I realize that this still needs work.
I.) Roman Catholicism & Kingdom of God
Since the Kingdom of God is closely identified with the Church, if any institution or cultural phenomenon is to be part of the Kingdom of God it must come under the authority of the Church. The Church is the Kingdom in this world and holds within its power and jurisdiction every aspect and domain of life.
All in the Church were considered part of the Kingdom but there developed theoretical moral standard distinctions between clergy and laity. Such accounts for the rise of monasticism within the Church. All within the church was clean but the monastic orders were the Holy that kept all else clean. All outside the church was unclean.
In Christian countries this resulted in the entire social life being covered by the wings of the institutional visible Church.
So thorough was church control that the Roman Catholic Church had guidelines for the days when husbands and wives could consummate their marriage.
As a natural result the world corrupted the Church, and by its dominion over the world the Church proved an obstacle to every free development of life. Nothing was allowed to develop independently according to its nature under the hand of God.
Three distinctions here then …
1.) Church / Kingdom
a.) Holy — Monastic orders / Church proper
b.) Clean — All else in the Church
2.) All outside the Church / Kingdom
This gives us a minor dualism within the Church (between Holy & Clean) and a major dualism between the Church and all outside the Church.
In the church we live and move and have our being.
II.) Anabaptism & The Kingdom Of God
Whereas for Roman Catholicism if anything was to be part of the Kingdom of God it had to come under and be supervised by the Church, for anabaptists the Church and the Kingdom of God were co-extensive.
For the anabaptist the Kingdom of God is a believing community where all members are to be part of the monastic orders that existed in Roman Catholicism conceptions. All in the believing community must be separate and holy the way that the monks and certain clerical orders were separate and holy.
The anabaptists believed that the unbaptized world was under the curse and for that reason anabaptists withdrew from all civil institutions.
If civil life was to be participated in it must be brought under the guardianship of the anabaptist kingdom community and remodeled.
Two distinctions here then
1.) Church / Kingdom in which all is Holy
2.) All outside Church Kingdom is evil and wicked
This is a dualism.
In the Church we live and move and have our being.
III.) Radical Two Kingdom & The Kingdom of God
Two Kingdoms
God’s Right Hand — The Church / Personal individual ethics
Spiritual — meaning non-corporeal
Uniquely Holy
Ruled by Scripture
God’s Left Hand — Everything else
Material realm
Ruled by Natural Law — No, appeal to Scripture allowed
Uniquely Common
Church is silent though Christians are involved as long as Christians don’t appeal to the Bible for their convictions.
Dualism —
All in Church is Holy
All Outside of Church is common
No such thing as christian culture. Christendom is bad.
Never the twain shall meet.
Very similar to anabaptist with these exceptions ….
Anabaptist see all outside the Church as wicked and so not to be involved with by their people. R2Kt see all outside the church as common and to be involved with by their people as long as their people don’t seek to Christianize the common realm. In different ways both see the non-Church realm as hopeless. One says that there is to be no involvement with the realm of hopelessness while the other says that involvement with the realm of hopelessness is allowed.
IV.) Calvinism & The Kingdom Of God
“The Kingdom may be said to be considered a broader concept than the Church, because the Kingdom aims at nothing less than the complete control of all the manifestations of life. It represents the dominion of God in every sphere of human endeavor.”
— Berkhof, Systematic Theology, pg. 570
Calvinism denies that the church can be equated with the Kingdom: The church is not the Kingdom, but is in the Kingdom.
Calvin’s conception of the Kingdom eliminated the church as the manifest Kingdom and made the individual Christian, in his activity, the citizen of that eternal order by virtue of divine grace.
A key notion of Calvinist concept of Kingdom is the reality that the Kingdom has differing expressions. Calvinism believes that God is sovereign over all, and that no one sphere captures the exhaustiveness of God’s sovereignty or Kingdom.
In the Calvinist concept the one (unity) and the many (diversity) is honored. The one is honored because it is recognized that God is sovereign over all. The many is honored because it is recognized that God’s omnipresent sovereignty is expressed multilaterally.
All is Holy or unholy dependent upon how the life of each is governed by individual Christians handling faithfully the Word of God. No mediatorial institutions remain. Institutions are ministerial at best. Christian culture and Christian institutions can come to pass as Christian people incarnate their Christian faith in all that they do.
The Church’s, “as institution” role is to herald and minister Christ and His grace and to faithfully handle the keys of the Kingdom. Ministering Christ and His grace means to faithfully set forth both the indicatives and the imperatives of Scripture. As the Church faithfully sets forth the whole counsel of God, the Church as organism is equipped to take that counsel and apply it to their respective callings.
Try to look at it as kind of a reverse pollen gathering reality. The member bees come into the Church and gather the pollen whereupon they take that pollen out into their respective callings giving their respective callings the aroma of Christ.
The Church’s authority outside of its sphere as such is merely spiritual and persuasive. The Church has no sword to force itself upon the other spheres.
There is no dualism here.
God is sovereign over all.
There is nothing that can’t be brought under that sovereignty and be made uniquely Christian.
However there are distinctions here between the way God’s sovereignty is expressed in differing Kingdoms / Realms / Spheres.
Because God’s sovereignty is emphasized, only here do we find that it is in God that we live and move and have our being.
Sources
Kuyper — Stone Lectures
Rushdoony — Politics of Guilt & Pity
Berkhof — Systematic Theology
Verduin — The Reformers & Their Stepchildren
