All Protestants acknowledged that there must be a mutual subjection of ministers and magistrates, as ministers submitted to magistrates in affairs of the temporal kingdom, while magistrates bowed to the authority of the Word as proclaimed by the ministers. But there were bound to be gray areas, especially in a society where nearly all citizens were baptized, and in which magistrates themselves were often devout readers of Scripture, seeking to apply it in their governing. 

What are the two kingdoms? Many Christians have some vague familiarity with the doctrine, and a general sense that it has something to do with the distinction of church and state, sacred and secular, or perhaps the authority of Scripture vs. natural law. And they’re not entirely wrong—it does have something to do with those distinctions, but it’s not quite that simple. The two kingdoms doctrine, above all, is an attempt to make sense of two realms, dimensions, or aspects of human existence: that dimension lived nakedly before God, and that dimension lived outwardly before one another. The former is the “spiritual kingdom,” the latter the so-called “civil” or “temporal” kingdom.

It’s not wrong to suggest that a distinction between “redemption” and “creation” is somewhere in this neighborhood, but we must be careful. Redemption may lay hold of the soul, but it does not stop there. It works its way outward to shape every area of our lives, so that even those we think of as “secular” must at every point be brought into obedience to Christ. On the other hand, those areas of life that we often think of as “sacred” have an irreducibly temporal dimension to them. Churches are more than just societies or institutions, but they are not less, and they must operate under the same constraints and rules of prudence that other institutions must. Far too many churches have run aground by thinking that thinks like budgets and background checks are beneath them and their “spiritual” mission.

My doctoral dissertation (later published as The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty) was in many ways concerned with making sense of the Reformers’ authentic two-kingdoms doctrine (in contrast to misleading modern knock-offs), and I spent much of the early 2010s engaged in various debates on the doctrine, culminating in my little 2017 book, The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed. Misunderstandings of the two-kingdoms doctrine, I argued, have important consequences for our political theology more broadly, and for contemporary debates over liberalism and post-liberalism. For instance, David VanDrunen, relying on an overly-schematic version of the doctrine which treats the “temporal kingdom” as basically interchangeable with “the state” and as a “common kingdom” concerned only with the preservation of body and indifferent to any religious concerns, tries to establish a theological case for proceduralist liberalism.

Recently, I was recently asked to write an introduction to “Two Kingdoms Theology” for Logos Bible Software, and had the opportunity to revisit the topic afresh. The result, published this week, is what I hope my clearest and most accessible treatment yet of this key foundation of Protestant ecclesiology and political thought.

One of the points I make up front in the essay is that the language of “two kingdoms” is perhaps unhelpful and misleading, suggesting two independent spheres of earthly life. Luther himself preferred the language of Zwei Regimente (“two governments”) for the doctrine, which highlights the dynamic character of the doctrine as a paradigm for understanding the two very different, yet complementary, ways in which Jesus Christ exercises his rule over the world, and over Christians within it.

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