Most Christians have a generic sense of the definition of church: something like: sinners graciously called out of the world to trust in Jesus Christ, united under pastoral oversight in liturgical worship for biblical instruction and mutual edification and gospel commissioning back out into the world.[1] There’s nothing particularly controversial or hard to grasp about this, and Christians from almost any church or denomination or ministry would feel comfortable with it. Of course, they’re plenty of arguments out in the weeds concerning the church: local and/or universal? visible and/or invisible? hierarchical or democratic? Sacramentarian or evangelical? traditional or contemporary? But if you were to ask a hundred church-committed Christians the definition of church, you might be surprised at how similar the answers would be.
1. L. Coenen, “Church, Synagogue,” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Colin Brown, ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1975, 1986), 1:291–307.
Grasping the Kingdom
The same isn’t true of the kingdom of God. Indeed, the many faulty understandings of the kingdom beg the question: What is the relationship between the church and the kingdom? I seek to explain the answer in this article. What is the kingdom of God? It fundamentally means the reign of God.[2] The Bible depicts God as King over the cosmos he created by his Son in the agency of his Spirit. He’s the King, and we humans are his subjects. Believers are his willing subjects, unbelievers his unwilling subjects. But all of us are his subjects. It’s not so much a realm over which the King reigns as it is the reign itself. We might say the kingdom is wherever the King is, and since everything is in the presence of the King, his kingdom is everywhere. The fact that he’s not universally recognized as King doesn’t negate his universal reign (Heb. 2:5–8). Sinful rebels resist his rightful authority. But all will one day recognize and bow to his regal authority (Phil. 2:9–11).
2. George Eldon Ladd, “Kingdom of God,” Baker’s Dictionary of Theology, Everett F. Harrison, ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1960), 310.
Unfortunately, many Christians have misdefined or misunderstood the kingdom. This has caused significant practical damage. Some believe God is King only of the Jews, but not the Gentiles. But the book of Psalms and other places in the Old Testament, and certainly the New Testament, prove this isn’t true. God in his Son is King over everyone and everything. And the New Testament makes clear that Jesus reigns over the Gentiles, not just the Jews (Rom. 15:12).
Others recognize that since he came to earth, Jesus reigns over the Gentiles, but they believe he reigns only within the church (the institutional church). Jesus is the King of the church, but God allows Satan and unbelievers to rule outside the church until eternity. The Bible nowhere teaches this. Jesus does rule in his church, but that’s because he rules over all things. He is King both inside the church and outside the church.
Still, others believe that Jesus won’t reign until he returns at the Second Advent and establishes his millennial kingdom on earth, or they believe that at the Second Advent, he establishes his eternal heavenly kingdom, but his reign is delayed until then. The Bible teaches neither (Acts 2:22–36).
Given these and other theological miscues, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Christian understanding of the relationship between church and kingdom has been muddied (the two are identified) and muddled (the two are therefore confused). This confounding confusion presents in two main ways.
The Kingdom Is Reduced to the Church
The first is that the kingdom is reduced to the church. The church is a vital aspect of, but not identical to, the kingdom. Ridderbos observes:
The church is the innermost circle, in which the kingdom reveals itself in the present world. The church and the kingdom of God do not coincide. The kingdom is broader than the church. Christ is not only the Head of the church, but he is also the Head of all things in heaven and on earth.[3]
3. Herman Ridderbos, “The Church and the Kingdom of God,” International Reformed Bulletin, 27 [Oct. 1966], 13.
The church is Christ’s body (Col. 1:18), for whom God in Christ shed his very blood (Acts 20:28). To minimize the church is to minimize a sizable component of the kingdom. But the kingdom is wider than the church. A California church leader once said, “The church is God’s Plan A, and there is no Plan B.” It’s more correct to say, “The kingdom is God’s Plan A, and the family and church and state are Plans 1A, 2A, and 3A.” The kingdom is The Plan. Everything else contributes to that Plan. Make no mistake: To dismiss or marginalize the church is to dismiss or marginalize Christ’s body and bride. Some Christians think they can bypass the church and still please God. No Christian in biblical (or patristic, or later) times would (or could) have dreamed of such a thing. The church is vital to the kingdom of God.
But the church is not the kingdom of God, and collapsing the kingdom into the church is dangerously limiting the rule of God. God is as interested in governing and ruling the culture outside the church by the Bible as he is over the church itself.
Today, in understandable reaction to the anti-church sentiment, many Christians have over-compensated and seem to believe our entire religious efforts should be expended on the church. Neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth went so far as to say, “Theology is . . . a function in the liturgy of the church.”[4] It’s hard to imagine a more culturally irrelevant view of theology. Theology can no more be limited to the church or liturgy than the Bible can. Barth and evangelicals who follow his view today practice what Joseph Boot terms Churchianity.[5] They ecclesiasticize the Faith and the kingdom. They care little for God’s authority in education, politics, music, science, technology, and entertainment—in the culture outside the church, that is, in the fuller kingdom. But there is a better way.
4. Karl Barth, God in Action (Manhasset, New York: Round Table Press, 1963), 49.
5. Joseph Boot, For Mission, The Need for Scriptural Cultural Theology (Grimsby, Ontario: EICC Publications, 2018), 8–29.
The church shouldn’t simply be training “full-time” church workers, but encouraging Christians to develop a distinctively Christian worldview and apply it in the field to which God has called them in their nine-to-five vocation. The goal of the kingdom is to capture and reorient every area of culture (2 Cor. 10:3–6) presently in the grip of sin—that is, in Satan’s rebellious sub-kingdom (Matt. 12:22–29) within God’s righteous kingdom. This task is obviously much larger than the church.
The Church Is Expanded Beyond Its Jurisdiction
But the confusion can originate from the opposite direction: when the church arrogates to itself kingdom work beyond its designated jurisdiction. S. U. Zuidema calls this “ecclesiastical colonization.”[6] The institutional church struggles to colonize the world by taking on obligations designated to other kingdom institutions or spheres. Almost all that God’s doing in the world, in this way of thinking, must be commandeered by the church.
6. S. U. Zuidema, Communication and Confrontation (Toronto: Wedge Publishing, 1972), 47.
But the church has its own specifically delegated role. The church is the exclusive guardian and transmission of orthodoxy. It holds the monopoly on the sacraments, or ordinances. It alone may pronounce one outside the fold of salvation. These tasks are vested solely in the church, not the family or state or any other institution or sphere of life. For example, the church is not tasked with launching and governing Christian colleges or other educational institutions. The same is true of starting ordinary businesses or local orchestras or movie production companies or even hospitals or medical clinics. These are the jobs of members within the institutional church, but not the church in its institutional capacity. They all stand squarely within Christ’s kingdom, and the world desperately needs more kingdom workers to start and man and expand them, but they don’t fall within the jurisdiction of the church.
In the present climate, however, the most obvious violation in this regard is politics. We live in times of political apostasy and depravity, and many Christians have creditably recovered the historic biblical vision of a Christian-shaped politics. Jesus is truly Lord in every realm, including the political realm. But the church isn’t commissioned for direct political engagement. The church engages politics only indirectly—by preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and training individual Christians to apply the Faith in every area of life and thought, including politics. A healthy politics is one consequence of the church’s faithful gospel preaching and living—but not its institutional task. As Zylstra writes:
The institutional church will carefully limit itself to its specific mission, “preaching the word, in season and out of season.” (2 Tim. 4:2) The subsidiary tasks that it will take upon itself are to create the conditions for its major responsibility: to bring men to repentance and service. But as an institution it will avoid taking over that service itself. The institutional church, in pulpit and pastoral care, will proclaim the Gospel for politics and economics; it will not want to become institutionally involved in political and economic responsibility, except in emergency situations. Instead, the proclamation of the Gospel must challenge the members of the church to become servants of the King in the non-ecclesiastical areas of life, as part of a life of sanctification.[7]
7. Bernard Zylstra, “The Word Our Life (The Kingdom of God as the Foundation of the Church),” International Reformed Bulletin 49/50 [1972], 73–74, emphasis in original.
Mixing the institutional church with civil governance tends to lead to messianic politics: political soteriology (a traditionally Leftist dogma). Messianic politics is fatal not only to politics but to the church. But there are no political messiahs apart from Jesus Christ (Donald Trump certainly isn’t one). When the church degenerates into an arm of a political party or precinct, it trades away its high calling as a bastion of gospel proclamation for the pottage of a political-action special interest group. The church shouldn’t permit the revisionary secular interpretation of the separation of church and state (meaning, the separation of the state from God) to propel them toward its opposite error: a melding of church and state. The church and state are two separate spheres, each tasked with its own unique privileges and responsibilities. This is called sphere sovereignty.[8]
8. Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, James D. Bratt, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 461–490.
Conclusion
The church does not equal the kingdom, but the church is part of God’s kingdom. And the church is not to directly oversee every activity in God’s kingdom. Muddying and muddling church and kingdom demotes each, but recognizing the church in its unique and vital role within the kingdom as Christ’s cosmic reign preserves the proper relationship between them that assures the coherence of God’s work in the world.
