When a society totally abandons the transcendent reality of Christ’s present kingship as well as an expectation of his future consummated reign, then that society will also lose all good and true politics.

Ever since Augustine’s The City of God Western political thought has kept some kind of separation—in lesser or greater degrees—between heavenly politics and earthly politics. Oliver O’Donovan clarifies this truth when he writes that “the opposition in Western theology between the City of God and the earthly city has enabled political thought to avoid theocratic conceptions of government, which, by claiming to express the rule of heaven and earth, must unify the earthly and the heavenly into a single totalitarian political claim. Western theology starts from the assertion that the kingdoms of the world are not the kingdom of our God and of his Christ, not, at any rate, until God intervenes to make them so at the end.”^[1]

Even in light of powerfully clear Biblical statements that testify to the current rule of Christ over every kingdom, passages like we see in Revelation 1:5, that Jesus presently sits at the right hand of the Father as “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth”, still, Christians have generally understood this current rule as an inaugurated reality. Until he comes back and every knee bow, Christ’s current rule, total and sovereign as it is, is not consummated. Here we see the influence of eschatology on political theology. And until Christ comes back, Revelation 1 reminds us that God “loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and has made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father… Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen” (Rev. 1:6-7).

Now, to be sure, there is a kind of wailing going on now among all tribes and governments and cities of this earth, but that wailing is not on account of Christ and his coming. No, it’s because they do not yet see Christ that fallen kingdoms inflict pain and bring about wailing. There’s a fallen cruelty, even among the best of the tribes and nations. And yet, still, Christ sovereignly sits in the heavens and laughs; he holds all kingdoms in derision (Ps. 2:4).

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