We need to start thinking about church/state relations in eschatological categories. If we think of them in static categories, the Christian church will find it hard to avoid becoming reactionary. That kind of conservatism is the way of death.
The Marxists know what they are supposed to be doing right now because they have an eschatology of the state. They say that the dictatorship of the proletariat will eventually wither away, which is perfect nonsense, but they nevertheless do have an eschatology of the thing. But when believing Christians get involved in politics they are hampered by the fact that politics is inherently an eschatological discipline, and their eschatology is either lurid, confused, pessimistic, or non-existent. Why should we want to drive the car if we don’t believe the car is going anywhere? Why should anybody let us drive the car?
So I want to think of where church/state relations are headed teleologically — we need a political eschatology. This will orient us where we need to be oriented. Man was created to be informed by the past, but oriented by the future, not the past. The future is the true East.
We have been all sorts of places. History is messy and at certain times we should want to identify with the Methodists, or Moravians, or Baptists, or Reformed, because that is where the Spirit was moving at that time. There were times when some form of anabaptism was closer to center of faithfulness. We should always identify with faithfulness, whether that faithfulness was connected to “our faction” or not. But in doing this, we need to stand with those faithful saints while avoiding the false eschatologies that arose from those situations. I say this because someone can be where they ought to be, but not know where all of us ought to go. Those are two separate questions.
So the central question I am trying to ask and answer in this discussion is this: where is the Spirit taking us, considered in thousand year chunks? What is it supposed to look like 500 years before the end?
Now, that said, if the Church is everything that matters for the new humanity, then one option is that the state outside the Church goes to hell and we let it (anabaptism). Another is that the functions of the state are subsumed into the Church (which for various reasons I don’t want). Yet another logical option is that the functions of the state wither down to nothing or virtually nothing because of the prevailing Edenic conditions brought about by gospel preaching. We don’t have the problem of reconciliation between church and state anymore because one of the parties needing to be reconciled went poof.
The problem I have with this third option is not a logical one, but rather the fact of the prophecies of healing for the nations, and the honor and glory of kings receiving much higher and greater glory because of their submission to the Church. When kings come to Christ, their glory will grow. When kings die to their own glory, they will be raised in the glory of Another. And incidentally, though I am a minarchist (not an anarchist), and I believe that the kings of the latter glory will largely be ceremonial figureheads, I do not intend this as demeaning or as some kind of a nothing-honor. Why would any of us think that ceremony is a trivial thing? I suspect it will be shown to be the chief thing, far better than the current techniques for lording it over people — to wit, kicking butt and taking names — peace through superior firepower. That is a model that has a certain rough justice about it, but we have to admit that improvements could be made. When the lion lies down with the lamb, it will not be because men with block letters on their jackets are standing over them with automatic weapons.
So my proposed solution to all this, my fourth option, is to divide a believing world into Church (believing administration of Word and sacrament) and Kingdom (believing administration of bread baking, lovemaking, candlestick making, warfare, sewage treatment, etc.) The Church is the central cathedral and the Kingdom is the parish. The Kingdom may certainly be called the Church by synecdoche, just as all ancient Israel could be called Zion, just so long as we maintain a category elsewhere that keeps them clearly distinct. I want to keep this distinction sharp because I don’t ever want to have ministers of the Word too closely involved in chopping off the heads of miscreants. Wanting to do better than the Inquisition is not setting the bar too high. Whaddaya say?
No one nation replaces Israel — there is one global Israel, an international kingdom, with the worship of Christ at the center. Let’s call it Christendom. We could also think of all the individual civil societies as so many little israels, but only to the extent that the national churches are “churches.” But if the universal Church is the Temple of the new order, then all the nations taken together are the outskirts of the new Israel.
The language I use for this distinction is Church and Kingdom. The Church is the heart of the Kingdom, but not everything in the Kingdom is Church proper, although it is “Church” in some sense. The Church is at the center, and Christendom surrounds her.
The early Church was not Israel complete “in itself,” but was rather an entity that took on certain civil functions in a jury-rigged fashion until a believing culture around the Church had been planted. In other words, Paul told the Corinthians to handle civil disputes in the Church, not because they belonged there ultimately, but rather because it would be worse to let unbelievers handle it. But Paul’s requirement of a jury-rigged small claims court in the Church disappears once the civil magistrates are all Christians, the laws are biblical, and the witnesses are sworn in on a Bible.
So America, Nigeria, Scotland, etc. never become the city of God. But they do all bring their honor and glory into the Church (Rev. 21:24, 26). They do become nursing fathers to the Church (Is. 49:23), submitting themselves to the Church, and being discipled by the Church. They all become parts of the Kingdom, they assume their station as one of the many nations of Christendom. I don’t see how the leaves on the tree of life can be for the healing of the nations without the nations actually getting better (Rev. 22:2).
So the Church is not gathered into the State, with ecclesiastical functions delegated to some part of the bureaucracy. Rather, I see the nations gathered to the Church, with the remaining civil functions distinct from the Church proper, but subordinate to it. The honor and glory of the kings really is honor and glory, and that honor and glory is really brought as tribute to be laid on the altar. In other words, I don’t see the nations gathering the Church, but rather the Church gathering the nations.
Remember, this is a purified Church, and not a grasping Church with a thin veneer of piety. Remember, this is eschatology, and depends upon the Spirit working through millennia. I am talking about 3500 A.D., and not proposing a sorry retread of the Sanhedrin or the Council of Constance to be implemented tomorrow.
Against this, it could be argued that in ancient Israel citizenship in the nation and membership in the congregation were identical, and so that creates problems for us in the era of an international Church, when they can’t be identical. But actually I deny the premise. I don’t agree that the two citizenships were identical in ancient Israel (Dt. 23:2-3). If Moabites and bastards could not come into the congregation of the Lord until after ten generations, that had to be ten generations of some sort of probationary catechumen status, presumably circumcised but maybe not. And then there were sons of Belial who were headed in the other direction. There were ways to be “cut off” from the congregation short of execution, which means that the two citizenships were logically distinct, but drastically intertwined — like being English and being Anglican at certain points in their history.
This is admittedly a rough, preliminary sketch. But Christopher Dawson once said that the Church lives in the light of eternity, and can afford to be patient. Recall that I am a postmillennialist. We have all the time in the world.