Things remain politically charged in the world, clearly; especially during this season of time as we lead up to the American presidential election in November. Ever since Trump, in 2016, it seems the balance of powers in the world have been disrupted, to a point that they are no longer willing to conceal their movements. These are indeed, trying and confusing times for Christians. Many simply want nothing to do with the politick, which is very understandable. Personally, I have grown weary of such things as well. And yet as Christians we are to be salt and light in the world. Indeed, we are emissaries of the Most High and Holy triune God. Even as we journey in this far country, even as our souls grow weary, to the point of fainting and exhaustion, as Christians (those in union with Christ), we operate with a Spirit anointed resurrection power in the humanity of Jesus Christ. It is from this power, the personal power of the risen Christ with whom we are participants, that we have overcome the principalities and powers of this world. Ultimately, our citizenship (literally in Greek, our “politic”) is in heaven; in the city of God. And yet because God is grace and beauty He continuously condescends, irrupts, and disrupts our dusty frames, our fallen world, and shouts “behold, I come with great tidings of great joy which shall be for all the people. . .. Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.” He has not left us as orphans, and He has not left this creation without hope or a Savior all encompassing.
The aforementioned ought to conjure something. It ought to make us recognize, as Christians, that every sphere of this world, including ourselves, belongs to the triune God in the risen Christ. That there is no place where His life, Immanuel, does not own the cattle on a thousand hills. This entails something for us, as participants in this type of Kingly life; i.e., that we have the most important voice in the world, in regard to who we represent, and who we bear witness to in all spheres; not least of which is the political. Father and son, Alan and Andrew Torrance, have the following to communicate as they reflect on the political theologies and themes present within the works of S∅ren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, respectively.
In chapter 3, we considered ways in which the Enlightenment subverted the gospel message. Whereas Kierkegaard exposed the impact of post-Enlightenment construals of reason on Danish theology, Barth exposed a parallel confusion in German cultural Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus)—one that provided fertile soil for the emergence of German nationalism. A key factor in this was the two kingdoms doctrine that was inherent in nineteenth-century Lutheranism and had shaped Christian thought in both Denmark and Germany. Its effect was to inoculate the people’s cultural and political commitments against any challenge from acknowledging the lordship of Jesus Christ and it did this by dichotomizing allegiances into the sphere of personal piety and the spheres of the state and culture. Christ’s lordship belonged to the former, the effect of which was to make it a spiritual lordship. This gave rise to an attitude of dual allegiance which was supported by a series of parallel dichotomies between law and grace, state and church, the secular and the spiritual—distinctions that would find further support, as Anthony Thiselton has argued, in Neo-Kantian dualism. The resulting division of allegiances meant that the lordship of Jesus Christ found itself circumscribed by more foundational loyalties to the state, to the nation, to the realm of the law, and thus to the culture.
But why did this separation of the realm of the church from that of the state and culture not weaken rather than strengthen cultural Protestantism? After all, cultural Protestantism held to a synthesis and confusion between faith and cultural affiliation. Their separation, one might assume, should encourage persons to avoid any syncretism. It is important to recognize why this is not the case. As Barth saw with such clarity, when theologians endorse a system of dual loyalties with different sets of obligations (in this case, to the state and also to the church), what is perceived to be the broader field of obligation tends to become foundational, constituting thereby a procrustean bed that determines the extent or boundaries of faith and thus the lordship of Christ. What the history of cultural Protestantism and “civil religion” illustrates is that when it is assumed that the “spiritual” is not allowed to inform the “worldly,” or that participation within the church should not interfere with political allegiances (i.e., that we should “keep Christianity out of politics”), the person of Christ and the Bible are bracketed out of the evaluation of the so-called worldly sphere and thereby the duties and obligations that characterize everyday life. The problem is then compounded when this dual allegiance finds theological endorsement in the insistence that Jesus Christ is Lord only over the spiritual realm of personal piety, but that God has a separate and different purpose for the sociopolitical domain. That has the effect of ascribing divine endorsement to the dictates that emerge within the political or secular realm. Romans 13 is frequently cited, eisegetically, in support of this move.[1]
I think the most important focus to grab from the above is to avoid the neo-Kantian dualism of abstracting the sacred from the secular, and vice versa. In the economy of God, the Kingdom of Christ, the great divorce between heaven and a fallen earth has been put to death in the crucifixion, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. The world, as both Kierkegaard and Barth would argue, just as the Torrances have fruitfully underscored for us, is no longer the sphere of the devil and his minions, but instead, it is the domain of the Word of God. There is no quadrant where Christ is not prime over all; where He is at once elevated and condescended for us by the Spirit, even as He has always forever freely chosen to be God with us, and not without us; to be God in us, and not merely outside of us. It is Immanuel’s veins that have brought times of refreshment to a world committed to a futility of its own sublapsarian making.
Ultimately, as Alan and Andrew Torrance have reported for us, as they have engaged with Kierkegaard’s and Barth’s theologies, respectively, what remains always the truth: is that Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords! This is not merely an ethereal Platonic form in the heavens, but instead a concrete reality as Christ in-breaks, by the Spirit, into the world afresh anew. Even as He is the firstborn from the dead, the firstfruits of God, it is from this place of primacy that the Christian has the elevation, even as we are constantly being given over to the death of Christ, that His life might be made manifest in the mortal members of body, to proclaim that Jesus is Lord, without remainder. This is against a cultural Protestantism that seeks to “win” by the weapons of carnality, and instead it is by a unionizing with the living Christ in the triune God wherein Christians go out in power; even if such power appears weak and foolish to the world and church writ large.
[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 150–1.