Jason Micheli serves as the preacher-in-residence for the Iowa Preachers Project. Applications for our next cohort will open at the time of the New York Mockingbird Conference in May. Right now, you can learn more here.
Here in the Washington DC area, the recent political transition has forced me to revisit Protestantism’s foundational understanding of Christian vocation and political witness. The lectionary Gospel passages the last two Sundays from Christ’s Sermon on the Plain have elicited a number of especially bad hot takes that muddle the gospel with the law into a kind of glawspel.
For example: I recently saw a number of colleagues on social media sharing a quote attributed to James Forbes, once the pastor at the historic Riverside Church in Harlem:
“Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.”
The assertion is rhetorically powerful, quite obviously.
Of course it is compelling: lex semper accusat — the law always accuses. But such an assertion, torn from Jesus’ hard teaching, merely recapitulates the anxiety-producing Christianity Martin Luther’s preaching movement attempted to reform.
Which is to say, “Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor” is not the gospel.
The poor person from whom every believer already possesses a letter of reference is Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim.
On account of Christ, by means of baptism’s saving flood and cleansing washing, we are justified. “Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor” is an instance of the modern liberal Christianity privileging the Jesus kerygma over the Christ kerygma.
Back to the matter at hand.
During the Reformation, Martin Luther sought to discern a biblical, theological framework for a Christian account of political engagement. In particular, with the bloody violence of the Peasants’ Revolt in mind, Luther was sensitive to the vulnerability of the fledging evangelical movement amidst the competing political parties of his day. Luther posited what came to be known as the doctrine of the two kingdoms — or realms.
Given that the mainline church today favors the Jesus kerygma over the Christ kerygma and speaks of empire more often than it speaks of Sin, the Reformation’s Two Kingdoms doctrine suffers critique and confusion in equal measure. In fact, both those who endorse Luther’s doctrine and those who reject it understand it as something quite opposite to the reformer’s original intent.
The Two Kingdoms doctrine does not mean what many think it means.
The doctrine did not separate the realms of religion and politics in such a way that privatized faith and baptized the state’s status quo. In fact, the Two Kingdoms doctrine was the historical expression of Luther’s call for radical faith in the eschatological gospel.
Firstly, Robert Jenson is quick to register the point that the doctrine cannot even be directly applied to contemporary problems of political engagement because the political entities it had in mind no longer exist, just as the sorts of revolutions it feared are also items of history.
More generally however, the Reformation’s Two Kingdoms doctrine is a corollary of its linguistic rule for speaking gospel, justification by grace alone in Christ alone through faith alone.
Justification is the Reformation’s reminder that in order to proclaim gospel:
- The speaker, as Fleming Rutledge often insists, must make God the subject of the sentences: the triune God is the active agent.
- The speaker must proclaim the gospel in the mode of promise. Nothing on our part can undo the Father’s unthwartable will to have a spouse for his Son.
- The speaker must speak in the mode of promise such that the message elicits relief rather than fear.
The immediate implication of the doctrine of justification (especially #1 and #2) is that everything falls under the umbrella of divine agency.
As Robert Jenson puts it:
Whatever happens, happens within the will of God. This immediate corollary of the doctrine of justification combined with observation of what actually happens in the world, may well drive us to unbelief. But, if our faith is so sustained by the proclamation of Jesus’s crucifixion that it can live in such testing, no part of life and the human world can then be indifferent for it.
As encounter with the endeavor of politics must clearly be a chief test of faith, so it must be a chief exercise of faith.
Thus, the first aspect to understand about Luther’s Two Kingdoms doctrine is that it sees all of reality as the event of the self-communication of the God shepherding all things to their End in the Last Future.
Because all political questions are questions about the human community’s shared future, all political questions are questions posed by God. Therefore, there are no theologically neutral political choices, just as there is no theologically viable choice to abstain from politics. “The believing community must participate in politics,” Jenson summarizes the Two Kingdoms doctrine, “whenever it has the chance. The tests of faith are the occasions for faith, for believers to let the political world go its way is merely unbelief.” As Luther put it plainly, an opportunity for political engagement is an opportunity to serve one’s neighbor; just so, the opportunity is obligation as God commanded it.
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“If an allegedly Christian group finds that its religion dispenses it from political action, the God of that group is not the gospel’s God.” –Robert Jenson
The doctrine of the Two Kingdoms does not pose a separation between religious activity and political activity. The doctrine of the Two Kingdoms instead posits the activity of God in and with and through all realms of life.
The Lord is up to something in the world! This is why the question to ask is never “Where was God when ______ ?” The question to ask instead is always “What is God up to given that ______ just happened?”
The God who gives himself to us in the gospel word is a God also disclosing himself in all of life and providentially ordering all things to their consummation in Christ.
This is simply what the apostle Paul acknowledges in his letter to the Romans. Once again, only a liar or a fool would insist that it is easy to look at the world and understand how its ways comport with the God revealed to us in Christ. This is why Paul’s acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty over the authorities of his day is not necessarily an endorsement of their policies.
On this point, Jenson writes:
To confess God by our political choices over against the realities of this world’s history is to abandon all hope of a unified explanation of God’s works. It is to accept the contradictions of historical experience as definitive short of the Fulfillment. God rules this world through his creatures. We believe that he is One and rules for the triumph of the one love of the one Lord Jesus Christ. But we may not expect theoretically or experientially to unify the works of his creatures by that belief. God’s right hand will know what his left hand has been doing only when both are outstretched to receive the fruit of his creation; until then, to confess God really, politically, is to accept struggle, contradiction, paradox, and polarity.
“To confess God really, politically, is to accept struggle, contradiction, paradox, and polarity.”
While we cannot synthesize the contradictions of God’s rule of his world, “We may interpret them by the dialectic of law and gospel.” God’s rule of his world is not a mere forceful compelling of events; it is done by his two words, law and gospel. All events are God’s deeds insofar as they are “in their total sequence his self-communication to his creatures.” So, we may, Jenson writes, “interpret the antinomies of God’s omnipotence by this duality [of law and gospel], though we will never see through them.”
The God who is about saving his creatures apart from works is a God who is the event behind all events.
The Two Kingdoms doctrine does not promote quietism among Christians. It instead confesses the straightforward implication of the gospel; that is, the God who is about saving his creatures apart from works is a God who is the event behind all events. In this respect, it expects God to disclose himself in the public square. Yet, because we cannot easily square this activity with Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim, Christians must engage politics with humility, knowing that we can only now — at best— see through a glass dimly.
Jenson continues:
God rules his creatures by the preaching of the gospel, by this particular future-granting communication among humans. God also rules his creatures by all communication among them, insofar as all communication somehow opens the future. The two modes of God’s self-communication open creatures to God’s future in very different ways; but it will be the same future. Our hope in this identity does not lift us above the antinomies that rend our image of God; but it does let us live in them.
When the active ruling of God towards the Last Future is lost from view, the Two Kingdoms doctrine functions opposite from its intent.
The Reformation doctrine thus depended on lively eschatological faith:
If Christological faith ceases to be attention to promises made now, and becomes meditation or theorizing only of what Christ, back then, made available, if it loses its eschatological reference, the unity of God’s two kingdoms is lost; for this unity lay in a common final goal. The two kingdoms then cease to be poles of historical unrest and become instead static compartments of interest.
If the God of the gospel really is, then compartmentalizing faith and politics, permitting God to speak in the former but not the latter, is but institutionalized atheism. If the God of the gospel really is, then private faith is atheism. As Jenson summarizes the Reformation doctrine the apostle Paul helped inform:
If one God rules through all powers but in more than one mode, then he meets us in the political arena and there tests and exercises faith, without having to be identified with the sovereignties through whom he rules.
