Lately I have been studying a lot about the resurrection of Jesus Christ and what that means for this world. When speaking of what exactly happened when Christ raised from the dead and brought about His kingdom on earth, many scholars like to use the term of the kingdom as "already here but not yet fully." Although this is true in some aspects, this way of wording it can easily lead us into a dualistic mindset resulting in separating the world in Christ from the world of the "secular." Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers a clarity to this delima:
"One is denying the revelation of God in Jesus Christ if one tries to be 'Christian' without seeing and recognizing the world in Christ. There are, therefore, not two spheres, but only the one sphere of the realizations of Christ, in which the reality of God and the reality of the world are united. Thus the theme of the two spheres, which has repeatedly become the dominant factor in the history of the church, is foreign to the New Testament. The New Testament is concerned solely with the manner in which the reality of Christ assumes reality in the present world, which it has already encompassed, seized, and possessed. There are not two spheres, standing side by side, competing with each other and attacking each other's frontiers. If that were so, this frontier dispute would always be the decisive problem of history. But the whole reality of the world is already drawn into Christ and bound together in him, and the movement of history consists solely in divergence and convergence in revelational with the rational. But between the two there is in each case a unity which derives solely from the reality of Christ, that is to say solely from faith in this ultimate reality. This unity is seen in the way in which the secular and the Christian elements prevent one another from assuming any kind of static independence in their mutual relations. They adopt a polemical attitude toward each other and bear witness precisely in this to their shared reality and to their unity in the reality which is in Christ"
Source: A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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