THE DOUBLE-DECKER BUS

 (Excepted from The Kingdom, an upcoming book by D. Rudi Schwartz and Neil Cullan McKinlay.)

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We must understand that Christ’s Kingdom is one, into which family, church, and state, are to be exhorted, each in their respective sovereign spheres of operation, to conform to Christ’s royal law. One King. One Kingdom. One Kingdom Law.  

Up until perhaps the late 70s, smoking cigarettes was permitted on the upper deck of those gravity-defying double-decker corporation buses that fly round corners in Glasgow at breakneck speed without toppling over. Smoking upstairs. Non-smoking downstairs. 

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Indeed, a common and perhaps arguably blasphemous phrase is that of referring to Jesus/God as “the Man upstairs.” Heaven is upstairs and earth is downstairs. The sacred/secular dualism of Two Kingdom Theology, rather than having Him upstairs, would have Jesus in the driver’s seat driving the bus – with incense-burning Christians doing “spiritual things” and “soul stuff” on the upper deck while the non-Christians get to do non-spiritual things, stuff of the body, on the lower deck. Special grace upstairs. Common grace downstairs.

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However, the true picture is that of Christ driving a single-decker bus with the passengers mixing and mingling all according to the rules for riding on His bus. The non-Christians will not be ejected until the bus reaches the terminus, its final destination. Meanwhile on the journey, the Christians are to try to Christianise the non-Christians with the gospel and the law. William Edgar warns us against dualism,

The comprehensive lordship of Christ, rather than the divided sacred-secular philosophy, can be established from other places in the New Testament. One of them is from the earliest portions of Acts. The disciples asked Jesus just before his ascension, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). What was behind their question? Some would say they had mistakenly expected some kind of takeover of the Roman Empire and had to be reminded, again, that the true nature of the kingdom was spiritual, not political. But Jesus’ answer belies this view. He did not admonish them to think of the soul and not the body, but only that they were not privy to the divine timetable” “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority” (Acts 1:7). Their task, in the meantime, was to receive power and be his witnesses (martyres, “trustworthy tellers”) in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8).[1]  

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[1] William Edgar, Created & Creating - A Biblical Theology of Culture, 151-2.