"Two Kingdoms"

[[ Illumination from the manuscript of St. Augustine's City of God; in the Medicean-Laurentian Library, Florence, Italy.]]



"In the after shocks of the sacking of Rome by the pagans in 410 A.D., the great church father Augustine, bishop of Hippo, wrote his famous 'City of God' ... as a Christian pastor he greeted the event as a providential opportunity: God had brought the mission field to the missionaries. ... his 'City of God ... helped to create what came to be called the doctrine of the two kingdoms.

According to Augustine, the distinction between the two cities--the city of God and city of man--is grounded in the two loves: love of God and love of self. The former leads to genuine fellowship and a communion of mutual giving and receiving, while the latter engenders strife, war, and the desire to exercise domination over others.


... When Jesus Christ arrived, He did not revive the Sinai theocracy as His contemporaries had hoped.Instead of driving out the Romans, He commanded love for our enemies. Gathering the new Israel--Jew and Gentile--around Himself, by His Spirit, through the Word and sacrament, Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of grace that will be manifested one day as the kingdom of glory. In this time between His two comings the wheat grows together with the weeds, the sons of thunder are rebuked for calling down judgment here and now on those who reject their message, and the faithful gather regularly for the apostles' teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers (Acts 2:42). Through its administration of Gospel preaching, baptism, the Supper, prayer, and discipline, the church is God's new society inserted into the heart of the secular city as a witness to Christ and the age to come when He will be all in all.

In our Christian circles in the United States today, we can discern a "Christendom" view, where some imagine America to be a Christian nation invested with divine commission to bring freedom to the ends of the earth. Of course, Christians have an obligation both to proclaim the heavenly and everlasting freedom of the Gospel and the earthly and temporal freedom from injustice. But they are different. When we confuse them, we take the kingdom into our own hands, transforming it from a kingdom of grace into a kingdom of glory and power.

We also recognize an opposite view, more characteristic of the Anabaptist perspective, as evangelist D.L. Moody asserted: "I lok upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, 'Moody, save all you can.'" In this view, improving the lot of our neighbors in the world is like polishing the brass on a sinking ship. Christians are often encouraged to focus almost exclusively on personal salvation (their own as well as that of others), unsure of the value of their secular vocations.

But we need not choose between these two kingdoms. Citizens of both, we carry out our vocations in the church and the world in distinct ways through distinct means. We need not "Christianize" culture in order to appreciate it and participate in it with the gifts that God has given us as well as our non-Christian neighbors. Though called to be faithful in our callings until Christ returns, with Abraham, we are "looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God" (Heb 11:10). -Michael Horton, from TableTalk Magazine