church matters, when he saith, He shall be a nurse-father.” Mere esteem is what any tradesman owes. Fatherly power is something more.[11] That “more,” if it is truly paternal, still aims at the child’s standing and not at the nurse’s indispensability. Any modern application that creates a new dependency, or that teaches a household to fear becoming able, has left the metaphor behind while keeping the name.

That is the received image. The next section asks what the office is for, once the American churches have denied it the keys and left it the duty to nourish.

II. What Remains after the Keys

The American revision did not abolish the office. It forbade one use of it. The magistrate may not preach, may not fence the Table, and may not decide a controversy of faith. He is still ordained. Chapter 23 begins where it always began. “God, the supreme Lord and King of all the world, hath ordained civil magistrates, to be, under him, over the people, for his own glory, and the public good.” To that end he is armed with the sword, “for the defense and encouragement of them that are good, and for the punishment of evildoers.”[12]

Paul had already named the same end. The ruler “is the minister of God to thee for good.” He does not bear the sword in vain. He is “a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.”[13] The Confession reads the passage as both gift and charge. Authority comes from God. The purpose of the authority is good. A magistrate who will only keep men from knifing one another in the street has not yet done what Romans 13 says he is for.

Calvin set the same end in a longer list. Civil government exists, “so long as we live among men, to foster and maintain the external worship of God, to defend sound doctrine and the condition of the Church, to adapt our conduct to human society, to form our manners to civil justice, to conciliate us to each other, to cherish common peace and tranquillity.” It is not appointed “merely… to enable men to breathe, eat, drink, and be warmed,” though it includes those things.[14] The American churches would not let the magistrate “defend sound doctrine” by calling synods or suppressing heresy. They did not strike the rest of the list. Piety, justice, and peace remain in 23.2. The church’s liberty to assemble and to minister remains in 23.3. The public good remains in 23.1.

What, then, is left of “nourish” once the keys are denied?

First, protection. The 1788 text is not shy. The magistrate is to protect “the church of our common Lord” so that ministers may discharge their functions “without violence or danger.” He is to protect “the person and good name of all [the] people,” and to take order that assemblies meet “without molestation or disturbance.”[15] That is nursing in the most ordinary sense: keeping the child from being struck. A state that treats public worship as a permitted hobby, to be crowded out whenever some other interest is louder, has already refused the duty.

Second, encouragement of the good. The sword is not only against evildoers. WCF 23.1 pairs “defense and encouragement of them that are good.” Romans 13:3 says the same: rulers are not a terror to good works. The Larger Catechism, describing what superiors owe inferiors, requires them to countenance, commend, and reward those who do well, and to discountenance and chastise those who do ill.[16] The magistrate is one of those superiors. He does not become a minister of the Word by praising what is good. He becomes a liar if he pretends that the law is silent about the difference.

Third, piety as a public good, not as a denominational verdict. “Maintain piety” in 23.2 cannot mean, after 1788, that the civil power writes the church’s confession. It can mean that the civil power does not pretend religion is a private taste with no public consequence. The Lord’s Day, the liberty of congregations, the honor of the Name, the protection of oaths: these are not sectarian preferences. They are the public conditions under which the church can be the church and a people can tell the truth. A magistrate who will not maintain those conditions is not being modest about doctrine. He is neglecting piety.

Fourth, provision according to the relation. WLC 129 says superiors are “to love, pray for, and bless their inferiors,” and to protect them and “provid[e] for them all things necessary for soul and body,” according to that power they receive from God, and that relation wherein they stand.[17] The clause is a limit as much as a charge. A father in the house provides as a father. A pastor provides as a pastor. A magistrate provides as a magistrate. He does not become a second husband or a second elder. He does owe, in the mode of law and public order, the love and tenderness Q. 125 already required of political fathers. A purely punitive state has answered only half of that question.

None of this returns the keys. The church still preaches. The church still disciplines. The church still decides what the Word requires of her members. The magistrate’s nourishing is outward and civil: peace in which the Word may be heard, justice in which households may stand, piety in which the Name is not treated as an embarrassment. That is a smaller office than 1647 described. It is a larger office than the night watchman.

The household has not yet been named as a separate object of policy. It does not need to be named yet. If the magistrate is for the public good, and if piety, justice, and peace are the names of that good, then whatever makes a people able to keep faith, keep contracts, and keep children will belong to his charge. The next section has to show that the household is that sort of thing, and that a magistrate who will not distinguish a household from its substitutes is not being neutral. He is already choosing.

III. The Household as Public Good

Isaiah’s nursing fathers nourish the church. They do not, by that verse alone, become a second parent in every house. The household enters the argument by another door. The magistrate is ordained for the public good, and he is charged to maintain piety, justice, and peace. Those goods do not float. They are kept, or they fail, in houses.

The Confession says so about marriage before it says anything about the magistrate’s family policy, because it has no family policy chapter. It has a doctrine of the ordinance. “Marriage is to be between one man and one woman.” It “was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and of the Church with an holy seed; and for preventing of uncleanness.”[18] Two ends sit in one sentence. Mankind is increased with legitimate issue. The church is increased with a holy seed. Malachi had asked why God made them one: “that he might seek a godly seed.”[19] Genesis had already named the joining: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”[20] The ordinance is not a private taste that the law happens to register. It is the ordinary way God appointed for help, for children, for the next generation of the church, and for the restraint of uncleanness.

If that is what marriage is, then a people that cannot form or keep households will be weak in all three of the magistrate’s charges. Piety thins when children are not raised where the Name is honored. Justice thins when the first natural society, the place where promise-keeping is learned, is treated as optional. Peace thins when the work of raising the young is shifted onto institutions that cannot love them as a father and mother can. None of this requires the magistrate to pretend that every household is intact. It requires him not to pretend that intact and broken are the same thing.

The fifth commandment already joined the house to the commonwealth. Father and mother name natural parents first, then all who are over us “in family, church, or commonwealth.”[21] The Catechism did not stack those relations at random. The political father is analogical. The household father is primary. A magistrate who weakens the first while congratulating himself on the second is sawing off the limb he sits on. WLC 129 only makes the analogy stricter. Superiors are to love, protect, and provide “according to that power they receive from God, and that relation wherein they stand.”[22] The magistrate’s relation is civil. He may encourage the household. He may refuse to subsidize its dissolution. He may not climb into the marriage bed with a check and call himself husband.

This is the point at which the night-watchman account fails in practice, not only in doctrine. The civil power already distinguishes households. It does so in the law of marriage itself, in legitimacy and inheritance, in custody, in the definition of a dependent, in the way it taxes and in the way it spends. A pose of neutrality toward “family structure” is usually a pose. The question is not whether the magistrate will have a household policy. He has one. The question is whether that policy will tell the truth about what a household is.

Telling the truth is not contempt for those whose houses have fallen. The church owes them ministry. Neighbors owe them mercy. The magistrate owes them justice, including protection from harm. What he does not owe them is the pretense that a substitute arrangement is the ordinance, or that a program built to replace parental care is the same thing as parental care. To prefer the household is to prefer what God ordained. To refuse the preference is still a preference. It prefers the substitute.

The limit named in Section I still holds. Nursing aims at growth. A civil gift that teaches an intact house to fear becoming able has ceased to nourish. The magistrate who favors the household must favor it as a father favors a child he means to see stand, not as a keeper favors a charge he means to retain.

IV. The Image Kept

The American churches took the keys from the magistrate and left him the duty to nourish. They did not leave him a blank. He is to protect the church of our common Lord, to maintain piety, justice, and peace, and to act as a father in the commonwealth without becoming a priest in the church or a husband in the house.

The image is still strange, and it is still useful. Kings nurse what is not their child in the ordinary sense. They carry, they guard, they aim at standing. They bow. A Protestant people that can remember only the sword will not know what to do with the purse it already holds. A Protestant people that can remember only the purse will forget that nursing is for growth.

The household is not Zion. It is the ordinary field in which Zion’s children are raised, and in which a commonwealth learns to keep its word. A magistrate who will not distinguish that field from its substitutes has not achieved neutrality. He has already farmed the substitute. If he is going to spend, he should spend as a nursing father: preferring what God ordained, refusing to trap what he claims to feed, and leaving the keys where 1788 put them.

Notes

Editions. Scripture is quoted from the Authorized Version (KJV), the English in which the Westminster Assembly received and proof-texted Isaiah 49:23. Unless otherwise marked, the Confession and Larger Catechism are quoted from The Confession of Faith and Catechisms (Willow Grove, PA: Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2005), which prints the traditional American text. The original British paragraph of WCF 23.3 (1647) is quoted from Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877), 652–53, which sets that paragraph beside the American revision. Calvin on Isaiah is quoted from Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, trans. William Pringle. The Institutes are quoted from the Henry Beveridge translation. Rutherford is cited from the 1649 London edition of A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience.

1. Isaiah 49:23.

2. WCF 23.3, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005). The phrase “nursing fathers” does not appear in the body of the 1647 text; it enters the Confession’s prose in the American revision. See note 6.

3. Heb. אֹמְנַיִךְ, from אָמַן, “to confirm, support, nourish.” The KJV margin at this verse is “nourishers.” Cf. Num. 11:12, where Moses asks whether he conceived the people and should carry them “as a nursing father [אֹמֵן] beareth the sucking child.” The parallel line in Isa. 49:23 gives queens as מֵינִיקֹתַיִךְ, “thy nursing mothers.”

4. Edward Dorr, “The Duty of Civil Rulers to Be Nursing Fathers” (election sermon before the General Assembly of Connecticut, 1765), printed in American Reformer, 8 October 2024: the prophecy “had a partial accomplishment, when Cyrus, Artaxerxes, Darius, and other Persian monarchs issued royal mandates in their favor,” and “a further and more glorious accomplishment when Constantine, Theodosius, and other Roman emperors publicly patronized Christianity.” Matthew Henry’s commentary on Isa. 49:23 makes the same two-stage reading: Persian patronage, then “whenever the scepter of government is put into the hands of religious princes.”

5. Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, on 49:23 (Pringle). The “higher pinnacle of rank” sentence concludes the same comment: converted kings “obtained this highest pinnacle of rank, which surpasses dominion and principality of every sort, to be ‘nursing-fathers’ and guardians of the Church.” The Psalm 2 citation in Calvin is Ps. 2:10–12.

6. WCF 23.3 (1647), in Schaff, Creeds, 3:652–53. The original paragraph assigned the magistrate the duty “to take order, that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed,” etc., and listed Isa. 49:23 among the proofs.

7. WCF 23.3, first sentence, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005).

8. WCF 23.3, nursing-father clause, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005).

9. WCF 23.2, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005). The wording of 23.2 was retained from 1647.

10. WLC Q. 124, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005). The Scripture proof marked for “commonwealth” is Isa. 49:23. Q. 125 adds that superiors are styled father and mother “to teach them in all duties toward their inferiors, like natural parents, to express love and tenderness to them, according to their several relations.”

11. Samuel Rutherford, A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (London, 1649). Rutherford is cited here only for the distinction between mere approbation and paternal power. He goes on, in the same work, to defend a coactive care of both tables that the American revision of WCF 23.3 no longer assigns to the magistrate. That further argument is not adopted here.

12. WCF 23.1, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005). The paragraph is unchanged from 1647.

13. Romans 13:4; cf. 13:1–3.

14. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 4.20.2–3, trans. Henry Beveridge. The sentences on “breathe, eat, drink, and be warmed” follow in the same discussion of government’s appointed end. Calvin’s “defend sound doctrine” is broader than WCF 23.3 in the OPC text and is cited here as the longer Reformed list, not as the American assignment of the keys.

15. WCF 23.3, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005).

16. WLC Q. 129, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005); Romans 13:3.

17. WLC Q. 129, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005). The limiting phrase is original to the answer: provision is “according to that power they receive from God, and that relation wherein they stand.” Q. 125 is cited above in note 10.

18. WCF 24.1–2, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005).

19. Malachi 2:15.

20. Genesis 2:24.

21. WLC Q. 124, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005). See note 10.

22. WLC Q. 129, in Confession of Faith and Catechisms (OPC, 2005). See note 17.