The Two Kingdoms Quotes

“it is worth pausing to consider the oddity of the charge that Protestantism drove God out of everyday life. After all, it was Luther’s intention to do just the opposite—to bring Christianity out of the monasteries and private masses of the chantry chapels into the ordinary life of the layman. To be sure, hearing priests chant in a foreign language behind an altar screen may have induced a certain frisson, but the Lutheran farmer lustily singing psalms in German while he ploughed his fields surely had a fuller sense of the presence of God in his work and in the world. The magisterial Reformers sought to transform the notion of the “spiritual kingdom” from an institutional realm of the clergy alone to a dimension of existence animating every aspect of a Christian’s life.”
― W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed

“Properly speaking, the rulers of the kingdoms of this world, mediating as they do the authority of Christ, are likewise responsible for sustaining the creation order for the sake of its redemption. Their task is not to try and achieve this redemption, but neither should they be wholly indifferent to it. Their office is only coherent if it has a purpose or end—sustaining the creation order—and this end is only coherent if it is itself directed toward a final end—the consummation of this order.”
― W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed

“Either the unity of the Trinity is compromised, by inappropriately setting the activity of God the Father and the activity of God the Son against one another, or the unity of Christ’s person is compromised, by inappropriately setting Christ’s divine nature as the eternal logos against his incarnate form as Christ the Redeemer.”
― W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed

“The two kingdoms were not two institutions or even two domains of the world, but two ways in which the kingship of Christ made itself felt in the life of each and every believer.”
― W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Two Kingdoms: A Guide for the Perplexed