There is a debate in Christian circles particularly in reformed circles about approaches for thinking through the Christian’s relation to society. This can include the church as an institution and how it relates to the broader society as well as how individual Christians relate to the world in which they live. The two basic schools of thought are the transformationalist view, sometimes associated with Abraham Kuyper. The other school of thought is connected with Lutheran theology and it posits that there are two kingdoms the spiritual kingdom governed by the church and the temporal kingdom governed by the state.
For Baptist believers who recognize that the newness of the new covenant requires only covenant members who were born from above, they are in a difficult position. Since they can only rely on conversions, there is little in the way of Christian transformational work that they can do which has New Covenant value.
However, the transformed life of a redeemed sinner expresses itself in new ways of thinking, rejecting the noetic effects of sin, and offering their work as worship to God. This latter type of transformational ethics leads to Christian ways of thinking and acting.
The two kingdoms approach can seem to lead to quietistic Anabaptism which verges on gnostic dualism. Spiritual is good, physical is bad.
What is strange about the worldview position is that it gets employed by both the right and the left. On the one hand, you can have an aggressive type of right-wing Kuyperianism from Moscow Idaho, while you can also have an elitist, left-wing Kuyperian from the Neocalvinians of Calvin College or the Institute for Christian Studies.
Left-wing evangelicals have extolled the church as an agent of transformation, using Critical Race Theory and policies for social justice, while right-wing evangelicals can call for an end to the liberal democracy in seeking to transform the culture into a hybrid theonomic society.
Is the answer to merely eschew right and left, always being in the middle in our cultural transformation work? This seems to be the position of those who are called “elite evangelicals”, who position themselves as apolitical, all the while tacitly supporting powerful cultural movements because they will not commit to resisting them. Such neutrality might work if it wasn’t for “the world, the flesh and the devil” who assail the Christian in thought word and deed.
So the two kingdoms approach admits the raging tide of the world against the church, but recognizes the sovereignty of God over all, working through even the state powers (eg. Babylon and Rome), so that general order is maintained while the gospel is faithfully proclaimed and promoted, even by suffering witnesses. The constant temptation is for the church to shrink back (the argument of Hebrews), to assimilate to the position of their oppressors. This is where the two kingdoms approach can fail to bolster the antithesis between the church and the world. Two kingdoms may presume to have temporal kingdoms that are deeply flawed, yet still organized around the vestiges of Christian outlook.
What remains for us to discern is not the absolute rightness or wrongness of Philadelphia or Escondido. Rather, we must see in both positions the corrective for the other, not only to improve our understanding but to clarify our interpretation of a post-Christian world faced by those who wield weapons of warfare (2 Cor 10:1-4) that are metaphysically suited for the task.
