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…

Posted in: book reviews, Dual Citizens, Jason Stellman, two kingdoms