Ken Myers on the “Two-Kingdom” Social Theory

I recently listened to an interview with Ken Myers at Ordinary Means, and I transcribed one of the questions and Myers’ answer from the interview at my blog. The question had to do with the two kingdom view of culture and the church. Justin Taylor picked it up on his blog, then Hunter Baker posted it here.

Readers could assume that Hunter is interacting with Myers’ view, and that Myers was saying that there is not a Christian view of politics (or whatever). Hunter responded to what the interviewer called the “high two-kingdoms view.” Myers was assuming the view for the sake of argument. If you read the whole answer, you will get some more of what Myers is trying to explain. Here is the whole exchange for context:

Question: One of the arguments out there by what I am going to call a “high two-kingdoms view,” is that there is not a distinctively Christian way of doing “X” vocation, even that we should resist that because that would be to mix the kingdoms, and if you were to, for example (this would be the anti-Abraham Kuyper position), be a politician, your Christian thought should not come in. Could you interact with that a little?

Myers: First of all I would agree…I am a believer in natural law. Let me put it this way. Let me say for the sake of the argument that I’ll agree with that, there isn’t a distinctively Christian view of politics and art, or anything. But there is a distinctively human view; that is there are de-humanizing possibilities in those spheres; Christians we are necessarily humanists. That is, Christians are necessarily interested in sustaining the best for human beings as human beings.

Now, having said that, I also do believe that any effort to understand the human apart from Christ falls short. Not that it is wrong, but I do think that we only understand our humanity fully by understanding [Christ]…I think that the biblical account of life helps us understand our humanity. So I think there are insights into humanity that come from all sorts of cultural sources through general revelation, but I do think that there are correctives that Scripture offers to understanding our humanity that are just not available elsewhere. Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is distinctively Christian.

Let me put it the other way. What does Paul mean when he says in Colossians 1 that all things are through him and for him and to him in. That whole passage, that whole hymn from Paul seems to be that creation cannot be properly understood unless you understand it in a Christocentric form. And I think that it has as much to do with Christ’s identity as creator as it does Christ’s identity as redeemer.

This is where I challenge my two-kingdom friends. I think there is a danger in two kingdom thought of separating Christ as creator and Christ as redeemer, at least more than the New Testament does. I think that the New Testament speaks, just as the Old Testament, about the identity of God as creator and redeemer in a non-modalistic way. God is both creator and redeemer at once, and Christ is both creator and redeemer at once. In fact, redemption is a recovery of creation; redemption is a restoration of creation. So I think that we need to be careful from separating creation and redemption too starkly.

So I would say that there ought to be a Christocentric politic and aesthetic. Christians will not be the only ones who can recognize properly human and hence Christocentric realities. I think that is what the Reformed idea of common grace means. That non-believers will have the capacity to see that because they perceive things that are built into the structure of creation, built in there by Christ. So there is no getting away from Christ.

I became excited by this when I read Colin Gunton, who points out that there has long been a tendency by Christians to view creation as Unitarians, in other words, an impersonal and non-Trinitarian view of creation. So we think that God the Father made everything, things got screwed up, God the Son came and paid the penalty, and God the Spirit comes along and affirms it. So there is a type of sequential Trinitarianism. But Scripture affirms over and over that creation is a Trinitarian act, and so we don’t separate Christ from the fact of creation and the ordering of creation. To do that too starkly is to make a mistake.

For more of Myers view on culture, you can check out his book All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture, or you can visit Mars Hill Audio. He is the host of that audio journal.