Internal and external difficulties must not make us pessimistic or inactive. What counts, here as in every area of Christian life, is the confidence that comes from faith, from the certainty that it is not we who are the principal agents of the Church's mission, but Jesus Christ and his Spirit. We are only co-workers, and when we have done all that we can, we must say: "We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty" (Lk 17:10).
One may not separate the kingdom from the Church. It is true that the Church is not an end unto herself, since she is ordered toward the kingdom of God of which she is the seed, sign and instrument. Yet, while remaining distinct from Christ and the kingdom, the Church is indissolubly united to both. Christ endowed the Church, His body, with the fullness of the benefits and means of salvation. The Holy Spirit dwells in her, enlivens her with His gifts and charisms, sanctifies, guides and constantly renews her. The result is a unique and special relationship which, while not excluding the action of Christ and the Spirit outside the Church's visible boundaries, confers upon her a specific and necessary role; hence the Church's special connection with the kingdom of God and of Christ, which she has "the mission of announcing and inaugurating among all peoples."
Jesus offers a new element of extreme importance. The eschatological reality is not relegated to a remote "end of the world," but is already close and at work in our midst. The kingdom of God is at hand (Mk 1:15); its coming is to be prayed for ( Mt 6:10); faith can glimpse it already at work in signs such as miracles ( Mt 11:4-5) and exorcisms (Mt 12:25-28), in the choosing of the Twelve ( Mk 3:13-19), and in the proclamation of the Good News to the poor (Lk 4:18). Jesus' encounters with Gentiles make it clear that entry into the kingdom comes through faith and conversion ( Mk 1:15).
When the Church identifies or equates itself with the Kingdom, the Church is declaring that it is the saving presence of God on earth and at least implying that God is not present as a saving God anywhere else except in the Church. This is what some of the Council fathers called "triumphalism."
In Christians in Society: Luther, the Bible, and Social Ethics (Fortress Press, 2001), William H. Lazareth makes a non-apologizing apologetic for Luther's use of scripture as a relevant norm for contemporary social ethics. Lazareth himself frames the work as a defense of Lutheran public responsibility against the charges of Luther's "social conservatism," "law-gospel quietism," "Augustinian dualism" and "cultural defeatism" (chapter 1). I also perceive a more fundamental defense running throughout Lazareth's substantive chapters on the world's two kingdoms (chapters 3 and 4) and God's two-fold rule (chapters 5-8). There, Lazareth methodically but eloquently saves Luther's divisions (between law and gospel, and between existence coram dei and existence coram hominibus) from being understood as dualisms or dichotomies. Over and against much of our romanticist cultural ethos that sees all division as fragmenting an otherwise wholesome existence, Lazareth implicitly defends critical thought, including Pauline-Augustinian-Lutheran thought, as itself a way to open "third options" between secularism and clericalism, legalism and libertinism, and a theology faithful to the Gospel and one relevant to ethical reflection.
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