One Kingdom, Not Two

Against the two kingdoms doctrine, from Calvin to Escondido

David VanDrunen of Westminster Seminary California teaches that God rules the world through his Son in two ways, the church as Redeemer through the Scriptures and the rest of human life as Creator and Sustainer under the law of nature, and he traces it to John Calvin. We agree with him about Calvin. Calvin divided Christ’s kingdom from civil government and then charged the magistrate with a true religion his division could not ground. Escondido kept the division and let the charge go. We trace the chain from Geneva to Escondido, show why the middle ground cannot stand, and argue from Scripture for one kingdom, Christ’s, in which the magistrate is his minister, bound by his word and charged with the church’s outward order.

Download the PDFOne-page summary (PDF)

The question

In 2010 David VanDrunen, who teaches systematic theology and Christian ethics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido, published Living in God’s Two Kingdoms. The book divides human life between a common kingdom, formally established in God’s covenant with Noah, which holds civil government, family, work and the other institutions believers share with unbelievers, and a redemptive kingdom, formally established in God’s covenant with Abraham and gathered now in the church. VanDrunen sums up the doctrine this way: God through his Son rules the first “as creator and sustainer” and the second “as redeemer” (Credo interview, 2012). D. G. Hart had already published A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State (2006). VanDrunen’s colleague Michael Horton writes that Christ “is Lord in different ways over the world and the church” (Christianity Today, 2006). R. Scott Clark, now emeritus at the seminary, defends what he calls Christ’s twofold kingdom. Meredith Kline, who taught there from 1981 to 2002, laid the school’s exegetical ground. We take the label from John Frame’s critique, The Escondido Theology (2011). The faculty rejected his account of them (2012), so we quote them in their own words.

The doctrine is older than Escondido, and it comes in two forms. The classical form runs from Calvin through the Westminster divines. It holds that God governs men in two ways, by a spiritual kingdom of Christ that reaches the soul through the Word, and by a civil kingdom that orders outward life by the sword, and it still charges the magistrate with the care of true religion. Its leading defenders now are Stephen Wolfe, Zachary Garris and Sean McGowan, whose Reformed Christian Politics (2026) attacks Escondido and keeps what it calls Christ’s twofold kingdom. The modern form, at Escondido, drops the magistrate’s charge. The two forms agree that his office lies outside the kingdom Christ rules as Redeemer and Mediator, and that agreement is the subject of this paper.

We hold that there is one kingdom. The Father has given the risen Christ all power in heaven and in earth, and every office that rules men, the father’s, the minister’s and the magistrate’s, holds its share of that power under him. Scripture distinguishes the offices. It never divides the kingdom. We also hold that Escondido is the classical doctrine followed to its end, and its teachers are right to claim Calvin as their source.

What Calvin divided

Calvin did not invent the division. Luther had written in 1523, “We must divide all the children of Adam into two classes; the first belong to the kingdom of God, the second to the kingdom of the world,” and that “these two kingdoms must be sharply distinguished” (Secular Authority, trans. Schindel). Luther drew the line between men. Calvin drew it inside each man, and the Reformed churches took it from him. He set it out in the third book of the Institutes, in his chapter on Christian liberty, to keep the freedom of the conscience from being turned against civil order. “In man government is twofold,” he wrote, “the one spiritual, by which the conscience is trained to piety and divine worship; the other civil.” Then he named them: “We may call the one the spiritual, the other the civil kingdom.” He meant the line to be sharp. “These two, as we have divided them, are always to be viewed apart from each other,” because “there exists in man a kind of two worlds, over which different kings and different laws can preside” (III.xix.15).

He drew it again at the head of his chapter on civil government. Anyone who can tell body from soul, he wrote, will see “that the spiritual kingdom of Christ and civil government are things very widely separated,” and he gave the reason: “it matters not what your condition is among men, nor under what laws you live, since in them the kingdom of Christ does not at all consist” (IV.xx.1). Christ’s kingdom is inward. The laws a man lives under belong to another kingdom.

Then Calvin gave that other kingdom a charge only Christ’s could fill. Civil government, he wrote, is assigned “to foster and maintain the external worship of God, to defend sound doctrine and the condition of the Church” (IV.xx.2), so “that no idolatry, no blasphemy against the name of God, no calumnies against his truth, nor other offences to religion, break out and be disseminated among the people” (IV.xx.3). The magistrate’s office “extends to both tables of the law,” and Calvin called it folly to make rulers judges of “earthly controversies” who omit “what was of far greater moment, his own pure worship as prescribed by his law” (IV.xx.9). The religion the magistrate guards is “the true religion, which is contained in the law of God” (IV.xx.3).

That charge needs a law the division did not give the magistrate. Sound doctrine and the true religion are not things nature teaches, and Calvin said so himself. Man, he wrote, “is scarcely able, by means of that natural law, to form any tolerable idea of the worship which is acceptable to God,” which is why “the Lord has given us his written Law, which, by its sure attestations, removes the obscurity of the law of nature” (II.viii.1). A magistrate charged to guard worship “as prescribed by his law” has to read that law to know what he is guarding. Calvin’s practice needed one law. His doctrine announced two.

Calvin also wrote the sentence that answers his division. The second psalm, he said, does not tell kings “to lay aside their authority and return to private life, but to make the power with which they are invested subject to Christ, that he may rule over all” (IV.xx.5). If Christ rules over all, civil government is not very widely separated from his kingdom. It is one of the places he rules. Calvin held the division and the charge together. Section 06 shows that his heirs kept the division and, one step at a time, gave up the charge. Beeke and Reformed Christian Politics read his two kingdoms as the inward man and the outward rather than church and state, and the last objection in section 11 shows that the problem is the same on that reading.

One King

The second psalm puts the question before any Reformer did. The kings of the earth stand up “against the Lord, and against his Christ” (Ps. 2:2), and the apostles read the verse of Herod and Pilate (Acts 4:25–27). The anointed answers, “But I have been made king by him on Sion his holy mountain” (Ps. 2:6), and the Lord promises him “the heathen for thine inheritance, and the ends of the earth for thy possession” (Ps. 2:8). Then the psalm turns to rulers: “Now therefore understand, ye kings: be instructed, all ye that judge the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice in him with trembling” (Ps. 2:10–11). The kings rose against the Lord and his Christ together, and the psalm tells them to submit to the rule they rose against. It knows no throne that answers to the Lord and not to his Christ.

Daniel saw the rule given. One came “with the clouds of heaven as the Son of man,” and “to him was given the dominion, and the honour, and the kingdom; and all nations, tribes, and languages, shall serve him” (Dan. 7:13–14). After his resurrection Christ claimed it: “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matt. 28:18). Paul gives the reason the gift came when it did. Christ was obedient unto death, “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth” (Phil. 2:9–10). A power given after the resurrection, as the reward of obedience, is not the power the Son held with the Father before the world was. It is given to the Son of man as Mediator, and it reaches the earth and every nation on it.

John says what the gift includes. “For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son,” and he “hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man” (John 5:22, 27). The ground of the gift is the title Daniel gave the one who received the kingdom. Paul calls the magistrate “the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Rom. 13:4). The wrath the magistrate executes is a share of the judgment the Father has committed to the Son, and he executes it under the Son, whether he knows it or not.

Paul says where the risen Christ sits and what lies under him. God “raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church” (Eph. 1:20–22). Not only in this world rules out a reign that waits for the last day. The head God gave the church is the head over all things. There are not two heads, one for the church and another for the thrones.

Paul also says how long the reign lasts and what it does. “For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet,” and the end comes “when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power” (1 Cor. 15:24–25). The kingdom Christ hands back at the end is the kingdom he received, not the deity he never laid down, and its work now is to bring all rule and all authority under him. Every rule and authority on earth lies inside the kingdom he rules as Mediator.

The thrones are his twice over. “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him” (Col. 1:16). The same Son is “the head of the body, the church,” and by him God reconciles “all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven” (Col. 1:18, 20). The one who made the thrones is the one who redeems, and he made them for himself. John names his rule over rulers in the same breath as his resurrection: “the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5).

The apostles preached it, and their enemies understood them. At Thessalonica the charge against them was that “these all do contrary to the decrees of Cæsar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus” (Acts 17:7). At Athens Paul told the philosophers that God “now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained” (Acts 17:30–31). The gospel the apostles preached contained at least one political principle: there is another King, and every ruler will answer to him.

The Westminster Larger Catechism places the ordering of all things inside Christ’s office as Mediator. Christ executes the office of a king, it says, by “restraining and overcoming all their enemies, and powerfully ordering all things for his own glory” (Q. 45). Jonathon Beeke’s study of the doctrine, which Reformed Christian Politics cites with approval, finds that the Reformed orthodox did not limit Christ’s mediatorial rule to the church, visible or invisible (RCP, 151). George Gillespie, one of the Scottish commissioners to the Westminster Assembly, is the exception that matters here. Writing against the Erastians, he gave Christ a kingdom over all creatures “as he is the eternal Son of God” and a kingdom “as he is Mediator, raigning over the Church onely,” because the law of nature, where magistracy has its foundation, flows “from God as Creator” (Aarons Rod Blossoming, 1646, 194, 244). William Symington, the Scottish Covenanter, granted the origin and denied the conclusion. Civil government, he wrote, originates “in the moral government of God as the God of nature, and not in the mediatorial system,” and it has been “put under the Redeemer’s feet,” so that rulers are “the vicegerents of the Prince of the kings of the earth” (Messiah the Prince, 1840, 250–51). The magistrate’s office began in creation and was armed after the flood. The question is not where it began but under whom it stands now. The distinction between the kingdom Christ holds as God and the kingdom he received as Mediator is old and sound. It cannot do the work Gillespie and Escondido give it, because Scripture puts the thrones on the second side of the line.

One law

The two kingdoms doctrine gives each kingdom its own law, Scripture for the church and the law of nature for the commonwealth. The law of nature is real. The Gentiles “shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness” (Rom. 2:15), and “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). The question is not whether nature teaches. It is whether a magistrate may read nature without the book God gave to remove its obscurity.

The Reformed tradition answered that the two are one law. Calvin wrote that “the law of God which we call moral, is nothing else than the testimony of natural law, and of that conscience which God has engraven on the minds of men,” and that “it alone ought to be the aim, the rule, and the end of all laws” (IV.xx.16). VanDrunen grants that this was the common Reformed teaching, and he grants what the orthodox drew from it: since natural law teaches both tables and is the standard of civil law, the first table lay within the magistrate’s purview (Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 160–61, 201, as quoted in RCP, 162–63).

Scripture handed the king the written law and told him to read it. “And when he shall be established in his government, then shall he write for himself this repetition of the law into a book by the hands of the priests the Levites; and it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord thy God” (Deut. 17:18–19). The priests kept the book, and the king ruled by it. The psalm says the same to the rulers of the nations: “be instructed, all ye that judge the earth” (Ps. 2:10). The Westminster Confession holds that the judicial laws of Israel oblige no other people now “further than the general equity thereof may require” (19.4), and the general equity of a law is read from the law.

Stuart Robinson stated the opposite rule for the American Presbyterians in 1858. The civil power, he wrote, “derives its authority from God as the Author of nature, whilst the power ecclesiastical comes alone from Jesus as Mediator,” and the civil power’s guide is “the light of nature and reason,” while the church’s is what “Jesus Christ has revealed in his word” (The Church of God, 85). Symington had already answered him: “It is absurd to contend that, because civil society is founded in nature, men are to be guided, in directing its affairs and consulting its interests, solely by the light of nature” (Messiah the Prince, 271).

Escondido keeps natural law and narrows what the magistrate may do with it. VanDrunen grants that natural law forbids the worship of false gods, then holds that God’s covenant with Noah limits the magistrate to dealings between men. Procreation, food and civil justice are necessary for society to survive, he writes, and “worshipping the true God in the right way is not” (Divine Covenants and Moral Order, 511, as quoted in RCP, 164). He adds that when the prophets turned to the nations outside Israel, idolatry nearly dropped out of view, and God judged those nations for injustice and pride, not for their idols (Politics after Christendom, 98, as quoted by John Shelton, The Gospel Coalition, 2020).

The prophets say otherwise. Isaiah heard the news of Babylon: “Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all her images and her idols have been crushed to the ground” (Isa. 21:9). Jeremiah gave the reason she would be put to shame: “for it is a land of graven images” (Jer. 27:38). Nahum told Nineveh, “I will utterly destroy the graven images out of the house of thy god, and the molten images” (Nah. 1:14), and Zephaniah promised that the Lord “shall utterly destroy all the gods of the nations of the earth; and they shall worship him every one from his place” (Zeph. 2:11). Isaiah gave the rule: “For the nations and the kings which will not serve thee shall perish; and those nations shall be made utterly desolate” (Isa. 60:12). Paul describes the same judgment falling on the Gentiles now. They “changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man,” and “Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness” (Rom. 1:23–24). The word wherefore ties the judgment to the worship.

The covenant with Noah gave the sword for blood: “He that sheds man’s blood, instead of that blood shall his own be shed, for in the image of God I made man” (Gen. 9:6). It does not state the whole of the magistrate’s law, and nothing in it says it does. Reformed Christian Politics points out that the passage does not distinguish murder from manslaughter either, and no one concludes that a magistrate may not distinguish them (166). Paul defines the magistrate by a wider word, “the minister of God to thee for good” (Rom. 13:4), and the law he enforces is made “for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane” (1 Tim. 1:9).

VanDrunen denies that any government is morally neutral, and he still finds “something at least initially suspicious” in any claim that governments depend on knowing Scripture (Politics after Christendom, 35–36, as quoted in RCP, 167). The second psalm addresses rulers in their office, and Paul told the Athenians that God “now commandeth all men every where to repent” (Acts 17:30). A command addressed to every man binds every office a man holds. A ruler who does not acknowledge it is still bound by it, which is what Paul means by “without excuse.”

The throne and the altar

Scripture distinguishes the king from the priest. When King Uzziah went into the temple to burn incense, the priests withstood him: “It is not for thee, Ozias, to burn incense to the Lord, but only for the priests the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated to sacrifice” (2 Chron. 26:18). The leprosy rose in his forehead while the censer was in his hand. The Westminster Confession of 1647 says the magistrate “may not assume to himself the administration of the Word and Sacraments, or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (23.3). On the Word and the sacraments we agree with it. On the keys we part with it, for the reasons this section gives.

The same Scripture puts the priests’ outward order in the king’s charge. Solomon “established, according to the order of his father David, the courses of the priests,” and the priests and Levites “transgressed not the commandments of the king concerning the priests and the Levites” (2 Chron. 8:14–15). Hezekiah brought the priests and the Levites in and commanded them, “Hear, ye Levites: now sanctify yourselves, and sanctify the house of the Lord God of your fathers” (2 Chron. 29:5). Josiah “appointed the priests at their charges” (2 Chron. 35:2). Jehoshaphat set up the courts at Jerusalem and named both their heads: “Amarias the priest is head over you in every matter of the Lord; and Zabdias the son of Ismael is head over the house of Juda in every matter of the king” (2 Chron. 19:11). The king appointed the priest who presided in the matters of the Lord. He did not take the priest’s place. After the exile a Persian king commanded judgment on whoever “shall not do the law of God, and the law of the king” (Ezra 7:26), and the disobedient were separated “from the congregation of the captivity” by “the counsel of the rulers and the elders” (Ezra 10:8).

Nor did the king order worship by his own will. Hezekiah stationed the Levites “according to the commandment of king David, and of Gad the king’s seer, and Nathan the prophet: for by the commandment of the Lord the order was in the hand of the prophets” (2 Chron. 29:25). The king commanded what God had commanded through the prophets. Calvin set the same limit. He did not allow men “at pleasure to enact laws concerning religion and the worship of God” (IV.xx.3).

Isaiah carried the office into the church of the nations: “And kings shall be thy nursing-fathers, and their princesses thy nurses” (Isa. 49:23). Calvin said that “the prophecy refers to the advent of Christ” (IV.xx.5), so the nursing-father is not a relic of Israel. The Westminster divines gave him his work. The magistrate is to “take order, that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed, all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed,” and to that end “he hath power to call synods, to be present at them, and to provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God” (23.3). American Presbyterians struck the paragraph in 1788 and gave the calling of synods to the church’s officers (31.1). Their Larger Catechism still prays that the church be “countenanced and maintained by the civil magistrate” (Q. 191).

The Reformation’s confessions said the same before the American revision. The Scots Confession of 1560 affirms that “to Kings, Princes, Rulers and Magistrates … chieflie and most principallie the conservation and purgation of the Religioun apperteinis,” and it names its pattern: “David, Josaphat, Ezechias, Josias, and utheris highlie commended for their zeale in that caise” (ch. 24). The Articles of the Church of England state the office and its limit together. The prince has “the cheefe gouernment of all estates of this Realme, whether they be Ecclesiasticall or Ciuile,” and “we geue not to our princes the ministring either of God’s word, or of Sacraments” (Art. 37, 1571). Richard Hooker defended the article against the Puritans. In England, he wrote, “one society is both the Church and commonwealth,” after “the pattern of God’s own ancient elect people,” who “were both under one chief Governor” (Laws VIII.i.7).

Andrew Melville drew the line elsewhere, through the church door. The Second Book of Discipline, agreed in the General Assembly in 1578, gave the Kirk a power from God “throw the Mediator Jesus Christ,” with no “temporall Heid on Earth, bot onlie Christ,” and held that “the Person of the Magistrat” must “be subject to the Kirk spiritually, and in ecclesiasticall Government” (ch. 1). It still called magistrates “Nourishers of the Kirk” (ch. 10). At Falkland in 1596 Melville took James VI by the sleeve, called him “God’s sillie vassall,” and told him, as his nephew recorded the substance of it: “thair is twa Kings and twa Kingdomes in Scotland. Thair is Chryst Jesus the King, and his kingdome the Kirk, whase subject King James the Saxt is, and of whase kingdome nocht a king, nor a lord, nor a heid, bot a member!” (James Melvill, Diary, 370). Melville kept the king’s duty to the Kirk and denied him any headship in it.

The question came to a head at Westminster, in a controversy named for Thomas Erastus. In 1568 Erastus had argued from the same kings this section has followed. “I see no reason,” he wrote, “why the Christian magistrate at the present day should not possess the same power, which God commanded the magistrate to exercise in the Jewish commonwealth,” a power that reached “even to order the whole external part of religion” (Theses 73–74, trans. Lee, 160–62). Gillespie wrote Aarons Rod Blossoming against what its title page calls “the present Erastian Controversie,” and he named the premise it turned on. His opponent Hussey, he wrote, “holds that Christ as Mediator hath placed the Christian Magistrate under him, and as his Vicegerent, and hath given him commission to govern the Church, which if he or any man can prove from the Word of God, it will go far in the decision of the Erastian controversie” (208). Section 03 proves the first half from the Word of God, and the kings of Judah show the second.

Gillespie added that the Erastians must also prove that Christ “hath committed the whole and sole power of Church-Government to the Magistrate, and so hath left no share of Government to the Ministery” (209). The Parliament that called the Assembly sided with the Erastians in practice. It enacted the confession in 1648 without the chapters on church censures and synods, and in Philip Schaff’s words it “retained an Erastian control over matters of discipline” (Creeds, vol. 1, 758–59).

Reformed Christian Politics grants the magistrate more than Melville did. It calls magistracy the highest office on earth, above the minister’s, and it allows him to reform and purify a destructive church (35, 199). It still keeps his office outside Christ’s rule as Mediator. When he corrects a church, the book says, he is “not placing himself under Christ as mediator, nor making himself head over the church,” and he acts by a power natural to his office (35).

Christ is the only head of the church, and the Westminster divines confessed it: “There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ” (25.6). The magistrate is not the church’s head, as he is not its preacher. He is its governor under Christ. The Heidelberg Catechism names two keys of the kingdom, “The preaching of the holy Gospel and Church discipline” (Q. 83). The first belongs to the minister of the Word, with the sacraments and the defining of doctrine. The second belongs to the magistrate’s government, as separation from the congregation did after the exile. The church’s outward order, its officers, its assemblies, its discipline, its maintenance and its protection from public error, lies within his charge, as it lay within Hezekiah’s, and no church court holds a jurisdiction beside his. That is the “whole and sole power of Church-Government” Gillespie said the Erastians had to prove, and it leaves the ministry everything at the altar. In that sense we are Erastian. The magistrate serves Christ in that charge, not God as Creator alone, because the power he holds is part of what the Father gave to Christ. That is the office Isaiah named.

Where it came from

We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. Escondido answers the first question itself. VanDrunen says his political theology affirms and refines the two kingdoms doctrine as the Reformed tradition developed it (Politics after Christendom, 38, as quoted in RCP, 151), and his Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms (2010) tells the story from Calvin forward. He judges that Robinson and Thornwell avoided several of the inconsistencies of their Reformed predecessors, and he calls Robinson’s doctrine “largely correct” (249, 275, as quoted in RCP, 95). Hart places Christ’s kingship over the magistrate in “his rule as creator rather than mediator,” and he rests the distinction on Samuel Rutherford, one of Gillespie’s fellow commissioners at Westminster (interview, 2009, Old Life, 27 January 2017). Our paper Out of the Root, the Fruit holds every genealogy to five tests: dependence, other sources, other causes, inference, and too much. The heir’s own testimony meets the first. The timeline names the other parents, and the note under each step records what it kept, removed and added.

The line runs one way. Melville denied the king any headship in the church. Gillespie, to keep the magistrate out of the church’s government, put the magistrate under God as Creator and the church under Christ as Mediator, the division VanDrunen states as Creator and Redeemer more than three centuries later. The American synod took the magistrate’s charge out of the confession. Robinson and Thornwell gave the state nature for its rule and the church the Word. Kline took religion out of the state, and Escondido built a kingdom on what was left. Gillespie and the Westminster Confession held the division and the charge together, and Reformed Christian Politics tries to restore the charge. No step after Calvin gave the magistrate a duty Calvin had not given him. Each removal followed from the division. If Christ’s kingdom does not consist in civil laws, a civil law that protects sound doctrine has to be defended on some other ground, and the only ground the division leaves is nature. Nature shows that God is and that he is to be worshiped (Rom. 1:20–21). It does not show which doctrine is sound, which church is true, or that Jesus is Lord, and Calvin said as much (II.viii.1). A charge that needs Scripture cannot survive in a kingdom whose law is nature, and one generation after another let it go.

Escondido’s teachers say the same thing about the old charge in two different ways. VanDrunen grants that the Reformed orthodox reasoned from natural law to the first table, and he calls Turretin’s support for coercive laws against blasphemy and heresy “ironic or even incoherent” (Politics after Christendom, 116 n. 25, as quoted in RCP, 152). Clark concedes that the magisterial Protestants were establishmentarians, holds that their establishment was peripheral to Reformed theology, and calls his own view, that the magistrate enforces the second table, “certainly a revision of the historic Christian view” (Heidelblog, 17 July and 13 September 2023). One says the charge did not cohere with the principles, the other that it was never essential to them. Both mean that the two kingdoms principle does not yield the charge. On that point they are right, and it is our reason for rejecting the principle. They argue from the premise to the conclusion. We argue from the falsity of the conclusion to the falsity of the premise, the form logicians call modus tollens.

Escondido has other parents, and the timeline names them. Meredith Kline divided God’s covenant with Noah into two, one redemptive and one common, and Reformed Christian Politics calls that division the sine qua non of the Escondido scheme (156). Our argument does not rest on it. Kline’s covenant gave the fruit its shape, a magistrate confined to the second table. The division gave it its root, a civil kingdom with nothing to stand on but nature. Strike Kline’s exegesis and the root still bears, because without Scripture in the civil kingdom the magistrate’s charge shrinks to whatever natural reason, read by whoever judges it, will concede. Others reached a religiously neutral state without Calvin, Baptists and Locke among them (All the Gods of the Heathen, section 03). That shows the division is not the only road to neutrality. It does not show that the division leads anywhere else. American pluralism and the new republic’s break with establishment explain when the American churches let the charge go. The division explains how they could let it go and still claim the Reformers, which is what VanDrunen and Hart claim. Nor does the argument prove too much. It convicts the division of kingdoms, not the distinction of offices, which Scripture teaches and section 05 keeps.

Why the middle cannot stand

Reformed Christian Politics is the strongest answer to Escondido from inside the Reformed churches, and on the magistrate’s duty toward religion we agree with it. It restores the first table, defends laws for the Sabbath and against blasphemy, and calls Escondido the innovation by the standard of the Reformed tradition (210). It keeps the division. The church’s end is the kingdom of Christ, the commonwealth’s is civil life (34, 200), and the book, summarizing Wolfe, says the gospel supplies no political principles (200).

That position has to answer the question Calvin’s did. The magistrate’s duty to religion, the book says, is a natural duty, which revelation specifies in application by declaring the true God to be the Triune God (200). Either revelation binds the magistrate in his office or it does not. If it binds him, the civil kingdom is governed by Scripture as well as nature, which is one law, and the division has been given up at the point where it matters. If it does not bind him, his duty to religion is what nature teaches, which is that God is, not that he is three persons, and the duty shrinks to a general theism. Stuart Robinson, who gave the state only the light of nature, still defended Sabbath laws in 1879, on the ground that “the weekly rest-day, established by immemorial usage, is necessary to the best interests of society” (as quoted in RCP, 90). The book itself notes that the argument would let a people that is not Christian choose another day (90 n. 144). A ground that rests on usage goes when the usage goes, and VanDrunen has drawn the conclusion that Sabbath laws are inappropriate because only Christians understand them (interview with Kevin DeYoung, 2023, as reported in RCP, 172).

The book holds the charge up with a second support. What the prince must or may do, it says, summarizing Wolfe, is limited by the people, from whom he receives his powers to govern (199). Our paper None Gives What He Has Not answers that premise. If the people bound the prince, the people draw the circle of churches he may protect, and the circle widens as they change. A charge held up by nature and by the people’s grant rests on the two things that took it down in 1788.

The middle borrows. Calvin borrowed Scripture to give the magistrate a charge his division assigned to another kingdom, and Reformed Christian Politics borrows revelation to fill out a duty it calls natural. Escondido has nearly stopped borrowing. Where its teachers still keep a piece of the old charge, they borrow too. Clark gives the magistrate a calendar of working and resting “according to the creational pattern” (Heidelblog, 27 October 2008), and Hart defends Sunday-closing laws on common-good grounds (Old Life, 12 January 2010). A day of rest kept by law is the fourth commandment in civil dress, and the pattern of six days and a seventh is learned from Genesis, not from nature. The only position that does not borrow is one kingdom, in which the magistrate’s office stands under Christ from the start and answers to his word.

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth, and the two kingdoms doctrine is built from three.

The offices are distinct. The king does not burn incense, and the minister does not bear the sword. The church’s oldest formula for the line spoke of two powers in one world. Pope Gelasius wrote to the emperor in 494, “There are two powers, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power” (trans. Robinson). Calvin was right that the church “has not the right of the sword” (IV.xi.3), and our paper The Sound of the Cornet traces what followed each time one office did another’s work (section 09). The two kingdoms doctrine turned a distinction of offices into a division of kingdoms. Scripture separates the king from the altar. It never separates the king from Christ.

Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. “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” (John 18:36). The verse says where the kingdom comes from and how it advances, not how far it reaches. Of this world is answered by not from hence. Christ’s servants do not fight to bring it in, because it does not come by the sword. Pilate heard in the next chapter where his own power came from: “Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (John 19:11). A kingdom not from this world rules the powers of this world, and Pilate held his under it. The American revision of 1788 cited the verse to forbid the magistrate to interfere “in the least” in matters of faith (23.3). The verse forbids the church to take up the sword. It does not take the magistrate out from under the King.

God is good to all men, and his law is written on their hearts. God “left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons” (Acts 14:17), and he “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good” (Matt. 5:45). Reformed theology calls that patience common grace, and it is real. Kline and VanDrunen turned God’s common patience with all men into a common kingdom of all men, with a moral law of its own and no religion of its own. Common grace is the reason the nations still stand while the gospel goes to them. It is not a second kingdom with another way of ruling.

Where it leads

Each claim below is a claim about what happened or about what a principle entails, and each is held to the tests in section 06. None is a forecast.

A church that takes its limits from the state. In December 1861 the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States adopted an address to all the churches of the world. B. M. Palmer, who moderated that Assembly, said the Address came from Thornwell’s pen (Life and Letters, 504). It drew the line where VanDrunen would draw it: “The State is a natural institute, founded in the constitution of man as moral and social, and designed to realize the idea of justice,” and “The Church is a supernatural institute, founded in the facts of redemption” (p. 5). It said where the church’s voice ends. When a moral duty depends on a political question, the church may not decide the question: “The condition must be given. She must accept it from the State, and then her own course is clear” (p. 6). Then it applied the rule to slavery. “We have no right, as a Church, to enjoin it as a duty, or to condemn it as a sin,” the Assembly said, because “The social, civil, political problems connected with this great subject transcend our sphere” (p. 10). Four pages later the same Address, speaking as a church, called the general operation of the system “kindly and benevolent” (p. 14). It had allowed the church to testify against “wicked laws” (p. 6), and on the institution the war was being fought over it found nothing to testify against. VanDrunen faults Thornwell and his allies for preaching politics and using the doctrine to preserve slavery, and calls it a breach of their own principles (Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 267, as quoted in RCP, 95). The principle forbade the church to condemn the civil order, set no limit on defending it, and handed the state the questions on which the church’s duty turned. A church that takes the boundary of its voice from the state speaks where the state allows it.

A magistrate with no religion of his own. Kline supported the Supreme Court’s ruling in Abington v. Schempp (1963), which struck down required Bible reading and prayer in public schools, to the dismay of some in his own church (John R. Muether, New Horizons, October 2022). VanDrunen holds that the state ought not to establish a religion or recognize one religious body as the true church (Politics after Christendom, 199–200, as quoted in RCP, 165), and that men hold “a penultimate natural law right to religious freedom before their fellow human beings” (International Journal for Religious Freedom, 2012, 145). He does not call the common kingdom morally neutral, and he denies that it is (Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, 15). It has a moral law. It has no religion. A state that recognizes no religion still has one. All the Gods of the Heathen shows that every order tolerates from inside an establishment, named or unnamed (section 06), and the establishment left when Christ is set aside is the self that defines its own existence.

A ruler who may not rule by what he knows. A Christian magistrate knows from Scripture that Jesus is Lord and that the first commandment is God’s law. VanDrunen grants that Christians must follow what Scripture says about politics, and he holds that it speaks there “only in a broad and general way” (Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, 31). On his account the covenant with Noah confines the magistrate to dealings between men (section 04), and citing Scripture in public, which nothing prohibits, is “probably not the wisest or most effective strategy in most cases” (Natural Law: A Short Companion, 110, as quoted in RCP, 167). On those terms the magistrate may live by what he knows of Christ and may not make it a rule of his office. Paul allows no such division in one man: “And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Col. 3:17), “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

What we do

Each session of our series ends with what a man does about what he has learned, in four places: himself, his home, his church, and what he asks of rulers. The argument comes down to these.

He serves one King in all his work. He does not keep one law for the Lord’s Day and another for the office. “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ” (Col. 3:23–24).

He teaches his house the second psalm. He teaches his children that Christ is “the prince of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5), that rulers are told to “Serve the Lord with fear” (Ps. 2:11), and that his house is not common ground. He brings them up “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4), and he prays with them for rulers by name, “For kings, and for all that are in authority” (1 Tim. 2:2).

He asks his church what it confesses. He asks his elders which text of Westminster 23.3 the church holds, the one of 1647 or the one of 1788, and why. He asks whether the church still prays, as its own catechism does, for a church “countenanced and maintained by the civil magistrate” (Q. 191), and whether the pulpit will name the magistrate as Christ’s minister.

He tells rulers whose ministers they are. He speaks to rulers from Scripture, not from nature alone, and he tells them that they hold their office under Christ and will answer to him: “Accept correction, lest at any time the Lord be angry, and ye should perish from the righteous way” (Ps. 2:12). He asks them for laws that honor Christ, beginning with a day of rest and a ban on public blasphemy. Our paper None Gives What He Has Not explains why we do this by speaking to rulers rather than by electing them.

Eight objections

“Christ rules the world as Creator and the church as Redeemer, so Escondido does not deny his rule.” This is the objection in its strongest form, and Escondido does confess Christ as Lord of all. Clark says Christ is king over all things and “administers his kingdom in two distinct spheres” (Heidelblog, 15 January 2024). The question is the capacity. VanDrunen says God through his Son rules the common kingdom “as creator and sustainer” (Credo, 2012). The power Matthew records was given to the risen Christ, and it covers the earth (Matt. 28:18). The judgment the magistrate executes was committed to the Son “because he is the Son of man” (John 5:27), and the kingdom Christ will hand back to the Father is the one in which he puts down “all rule and all authority and power” (1 Cor. 15:24). Calvin himself said kings must make their power “subject to Christ” (IV.xx.5).

“My kingdom is not of this world.” Section 08 answers it. The verse names the kingdom’s source and its weapons, not its reach, and the man Christ said it to held his power from above (John 19:11).

“Christ separated the realms himself.” He told the Pharisees, “Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21). He had just asked whose image was on the coin, and God’s image is on Cæsar, “for in the image of God I made man” (Gen. 9:6). The verse sets two debts side by side, and the second contains the first. Paul gives the reason tribute is owed: “for they are God’s ministers” (Rom. 13:6). When a man asked Christ to divide an inheritance, he answered, “Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you?” (Luke 12:14). He declined an office in that case. He did not deny that all judgment was his (John 5:22). Both texts teach what we teach. The offices are distinct, and the King is one.

“The New Testament never gives civil rulers a duty toward Christ’s kingdom.” VanDrunen says the New Testament never charges civil authorities with conforming the social order to the kingdom of heaven, and that Christians should expect from the state only justice, so that they may live a peaceful and quiet life (Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, 121, as quoted by Keith Mathison, Ligonier, 2010). Paul’s prayer for kings asks more: “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Tim. 2:2), and Calvin read the verse as Paul’s commending of “the condition of the Church to their protection and guardianship” (IV.xx.5). The apostles read the second psalm of the risen Christ (Acts 4:25–27, 13:33), so its command to kings is a New Testament command. John saw where the kings are going: “the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it” (Rev. 21:24).

“Israel’s theocracy was a type of the end, so its kings are no pattern for ours.” Kline knew what this answer gives up. He admitted that “the original Chapter 23 did attribute to the state the function of enforcing the first four laws of the Decalogue,” and he asked whether the American revision was not a patchwork that left the confession in tension with itself (“Comments on an Old-New Error,” 1978). Scripture does not leave the kings’ duty in Israel. The nursing-fathers belong to the church of the nations (Isa. 49:23), the second psalm is addressed to “all ye that judge the earth” (Ps. 2:10), and Paul calls the magistrate of pagan Rome the minister of God (Rom. 13:4).

“Westminster itself teaches a church government distinct from the magistrate.” It does, and on that point we part with Westminster. Chapter 30 puts a government “in the hand of Church officers, distinct from the civil magistrate,” and commits the keys to them (30.1–2). That is Melville’s line written into the confession, and section 05 gives our reasons for rejecting it. The Parliament that called the Assembly enacted the confession without chapters 30 and 31 (Schaff, Creeds, vol. 1, 758–59). We keep what the confession says of the magistrate in 23.3, that he calls synods and provides that what they do agrees with the mind of God, and its rule that synods are “not to intermeddle with civil affairs” except by “humble petition in cases extraordinary” (31.5).

“This is Erastianism, or the emperor in the pulpit.” It is the first and not the second. Section 05 states the Erastian position and holds it: the church’s outward government, its discipline included, lies within the magistrate’s charge. The pulpit, the sacraments and the defining of doctrine do not. When the Arian emperors ruled doctrine, one office did another’s work (The Sound of the Cornet, section 09). Hezekiah commanded the Levites by the word God gave through the prophets (2 Chron. 29:25), and Uzziah was struck when he burned incense. The line Scripture draws runs between the throne and the altar, not between the throne and Christ.

“Calvin’s two kingdoms were the inward man and the outward, not church and state, so Escondido misreads him.” Beeke and Reformed Christian Politics read Calvin that way, and we grant the reading. Our argument does not depend on Escondido’s reading of Calvin. On the inward and outward reading, the outward worship of God belongs to the civil kingdom, and what the magistrate is to maintain in it, “sound doctrine” and “the true religion, which is contained in the law of God,” is known only from Scripture. Either the civil kingdom is ruled by Scripture as well as nature, which is one law, or by nature alone, which is Escondido. The reading moves the line. It does not remove the problem.

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not give the magistrate the pulpit, the sacraments or the defining of doctrine. Section 05 keeps all three with the ministers of the Word. It gives him the church’s outward government and discipline, and nothing at the altar.

It does not defend compelling belief. No magistrate can make a man believe, and none should try. The magistrate’s charge concerns public acts (All the Gods of the Heathen, section 04).

It does not counsel resistance or offer a program. The American government is the power that is, and the Christian owes it obedience, taxes and honor (None Gives What He Has Not, section 11).

It does not deny natural law or common grace. Section 08 affirms both. It denies that either is a second kingdom.

It does not claim that Escondido teaches a morally neutral commonwealth. VanDrunen denies that, and he says the church’s preaching includes the state, human life and marriage (Credo, 2012). Our claim is that his commonwealth has a moral law and no religion, and that Scripture gives it both.

It does not claim that Calvin caused Escondido or would approve of it. It claims that Escondido is consistent with Calvin’s division and follows from it once the charge the division cannot ground is removed. Calvin’s charge stands against Escondido, and so does his reading of the second psalm.

It does not judge the faith of the men it answers. Gillespie, VanDrunen, Hart, Horton, Clark, Kline and the authors of Reformed Christian Politics confess Christ. The dispute is over the reach of his rule as Mediator.

It stands or falls on one premise. If the authority the Father gave the risen Christ does not include the magistrate’s office, the conclusion fails. Section 03 answers that premise with the second psalm, Daniel 7, Matthew 28, John 5, Ephesians 1 and 1 Corinthians 15. A reader who rejects the conclusion should reject it there.

Download the PDFOne-page summary (PDF)

Texts and editions

Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (London, 1844), with its numbering.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

Gelasius I to the Emperor Anastasius (494), in James Harvey Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. 1 (Boston, 1904), 72–73.

Martin Luther, Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523), trans. J. J. Schindel, in Works of Martin Luther, vol. 3 (Philadelphia, 1930), 234, 237.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), II.viii.1, III.xix.15, IV.xi.3, IV.xx.1–3, 5, 9, 16.

The Scots Confession (1560), ch. 24, in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3 (New York, 1877).

The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Q. 83, in Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3.

Thomas Erastus, The Theses of Erastus touching Excommunication (written 1568, published 1589), trans. Robert Lee (Edinburgh, 1844), Theses 73–74, 160–162.

The Articles of Religion (1571), Art. 37, in Charles Hardwick, A History of the Articles of Religion, 3rd ed. (London, 1876).

The Second Buik of Discipline (1578), chs. 1 and 10, in [William Dunlop, ed.], A Collection of Confessions of Faith, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1722).

Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book VIII, ch. i, §7, in The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. John Keble, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1836), 424–425.

George Gillespie, Aarons Rod Blossoming. Or, The Divine Ordinance of Church-Government Vindicated (London, 1646), title page and Book 2, chs. 5–7, 194, 208–209, 231–244.

James Melvill, The Autobiography and Diary of Mr James Melvill, ed. Robert Pitcairn (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842), 369–371.

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), 19.4, 23.3, 25.6, 30.1–2, 31.2, 31.5, and the American revision of 23.3 and 31.1 (1788), in Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3.

The Westminster Larger Catechism, QQ. 45 and 191, text of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 1, The History of Creeds (New York, 1877), 758–759, on the Articles of Christian Religion passed by Parliament in 1648.

Stuart Robinson, The Church of God as an Essential Element of the Gospel (Philadelphia, 1858), 84–88.

William Symington, Messiah the Prince: or, The Mediatorial Dominion of Jesus Christ, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1840), 225–279.

Address of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, to All the Churches of Jesus Christ throughout the Earth (Augusta, 1861), 5–6, 10–11, 14.

B. M. Palmer, The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell (Richmond, 1875), 504.

Meredith G. Kline, “The Relevance of the Theocracy,” The Presbyterian Guardian, 16 February 1953, and “Comments on an Old-New Error,” Westminster Theological Journal 41 (1978), texts at meredithkline.com.

D. G. Hart, A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006); “The Two-Kingdom Case for Blue Laws,” Old Life, 12 January 2010; “The Shelf Life of 2k, Part Four,” Old Life, 27 January 2017, reprinting a 2009 interview by David Strain.

Michael S. Horton, “How the Kingdom Comes,” Christianity Today, January 2006.

David VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010); Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); interview with Chris Cooper, Credo, 20 March 2012; “A Natural Law Right to Religious Freedom,” International Journal for Religious Freedom 5, no. 2 (2012); Divine Covenants and Moral Order (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014); Politics after Christendom (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020); Natural Law: A Short Companion (Brentwood: B&H Academic, 2023).

R. Scott Clark, Heidelblog: “Natural Law, the Two Kingdoms, and Homosexual Marriage,” 27 October 2008; “Are Theocratic Politics of the Essence of the Reformed Confession?,” 17 July 2023; “Sub-Christian Nationalism? (Part 10),” 13 September 2023; “Distinguishing Spheres Affirms Christ’s Lordship Over All Things (Part 1),” 15 January 2024.

Reviews: Keith A. Mathison, Ligonier Ministries, 9 December 2010; John Shelton, The Gospel Coalition, 13 May 2020.

John M. Frame, The Escondido Theology: A Reformed Response to Two Kingdom Theology (Whitefield Media, 2011). Westminster Seminary California faculty, “Response to John Frame,” 7 February 2012.

Jonathon D. Beeke, Duplex Regnum Christi (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

John R. Muether, “Meredith G. Kline: Controversial and Creative,” New Horizons, October 2022.

Stephen Wolfe, Zachary Garris and Sean McGowan, Reformed Christian Politics (2026), reformedchristianpolitics.org. Cited as RCP. Works marked “as quoted in RCP” or “as reported in RCP” are given from that book’s quotations.

None Gives What He Has Not. All the Gods of the Heathen. Out of the Root, the Fruit. The Sound of the Cornet.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament from Brenton’s Septuagint with its numbering (King James Jeremiah 50 is Jeremiah 27, Ezra is Brenton’s 2 Esdras, and Daniel follows the Greek). New Testament from the King James Version. Calvin is quoted from Beveridge’s translation, Erastus from Lee’s, the Westminster Confession from Schaff’s text of 1647 with the American revision noted, the Heidelberg Catechism from Schaff’s translation, the Larger Catechism from the text of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Hooker from Keble’s edition, and the Scots Confession, the Articles, the Second Book of Discipline, Gillespie and Melvill’s diary in their original spelling. Modern authors are quoted briefly and paraphrased otherwise. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com