by Adi Schlebusch
When speaking of the Kingdom, the Church, and the relationship between the two, it is first necessary to define both. Throughout Scripture, both are mentioned dozens of times as being the possession of God. The Greek word used in the New Testament for the church, ecclesia (ἐκκλησία), is perhaps one of the most famous words in Koine Greek. Less famous is the Greek word basileia (βασιλεία), the Kingdom, which is mentioned 162 times in the New Testament alone.
The Old Testament equivalents of these terms are qahal (קְהַ֖ל) which, like ecclesia means assembly, and malku (מַלְכוּ֙) meaning kingdom.
In its 27th article, the Belgic Confession defines the Church as
a holy congregation and gathering of true Christian believers … not confined, bound, or limited to a certain place or people … joined and united in heart and will, in one and the same Spirit, by the power of faith.
The Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck points out that the Kingdom of God encompasses far more than just the Church as the gathering of true believers bound together by faith. In fact, he notes that the Kingdom consists of three different life spheres, one of which is the church, with the other two being the state and the culture, with the family serving as the foundation of the aforementioned three life spheres. Yet all of these life spheres are, per Bavinck, brought into the Kingdom of God through the process of sanctification.[1] The Kingdom of God consists of every sanctified element of creation which has been transformed from the darkness of distortion and depravity to the light of purity and true purpose. The Kingdom of God consists of everything in creation liberated from slavery to Satan, sin, and death. The father of Reformed Biblical Theology, Geerhardus Vos, likewise points out that:
The thought of the Kingdom of God implies the subjection of the entire range of human life in all its forms and spheres to the ends of religion. The Kingdom reminds us of the absoluteness, the pervasiveness, the unrestricted dominion, which of right belong to all true religion. It proclaims that religion, and religion alone, can act as the supreme unifying, centralizing factor in the life of man, as that which binds all together and perfects all by leading it to its final goal in the service of God.[2]
Bavinck and Vos’ definition differs from that of Augustine, who writes in the City of God that “leaving out that Kingdom concerning which He shall say in the end: ‘Come, ye blessed of my Father, take possession of the Kingdom prepared for you,’ the church could now be called his Kingdom or the Kingdom of heaven.”[3] This points to a lamentable Platonic influence on Augustine which sadly affected his doctrine of creation, and which blinded him to the redemptive significance of Christ’s work for creation itself. He therefore wrongly regards Christians as belonging to heavenly city to the extent that they are living in captivity in the earthly city as a foreign land.[4] In this regard Augustine was rightly countered by his contemporary Salvian, who emphasized not only that the kingship of God extends to all of creation, but also pointed to the cosmic significance of Christ’s redemption, with God demanding covenantal obedience from all families and nations.[5] In other words, while regeneration entails becoming part of the Christ’s Church, the believer always remains part of a distinct family, a city, a community, a business, and a tribe or a people. These relations also have a distinct eschatological significance along with the Church, not only because they are preserved to the end of the world and beyond (Rev. 7:9), but also because God designed people in such a way that we look toward the future in terms of their progeny. And as such the Church’s own perpetuation is largely dependent upon families who procreate and baptize their children. These social units, along with the Christian civil order (or state), are all constituent parts of the all-encompassing and unrestricted Kingdom of God, which transcends the distinctions between the various life spheres, yet without doing away with these distinctions.
In this regard the Radical Two-Kingdom notion that the Church and the Kingdom are synonymous ought to be rejected. This erroneous view leads R2K to propose that nothing outside the church realm as existing in the public square is an expression of the Kingdom of God. Everything outside the church realm supposedly exists in a so-called “common realm” which is, according to R2K, not be associated with the Kingdom of God in the Church. This false equation of the Kingdom and the Church leads to R2K’s destructive notion that there is no such thing as Christian families, Christian schools, Christian media, Christian philosophy, Christian communities, or Christian nations. Indeed, Christian in the adjectival sense cannot be used for anything but the church.[6] But the visible Church is also not the only outward expression of the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God also becomes visible in the spheres of the family, art, commerce, industry, and politics. As Geerhardus Vos points out:
Wherever one of these spheres comes under the controlling influence of the principle of the divine supremacy and glory, and this outwardly reveals itself, there we can truly say that the Kingdom of God has become manifest … It is entirely in accordance with the spirit of Jesus’ teaching to subsume these [the family, politics, art, science, commerce, industry] under the kingdom of God and co-ordinate them with the visible Church as true manifestations of this Kingdom.[7]
And so while it is important to maintain that the Church is not the Kingdom, this is not to say that the Church is not central to the Kingdom of God. The Church Invisible consists of all the true citizens of God’s Kingdom, while the Church Visible is a manifestation of the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth. The Church Invisible is the single Bride of Christ and wherein all the elect children of God share a membership without distinction. As such, the Church is the cement that keeps the Kingdom, consisting of various families, nations, communities, and individuals, together. The Church is the spiritual nation of God who concretizes the Kingdom on earth by exercising dominion for Christ. The Church is also integral to the Kingdom in a way that a nation isn’t—in other words, while the Kingdom can, short interval, still continue to exist in the absence of a a Christian nation, it cannot exist without the Church. This is because the Church itself holds the power of the keys of the Kingdom of God, to bring in or shut people and families out of this Kingdom (Matthew 16:19). The Kingdom is brought to the world through the Church. Vos explains: "The binding and loosing do not refer to heaven itself, as if heaven were shut or opened, but refer to certain things lying within the sphere of heaven, and not of heaven alone but of earth likewise."[8]
This of course implies that, in a postlapsarian sense, the Church both logically and chronologically precedes the Kingdom in that the Kingdom only comes through the work of those who have already been ingrafted in the Church. The work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration brings about the Church, so the work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification brings about the Kingdom. It is through the witness of the Church that the nations are discipled (Matthew 28:19) and it is through the witness of the Church that the kingdoms of the earth are transformed into the Kingdom of Jesus Christ (Revelation 11:15). While the Kingdom and the Church are both covenantal institutions, the invisible church as consisting of all the elect who cannot ever lose their salvation has an unconditional membership, while covenantal membership in the kingdom of God on earth is conditional. This is a characteristic the kingdom of God on earth shares with the visible church that it does not share with the invisible church. The Reformer Heinrich Bullinger’s covenant theology helps us understand this conditionality of Kingdom covenantal membership in that he explains that this membership of nations, families and cities can, unlike election of individuals unto salvation, be lost through apostasy and disobedience, while it must be maintained through covenantal obedience to God’s Law. In this regard it is vital to note what Vos comments on Romans 11:
[The] “branches broken off” metaphor has frequently been viewed as proof of the relativity and changeability of election, and it is pointed out that at the end of vs. 23, the Gentile Christians are threatened with being cut off in case they do not continue in the kindness of God. But wrongly. Already this image of engrafting should have restrained such an explanation. This image is nowhere and never used of the implanting of an individual Christian into the mystical body of Christ by regeneration. Rather, it signifies the reception of a racial line or national line into the dispensation of the covenant or their exclusion from it. This reception, of course, occurs by faith in the preached word, and to that extent, with this engrafting of a race or a nation, there is also connected the implanting of individuals into the body of Christ. The cutting off, of course, occurs by unbelief; not, however, by the unbelief of persons who first believed, but solely by the remaining in unbelief of those who, by virtue of their belonging to the racial line, should have believed and were reckoned as believers. So, a rejection (or multiple rejections) of an elect race is possible, without its being connected to a reprobation of elect believers. Certainly, however, the rejection of a race or nation involves at the same time the personal reprobation of a sequence of people. Nearly all the Israelites who are born and die between the rejection of Israel as a nation and the reception of Israel at the end times appear to belong to those reprobated. And the threat of Romans 9:22 (of being broken off) is not directed to the Gentile Christians as individual believers but to them considered racially.[9]
Only once this earthly manifestation of the Kingdom, which Bullinger calls the kingdom of grace (regnum gratiae terrenum) is transformed into an eternal heavenly kingdom of glory (regnum gloriae coeleste) with the second coming of Jesus Christ, and only then is there a full and complete overlap between membership in the church and the kingdom of heaven.[10] It is also this earthly kingdom of grace which Jesus hands over to the Father for it to be transformed into the heavenly kingdom of glory (I Corinthians 15:24).
Bullinger’s emphasis on the bilateral nature of the covenant also needs to be distinguished from Calvin’s view of a unilateral, unconditional covenant which tends to support the Augustinian conflation of Church Militant and Kingdom on earth. For Bullinger there are not two kingdoms but one, which unites itself in all aspects of creation under the rule of God.[11]
To explain this further: creation itself was designed as a monarchy in which God exercises absolute rule. The dominion mandate is all about restoring this rule wherever it has been disrupted by sin, but the dominion mandate does not entail transforming creation into a church, but rather the Church being the salt and light, that is, a main vehicle through which the Kingdom of God is gradually established over every square inch of creation by the work of the members of Christ’s Church. In this regard the Kingdom can be viewed as growing out of the work of the Invisible Church.
A thorough understanding of the nature of the Kingdom of God and the place of the Church in that Kingdom is actually central to understanding our calling as members of Christ’s Church in the context of the Kingdom of God. As true members of Christ’s Church, we desire to live in complete obedience to Him so as to be a blessing unto the nations, and to see his nearness to us communicated through the coming of his Kingdom in terms of redeeming not only every aspect of the social order but also every aspect of the cosmos itself.
So in conclusion, the Church Invisible is different from the Kingdom of God in that membership of the former is unconditional and made up of all the elect without distinction. The Church Visible, on the other hand, is an institution that forms a central part of the manifestation of the Kingdom of God and which co-ordinates with the other spheres of life in which the Kingdom manifests, but remains just that—a part of the Kingdom just like the Christian family, the Christian nation, the Christian business, the Christian university, the Christian city, the Christian research institute, and the Christian sports club. The Church Visible is not the Kingdom, and the Church Invisible is not the Kingdom, but the relationship between Church and Kingdom is ultimately one of interrelatedness and interdependence. Only with the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, will the Church Invisible become visible and through it, the fullness of heavenly, eternal kingdom of glory will be revealed.
The author is a senior researcher with the Pactum Institute.
[1] Herman Bavinck. 2011. “The Kingdom of God, The Highest Good,” Translated by Nelson D. Kloosterman. The Bavinck Review 2, p. 156.
[2] Geerhardus Vos. 1903. The teaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church. New York: American Tract Society, p. 192.
[3] Augustine, City of God, XX.9.
[4] Ibid., XIX.17.
[5] Salvian, On the Government of God, IV.9
[6] Bret McAtee. 2023. Saved to be Warriors: Exposing the Errors of Radical Two-Kingdom Theology (Pantokrator Press: Aalten), 39.
[7] Vos, Kingdom of God, 163, 165.
[8] Vos, Kingdom of God, 148
[9] Geerhardus Vos. 1896. Reformed Dogmatics vol. 1: Theology Proper. Translated by Richard Graffin (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press), 118.
[10] Bullinger, Decades 2:276.
[11] E. Campi. 2014. Shifting Patterns of Reformed Tradition (Gӧttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht), 64.