The Thief and the Citizen

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: the thief and the citizen — politics and the mission of the church.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

Four Wednesdays now this lane has examined the pastor's own speech. The mandate to speak at all. The manner of the speaking. The cost of it. The competence it requires. All four of those nights assumed something underneath them without ever examining it: that political life belongs somewhere inside the church's work in the first place. Tonight we go down to that foundation. What is the church for? What is her mission? And when she takes up the citizen's life — the vote, the law, the neighbor, the city — is she doing her work, or wandering from it?

Begin where every answer to that question begins, on a mountain in Galilee. From the gospel according to Matthew, the twenty-eighth chapter:

Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted. And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

Two things to hold from that text before anything else is said. The commission begins with a claim of jurisdiction — all power, in heaven and in earth — and it ends with a curriculum: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. The mission of the church is to make disciples. On that sentence there is no dispute worth naming. Every party to the argument we are about to survey agrees that Matthew twenty-eight is the church's marching order. The fight — and it is a real fight, running through a generation of Reformed and evangelical writing — is over how far the word disciple reaches.

On one side stand those who hold the mission close and narrow. Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, in a book titled What Is the Mission of the Church, locate the mission in the Great Commission and nothing wider: the church is sent to make disciples by proclaiming the gospel and gathering the converted into congregations. The men of the Nine Marks school — Mark Dever, Jonathan Leeman — press the same line with an added distinction: the church as an institution has one commission, while individual Christians, scattered into their callings, carry broader duties. Confuse the two, they warn, and you get mission creep — a church that trades the gospel for a program of social repair. On the other side stand writers like Christopher Wright and the missional movement, who argue that disciple-making cannot be quarantined from justice and mercy and the mending of the world — that a church which proclaims the gospel while stepping over the wounded man on the road has misread its own commission. Those are paraphrases of living writers, credited as such, and the dispute between them is real. Tonight does not settle it. Tonight examines the ground both sides stand on.

Because both sides do stand on common ground, and the ground is a single case that Scripture hands us plainly. It comes from the letter to the Ephesians, the fourth chapter, and it concerns a thief. From Paul:

Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.

One verse. Two commands, with a man's old life bookended between them. Stop stealing. Start working — and work until you have enough to give away. Put off taking; put on giving.

Now attend to everything that verse does not say. Paul does not tell the thief how to find employment. Nothing about acquiring a trade, or discerning which trade. Nothing about approaching an employer with a thief's reputation, or managing wages once they begin to come. Paul issues the command and leaves the execution entirely unaddressed. The command stands over a gap, and the gap is filled with skills Scripture never lists. If the former thief cannot learn those things, he cannot obey. And here is the point on which tonight's whole question turns: helping that man across that gap — walking him from the command into the competence that makes obedience possible — is discipleship. Not a distraction from the work. The substance of it. No one reads Ephesians and concludes that teaching a converted thief an honest trade falls outside the mission of the church.

Now carry the thief's case into the citizen's. Scripture gives commands about a Christian's life as a subject and a citizen, and they are bookend commands of exactly the same shape. Hear four of them.

To the exiles in Babylon, from the prophet Jeremiah, the twenty-ninth chapter:

Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all that are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon; Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.

From the prophet Micah:

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

From Paul's letter to Titus:

Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work, to speak evil of no man, to be no brawlers, but gentle, shewing all meekness unto all men.

And from the first letter to Timothy — and mark where this one ends, because it fastens the citizen's duty directly to the mission itself:

I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.

Pray for kings — and the reason given is not civic order for its own sake. The reason given is a God who will have all men to be saved. In Paul's own sentence, the political duty and the saving mission are not two departments. One serves the other.

Those are the bookends. Seek the city's peace. Do justly. Obey magistrates. Pray for kings. What Scripture does not give — anywhere — is the prudential middle. Which form of government. Which policy. Which candidate. How to weigh competing goods in this election, in this country, under this constitution. There is no complete script for the civil order in the Bible, no regulative principle for politics prescribing the state the way the Reformed tradition says Scripture prescribes the elements of worship. There cannot be. Nations rise and fall, regimes change shape, and the New Testament was not written to charter a republic.

The spare account of the church's mission reads that silence as a boundary: Scripture stops here, so the church stops here. The thief shows why the silence is not a wall. Scripture stops short of the practical skills in his case too, and no one concludes that helping him find honest work falls outside discipleship. The space between command and competence is where discipleship does its work — in the thief's trade, and in the citizen's duties. This does not make politics the mission of the church. It keeps politics inside the mission, rightly understood. To help a believer reason from the commands Scripture does give toward the prudential judgments it leaves open is to teach him to observe all things whatsoever Christ commanded. That is the Great Commission — not an addition to it.

If that is the argument, the rest of the evening tests it against the record — first against the kingdom texts themselves, then against two of the church's greatest teachers on the two cities.

Begin with the hardest text, the one most often quoted to end the conversation. Jesus before Pilate, from the gospel according to John, the eighteenth chapter:

Then Pilate entered into the judgment hall again, and called Jesus, and said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews? Jesus answered him, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me? Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done? Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

Read the whole exchange and notice what "not of this world" is doing there. Jesus gives Pilate the evidence for the claim in the same breath: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight. The kingdom's otherness is an otherness of origin and of method — it does not come from the world's system and it does not advance by the world's weapons. What the text does not say is that the kingdom has nothing to do with the world. The man saying these words is standing in a Roman courtroom, bearing witness to the truth in the face of the governor — and He does not decline the word king.

The disciples' last question before the ascension, from the book of Acts:

When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

They asked for a restored national throne. They were given a mission instead — but notice the answer redirects the kind of power, not the scope of the claim. Witnesses to the uttermost part of the earth is not a smaller ambition than the kingdom of Israel. It is an immeasurably larger one.

How, then, does a kingdom like that move through the world? From the gospel according to Luke:

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

And from Matthew, the thirteenth chapter, two parables:

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof. Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.

Not with observation — no marching columns, no seized capitals. A seed, and leaven. But follow both figures to their ends. The seed becomes the greatest among herbs, and the leaven does not stop until the whole is leavened. The method is hidden and patient; the reach is total. Nothing in the meal is finally left untouched — and it is hard to read "three measures of meal" in a way that quarantines the civic portion of the lump.

One more text from the record, the most famous political sentence ever spoken. From Matthew, the twenty-second chapter:

Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk. And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. When they had heard these words, they marvelled, and left him, and went their way.

The coin bears Caesar's image; give Caesar the coin. And the unspoken half of the argument, which every hearer standing there could finish: man bears God's image; give God the man. Caesar's column is real, and it is short. The saying that is quoted to keep the church out of politics is, on its own terms, a lesson in how to think about politics — it draws the line between the two claims, ranks them, and hands the disciple the harder task of telling one from the other for the rest of his life. Which is to say: it leaves him needing exactly the formation we have been describing.

The church has thought about this longer than any nation now on the map has existed. Two teachers tonight, at length. The first is Augustine, writing The City of God as Rome was falling, and giving the whole question its permanent architecture. From the fourteenth book, the chapter on the nature of the two cities, in the Marcus Dods translation — read whole:

Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, Thou art my glory, and the lifter up of mine head. In the one, the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take thought for all. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the persons of its rulers; the other says to its God, I will love thee, O Lord, my strength.

He goes on:

And therefore the wise men of the one city, living according to man, have sought for profit to their own bodies or souls, or both, and those who have known God glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise — that is, glorying in their own wisdom, and being possessed by pride — they became fools. But in the other city there is no human wisdom, but only godliness, which offers due worship to the true God, and looks for its reward in the society of the saints, of holy angels as well as holy men, that God may be all in all.

Two cities, two loves — and notice that the dividing line is not geography or party. It runs through every nation, every legislature, and every congregation. No earthly polity is the city of God, and no earthly polity is beneath its concern.

Five books later Augustine asks how the two cities live together in the meantime — and his answer is the charter for everything this lane has been arguing. From the nineteenth book:

The earthly city, which does not live by faith, seeks an earthly peace, and the end it proposes, in the well-ordered concord of civic obedience and rule, is the combination of men's wills to attain the things which are helpful to this life. The heavenly city, or rather the part of it which sojourns on earth and lives by faith, makes use of this peace only because it must, until this mortal condition which necessitates it shall pass away. Consequently, so long as it lives like a captive and a stranger in the earthly city, though it has already received the promise of redemption, and the gift of the Spirit as the earnest of it, it makes no scruple to obey the laws of the earthly city, whereby the things necessary for the maintenance of this mortal life are administered; and thus, as this life is common to both cities, so there is a harmony between them in regard to what belongs to it.

He goes on:

This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace. It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced. Even the heavenly city, therefore, while in its state of pilgrimage, avails itself of the peace of earth, and, so far as it can without injuring faith and godliness, desires and maintains a common agreement among men regarding the acquisition of the necessaries of life, and makes this earthly peace bear upon the peace of heaven.

Desires and maintains a common agreement among men. That is Augustine's pilgrim church doing politics — not seizing the earthly city, not fleeing it, but caring for its peace on purpose, because Jeremiah's letter to Babylon is still in force: in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.

The second teacher is Calvin, who inherited Augustine's two cities and had to govern with them in view. The final chapter of the Institutes takes up civil government, and it opens by facing both errors at once. From Calvin, in the Beveridge translation:

Having shown above that there is a twofold government in man, and having fully considered the one which, placed in the soul or inward man, relates to eternal life, we are here called to say something of the other, which pertains only to civil institutions and the external regulation of manners. For although this subject seems from its nature to be unconnected with the spiritual doctrine of faith, which I have undertaken to treat, it will appear as we proceed, that I have properly connected them, nay, that I am under the necessity of doing so, especially while, on the one hand, frantic and barbarous men are furiously endeavouring to overturn the order established by God, and, on the other, the flatterers of princes, extolling their power without measure, hesitate not to oppose it to the government of God. Unless we meet both extremes, the purity of the faith will perish.

Mark the map he has just drawn. Two ways to lose the faith over politics, not one: the revolutionaries who would overturn the order God established, and the flatterers of princes — the four hundred prophets of our August fifth evening — who exalt it beyond measure. The pastor's political teaching exists to guard his people from both cliffs, which is precisely why he cannot stay out of the country where the cliffs are.

Calvin continues, answering those who would make the kingdom's spirituality a reason for the church to wash her hands of civic life:

He who knows to distinguish between the body and the soul, between the present fleeting life and that which is future and eternal, will have no difficulty in understanding that the spiritual kingdom of Christ and civil government are things very widely separated.

He goes on:

Still the distinction does not go so far as to justify us in supposing that the whole scheme of civil government is matter of pollution, with which Christian men have nothing to do. But as we lately taught that that kind of government is distinct from the spiritual and internal kingdom of Christ, so we ought to know that they are not adverse to each other. If it is the will of God that while we aspire to true piety we are pilgrims upon the earth, and if such pilgrimage stands in need of such aids, those who take them away from man rob him of his humanity.

Very widely separated — and not adverse to each other. Hold those two clauses together and you have the whole balance: distinction without divorce. The kingdom of Christ is not the civil order, and the civil order is not nothing.

The commonplace books have kept a shelf of smaller stones on tonight's subject. A handful, briefly.

From the old compilers, on the church. Beza, successor to Calvin at Geneva: It belongs to the church to suffer blows, not to strike them. Toplady: The church of Christ, which is partly militant and partly triumphant, resembles a city built on both sides of a river; there is but the stream of death between grace and glory. Bishop Jewell: This church is the kingdom, the body, the spouse of Christ; Christ alone is Prince of this kingdom. Matthew Henry: The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve the purity of it. And Bishop Simpson, of the American Methodists, on how far the mission reaches downward: The church must grope her way into the alleys and courts and purlieus of the city, and up the broken staircase, and into the bare room, and beside the loathsome sufferer; she must go down into the pit with the miner, into the forecastle with the sailor, into the tent with the soldier. A church with that job description will not manage to stay out of public questions; the alleys and the courts are full of them.

And on politics itself, the compilers preserved both registers, warning and vocation side by side. Aristotle: Man is by nature a civic animal. Goldsmith, on the partisan narrowing of a large soul: Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind, and to party gave up what was meant for mankind. Pope: Party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many, for the gain of a few. Jefferson: Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct. And on the other side of the ledger, Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist: Responsibility educates, and politics is but another name for God's way of teaching the masses ethics. De Tocqueville, surveying the young republic: Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts — the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims.

The warnings are about party, office, and appetite. The vocation is about neighbors. The church's political teaching lives on that second side, and the warnings are part of the curriculum.

There remains the question of standing. If the church is in the city but not of it, caring for its peace but never confusing it with the kingdom, what exactly is she while she is here? Paul's answer gives the whole posture in one civic metaphor. From the second letter to the Corinthians:

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; to wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God.

And to the Philippians, one sentence:

For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Our citizenship is in heaven — that is the sense of the old word conversation. And the office assigned to that citizenry, scattered through the nations, is ambassadors. An embassy is a useful thing to think with as this evening closes. An embassy stands on foreign soil and never pretends the soil is home. It does not raise armies, and it does not run for the host country's offices in its own name. But no one has ever accused an embassy of being apolitical. It learns the language. It studies the country's laws and loves the country's people. It keeps its sovereign's interests in every conversation, and its whole reason for existing is to represent one kingdom inside another — and to plead: be ye reconciled. The mission is the message of reconciliation. The politics of the place is part of the terrain the message crosses, and an ambassador who refuses to understand the terrain is not being faithful to the message. He is being careless with it.

That is the argument of the evening, laid alongside the record. The mission of the church is to make disciples — no wider, and no narrower. And a disciple is a whole man: a worker, a neighbor, a subject, a citizen. The church that walks the thief from command to competence must walk the citizen the same road, because both roads are the same road: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.

The psalter has a song for the city that outlasts every Babylon, and the last hour of the day belongs to it. Psalm eighty-seven, whole:

His foundation is in the holy mountains. The LORD loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. Selah. I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon to them that know me: behold Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia; this man was born there. And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was born in her: and the highest himself shall establish her. The LORD shall count, when he writeth up the people, that this man was born there. Selah. As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there: all my springs are in thee.

Even Babylon appears in that census — not as conqueror but as birthplace of citizens the Lord counts as Zion's own. John Newton took that psalm and built the church's song out of it. From the Olney Hymns, seventeen seventy-nine — Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken:

Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our God. He whose word cannot be broken formed thee for his own abode. On the Rock of Ages founded, what can shake thy sure repose? With salvation's walls surrounded, thou may'st smile at all thy foes.

See, the streams of living waters, springing from eternal love, well supply thy sons and daughters and all fear of want remove. Who can faint while such a river ever flows their thirst to assuage? Grace, which like the Lord, the giver, never fails from age to age.

Round each habitation hovering, see the cloud and fire appear for a glory and a covering, showing that the Lord is near. Thus deriving from their banner light by night and shade by day, safe they feed upon the manna which he gives them on their way.

Saviour, since of Zion's city I through grace a member am, let the world deride or pity, I will glory in thy name. Fading is the worldling's pleasures, all his boasted pomp and show; solid joys and lasting treasures none but Zion's children know.

You hold two passports tonight. Use the temporary one faithfully, for the sake of the permanent one.

Good night.