Note: From Two Cities, Two Loves (P&R Publishing, 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
The bottom line of what I have been arguing in this chapter is that Christians are citizens of two kingdoms, the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and they have responsibilities in each. Those responsibilities are not on an equal plane. Christians are citizens of God’s kingdom first, which means that they will enter the secular world as Christians and work for its good as Christians both should and can, but they should not enter the Christian world as unbelievers, attempting to modify the church to accommodate the world’s concerns. Nevertheless, they will be part of the world in which God has placed them.
But what are they to do practically? Christians have some idea of what government, life and culture might look like from a Christian point of view. How do they go about moving toward this better world if the solution is not merely trying to impose their vision of the just society on others by power legislation? As a starting point, I suggest the following three priorities.
Participation
In the first place, Christians need to participate in secular life rather than merely shoot from the sidelines at secular people and at what secular people are doing. In other words, we must participate in man’s city – but in the right way.
One of the arguments Michael Horton makes in Beyond Culture Wars is that at this moment in history evangelicals have little to offer in the cultural battles, first, because they have not participated in culture enough for their views about it to be taken seriously, and second, because they do not know the Bible or their own theology well enough to be able to give a distinctly Christian contribution if they did. All they can do is be negative. They are not making their own positive contributions.
It was not always this way. We need to remember that in the past, America’s great academic centers, such as Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Princeton and other schools, were established by orthodox Christians. Many, though not all, of the United States’ founding fathers had Christian commitments and contributed to the formation of the American democratic experiment out of a biblical world and life view. Thinking back to Europe, we remember that the Reformation faith gave content and motivation to such cultural giants as Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel, Rembrandt, John Donne, John Milton, Sir Isaac Newton and others. Evangelicals are just not producing people of their caliber today.
Until we produce our own quality art, our hysterical denunciations of what is admittedly “artistic trash” will fall on deaf ears. Until we show how Christians in government can and should function, being concerned not just for our rights and privileges but for the good of all and with justice for all, we will rightly be ignored. As Horton says, “If we have not paid our dues by years of making positive contributions to culture, we simply do not have the cultural clout to pontificate about cultural crises.” [p. 30] Only by participating in such cultural endeavors and thus by modeling what we believe can and should be done will we gain a hearing and actually begin to be effective.
Persuasion
The second thing evangelicals need to learn if they are to be effective in moving the world in a more righteous direction is the art of persuasion. There are two parts to this. First, evangelicals must learn to think about the issues – really think about them. Second, they must learn the art of persuasion itself.
Evangelicals are not great thinkers. To be sure, the current age is not a thinking age even for non-Christians. These are exceedingly mindless times. Television and other forms of visual media bypass rational thought by means of images. This means not only that they do not encourage thought in those who watch them but that they actually help to destroy rational processes. As a result, most people have become susceptible to mere manipulation not only in buying commercial products (which they usually do not need) but also in trying to fulfill such serious duties as voting in national elections. Politics at the highest level is no longer a politics of principled positions and arguments but of appearances.
All of this is true. Nevertheless, there are those at the top of our society who are manipulators rather than the manipulated, thinkers rather than the mindless hordes, and these are the leaders that Christian thinkers must engage. It is here the battle must be won, if it is to be won, and it must be won by arguments.
Moreover, our arguments must be formed by genuinely Christian thinking. A few years ago the board and staff of the Bible Study Hour, the radio and conference ministry in which I am engaged, met to work out a focus for the ministry. We knew what programs we were conducting. But we met to ask what it was that we were really hoping to accomplish and what we might want to do differently to achieve those goals and not some other ends. At the end of a day and a half of careful self-examination, we expressed our goal as “teaching people to think and act biblically.” Those words said that although we are concerned with right action, we recognize that right thinking comes before right action. Furthermore, because we are Christians, we also recognize that right thinking must be biblical, that is, informed by biblical truths and controlled by biblical categories.
In Romans 12:1-2, at the start of the application section of Paul’s great letter to the Romans, there is an important reference to renewal. The verses say,
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.
In this important passage, renewal is the key. But it begins with the renewal of our minds, and this means that it begins with the individual believer first of all. The Christian must become a person who thinks as God thinks because he or she has a deep and perceptive knowledge of the Bible in which the mind of God is disclosed.
The apostle had a renewed mind himself. So he described his battle with the world in these terms:
Though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (II Corinthians 10:3-5)
The battle in which the apostle Paul saw himself engaged was not a battle for political power by which he hoped to gain his objectives but a battle of arguments. It was a battle of ideas that he knew would in time change the world. Paul thought in a Christian way, and he wanted to persuade others to think along Christian lines too.
Here is an example from the Reformation period. In 1524, seven years after Martin Luther had nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, the farmers of Germany rebelled against their feudal lords in what became known as the Peasants’ War (1524-1526). It began near Schaffhausen, where Hans Müller, acting on a suggestion from Thomas Münzer, formed the peasants into an “Evangelical Brotherhood” that was pledged to emancipate the farmers. By the end of that year, some thirty thousand farmers were in arms in southern Germany, refusing to pay state taxes, church tithes or feudal dues. In March 1525, they drafted and circulated widely a document called the “Twelve Articles” in which they claimed the right to choose their own pastors, pay only just tithes, be considered as free men rather than serfs, enjoy fair rents and other such reasonable demands. They were also favorable to the Reformation and opposed to the Roman Catholic Church.
The peasants sent a copy of the articles to Luther, fully expecting his support. And, indeed, Luther’s first response was sympathetic. Luther acknowledged the injustices about which the farmers were in arms and blamed the rulers of both state and church for their responsibility. “We have no one on earth to thank for this mischievous rebellion except you, princes and lords, and especially you blind bishops….You do nothing but flay and rob your subjects, in order that you may lead a life of splendor and pride, until the poor common people can bear it no longer.” [Martin Luther, “Admonition to Peace,” quoted in Will Durant, The Reformation, p. 386]
But Luther did not endorse the rebellion, even though the majority of its goals coincided with those of the Reformation. And later, when hundreds of monasteries were sacked and many cities overrun, Luther denounced the violence in characteristically fierce and uncompromising terms.
Why did he react this way, when nearly everyone, the peasants above all, expected him to side with them? Luther’s justified fear of anarchy was one strong reason. Another was his belief that God had established the authority of princes. To rebel against the powers that exist is to rebel against God, he said. But Luther also knew that the power of the sword has not been given either to the church or to the individual Christian, and he was aware that our weapons are not the weapons of this world and that our arguments alone have power “to demolish strongholds” (II Corinthians 10:4).
According to Luther, the Reformation would proceed non vi, sed verbo – not by force, but by the power of God’s Word. And so it did! The Peasants’ War was a tragic episode in the Reformation period. More lives were lost in that war in Germany than in any tumult prior to the Thirty Years’ War. Some 130,000 farmers died in battle or afterward as a result of retaliatory punishments. Germany was impoverished. The Reformation itself almost perished. But it did not, because it was moving forward by the power of the Word of God and persuasion, as God blessed the teaching and influence of the Reformers.
Prayer
Yet when all is said, it is not enough for evangelicals merely to participate in the world’s affairs and attempt to persuade non-Christians of a right and better way. We must also be people of prayer since we know that apart from God’s intervention, the world will neither understand nor heed what we are saying.
We are not competing on a level playing field, to use a modern idiom. We are fighting for spiritual realities, and the world is blind to these truths. Moreover, the world is hostile to God, and as a result it is also hostile to those who represent him in this world. Jesus said, “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: ‘No servant is greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also” (John 15:19-20). In that day the religious power of Israel and the secular power of Rome combined to have Jesus executed, and all he had done was to speak the truth among them.
In the mid-1990s, Gene Edward Veith predicted that in the days ahead, Western Christians are going to experience more and more hardship and even persecution. In the postmodern world into which we are moving, “Christians must not…expect to fare particularly well….Christians will be excoriated for ‘thinking they have the only truth.’ They will be condemned for their intolerance, for ‘trying to force their beliefs on everybody else.’ Christians can expect to be excluded from postmodernists’ invocations of tolerance and pluralism. As the culture becomes more and more lawless and brutal, Christians may even taste persecution. The church may or may not grow in such a climate.” This sounds discouraging, but Veith remains optimistic because, as he says, “the church of Jesus Christ cannot be overcome by the gates of hell, much less by a culture (Matthew 16:18).” [Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times, pp. 222-223.]
When Jesus was about to be taken from the world, he prayed for all who should believe on him, that they would stand for the truth, as he did, and live as he did in the world. That is the most important thing, after all: that we should be like Jesus Christ. If we are, there will be persecutions. We will lose battles. But we will win some too, and when that happens the world will look on and occasionally confess that we were right.
Taken from Two Cities, Two Loves, by James Montgomery Boice, ISBN 979-8-8879-016-9, “Citizens of Two Kingdoms” (pp. 114-120); used with permission from P&R Publishing, P.O. Box 817, Phillipsburg, N.J. 08865.
James Montgomery Boice, theologian, Bible teacher, author, and speaker
