A Holy Calling

A PREACHER ONCE PARAPHRASED a bygone theologian as a challenge to the congregation: “To convert one sinner from his way is an event of greater importance than the deliverance of sub-Saharan Africa from the problem of malaria.” He went on: “The very fact that we have pause here is an indication of the influence of relativistic thinking among us.”

On the one hand, this point needs to be heard—a church who thinks the primary concern of Christianity is to make the world a better place suffers form short-sightedness. But it also perpetuates a false dilemma. No doubt, for those churches who allow the message of the good news of Jesus Christ to be overshadowed by social action, the fact that top priority must always be given to the conversion of souls cannot be overstated. Yet the last thing a church that is so afraid of falling prey to the social gospel that works of charity are avoided needs is "theological" justification for their inaction. The remedy is clear: the situation ought not be cast in terms of either/or—either work toward the conversion of souls or work for the eradication of malaria in southern Africa (or abortion [through social, not legislative, action] in the West, child prostitution in southeast Asia, or wage-slavery and state-generated oppression the world over). Indeed, a church's works of charity is (or ought to be!) inextricably bound to the news that the king of all kings was born in Bethlehem about 2,000 years ago.

Maybe this stems from our confusion over what “conversion of souls” means. It’s not just about redeeming one’s spirit; salvation involves the whole person. In fact, a soul, in biblical terms, is the whole person—both the body God fashioned from the ground as well as the breath of life he breathed into that body (Gen. 2:7 KJV). “The conversion of souls,” then, has nothing to do with redeeming some kind of wispy vapor animating our bodies (that has more to do with a philosopher named Plato than we might think). Rather, it has everything to do with the calling God gives to those he's called out according to his boundless grace and love. (Note here that conversion, in the language of the New Testament, is denoted by the word calling, 1 Cor. 1:26; Eph. 4:1; 2 Thess. 1:11; 2 Tim. 1:9; Heb. 3:1; 2 Peter 1:10). So, there’s no doubt the calling of sinners into God’s kingdom, with no qualifications, ought to be the church’s top priority. We just need to remember that God has promised to deal with bodies and tangible things, like all of creation—not shadows and mist—when it comes to redemption.

Connected to this calling is the purpose or mission for which people have been called. Just because a church has a top priority doesn’t mean it's allowed to relegate its subsequent priorities to the shelf—especially when those other priorities flow from the top one itself. This speaks to the purpose of the church’s existence. It is why the church is often described as a “missionary church,” a body of people whose mission is to go into all the world and make disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ (the one given all authority in heaven and on earth), baptizing them as a sacramental act of entrance into the covenant community and of union with the risen Christ. Having been called (converted), God’s people are then “sent” to fulfill that holy calling (John 20:21). But to do what?

This brings us full circle: First, to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord, that sin and death have been defeated, that all people are called to trust in him and turn from sin if they want to be resurrected one day, and that by his Spirit he is establishing God’s kingdom now (hark, powers of the earth!). Second, precisely because Jesus is the one through whom God began this good and final work in the world (i.e., it is well underway), we too must get with the program. We are being sent, and thus we are called to be agents of God’s healing love in this dark world. (This is what it means, incidentally, to be the "people of God," that is, the "elect.")

There is no dilemma here. The two are bound up together in the very same mission. And it’s not a mission to establish a country club or voluntary association that meets every Sunday morning. It’s not a mission to become a better person and develop some kind of spiritual potential. It’s not a mission to huddle together in order to escape from an evil world and to pave the way for heaven when we die. It’s not a mission to fill our heads up with facts. It’s not a mission that merely seeks to encourage others, and it’s certainly not a mission to show the people of the world that Christians are just like them. The mission is clear, distinct, and twofold: the calling of people to talk about the gospel of God with others, as well as the calling to acts of “justice and mercy and faithfulness.”

In Matthew 23:1–39, Jesus lays into a series of woes. They serve as warnings to us today insofar as we’ve fallen off the missionary track. Behind these threats of sorrow lie Deuteronomy 27:15–26 and 28:16–20, where Israel is threatened with exile if they do not keep the covenant. This challenge Jesus basically reiterates to the leaders of Israel in his day. Matthew, in recording it, is challenging us too: he puts the choice of exile or long life in the land before us. In which place will you be found?

{Part of this originally appeared in Tabletalk 32.10 (Oct. 2008): 12–13}

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A Faith of Whose Own?

AS A TWO kingdomite, of the Pannenberg persuasion, I always begin reading “Christ & Culture” books with a sigh and some hesitation. Jonathan Merritt's A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars was no exception.

First, though, I'll warrant that I'm not representative of the target audience of this book, for the following three reasons: (1) I've read my fair share of academic "Christ & Culture" books; (2) I'm in my late 30s (and thus a cynical, disengaged and barely Christian genXer); and (3) I am not southern (though I am intimately familiar with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Royal Ambassadors, Living Christmas Trees, 4th of July Sunday extravaganzas, as well as Freddy Gage crusades). But enough about me.

This isn't to say that I ought not to have read the book, or that I didn't enjoy it, for what it's worth. I do think the target audience very much ought to read this book, however. If you're just coming to the "Christ & Culture" discussion, if you're in your 20s–early 30s, if you were raised in the Bible Belt, or (which I didn't mention previously) if you're from an older generation and desire to get a glimpse of the angle from which Millennials are engaging these matters, then read this book.

I think I'd commend it even if I didn't largely agree with it; I remain somewhat surprised that I did, actually. I was expecting a conflation of the kingdoms at least on every other page, but Merritt is refreshingly aware that if he were to simply swing the pendulum the other way, to simply react to the cultural construction in which he was raised, that he'd end up being just another side of the same coin (e.g., Fundamentalist/Modernist; Christian Right/Christian Left; Mohler/Wallis, etc.). In the end, Faith of Our Own is essentially a lay-level version of certain bits of James Davison Hunter's To Change the World.

Nutshell message:

• "As one plunges deeper into the culture wars, one loses a sense of reality and embraces a partisan perception" (p. 35).
• Christians are not to abandon the public square, but we need to learn how to engage it in a less worldly and politically partisan way.
• "Good Christians are good citizens, and as such, they should establish a faithful presence in the public square as in media, business, science, education, and the arts" (p. 40).
• "Ousting is a typical culture-war tactic," leading to third-degree separationism. (And I would add, it's a typical tactic among those who think they have the corner on dogmatic truths.) "The result is an insulated group in an isolated echo chamber where conservatives become more conservative and liberals become more liberal. No one has permission to think for themselves" (p. 61).
• "We take a slice out of the Bible-pie and then call it the pie" (p. 88).
• "The change we're witnessing is a shift from a political faith to an incarnational faith. One that seeks to be a faithful presence in the public square but knows that real change happens when we heal and help each other" (p. 153).
• In his role as public representative of his church (and, by default, Christianity), he "never wades into debates about specific legislative proposals," and "where the culture wars are fought, unity is almost always absent" (p. 160).

It wasn't until the last chapter that it became clear to me that Merritt's thinking about the relationship between the church and state (or "Christ & Culture") was one that I hope others of his generation and younger pick up. Merritt recounts a time when Richard Mouw had written an essay on social ethics that caught the eye of Carl Henry. Henry wanted to publish it, but not without implementing a few edits. Here's the text (from pp. 173–74):

Mouw argued that the church should take stands on specific issues of social justice, but Henry wanted to change the wording to speak of individual Christians' needing to take stands. But Mouw . . . believed that the church as an institution should speak to specific social justice concerns in the public square, so he turned down Henry's offer.

Note that by "specific social justice concerns" what's not meant is the church as an institution decrying in general poverty, racism, criminal justice reform, hunger, etc. (I mean, who would disagree that those are societal ills?), but rather specific legislative solutions to those problems. As the story goes, after a few weeks of back-and-forth, Mouw let Christianity Today publish the essay:

The final version asserted that the church must maintain its prophetic voice and say "no" to the status quo of injustices, but stopped short of saying the church should endorse specific policy solutions. . . .

[Mouw later wrote] "What I really wanted to say is that the church—in the form of both preaching and ecclesial pronouncements—could do no more than merely utter a 'no' to some social evils. There were times, I was convinced, that the church could rightly say a bold 'yes' to specific policy-like solutions. I now see that youthful conviction as misguided. Henry was right, and I was wrong."

What else can I say? [queue: Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus] If this isn't a good two-kingdoms start in the right direction, I'm not sure what is. God bless you, Jonathan, for not offering the same old reactionary tripe.

But this wouldn't be a proper review without some critique, right? While I'm not familiar with Merritt's other writings, the prose is just okay. Not much literary flair here, even if there's a good handful of quotable content throughout it. He also nudges up against pietism at times, spiritualizing everything. And despite his caveat in chapter 9, his generation comes off smelling a little rosy. He sometimes conflates the two kingdoms in his desire to alleviate societal ills through Christianity, as if the gospel itself is about making the world a better place. Sure, it may serve as an impetus to do this or that, but more properly this is where the concept of natural law would enter, which for obvious and forgivable reasons didn't have a place in this book. Finally, his brief recognition of the sinful fragmentation of the church catholic in chapter 9, while commendable, offers little more than the typical Protestant low-church ecclesiology (pp. 162ff.; but Merritt is Baptist, after all).

Because Faith of Our Own is, as one endorser put it on the back cover, "part memoir, part manifesto," the reader ought to move beyond it pretty quickly. Anecdotes can only take one so far. Here's my short list of "Christ & Culture" must-reads, for those whose palates have been whet (in a somewhat arbitrary chronological order of reading):

1. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge and The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion

2. The Politics of Jesus

3. Resident Aliens: A Provocative Christian Assessment of Culture and Ministry for People Who Know that Something is Wrong

4. The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist

5. A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society

6. To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

7. The Cost of Discipleship

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2K or Not 2K?

. . . so wonders my colleague. Read his review of David VanDrunen's Living in God’s Two Kingdoms and wonder with him (for me, the answer is yes, but not exactly in the [minority] fashion proposed by VanDrunen and others).

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An Exilic Presbyterian's Manifesto, final thoughts

I realized last week that I didn't have much more to say about Stellman's project than what I've said already (see parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). I was expecting a little pushback from folks on the points I raised about the sacraments (if not the Sabbath)….

So, one final word of caution might be in order: a healthy skepticism of the modern church, and especially evangelicalism, on a bad day slides easily into cynicism, which is just a hair’s breath away from devolving into hatred for fellow believers. This was one of the major sins of the leaders of Israel during Jesus’ day, as they held contemptuous what God himself had wept over. For us, it’d be like sitting through a Bible study about the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not as bad a sinner as the tax collector and then closing that Bible study with a prayer thanking God that we’re not like that self-righteous Pharisee. Embracing two-kingdoms doctrine and the subversion and disdain of modern, Western Christian worldliness that it produces must be motivated by a deep and lasting love for Christ and his church (inextricably bound together as the two are). Put differently, if you’re not dedicated to being a living witness among God’s people (one who has his “head in heaven, fingers in the mire,” to follow Stellman in quoting Bono, 135) to the truths you’ve come to believe as a result of this book (or other study), then kindly keep criticisms of this sort to yourself.

*UPDATE and final thought: As long as there's stuff like this (be sure to watch promo #2) being promulgated by and for 'Christians', books like Dual Citizens must continue to be written. "Sometimes history does repeat itself." Indeed.

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An Exilic Presbyterian's Manifesto, part 4

This fourth installment marks the end of my walkthrough of Jason J. Stellman's Dual Citizens: Worship and Life Between the Already and the Not Yet. I appreciate your reading thus far, and I will follow this up with a few reflections in the coming days. Without further adieu:

Chapter 11 simply seeks to demonstrate how “Pilgrim Theology, driven as it is by the doctrine of the two kingdoms, actually carves out some valid space for creation and the goodness of earth and its blessings” (126). Using G.K. Chesterton’s delineation of the two poles that mess this up (“puritans” and “pagans,” broadly understood) as his point of departure, Stellman intends here to show how the two-kingdoms paradigm provides the needed balance between the pagans’ pursuit of earthly pleasure and the puritans’ avoidance of it. He argues, in short, that “if we desire to give authen­tic expression to our citizenship both of this age and the age to come, then we need to beware of enjoying earth too little, as well as enjoying it too much” (135).

One main reason this balance must be maintained is simply because of what God’s Word teaches about this transitory life, which, under the new covenant, “is characterized by sweetness as well as bitterness, by possession as well as longing. In short, the presence of the Spirit within the believer means that the future has intruded into the here and now, and the saint has been granted some ‘already’ to go with the ‘not yet’” (138). If we are to give expression to this “pilgrim dynamic,” understanding this principle is absolutely crucial, according to Stellman. Thus he spends the entirety of the chapter backing it up biblically—mainly through a redemptive-historical reading of Romans 6–8, a lá Ridderbos, Fee, and Moo (if not Wright). If you’re likely to hold this book in less esteem because of Stellman’s exegesis here, then you can skip this chapter with no real loss, so long as you take his main point to heart: “The ever-present sense of ‘not yet’ that frustrates us throughout this age does not negate the dynamic ‘already’ that was inaugurated as our risen and ascended Lord bestowed on His church the gift of the Spirit as an engagement ring, assur­ing us of our future glorification. Because the cross was followed by an empty tomb, we must not fail to incorporate the resurrection into our understanding of Christian living” (149–50). One gets the sense that Stellman has been carefully loading both barrels of a sawn shotgun.

As it turns out, the bullets are rather benign—or are they? The next chapter makes the case for new covenant boasting—“not in the things we achieve, but in the entitlements we sacrifice for the sake of Christ’s kingdom and the cross-bearing lives Jesus challenges us to live” (155). Why might this prove scandalous? Because, Stellman contends, despite the fact that we’ve outgrown the old law (like a young adult does a babysitter), “the new covenant affords us the freedom not simply to do less than the law requires, but to do more. This freedom opens up a new—and largely unfamiliar—avenue of Christian growth for God’s people (though it might not exactly be welcomed with open minds or hearts)” (158–59). Suffering is this avenue, and it’s not to be understood by us Americans primarily in its extreme forms (e.g., torture or imprisonment), which serves to help us “make peace with the concept of suffering [because] we can be cer­tain that we never will have to do it” (ibid.). Taking Saint Paul as our example (if not Jesus), Stellman exhorts us to engage “in a kind of active, rather than passive, suffering,” which means that it’d be “in some sense voluntary and therefore boast worthy” (159–60).

Thus, the whole point of the previous chapter comes into view: being freed in the new covenant by the power of God’s Spirit to fulfill the law of Christ rather than laboring under the law of Moses, it’s now “possible for the Christian under the new covenant to voluntarily suffer by going above and beyond the call of duty and relinquishing his right to enjoy certain blessings to which he is entitled” (160).

And how can I not recount Stellman’s refreshing challenge to his fellow pastors?

Likewise in the spiritual realm, when the pulpit is used as a means of meticu­lous legislation, it may engender conformity driven by fear, but if that were the goal for the Christian life, would not the law have sufficed without needing to give way to the gospel? A minister who turns the pulpit into a bully pulpit from which to micromanage the flock rather than tend it will only retard the natural process by which lambs mature into full-grown sheep. To put it simply, when the pastor never stops telling his people what to do, he is not only failing as a leader by giving his congregants what they want (law) rather than what they need (gospel), he is also making it virtually impossible for them to mature. And only a mature saint will seek the opportunity to boast in willingly forfeiting his right to enjoy perfectly legitimate blessings. (161)

Stellman goes on to offer several other encouragements and challenges to the lay reader, like this: “If you feel that you are wronged, ignored at times, or occasionally taken advantage of, you can demand to be treated fairly and with appropriate sensitivity, or you can look past such things and offer your suffering as a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the God who suffered so much for you” (162).

Well, where would you expect a book like this to end? An exhaustive concordance of all the secular pursuits worthy of Christian participation (like, for example, a guide through the best beers from all over the globe)? Think again; the topic is assurance, and the role of the “absolutely central” person of the new covenant, the Holy Spirit (165). What’s the connection? The believer’s life, that one leg he has in the earthly kingdom, is fraught with chaos and tragedy even in the midst of the anticipated return of the king. Thus assurance is a precious commodity. And under the new covenant, Stellman argues, the church’s assurance “should be much stronger than it would have been under the old. This is because the witness of the Holy Spirit is to be under­stood as an authenticating work whereby He gives the believer assurance of salvation not only by directing us to the objective promises of the gospel, but also by means of appeal to the evidence of His own handiwork in the believer’s life” (166).

Stellman does this oft-discussed subject justice, which elevates it from the simply redundant to being actually helpful. As seen in the quote above, he refuses to separate the witness of the Spirit from either the objective promises of God in Christ or the evidence in our lives with which we find that love for God has been poured into our hearts. It’s helpful because it steers clear of divorcing “Word from Spirit, making assurance possible by Word alone without the Spirit’s witness, by Spirit alone without the Word’s promise, or by works alone without either” (170). So many books and sermons about assurance have suffered from precisely this.

But there’s still something missing here, even if Stellman gave it the appropriate attention elsewhere (e.g., xi, xxvii, 5, 8, 12ff., 20, etc.). In a word, it’s the sacraments. Not even an allusion. The best of classical Protestant theology has always held that the regular and ordinary means of grace do provide us with the assurance of God’s favor. How? Because they are graceful signs (not mere witnesses or memorials) of (in Stellman’s words) the “objective promises of the gospel.” That is to say, baptism and Holy Communion, as the visible Word, convey the finished work of Christ. This is why Luther could answer “I am baptized” when faced with doubt; he understood that through the sign of baptism the objective, completed faithfulness of Jesus was promised to him (no doubt authenticated by God’s Spirit). All this might be barely underneath the surface in this final chapter. But the reader wouldn’t know it.

At any rate, Stellman wonderfully ends with a good word about works in the new covenant and how the Spirit’s enabling grace and thus the believer’s foretaste of the future means that the “new covenant saint derive[s] comfort from his works rather than fear” (175). In other words, “the believer’s giving practical expression, by faith, to his heavenly identity in his day-to-day life on earth is anything but a legalistic activity” precisely because “the Spirit’s role is to bring the future into the present” (174). The point of all this talk about assurance at the end of a discourse on Christian life in this time between the times? So that we may have a “measure of certainty in our sighs as we long for the full attainment of what has been promised to us. The gap we feel between what awaits us and what we presently experience—so often heightened by our own sin and shortcomings—in no way threatens our certainty that the God who has made such great and precious promises, and has confirmed them with an oath, will be faithful to keep them” (176).

* Here are parts one, two, and three of this review.

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An Exilic Presbyterian's Manifesto, part 3

On the heels of the sabbath discussion comes Stellman’s next concern (chap. 7): “to highlight the fact that, regardless of any earthly nation’s horizontal goodness and civic uprightness, there is only one nation with which God is in redemptive covenant, and that is the church.” We can thus free ourselves from the notion that any nation-state (such as America or Israel) “carries redemptive significance” (64). Not much else needs to be said other than Stellman’s own recounting of Donald Barnhouse’s musings about what a city would look like if Satan took it over: “He didn’t envision rampant violence and deviant sexual perversion, with Christians being tortured or thrown into prison. Rather, Barnhouse surmised that if the Devil were in charge of a city, the bars and pool halls would close, the streets and neighbor­hoods would be cleaned up, children would say “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and every Sunday men and women would flock to churches where Christ was not preached” (65; emphases original throughout, unless otherwise noted). This point, Stellman argues, is one with which we American believers need to wrestle. We, in short, need to look in the mirror: “Do we truly understand that no myth of manifest destiny can justify the earthly, fallen, and selfish motives that drive us ‘further up and further in’ to this dream that we have been told is our inalienable right to enjoy? After all, the Babylonian fixation with free markets and military aggression cannot but sound just a tad familiar to those who dare to read the national news (Rev. 13: 1–2, 4, 11–12a). It appears that Bob Marley and the Wailers were wrong: we don’t need to get to Babylon by Bus, for we can simply go the route of Babylon by mirror” (66). 

In the final chapter of this first part on Christian worship, Stellman turns to a defense of “churchly piety” as opposed to the more common concept of piety (“quiet times,” etc.) prevalent in America today (it’s wise to note that at least the concept is prevalent, if not the practice). He apparently doesn’t intend to emphasize the former at the expense of the latter, he simply hopes to bring back into focus God’s actual ordained means for the health and growth of his church and to exhort all Christians to avail themselves to them. Even more succinctly, his point is that "the faith once delivered is also the faith corporately practiced” (81, emphasis added). The alternative is lethal, Stellman argues, for we cannot take a gnostic shortcut that severs Jesus from his church, the personal from the corporate, the head from his body. “If physical decapitation is lethal, then it would follow that its spiritual equivalent is infinitely more deadly” (84).

Turning now to a discussion in the second part of the book on the “good” kind of worldliness, Christian life in the earthly kingdom, Stellman sets up the big picture of God’s redemptive purposes of the cosmos and the individual pilgrim’s relationship to it. In so doing, he hopes to undo the egocentric paradigm that defines much of Western “churchiness” and to help us see “our struggles as parts of a larger saga, a love story of epic scope” (88). The remaining portion of this chapter is spent defending the thesis that the great redemptive battle is already won (with implications to how Christians view life in the secular realm), and he employs Revelation 12:1–6 in the process. This passage gives the church “a glimpse of Christ’s victory in his cosmic war with Satan, and that glimpse provides comfort and protection for God’s people” (89).

Moving from his brief glance at the epic scope of God’s redemptive plan, and how that plan catches each of us who are in Christ up in it, Stellman goes on to discuss how despite the protections and pleasures of the secular, earthly realm (e.g., “Egypt”), it is ultimately unsatisfying (102). Old Testament faithful like Joseph and Moses are taken to be exemplars of this principle (especially as they are portrayed in Heb. 11). “This is not because the blessings of earth are mere mirages, but because they are subject to the ravages of time, while we have been created with a built-in dissatisfaction with anything short of eternal, heavenly glory” (102–103).

Time, then, is the enemy. And it adversely affects, in the Preacher’s words in Ecclesiastes, all our toil under the sun. “Time renders all of man’s earthly pursuits utterly pointless” (104). Stellman thus directs our attention to three of man’s greatest quests for meaning in this life—pleasure, philanthropy, and piety—and how time frustrates and defeats them, and rightly so, for we are “hardwired” to long for that which stands forever. It seems that Stellman’s point here is not to persuade his readers to check out on all earthly pursuits but to challenge them to not divorce such pursuits from eternity. This “serves to rob even the most noble of earth’s pursuits of any ultimate value, for the bigger the barns we build to store our bounty (pleasure to please the body), the more old ladies we help across the street (philanthropy to calm the con­science), or the more deposits we make in our moral bank accounts (piety to soothe the spirit), the more damning will be the ‘Thou fool!’ that we will hear from God’s lips on that final day (Luke 12:16–21; Matt. 7:21–23)” (109).

Most poignantly, this brings into question the common idea found in modern evangelism, “that before a person can be expected to repent and trust in Christ he must be convinced of his dissatisfac­tion with life as he presently knows it.” Stellman refers to this as the “Jesus Is Better Than Drugs” method of evangelism (111, which, as those of us know who have participated in such extracurricular activities, isn’t true, “if what is being compared here is the feeling one derives from Jesus on the one hand and drugs on the other”). It’s not that worldly happiness is a farce; rather, thinking this way highlights what modern Christians, again, so often forget: “it is the height of vanity to identify our lasting treasure with the stuff of earth; the ‘not yet,’ God’s still-unfulfilled promises, make the earthly treasures of Egypt utterly unworthy of our affection” (112).

Just when the reader may think that Stellman’s leaving them with the utter uselessness the Preacher bemoaned, he turns to consider what, if any, earthly pursuits are worthy of our devotion. Always taking our futures, the telos of God’s cosmic, redemptive plan into account is necessary. “We are to live with our heavenly destiny in view” (115). And what is that destiny? Eternal life on a renewed earth in renewed, resurrected bodies. Humanity, according to Stellman (taking 1 Cor. 14:42–49 as his cue), longs for such an existence, one that transcends the merely earthly and Adamic to which we are currently confined.

But more than humanity groans for this destiny. The entire created order eagerly anticipates it. Citing Romans 8:19–22, Stellman points out that “the fate of the created order…is bound up in the destiny of God’s people, and creation knows it.” He emphasizes this so as to challenge the reader to consider that if subhuman creation groans for more, and if all people also ache for eternity, then how much more ought the people of God “recognize this longing and give expression to it? …The irony, however, is that the unbelieving world often displays, through its art and other media, a greater frustration with earth than many believers exhibit” (119–20). The charge, then, for all believers is to embrace biblical “escapism,” one that is true and grounded in fact (which actually undoes the charge of escapism)—and to live like they believe it. Stellman quotes Kreeft: “Otherworldliness is escapism only if there is no other world. If there is, it is worldliness that is escapism” (121).

The last section of this chapter enjoins the reader to think deliberately about which narrative of origins defines who he or she is. While Stellman does seem to adopt the view that the scientific evolutionary narrative of origins is directly opposed to the narrative of Scripture regarding humanity’s being made a little lower than the angels (Ps. 8:5), he ends up focusing precisely where he needs to: “Are we simply pushed by our past, driven by mere instinct and the desire for the survival of the fittest? …The chicken is indeed produced by the egg, and, likewise, we are the product of our ancestry in some sense. But all of that pales in light of the deeper question of what the chicken is for. Sure, the ‘origin of the species’ is important, but not nearly as important as its final destination” (122). Quite right. Even if we were to grant the neo-Darwinian synthesis its basic veracity, the point is still the same: Are we humans going to live down to our natural instincts? Or are we going to live up to God’s goal, bearing his image, reflecting his glory? 

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An Exilic Presbyterian's Manifesto, part 2

In his first chapter, Stellman simply carries on his thesis and argues for the distinctiveness of Christian worship (again, as opposed to Christian life) by promoting, and this will come as no surprise to Reformed readers, the ordinary—otherwise known as Word and sacrament. In short, the “faithful attendance on the simple means of grace that Christ has instituted for His people’s growth” (5).

Naturally, then, some time is spent taking aim at new and improved programs at the expense of sticking to what God himself has prescribed: “a simple, straightforward, and easy-to-follow program for the growth of the church and the edification of believers: the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper” (ibid.). The rest of the chapter essentially defends this ‘boring’ program in the face of the many temptations to make appealing, even “sexy” (3), the worship of Christ’s church.

Chapter two calls into question the modern church’s quest for relevance and subsequently compares such a pursuit to grits (as a Yankee, this is particularly endearing to me)—because grits, you see, “takes on the flavor of anything that is added to it, [whereas] salt imparts its own distinct taste to the food to which it is added” (17–18). It comes as no surprise which one Stellman desires the church to emulate, and he thus contends that Christians are to be most distinct from the world when they are gathered for worship. He rests on 1 Peter 2:4–17 to make his case. Does the church need to mirror popular culture in order to seek and save the lost? That is, does it need to “offer baptized versions of every worldly form of program, event, and small group under the sun” (20)? In a word, no, Stellman says (26). 

Objectors will have undoubtedly cried foul already. All this distinguishing, worship from life, sacred from secular, must lead to a kind of carnal Christianity that hypocritically puts on the façade each Sunday only to remove it every Monday. Stellman rightly anticipates this and (finally) sticks his finger in the dike: “Certainly not. As much of the New Testament’s practical instruction clearly demonstrates, a Christian husband, wife, employer, or employee will discharge his or her duties in a manner distinct from the way an unbeliever will (and for very different reasons)” (22). It might’ve been more in keeping with his central thesis to say that Christians will often not discharge their duties in any manner distinct from others, but the reasons behind such diligence to said duties are very different. Still, the fact remains: many of our actions in the secular realm will indeed be distinct from those of non-Christians. “But this requirement for distinctive behavior does not change the fact that believers are citizens of two kingdoms, the eternal kingdom of Christ and the temporal kingdom of culture” (ibid.). 

So, in the end, the cry for relevance is, indeed, most irrelevant, for the call is to holiness, not relevance (25). Even further, “when the faithfully preached gospel of our dying and rising God seems irrelevant to modern man, it is man, and not God, who is irrelevant” (27; again, emphases original throughout). 

The third chapter continues the same trajectory, using the same text (1 Peter 2:4–17) as the springboard, but now expands the discussion to include not just the distinctiveness of Christian worship but of the church’s citizenship (as pilgrims sojourning toward their true home); language (as persons who share the same peculiar and tribal lexicon as Jesus and his friends); and history (caught up as it is in the story of Christianity from the first Adam to the last and in that our ties to the communion of saints—past and present—transcend all others). 

Here’s the money quote that sums it all up: “The insistence that our religion is valuable only insofar as it makes an easily discernible difference in the affairs of everyday life is false. Demands for ‘Christian’ art, music, or dentistry are both an elevation of those legitimate pursuits above their proper station and a debasing of the label Christian by apply­ing it to areas concerning which it has little or nothing to say. Hence, culture is sacralized and cult is trivialized, all in the name of a notion of relevance that God has nowhere promised to bestow” (32). 

The next chapter, in essence, pushes the old amillennial line: “the victory for which the church longs is largely a future promise, with the present being characterized by struggle, temptation, and a status of underdogs” (42). This is good and right, Stellman argues, not just because it’s biblical but because it keeps in check “the lust for victory in the here and now…[which] has the ugly effect of (mis)shaping [the church’s] corporate and personal piety into something as inconsistent with the New Testament as faith is with sight and as the cross is with glory” (ibid.). 

To be sure, the Western church, and particularly American evangelicals, resists such theologia crucis notions of destiny. But this is to resist the very message of Jesus and his apostles (Stellman directs us to Matt. 24:37–39, 42, as an example of future suffering). The arguably better exegesis that sees this particular Matthean pericope pointing to the destruction of Jerusalem notwithstanding, Stellman’s point holds up. “The spirit of triumphalism that characterizes so much of the evangelical church regards such a message as anathema” (47). Who, after all, would rather bear the reproach of Christ than surpassing wealth and power? 

But instead of merely arguing that God has determined his church to be the underdogs in this age (an argument that he of course could make, though not, I believe, without criticism), he does the reader a better service by showing how such a minority position is actually the church’s vocation, which has been described powerfully in John Howard Yoder’s words some years ago: “The believer’s cross is, like that of Jesus, the price of social non-conformity” (The Politics of Jesus). Stellman thus challenges the church to live up to its calling, which is, ironically if not uncomfortably, embracing its underdog status encapsulated in the foolishness of the cross. 

The fifth chapter moves to connect the essential distinctiveness of the Christian ‘cult’ to its worship on a particular day of the week, namely, the first. As is often the case (which makes this a fun read, incidentally), Stellman approaches this issue from a fresh angle, starting with a brief discussion on how the various shades of sabbatarianism in America often stemmed from a “transformational impulse—a desire to capture or recover the glory that once characterized America” (52). In so doing, he sets up a good foil to juxtapose with proper worship observance on the first day of the week. 

Stellman thus wants to maintain the continuation of the fourth commandment in the new covenant, but without resorting to the old, Americanized rationale. Instead, he offers (no surprise) a two-kingdoms rationale, one that maintains the distinction between cult and culture, sacred and secular. 

In brief, Stellman rightly notes that under the old covenant Israel was enjoined to strict and proper Sabbath observance (he also adopts the common Reformed premise that the Sabbath is a creation ordinance, applicable to all humankind before its particular embodiment in the Mosaic covenant). Stellman adds to his case by walking us through Kline’s views on the subject of new covenant Sabbath observance. In short, Kline restricts the Sabbath’s application to the covenant community (not to non-believers). Nor does its application extend beyond that of the covenant community’s assembly. With the two-kingdoms doctrine as his paradigm, Kline believes that “to apply the Sabbath’s restrictions to activities in the cultural realm would be to stamp the profane with God’s holy imprint, thereby conflating the two kingdoms” (57). 

Stellman, however, and many Reformed readers will be happy to know this, does not desire to follow Kline all the way down this path: “I would argue that [Kline’s] limitation of [the Sabbath’s] application to the worship service alone is insensitive to the eschatological character of man’s existence from creation onward. In fact, the very two-kingdoms paradigm that Kline propounds urges withdrawal from cultural activity on the Lord’s Day” (ibid.). 

This not being primarily an exegetical argument, Stellman’s urgings for cultural withdrawal throughout the entirety of the first day of the week are in the end practical: “it…serves to challenge and subvert the assumptions of this fleeting age” (58). I’m all for such pragmatic responses to this hedonistic world. But of course our pragmatic reasons cannot and should not be elevated to normative status—unless we’re commanded to by God himself (granted, sabbatarians think precisely this). No doubt Stellman is convinced exegetically of the Westminsterian Sabbath view, but he didn’t need to use the particular (and debatable) sabbatarian language of this chapter to make his point. I’ve also always had the sneaking suspicion that cultural withdrawal throughout the entirety of the first day of the week is only a viable option post Constantine. It wasn’t until Christianity became a religio licita that anything like a non-workday during the week began to take shape (Jewish and pagan festivals already enjoyed for some time work-free days). In other words, only those of us with the luxury of a “weekend” can spend time arguing about what the entirety of our day of worship is supposed to look like. 

Despite this reviewer’s disagreement with the underlying exegetical presuppositions of this chapter, it’s sufficient to say that one needn’t be a sabbatarian to refrain from treating Sunday like “Saturday, Part Two” (51), nor is the principle of Stellman’s exhortation to be overlooked: “A ‘subversive Sabbatarianism,’ therefore, does not affirm the world but condemns it, employing God’s divinely ordained tool to challenge the culture and its ‘idols of leisure and consumption’” (61). 

* Look for part 3 of this review on Monday of next week.

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An Exilic Presbyterian's Manifesto

This post begins a multi-series book review, or, rather, walkthrough of Jason J. Stellman's Dual Citizens: Worship and Life Between the Already and Not Yet. I jotted this down as I was reading the pre-publication manuscript (note therefore that my page numbering may be off) and was thinking I'd cull together some of it for an actual review to be of use somewhere, but the "conflict of interest" factor proved too great. So I'll be posting my thoughts here alone. Again, this is more of a walkthrough, and as such, my personal opinions will be kept to a minimum, except where it provoked a more visceral reaction. Please note that I had nothing to do with this manuscript's acceptance, development, etc.; I have no official role in Reformation Trust. Here goes:

The last thing we need is another book analyzing the problems facing the Western church or how “Christ” relates to “culture,” right? (In fact, once I read Rodney Clapp’s Peculiar People and then Craig Gay’s The Way of the (Modern) World, not to mention Hauerwas' and Willimon's Resident Aliens, I considered this genre officially closed.) Well, I guess we wouldn’t need another one if the majority of them were more concerned with fidelity to the charter (i.e., Scripture) given to the church by Jesus and his apostles than with “transforming” or improving culture—often through questionable, cultural (and thus ultimately subjective and relative) tactics.

One of the many reasons, it seems, that Christians drift toward this latter tendency is their forgetfulness. What do they forget? The stated central thesis of Stellman’s book: “…the new covenant situates us in a tension between ‘the already’ on the one hand and the ‘not yet’ on the other” (xiii). This tension arises out of the fact that God’s Messiah has already come and inaugurated his Father’s kingdom, while leaving some aspects of it not yet enacted. “God’s delay in ushering in the kingdom in its glorious and final form means that we live in the intersection of the present and the futures as exiles and pilgrims in the divinely ordained overlap of the ages” (xiv).  Sound like a bore? Maybe, if you already have this stuff figured out. But the actions, concerns, and emphases of the majority of American Christians betrays otherwise. Thus the need for yet another book on this subject. In short, what we’ve got here in Dual Citizens appears to be young, restless, and, with apologies to Mr. Hansen, thoroughly Reformed.

The book itself is split in two: part one looks at worship and part two deals with life. Both are discussed under the rubric of living as pilgrims in these times between the times.

Expecting the reader to scratch his head in response to the subtitle, “Worship and Life Between the Already and Not Yet,” Stellman begins by taking to task what is often taken for granted in the Western church. Thus his introduction begins by tearing asunder what many Christians think God hath joined together: worship and life. “Characteristic of this position,” Stellman writes, “is Reformed theologian John Frame, who insists that ‘there is no real difference between worship and the rest of life…[for] it is very difficult, in general, to separate “life” from “worship” in a biblical framework’” (xviii). Contrarily, Stellman argues that God’s Word maintains this distinction, and he spends the remainder of his introduction attempting to prove just that (it is this particular point that distinguishes Stellman’s attempt from so many of the others. Most, in my experience, collapse this distinction, and, indeed, decry it).

The main reason he finds the distinction valid is due to the place Christ’s church now occupies: “The people of God under the new covenant are in a situation more like that of the patriarchs under the Abrahamic covenant than that of Israel under the Mosaic covenant” (xxv). That is to say, the church is not a “triumphant theocratic nation dwelling in an earthly holy land, but a band of dispossessed pilgrims whose true country—of which Eden and Canaan were types and shadows—is not to be found ‘under the sun’ but beyond it, in heaven itself” (Ibid.). Note his connection of the nation of Israel—the ‘cult’ (a religious realm as distinct from the secular realm, see fn. 2, xxviii)—to their land.

Following Meredith Kline (in Kingdom Prologue), Stellman argues that God’s rule over both pre-fallen man and Israel included a realm, namely the garden of Eden and the Promised Land. For both Adam and Israel, God provided “for his covenant people a distinct land in which they are to serve Him as His loyal subjects…[where] cult and culture, church and world, temple and palace, are one” (xix–xx). But under Abraham, as under the new covenant, the situation can be characterized as “pilgrim politics, a term that highlights [the patriarch’s—and the church’s] status not as a triumphant theocratic army but as ‘resident aliens’ and ‘tolerated sojourners’ whose inheritance was not yet a reality” (xxi, emphases original throughout, unless otherwise indicated). Indeed, precisely because of the church’s lack of a distinct country, “we exist in a cultural realm that is distinct from that of the cultic. We are, like the patriarchs religiously particular but culturally indistinct. For the new covenant church, cult is distinct from culture, church is distinct from world, and the sacred is distinct from the secular” (xxvi).

Has your hair begun to bristle? So keen are we Christians to transform or improve culture in the name of Christ that such notions of seeming withdrawal produce reflexive scorn. But Stellman doesn’t back down (nor does he intend for the church to “withdraw,” as we shall see). He sees himself comfortably couched not just in the Reformation principle of Christians simultaneously living in two kingdoms but in the Pauline notion that culture has its own legitimacy apart from cult (again, understood as a secular realm distinct from the religious realm). The American nation is decidedly a “non-theocratic context” and thus we Christians, like the Christians of the first century, are to submit to the governing authorities, as well as participate in them (ibid.). Both the secular and sacred are under the reign of God, and thus distinguishing between life and worship, as the subtitle of his book suggests, Stellman argues is “a necessary consequence of careful Bible study” and life under the new covenant (xvii).

I suppose I could just leave the whole discussion here, since this series is filled with spoilers…

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Mercy Established

Master of Alkmaar, Seven works of mercy, ca. 1504, polyptych (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum)

For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself. For the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever. (Heb. 7:26–28)

In this passage we see the importance given to the fact that Jesus identifies with those for whom he died by undergoing temptation. We are also made aware of the necessity that this high priest be sinless, or else he would not have been qualified to enter into the heavenly sanctuary on our behalf. The author of this epistle clearly assumes that this once-for-all sacrifice is enacted on behalf of individuals: “…since he did this [offer a sacrifice for the sins of the people] once for all when he offered up himself” (Heb. 7:27b). What wondrous love is this?

But while we may know well-enough about the personal benefits of Jesus’ atonement, how often do we think about its effect on the community at-large? How does this relate to the call of loving others through good deeds? Why is the task of outward reconciliation part and parcel of the Christian life?

Saint Paul wrote about this in his letter to the Colossians: Through Jesus, all things will be reconciled unto himself, “whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (1:20).

Unfortunately, some theologians today take the apostle to mean that this outward peace ought to be the primary element of the atonement, that it is not so much concerned with the reconciliation of individuals but with the reconciliation of the entire world through works of mercy. But what makes up the entire world if not individual and particular living souls?

Attempts such as these offer an unworthy trade, not to mention a false dichotomy. If a community of individuals seeks to establish the good works of Jesus on earth (which includes both preaching redemption and meeting human needs) without first being a community that realizes the depth of their depravity before a holy God, then they are destined to promote an empty moralism, worth nothing, saving no one. We evangelicals cannot afford to let those who deny Paul’s message of reconciliation to individual sinners champion the cause of doing good through works of mercy in this world. We own it, properly speaking. The once-for-all sacrifice of the great high priest not only affects our individual lives at one particular instant in history, it affects the whole of our lives, and through us, the whole world.

Therefore, being in the world, as a community of atoned-for individuals, means having a righteous effect upon the world. Such a task could not be fulfilled if we were to withdraw out of the world, or if we were to succumb to the world, thus becoming of this world, or “worldly,” as the apostle John phrases it (see 1 John). The church’s mission is entirely wrapped up in Jesus’ work on the cross. We must see that it is because of the selfless, tortured, and crucified Son of God that the church is bound to the task of doing his work in every generation. Jesus intimately knew pain, hunger, mental anguish, death, and something this side of physical death no one has known — being forsaken by the Father. Jesus took that ultimate burden upon himself. Thus the cross, and the atonement procured for sinners therein, becomes the very reason we seek to establish righteousness here and now.

If Jesus had already returned (as certain end-time enthusiasts exclaim), there would be no need. But our time here is filled with tension, filled with the need to establish justice and righteousness. It is a tension that describes the kingdom as here but not yet fully. It is a tension that portrays the visible people of God as consisting of both wheat and tares. It is because of this tension that the church still seeks to fulfill her mission.

Stemming from God’s command to love Him totally, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, Christians are called first to the conversion of souls and then to works of mercy. It was no coincidence that Jesus inaugurated his redemptive ministry in Galilee with the following words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19). Throughout his ministry, Jesus did just that. He preached repentance and reconciliation to the downcast, not to the “righteous” (Luke 5:31–32). He also healed the sick and fed the hungry (Matt. 15:32; Mark 1:41). As followers of Christ, then, we are to do the same. After reading about the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) or the king who divides sheep from goats (Matt. 25:34–40), who does not think part of the church’s mission is to meet human needs with mercy and liberality? Through this, the world will see the love of God and the authenticity of his good news — that saved sinners love God and their neighbors.

The final question we are left with is this: Will Jesus return to a world in shambles due to our neglect? Or, will he return to a church empowered by the life-giving Spirit, a church that has taken seriously her commission to train disciples in the kingdom of God?

{This originally appeared in Tabletalk 28.5 (May 2004): 42–43}

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Peace: It's What's for Dinner (in both kingdoms)

IN THIS POST, on the good and thoughtful Faith and Theology blog, contributor Kim Fabricus writes of the ten most influential moments in his life that pushed him on toward pacifism. There's no reason to summarize it; go on, read it.

First, let's give the dictionary definition of pacifism: "Opposition to war or violence as a means of solving disputes." Now, the government's policing efforts will not be brought into question in this post. Such is not the focus here, if for no other reason than what Saint Paul writes about it in Romans 13:4:

   "The government is God's servant working for your good. But if you do

    what is wrong, you should be afraid. The government has the right to 

    carry out the death sentence. It is God's servant, an avenger to execute

    God's anger on anyone who does what is wrong."

The fact that this was written before any major persecutions against Christians is beside the point. The apostle in that case might have more fully explained the "wrong" he was speaking of (or he might have tweaked it in the direction Saint Peter does in 1 Pet 3:13–14; 4:12–19).

What I'm interested in is a small, yet misguided statement by Kim (and perpetuated by a few responders) encapsulated in the following:

   "I should say that at no time did I have any truck with two kingdoms

    doctrine, in spite of clarifications and fine-tuning by theologians like

    Pannenberg. My thoroughly Reformed understanding of the universal

    Lordship of Christ over church and world (or state) precluded any such

    Lutheran 'compromises.'"

I'm of the opinion that this is flat wrong, as it rests upon an oft-promoted, yet faulty, assumption. In brief, Martin Luther's articulation of the two-kingdoms model (a model that discusses the role of the church in the world) has been grossly distorted. Many think that Luther taught silent, supine submission to the absolute authority of the state and thereby liberated the government from any form of moral constraint from the church. Ernst Troeltsch's massive study The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches popularized the view that Luther promoted state absolutism and moral dualism while the Reformed offered a vital interrelationship between church and state. This inaccurate stereotype was perpetuated in the English-speaking world by Reinhold Niebuhr, along with a legion of others.

In popular history, this perversion became the widespread explanation for the rise of Hitler and the failure of German Christianity to recognize and resist the evils of Nazism (coveniently ignoring the fact that those in the Lutheran underground church were arguably more patriotic than the Lutheran state church). But in actuality it was Fredrick the Great (1712–1786), not Luther, who paved the way toward Nazism (it, of course, must be recognized that in his late life, Luther was no friend of the Jews; yet we are speaking here of the two kingdoms model and whether or not it's dualistic — that is, whether or not the state is to be governed by a completely different ethic than the church. We're starting to nudge up against natural law here, but that's a discussion for another day).

Frederick eventually left his Lutheran roots and became Reformed (of the theology-of-glory stripe); he also found himself increasingly enthralled with the Enlightenment. The culmination of his (and others') subsequent ecumenicity was manifested in the Prussian Union of 1817 (decreed by King Frederick William III on the 300th anniversary of the Reformation), which unionized the Lutheran and Reformed churches, essentially decimating confessional Lutheranism and along with that, the two kingdoms model (N.B. this is when major Lutheran emigrations to the U.S. started, and the LCMS finds its origins here). Herman Sasse, a faithful confessional Lutheran, who played a leading role in the German Church Struggle against Nazi coercion within the church contends:

   "No, it was not Lutheranism as such, but a sick Lutheranism that gave

    National Socialism an open door into the church. It was a Lutheran 

    Church which was no longer capable of standing guard over the souls of

    its people because it had fallen asleep itself. It had lost its power over 

    demons because it no longer possessed the power of distinguishing 

    between "spirits."...We have noble families in which the grandfathers 

    were conservative and confessional Lutherans, the fathers were German

    nationalists and members of the union church and the sons joined the SS"

    (Stewart Herman, The Rebirth of the German Church, 50–51). 

Those who cited Luther in favor of subservience to the state no matter what were guilty of abusing and distorting the reformer's true position. Sasse asserts: 

   "They picked out of Luther's teaching those phrases regarding govern-

    mental authority which were opportune and which people wanted to

    hear; phrases concerning the dignity of divinely ordained offices and 

    the duty of obedience to them. But what Luther said about the sins 

    of governmental authority; about the tyrannous murder of man's soul

    by the authority which goes beyond its limits or about the boundaries

    of obedience — all that was whispered very softly in the first years of 

    the Third Reich, or not mentioned at all. …They supplemented Luther 

    with Robespierre" (Herman, 52).

The reason for all this banter up to this point is this: to show that the two kingdoms model does not preclude pacifism. It's arguable as to whether it demands it, but it doesn't preclude it.

And now, Luther's own words:

   "In all his works [the Christian] ought to entertain this view and look 

    only to this object — that he may serve and be useful to others in all 

    that he does; having nothing before his eyes but the necessities and

    the advantage of his neighbor" (from Luther's On Christian Freedom).

This, arguably, puts duty to fellow humans before any other secular duty — even the obligation to one's country. It may be that pacifism is only implicit in Lutheran theology during the Reformation, but it nevertheless seems to be well-founded upon the non-dualistic two-kingdoms model. The model emphatically does not necessitate playing the part of judge, jury or executioner (as both Article 16 of the Apology and Article 12 of the Formula of Concord explicitly endorse). Alternatively, the two kingdoms model does, in fact, necessitate always carrying one's Christian faith everywhere, which frees the Christian up for positive ethical involvement (like pacifism) in the world. It is not a "confusing of the two kingdoms" to suggest this, as Gene Edward Veith asserts here. Remember, pacifism does not (cannot!) preclude the policing efforts of governments; it refuses to see war or violence as an option to resolve disputes. This message is the church's own, as it stands as prophet in this world. The church's business is not to promulgate some notion of a "Christian nation" or "christen-dom" (an oxymoron both in Lutheran and apostolic terms). It, in fact, needs to confront christendom with the ethics of the kingdom, the already/not yet, the paradox, far more than it currently does. The two kingdoms model enables and informs this work. And the reason why pacifism is a valid Lutheran position is both because pacifism is grounded in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and because there are no just wars, not now, and, arguably, post the resurrection of Christ (I have an eye on old covenant theocracy here), not ever. (Maybe the world's involvement in WWII could be pointed to as an exception. But it'd be just that — an exception.) So, the reason why it's best for a Christian to not be a soldier is precisely because of the inherent injustice of that vocation — both in christological and practical terms (remember the obligation of which Luther spoke quoted above). Some more Luther:

   "Beyond that, however, he [that is, the pastor] does great and mighty

    works for the world. He informs and instructs the various estates on 

    how they are to conduct themselves outwardly in their several offices 

    and estates, so that they may do what is right in the sight of God. …To

    tell the truth, peace, the greatest of earthly goods, in which all other 

    temporal goods are comprised is really a fruit of true preaching. For 

    where the preaching is right, there war and discord and bloodshed do 

    not come; but where the preaching is not right, it is no wonder that 

    there is war, or at least constant unrest and a desire to fight and shed

    blood" (from On Keeping Children in School).

You might ask, then, in light of this, what is the purpose of the two kingdoms model? Well, and this might surprise you, it's for the church's protection. It's to be held out in front of us so as to protect us from suffering under the delusion that even our best efforts here will produce some kind of golden age before the return of our king. This by no means is to be equated with that old cliché: "Why polish brass on a sinking ship?" The ship doesn't have to sink, and, indeed, it won't, as a result of the intervening and gracious hand of Christ our Lord. Our vocations as callings are clear: bring the future hope into this present darkness, whatsoever ye do. But the two kingdoms model takes seriously the collective sinfulness of nations, institutions and well-meaning Christian politicos, pundits and activists and guards them from perpetuating Constantinian notions of christendom.

Would you like a slice of pie with that? For what it's worth (and to calm my fellow two-kingdoms naysayers), peace will be served in God's coming kingdom, but he's apparently called us to start preparing the dish. Who knows? Maybe all he'll have to do when he returns is add some special sauce. But on the other hand, maybe he'll have to throw it all away and start from scratch. I really don't know, and, what's more, I don't think we can know. I just don't want to be standing there like an idiot when the head chef starts demanding ingredients I haven't prepared.

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