The notion of Christendom is not just a personal pipe dream. It is not a collection of “wouldn’t it be nice” surmises. A Reformed understanding of the gospel, of worship, of education, of politics, and so on, is incoherent apart from a commitment to Christendom. Christendom is an essential part of a Reformed theology in its historical setting. This does not mean that said Christendom must be up and running — just that there needs to be a commitment to it by faith. When Abraham saw his descendants as heirs of the whole world, and not by law either, he did not have Christendom up and running at just that moment. But he still knew that the world was his, and that his heirs would walk around in it. A faithful Reformed missionary in Egypt knows that Christendom is not right outside his window. But Jesus is right outside his window, and everywhere else too. We do not yet see everything subject to man — but we see Jesus. Christendom is easier to see when it can be photographed, but we are called to see it whether it can be photographed or not.
This whole issue is what systematic theologians might call a “big deal.” Underneath a lot of the current controversies that are roiling the Reformed world are the issues of paedocommunion and postmillennialism. The thing these two doctrines share in common is that they are both, in different ways, an optimistic testimony about the course of future generations. Paedocommunion nurtures the next generation in optimistic faith, and postmillennialism is the grounded hope that God will continue to nurture His Church across multiple generations. Generations do not occur in the resurrection — they are a phenomenon found in this world, and they are directly connected to the questions that swirl around the formation of a culture. No culture without cultus. A culture is religion externalized, and thus it makes sense to ask of every culture what form of worship lies at the center of it. It is a stark fact that the center of secular culture is not the worship of God the Father through the name of Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit. That being the case, Christians ought to have no devotion whatever to secular culture. Devotion to their culture means devotion somehow to their gods, and we should always refuse to bow down to their gods.
If this historic Reformed faith is resurgent (and it is), and if people are starting to pay attention to it (and they are), and this poses a threat to those in the Reformed world who have signed a peace treaty with the Amalek . . I meant to say the secular state, then it might seem like a good idea to distract everybody by getting people to be suspicious about our Reformed bona fides. This can easily be done by saying that we are wobbly at best on sola fide, or that we are sacramentalists of some sort, and that such things are clearly Not Good. But if they were to raise the real objection, which is that we believe that Jesus is Lord of Heaven and earth, and that the earth ought to admit it sooner rather than later, a lot of people in their own churches would wonder (and perhaps say), “What’s wrong with that?” It is easier to say that we don’t really preach the gospel than to say something far closer to the truth, which is that we believe that the unchained gospel is in the process of conquering the whole world.
After all, how potent is a gospel that allows you the freedom to sign peace treaties with Amalekites?