A unique public voice of blessing for all: part 4
The uniqueness of 2kg citizenship
Differentiating God’s preserving from His saving work has practical implications for cultural engagement. The state is a temporal agency, dealing with temporal solutions to temporal issues. The Church is an eternal institution, dealing with eternal solutions to eternal questions. The state can compel its citizens to do what is demanded; the church can only persuade, not coerce.
2KG praxis, which clearly differentiates God’s preserving and saving work, therefore means:
That it is permissible for a Christian to hold public office, to render verdicts on the basis of imperial laws or other stabled laws, to prescribe just punishments, to engage in just war, to serve in the military, to enter into legal contracts, to own property, to take an oath, when magistrates require it, or to contract marriage.”…This entire topic on the distinction between Christ’s kingdom and the civil realm has been helpfully explain in the writings of our theologian (Chiefly Luther.) Christ’s kingdom is spiritual, that is, it is the heart’s knowledge of God, fear of God, faith in God, and the beginning of eternal righteousness and eternal life. At the same time, it permits us to make outward use of legitimate political ordinances of whatever nation in which we live, just as it permits us to make use of medicine or architecture, or food, drink, and air. [1]
2KG citizenship motivates a dynamic yet differentiating public engagement praxis which engages the cultural and political issues of the day. Such work is easier said than done. Professor William Schumacher correctly notes that still today, “American Christians wrestle with the old alternatives of conquest or exile”[2] in engaging cultural issues. Robert Benne helpfully describes this engagement praxis as a biblical, “paradoxical”[3] vision. Such a “paradoxical” framework maintains God’s sovereignty over all things even as He engages the world in very distinct ways. He says,
[The paradoxical Lutheran vision for ecclesial public engagement] provides a valuable, if not indispensable framework for any adequate Christian public theology. This framework protects the radicality and universality of the gospel itself as well as the integrity of the church. . . . But in addition to protecting the Gospel, the paradoxical vision provides a framework that ought to condition Christian public theology’s assessment of human nature, of God’s governance of the world, and of the historical process itself even if it doesn’t provide a substantive public theology of particular policy positions). [4]
God's twofold intervention into our world keeps in tension the uniqueness of the work of Jesus Christ for all people even as it calls for Christians and all people to be involved in the right ordering of society for the sake of temporal justice and peace. Such a distinction addresses the challenges of concrete temporal solutions to the myriad of cultural and political issues, while rooting people’s ultimate sense of their dignity and worth elsewhere in God’s gracious saving of all humanity in Christ not merely in the political and economic solutions and actions of sinful people of power and prestige.
The Rev. Dr. Gregory Seltz is the executive director of the Lutheran Center for Religious Liberty. This is the fourth in a series regarding the two ways in which God is at work in the world and how we as Lutherans are given to embody that message anew for the world in which we live.
Be Informed
Learn more about woke ideology and public school curriculum with Joy Pullmann of The Federalist.
Be Equipped
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Be Encouraged
“We make a mistake in thinking about politics simply in terms of a left versus right dynamic. The opportunity really lies today in focusing on a top versus bottom dynamic. An elite class of people are acting in their own interest and against the interest of the vast majority of American—those who are still attached to the idea that America is a force for good and who think that young children should be protected from the imposition of radical gender ideology.”
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