No Dual Citizenship

Last week Greg Boyd spoke at Park View Men­non­ite Church in Har­rison­burg, about his book The Myth of a Chris­t­ian Nation. His main idea was that there is the king­dom of the world, and the king­dom of God and that they are dif­fer­ent. You can tell because the king­dom of God on earth looks like Jesus. So if you ever want to know if some­thing world king­dom or God king­dom, just check whether it looks like Jesus or not.

The Anabap­tist tra­di­tion has cen­tred on this fairly closely, his­tor­i­cally. Boyd urged the Men­non­ites in the audi­ence to keep this voice strong, while at the same time chal­leng­ing to be flex­i­ble and open on every­thing else that is not about God’s king­dom. A chal­lenge, to say the least.

He empha­sized how God’s king­dom is inclu­sive, rad­i­cally inclu­sive, so much that the Matthews (tax col­lec­tors) and Simons (zealots who “some­times assas­si­nated tax col­lec­tors”) could fol­low Jesus together in the same group of dis­ci­ples, dia­logu­ing, inter­act­ing, and focus­ing on liv­ing the God’s king­dom –kind of life.

As fol­low­ers of Jesus, we can have dif­fer­ent opin­ions and view­points on pol­i­tics and the way the world should go, but ulti­mately we are gath­ered together as one in the king­dom of God, which takes pri­or­ity over all other issues.

So this is my cit­i­zen­ship. I need to remem­ber this and not be con­fused while liv­ing in a ‘for­eign’ king­dom of this world. I was reminded that while I can dia­logue and chal­lenge and engage the world king­dom, my iden­tity and pri­mary alle­giance lies in God’s king­dom. If I choose to fol­low Jesus, I give up my cit­i­zen­ship to the world. There is no dual cit­i­zen­ship here.