Two Kingdoms

Bob Waters has written an interesting essay on Luther's teaching of the Two Kingdoms. I must admit I know nothing about that teaching beyond what Waters has written. The idea is that "God exercises His sovereignty in two ways- through compulsion, and through love." The compulsion element is through laws, which includes the State, the love through the church.

The emphasis in Waters' article is that these two kingdoms are distinct from one another, and should not be mixed. We understand this theologically by rejecting legalism, which would define the love and salvation of God as bound by submission to specified rules. The love of God is not found in rules, but in faith in Christ.

But Waters' point is that there is another realm in which this becomes an issue, and that is the mixing of Christian faith and State issues. This is one of the great problems in the American Christian church, the blurring of the line between God and the United States. I can recall reading internet newsgroups long ago, and seeing a posting that said something to the effect of "the American flag is the battle flag of heaven." Fellow believers routinely blend patriotism with faith. Waters writes

The Church as such owes allegiance to only one country- a heavenly one- and despite the desirability of our loving and praying for our earthly commonwealth, the appropriateness of having a symbol of division [the national flag displayed in front of the church] among the members of the Body of Christ in the front of a church is nearly as questionable e as the very notion of having a symbol of a loyalty other than our loyalty to God in the chancel as a matter of principle. There are First Commandment issues involved here- though comparatively few Americans would see them.

In a similar vein, I once wrote

As Christians, we are to have one and only one allegiance: to God. Jesus said you cannot serve two masters. Inevitably, the two masters compete for your loyalty, and it is always easier in the moment to serve the other master rather than God. I am not saying I am not patriotic, nor am I speaking against loyalty to my country. Not at all. But my allegiance must only be to God, never to anything else.

As believers, we must remember who we are and to whom we belong, and not let anything get in the way of that.

God and the Tsunami

Stuart Buck writes about the crisis of faith some have because of the catastrophe in south Asia. It's the standard question: how can a loving God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Part of the answer, I think, is something I've written before, namely that "God is concerned primarily with our spiritual lives, not our physical lives" whereas we humans tend to be completely focused on this life. In the end, the suffering experienced in this world will either be infinitely dwarfed by the suffering of Hell or be made to completely disappear against the shining paradise of Heaven.

But, there is another point to be made. In one of the comments to Buck's post, a writer quotes C.S. Lewis saying

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the "unimaginable sum of human misery". Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must also remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

This is an important point. Catastrophes on the order of the tsunami or the Holocaust bring about the kind of questions being raised now, but catastrophes on a much smaller scale do not. It is as if the suffering of those victims in Asia is so much greater than the victims, say, of the flooding in California this week. What this really reflects is the callousness in our hearts. We have come to accept a certain level of suffering and pain. Our attitude is, if five people die in a fiery car crash, well that's sad and unfortunate, because we are accustomed to people dying in car crashes. It requires an event out of the ordinary, like the tsunami, to shock us into a reaction.

We face the danger of becoming insensitive to other's sufferings. Pain is pain, whether one person is suffering it, or one thousand. It is all the same.