Election 08's 'False Clerics and Schismatic Spirits'
In this election year, I urge you to consider this sound wisdom in regards to the two kingdoms. Concordia Seminary Institute of Lay Vocation: Election 08's 'False Clerics and Schismatic Spirits'
No doubt our pastor, John F. Johnson, and many congregants have experienced just as many frustrations as Wright [Obama's pastor] on account of their race. But I have never heard about it from the pulpit or in committees and voters' meetings. Johnson preaches every Sunday on the prescribed readings for that day. That's the beauty of lectionaries in liturgical churches; they are meant to shield homilists from the hubris of their urge to be "original." Therefore our pastor is a much more convincing preacher than Wright. As a confessional Lutheran, he knows, as do his listeners, that personal gripes have no place in divine service. They have learned from childhood to distinguish properly between the spiritual and the secular realms, between law and gospel, between the "two kingdoms," as we Lutherans call the two realities constituting every Christian's paradoxical existence - kingdoms in which every Christian holds dual citizenship. There is the "right-hand" kingdom that will ultimately be glorified in the kingdom of God. It is infinite, and the church is part of this realm. Here God has revealed himself in Christ. Here Christ rules by grace. Here all are equals, all forgiven sinners, all members of Christ's body. And then there is the temporal "left-hand kingdom," where God conducts a strange mummery and never reveals himself. "Through good and bad princes God governs the terrestrial world," Luther said. In a democracy, these "princes" include all of us, the voters. We make mistakes, of course, but God will ultimately correct those. This is the realm of the law and of practical reason, both under sin, yet gifts from God to operate in this world. The kingdoms are not antagonistic toward one another. Both are God's, and their dialectic is "one of the most valuable and enduring treasures of Luther's theology," wrote German theologian Paul Althaus. It is a treasure because of the liberating message proclaimed by Luther "that society need not be run by the Church in order to be ruled by God," according to William Lazareth, the former Lutheran bishop of New York. Yet too many Protestants have a hard time grasping the breathtaking implication of this insight, which reminds me of Luther's grumble in his commentary on Psalm 101: Â Â Constantly I must pound in and squeeze in and drive in and wedge in this difference between the two kingdoms, even though it is written and said so often that it becomes tedious. The devil never stops cooking and brewing these two kingdoms into each other. In the devil's name the secular leaders always want to be Christ's masters and teach Him how He should run His church and spiritual government. Similarly, the false clerics and schismatic spirits always want to be the masters, though not in God's name, and to teach people how to organize the secular government.
