Christ’s kingdom is not just sitting alongside Satan”s kingdom (dualistically!), but Christ is in the process of defeating Satan (the usurper) and his kingdom. Sphere sovereignty has to do with how power and authority are limited/distributed and how culture is built. Properly understood, it is not to be used as a way of declaring certain domains “neutral” or outside the authority of Christ and His word
In the Scripture, we are not taught to think of the kingdom of God in some abstract fashion, like a circle in a diagram. The kingdom is described in dynamic and militant terms, as a mountain that fills the earth, or a stone that breaks in pieces all opposition. The kingdom doesn”t float down like a UFO, it breaks into the present order with power and permeates all.
This all seems so obvious but the really frustrating part of this is that in R2K “theology” I can’t really find the Kingdom of Satan. The Kingdom of Satan can’t be in their “Redemptive Realm,” for that is, according to their “theology,” uniquely Christ’s Kingdom. The Kingdom of Satan can’t be in their “Common realm” for that is, according to their “theology,” uniquely the neutral realm, public square that is owned by neither Christ nor Satan. The R2Kt lads have two Kingdoms but no Kingdom for Satan, no place where I can conceptualize a “present evil age,” resisting the leavening effect of the currently invading “age to come.”
In Kingdom Prologue, Kline has a very helpful discussion of the common grace city and its relationship to the kingdoms of God and Satan. He describes two aspects of the common grace city, that of religious antithesis and common grace, as follows:
“There is in the city a spiritual malignancy, the fatal consequence of the usurpation of the world kingdom by Satan and the prostitution of the city to demonic service. In the lurid expose found in the apocalyptic mode of Scripture, the satanically perverted urban power structure is seen as a beast savagely turned against the citizens of the city who refuse its mark…. The victims are not those disadvantaged in things temporal. It is rather a matter of religious antithesis, an ancient diabolical enmity. It is against the redeemed of the Lamb that the controlling powers of the world kingdom direct their hellish hostility.
“Yet in the face of the bestial aspect assumed by the city and the ensuing religious warfare that rages within it, Scripture affirms the legitimacy of the city. One thinks of the historical context of Romans 13. The legitimacy of the city is affirmed not because the bestializing of the city is a relatively late historical development. As a matter of fact, the Beast-power is not just a phenomenon of the present church age. The founder of the city was himself the slayer of the first martyr-prophet…. Our positive affirmation of the city structure is not based on a mere chronological priority of positive to negative factors in the make-up of the city. It is due rather to the fact that fundamental structural legitimacy is a matter of divine ordinance, not of the nature of man’s administration of the institution. The frightful religious tension of the city belongs to the story of the apostate direction taken by the city potentates and should not be allowed to obscure the character of the city as a structure founded on the common grace ordinance of the Creator.
“Over against every tendency to identify the city at its essential core with those demonic powers that seize and manipulate the power of the state we must assert the biblical testimony to the goodness of this postlapsarian institution as an appointment of God’s common grace, beneficial and remedial in its functions.”
“Summing up then, the meaning or essential identity of the postlapsarian city is not found in identification either with the kingdom of Satan or with the kingdom of God. Nor is it to be explained in terms of a dialectical seesawing between the demonic and the divine. This divinely appointed institution exists within the sphere of common grace, which is the corollary, the counterpoise, of the common curse. The fundamental shape of the city is the resultant of the interplay of these two correlative principles of divine action, a divine wrath and a divine grace that restrains that wrath according to the measure of sovereign divine purpose. Such is the biblical conceptual framework for defining the basic meaning of the city.” (pp. 168-172)
LOL …. let me get this straight David.
We have a dualism between the City of God and the City of Man and in the City of Man we have a dualism between common grace and common curse (a perfectly equipoised ying and yang). What next a dualism in both the respective yings and yangs?
Occam’s razor is screaming over being violated.
As I’ve said countless times, dualisms abound in R2K
jetbrane,
Not a dualism, a distinction, such as are standard fare in Reformed theology. I do think the quote nicely answers the question raised in your post.
David R.
I probed this issue a little more in my most recent Iron Ink entry titled “Kline Klatch.”
Thank you for your comments.
David R.
See my response on the face of Iron Ink titled “Kline Klatch.”
Thank you for your participation.