Making Sense of Christ's Two Kingdoms

One of the central doctrines of Protestant political theology is pervasively misunderstood

Christ before Pilate by Mihaly Munkacsy

What are the two kingdoms? Many Christians have some vague familiarity with the doctrine, and a general sense that it has something to do with the distinction of church and state, sacred and secular, or perhaps the authority of Scripture vs. natural law. And they’re not entirely wrong—it does have something to do with those distinctions, but it’s not quite that simple. The two kingdoms doctrine, above all, is an attempt to make sense of two realms, dimensions, or aspects of human existence: that dimension lived nakedly before God, and that dimension lived outwardly before one another. The former is the “spiritual kingdom,” the latter the so-called “civil” or “temporal” kingdom.

It's not wrong to suggest that a distinction between “redemption” and “creation” is somewhere in this neighborhood, but we must be careful. Redemption may lay hold of the soul, but it does not stop there. It works its way outward to shape every area of our lives, so that even those we think of as “secular” must at every point be brought into obedience to Christ. On the other hand, those areas of life that we often think of as “sacred” have an irreducibly temporal dimension to them. Churches are more than just societies or institutions, but they are not less, and they must operate under the same constraints and rules of prudence that other institutions must. Far too many churches have run aground by thinking that thinks like budgets and background checks are beneath them and their “spiritual” mission.

My doctoral dissertation (later published as The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty) was in many ways concerned with making sense of the Reformers’ authentic two-kingdoms doctrine (in contrast to misleading modern knock-offs), and I spent much of the early 2010s engaged in various debates on the doctrine, culminating in my little 2017 book, The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed. Misunderstandings of the two-kingdoms doctrine, I argued, have important consequences for our political theology more broadly, and for contemporary debates over liberalism and post-liberalism. For instance, David VanDrunen, relying on an overly-schematic version of the doctrine which treats the “temporal kingdom” as basically interchangeable with “the state” and as a “common kingdom” concerned only with the preservation of body and indifferent to any religious concerns, tries to establish a theological case for proceduralist liberalism.

Recently, I was recently asked to write an introduction to “Two Kingdoms Theology” for Logos Bible Software, and had the opportunity to revisit the topic afresh. The result, published this week, is what I hope my clearest and most accessible treatment yet of this key foundation of Protestant ecclesiology and political thought.

One of the points I make up front in the essay is that the language of “two kingdoms” is perhaps unhelpful and misleading, suggesting two independent spheres of earthly life. Luther himself preferred the language of Zwei Regimente (“two governments”) for the doctrine, which highlights the dynamic character of the doctrine as a paradigm for understanding the two very different, yet complementary, ways in which Jesus Christ exercises his rule over the world, and over Christians within it. Through one, he upholds and sustains the created order which, even in its fallen state, reflects God’s glory and offers a fitting habitat for his image-bearers. Through the other, he redeems his people from their state of alienation and spiritual death, and transforms them into emissaries of his rule, able to act within the temporal kingdom in ways that more nearly reflect God’s original will for creation.

That said, the language of “two kingdoms,” like the similarly unhelpful “TULIP” idea of Calvinism, has become too pervasive to get rid of, and we might as well work with it. To understand it properly, I suggest, we must recognize first that both kingdoms belong to Christ, and will be united under his rule at the last day—so there can be no question of treating the “temporal kingdom” as a religiously-neutral space. The two kingdoms, however, are characterized by different ends, different laws, and different means.

At the level of ends, we can think of the temporal kingdom as concerned with maintaining human life and the spiritual with redeeming human life. Believers, accordingly, have a foot in both kingdoms.

At the level of laws, we can make a rough-and-ready distinction between natural law as the rule which governs temporal life and Scripture as the rule which governs the spiritual life. Of course, we must quickly qualify, recognizing that Scripture itself contains a restatement and application of natural law, and thus has much to say about the temporal kingdom as well.

At the level of means, classical two-kingdoms theology distinguishes between “the Sword” and “the Word.” Both, however, are synecdoches, and can easily be misunderstood. “The Sword” really encompasses any form of outward, bodily constraint or coercion, reward or punishment, while “the Word” describes not simply a text but the living and active “internal Word” of the Gospel as it lays hold of the inner man. Thus, the temporal kingdom is sometimes described as “visible” and the spiritual as “invisible.”

That said, the spiritual kingdom is not entirely hidden—although we can never know for sure who enjoys a life-giving union with Christ, the visible church is the outward symbol of the body of Christ, and in it, the means of grace are bestowed through effectual outward signs: the Spirit imparts life to our hearts through the spoken words of the preacher, the cleansing waters of baptism, the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. In the spiritual kingdom, then, as in the temporal, God has his ministers to act on his behalf, yet there is an asymmetry. The ministers of the temporal kingdom (civil authorities) have discretionary authority to make binding laws; the ministers of the spiritual kingdom (pastors), however, can only proclaim what Scripture teaches. Civil authorities can enforce their commands, while pastors can only bear witness to God’s future punishments. The visible church, then, straddles both kingdoms.

Many early modern debates over political theology, then, were carried on between different variants of two-kingdoms theology. All Protestants acknowledged that there must be a mutual subjection of ministers and magistrates, as ministers submitted to magistrates in affairs of the temporal kingdom, while magistrates bowed to the authority of the Word as proclaimed by the ministers. But there were bound to be gray areas, especially in a society where nearly all citizens were baptized, and in which magistrates themselves were often devout readers of Scripture, seeking to apply it in their governing. Today, we may have largely disentangled church and state as institutions—although the boundaries of jurisdiction will still be fuzzy sometimes, as the recent pandemic showed.

The two-kingdoms doctrine, then, while it should play an important role in Protestant political theology, will not resolve all its questions for us. Indeed, perhaps its greatest value for us today is that can open up space to be comfortable with uncertainty. By it we can distinguish between the realm in which Scripture alone tells us everything we need to know, and the realm in which God leaves us much more to our own wits, to navigate the world with wisdom—wisdom nurtured by Scripture of course, but also by our own observation and experience of the world.

I hope you’ll take the time to read the full essay here.

Newly Published

• “Two Kingdoms, One King: What Two Kingdoms Theology Really Is” (Logos Word by Word): Summarized above.

• “After the Flood” (Compact): Our trip to hurricane-ravaged Western North Carolina a couple weeks ago made a deep impression on us, simultaneously offering a picture of the extraordinary resilience of the American people and the extraordinary fragility of the American state. In this long-form essay for Compact (my first time publishing there), I narrate what we saw and share the stories of some of the remarkable locals there, while drawing out larger lessons about the state of the union and how we can revive public trust in preparation for future natural disasters.

• “Weather Worries” (WORLD Opinions):  The breakdown of trust between governing and governed has been on vivid display in recent weeks in the response to Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. A barrage of conspiracy theories proliferated, escalating from stories about FEMA seizing donations (not altogether implausible) to officials burying bodies to suppress the death toll (riiiiight…) to government scientists geo-engineering the hurricanes to displace Trump voters and/or seize lithium deposits (say WHAT?). Unfortunately, the breakdown of trust represented by such theories has real-world consequences.

• “Getting Real About Politics”: This past Sunday, I had the opportunity to teach one more adaptation of my “Faithfulness as Christian Citizens” mini-course, this one the most condensed yet (just two hours). It went very well, and moving forward I’ll be looking to hopefully design a video course that can be replicated in churches across the country.

Coming down the Pipe

• “Of Course They Knew” (WORLD Opinions): My latest piece for WORLD, forthcoming in the next few days, responds to the recent shocking-but-really-not-shocking revelations that TikTok executives knew well from their own internal research that their product was addictive and exploitative especially to their “golden audience,” young teens, knew that their various advertised safeguards had little effect, and were just fine with that. The revelations emerged in the course of a 14-state coordinated lawsuit against the tech giant that could represent a moment of reckoning for the industry.

• Amicus brief in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton: Something I’ve mentioned only fleetingly in previous Substacks but that has consumed a lot of my time and attention the past three months is the legal effort in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a case going before the Supreme Court this winter to determine the constitutionality of a Texas law (one of many similar laws recently enacted in almost two dozen states) requiring age verification for pornography websites, and limiting access to adults, as is the case for bars, nightclubs, etc. My colleague Clare Morell and I have been hard at work on an amicus brief demonstrating that the governing precedent in this field of law, Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004) is factually obsolete, premised as it is on the now-discredited claim that parental control filters can sufficiently protect children from obscene content online. We recently completed a full draft and are working with our EPPC in-house attorneys to get it ready for the court. Look for more details about this effort soon.

On the Bookshelf

• Stephen O. Presley, Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church (2024): Good stuff so far, especially on the necessity of recovering robust catechesis in our churches if we’re to weather the growing cultural hostility. I do wonder, though, whether Presley doesn’t repeat a common mistake in his interpretation of MacIntyre’s famous ending to After Virtue, where he says we are waiting for a new St. Benedict. Like many, he interprets Dreher’s Benedict Option as preeminently a book about what to do after the death of Christendom and the rise of a new paganism. But let us not forget that St. Benedict lived and worked two centuries into Christendom, which was in many ways waxing rather than waning during his time. The problem he faced was not re-paganization but re-barbarization: that is to say, the destruction of knowledge, learning, and civilization, even if the barbarian tribes responsible for this destruction were technically Christian. To be sure, we do face the challenge of declining faith and renewed paganism, but perhaps just as great is the challenge of barbarism, which is as great within the churches as without.

• D.C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality (2017): I’m finally coming in toward the end of this book, and made it to his section on technology. Boy was it worth the wait. Although many authors have gestured toward the difference between premodern tools or techne and modern technology, Schindler describes it more clearly than any others that I can recall. Whereas older technologies seek to harness natural causes as natures, so that we are drawn into closer relation with and knowledge of nature even as we use tools, modern technology deconstructs them in order to extract mere power from them, so that the more we use it, the less we know of he underlying natures. He gives this vivid example:

  “A person can’t sail a sailboat without a knowledge of how the winds work, the function of the various ropes, pulleys, and boom, and a constant attention to the actual quality of the wind and weather; indeed, it is the very nature of the techne that one constantly learns more about, not only the elements that make up the mediating instrument itself but also the nature in which it is involved, in the use of it. By contrast, one doesn’t need to have the slightest understanding of how a motor works internally to be able to operate a motorboat, as long as one knows how to start it and where to put the gas, and operating such a motor never has to mean understanding it better.”

• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2009)

Recommended Reads

• “The Long Defeat of History” (Jake Meador, Comment) Jake Meador has written a fine reflection on J.R.R. Tolkien’s moral imagination, including many of my favorite quotes from the timelier-than-ever Lord of the Rings. One bit particularly struck me: “There is a simplicity about Tolkien’s moral vision that is refreshing. Certainly, there are times when the answer to the right course of action is not altogether plain, and wisdom and prudence are needed to help one see the right way. But if honour compels one toward a certain action, come what may, then nothing else matters—at least not for Tolkien.” In my frequent  pushback on the premature quest for moral certainty that characterizes many American evangelicals, I wonder if I don’t sometimes over-emphasize the complexity and contingency of moral reasoning. It really isn’t the case that we’re supposed to have to start from scratch in every moral situation and calculate the best course of action; sometimes there is no need to calculate, because honor and duty have already answered. But the cultural fabric within which such terms as “honor” and “duty” once had meaning has long since dissolved, forcing us to improvise anew in each fresh moral dilemma.

• “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is” (Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic): Another lament prompted by the epistemic chaos on display in the recent responses to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. It opens with the grim line, “The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.” I don’t disagree with that assessment; however, the author of the article betrays in various places that he seems to think that this is a problem exclusively on the populist Right. Even setting aside the point that there are few dissociations from reality more extreme than on the transgender-affirming Left, I worry that the misinformation epidemic will only become worse as long as any and every critique of the government is treated equally. The fact is that “the government engineered this hurricane to target Trump voters in western North Carolina” and “the government response to this hurricane was abysmal” are very different claims, meriting very different responses. But many on the Left have shown their own dissociation from reality by doubling down on any and every defense of the authorities, and dismissing every critique as conspiracy-mongering. Not a recipe for restoring public trust.

• “Shoplifters Gone Wild” (Marc Fisher, The Atlantic) A very interesting article on the recent upsurge of shoplifting, which seems to be in part a predictable response to a progressive approach to criminality: namely, that acts of petty crime are understandable responses to the disempowerment of minorities and should be treated with sympathy, and that any use of coercive force against lawbreakers is to be discouraged. But, the essay suggests, it may also be a deeper index of civilizational decay:

  “the surge in shoplifting is one piece of a larger collapse of the social forces that once restrained wayward behavior at least as much as the law did: trust, guilt, and shame. It took us a lot to get to this point—huge technological and psychological disruption; the atomization of American life by the anonymity of the internet; the isolation imposed by COVID lockdowns, which eroded many people’s sense of empathy; a lack of consequences for stealing attributable to reductions in policing and store staffing. It’s hard to see how better surveillance cameras and longer prison terms…could roll back such powerful changes in how we live.”

Get Involved

If you like this Substack, please spread the word with others. For now, this Substack will be totally free, but if you like the work I’m doing, please consider donating to it here by supporting EPPC and mentioning my name in the Comments.

If you have any questions or comments or pushback on anything you read here today (or recommendations for research leads I might want to chase down), please email me (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com). I can’t promise I’ll have time to reply to every email, but even if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sure I’ll benefit from hearing your thoughts and disagreements.