William Symington was a Scottish Covenanter pastor. In 1838 he finished his manuscript that later became published as ‘Messiah The Prince.’ There are very few books that labor so diligently to show from scripture that Jesus Christ is the risen Mediatorial King, not only of the Church, but also of the Nations in their various civil-social expressions. Dr. Symington’s work leads one to see that it is not only the Church that must bear allegiance to the risen Priest-King Jesus, but also the Counting Houses, Law courts, Economic arrangements, and every other institutional structure of any given people.
“Bodies-politic or corporations are to be regarded as large moral subjects. To suppose that men, as individuals, are under the moral government of the Almighty, and bound to regulate their conduct by His law, but that, as societies, they are exempted from all such control, is to maintain what involves the most absurd and pernicious consequences.”
Pastor’s Symington’s work flies in the face of much of contemporary Calvinism that has emasculated the Church’s Biblical Message of salvation by restricting the Church’s proclamation of a salvation to a personal area of one’s heart or perhaps limiting salvation to concerns of Church and maybe family. Such castrated Calvinism misses that the blessings of salvation are to come not only to individuals but also to the cultures that numerous individually saved people build when living together in community. Symington’s leaves one with the clear understanding that should the Lordship of Christ in non-Church cultural realms be vacated for some kind of attempt to work with the epistemologically self conscious unbeliever, in a putatively non-religious realm, where Lordship is only expressed through a Natural law will result in the exercise of Lordship by some other competing deity. Man, both individually and corporately considered, is a being animated by his conceptions of who he takes to be his Lord and if Jesus Christ, as revealed in Scripture, be not Lord in every area of Man’s cultural endeavors, some other false lord will be Lord in every area of cultural endeavor.
Part of the problem with some contemporary expressions of Calvinism in this area might be the insistence that those realities, which are spiritual, can’t be corporeal. For example, often we hear that the Kingdom of Christ is a spiritual kingdom. I do not disagree. What I do disagree with though is that spiritual Kingdoms don’t end up being clothed with corporeal instantiations. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that all earthly kingdoms are corporeal instantiations of some spiritual Kingdom behind them which is the greater reality of which the incarnated Kingdom is but a distant echo.
Another thing that we get from some contemporary Calvinists is the quote of Christ telling Pilate that ‘His Kingdom is not of this World,’ as if that is to end all conversation on the Lordship of Christ over all cultural endeavors. What is forgotten is the way that John often uses the word ‘World.’ John often uses the word ‘World’ with a sinister significance to communicate a disordered reality in grip of the Devil set in opposition to God. If that is the way that the word ‘world’ is being used in John 17:36 then we can understand why Jesus would say that His Kingdom ‘was not of this world.’ The Kingdom of Jesus will topple the Kingdoms of this disordered world changing them to be the Kingdoms of His ordered world, but it won’t be done by the disordered methodology of this World and so Jesus can say, “My Kingdom is not of this World.” Hopefully, we can see that such a statement doesn’t mean that Christ’s Kingdom has no effect in this world or that Christ’s Kingdom can’t overcome the world.