Today I’m reading Edmund Clowney, a chapter called “The Biblical Theology of the Church,” from a book edited by DA Carson entitled The Church in the Bible and the World. Great chapter! I wanted to quote at some length from a section where Clowney is discussing how the role of the Church is different from and superior to that of the State. I find in this excellent description words of warning for Christians on both the left and the right.
“The new Israel of God is not less a nation because it is spiritually constituted… Like Israel, the NT church is a theocracy, subject in all things to the word of the Lord. But unlike Israel of old, God’s people are no longer to bear the sword to bring God’s judgments on the heathen, nor to defend a territorial inheritance in the earth…
“To this church Christ gives, not a sword, but the keys of the kingdom. The authority sanctioned is not less, but greater than the power that the state exercises with the sword. Not temporal, but eternal judgments are pronounced in the name of Christ… It is because the church invokes eternal rather than temporal judgment that the sword cannot be its instrument…
“The temptation to repeat the Crusades remains with the church… It seems difficult to accept a calling for the state that is so limited: to preserve peace and order, to protect and support human life. Many rightly recognize that the expression of God’s saving kingdom must go beyond personal piety, and they look to the state… to crust social evil and bring in divine justice. But the state is not called to bring in the kingdom, nor to enforce the rule of God’s absolute righteousness. Yet there stands a nation, the church of Jesus Christ, to be not only a witness and a refuge, but a people among whom the power of the kingdom is already at work, and Christ’s final salvation already realized. Until the church manifests in corporate form the meaning of the coming of the kingdom in the Spirit, its witness will be hindered. It will not be a city set upon a hill. Not only will it fail to manifest the social dimension of God’s aving righteousness: it will diminish the gospel message tha tit seeks to proclaim.”
(citations range from pages 33-35).