Just as Christian morality has in mind the realization of the kingdom of God within the individual, so Christian policy should prepare for the coming of the kingdom of God for all mankind as a whole, consisting of large parts — peoples, tribes and states.

… Godless enmity and discord still reign in the politics of the Christian peoples, there is not even a mention of the kingdom of God. … The whole dignity of a man lies in the fact that he consciously struggles with bad reality for the sake of a better goal. … And in the common life of mankind, the kingdom of evil and discord is a fact, but the goal is the kingdom of God, …

… Vl. Solov’ev acknowledges a positive significance to the falling separate of the natures of the human powers from God, since after the falling separate there is made possible the free co-uniting of man with God. The Kingdom of God cannot be realised by way of compulsion and coercion. Compulsory theocracy ought to collapse, and man ought to enter upon the path of a free revealing of his powers. Vl. Solov’ev surmises, that the world ought to proceed through freedom and freely come to God.

Great is the truth and prevails! (2 Ezd 4:41). The all-one divine wisdom can say to all false principles, which are all its creations, but in their contention have become its enemies, it can say to them with confidence: “Go straight in your ways until you see the abyss before you; then you will renounce your strife and you will all return, enriched by experience and consciousness, to your common fatherland, where for each of you there is a throne and a crown, and there is enough space for everyone, for there are many mansions in the house of My Father” (John 14:2).

Vl. Solov’ev always understood Christianity not only as a given, but also as a task, oriented towards human freedom and activity. In this was his great merit. The deed of Christ in the world is love, first of all. And the deed of love, as Solov’ev conceives it, ought not to be for justification whether by works or by faith, but for the realisation of the Kingdom of God. “Mankind, — writes he, — ought not only to accept grace and truth, as something posited in Christ, but also to realise this grace and truth in his own particular and historical life”. “The perfection of the Church or the creation of a Christian culture in the world demands, beyond the guidance of an universal power, likewise the free activity of personal human powers”. In God-manhood collectively there ought to occur suchlike a co-uniting of the two natures, as individually did occur in the God-Man Christ. According to his original schema, Solov’ev thought, that God-manhood will appear as a result of the co-uniting of the Divine principle, preeminently expressed in the East, with the human principle, preeminently expressed in the West. … The sympathies of Vl. Solov’ev for Catholicism were defined by his conviction, that an organised human activity is stronger in Catholicism, whereas Orthodoxy is rather too passive. These Catholic sympathies were defined for him by externals, and not from within by the dogmatic system of Catholicism itself. Solov’ev was fond of the idea of the dogmatic developement of the Church, in which he saw a manifestation of human activity, and he saw greater suchlike developement in the West rather than in the East. … “The essential and core distinction of our religion from other Eastern ones, — writes Vl. Solov’ev, — in particular from the Mussulman, consists in this, that Christianity, as a religion Divine-human, presupposes the activity of God and together with this demands also human activity. From this perspective the realisation of the Kingdom of God is dependent not only on God, but also upon us, since clearly, the spiritual regeneration of mankind cannot happen except with mankind itself, it cannot be merely an external fact; it is a deed, imposed upon us, a task, to which we mustneeds attend”.

The more fully the Christian world would express the Christian idea of spiritual and universal theocracy, the more powerfully would Christian principles have an impact upon the private lives of Christians, upon the social life of Christian peoples, and upon the political relations within Christendom. The more obviously, then, would the Jewish view of Christianity be overturned, and the nearer and more possible would the conversion of the Jews be. Accordingly, the Jewish question is a Christian question.

Christianity and Jewry have a common theocratic task: the establishment of a righteous society. And since God is the source of all righteousness, the righteous society is a divine-human society. In it, the whole man serves God willingly, and all people live in mutual unanimity and possess full mastery over material nature. According to Jewish conceptions, such an ideal society must become incarnate in the people of Israel (in the kingdom of the Messiah). According to Christian conceptions, all peoples are equally called to it. This Christian universalism should not be understood to imply that all ethnicities provide undifferentiated material for the universal theocracy. All peoples are equal at least before the law of the Gospel in the same sense as, for example, all the citizens of a kingdom are equal before the law of the land. This in no way prevents the different constituencies and categories of citizens from having their own special rights, rights deriving from the particular responsibilities of their service (thus in the most egalitarian country, the doctor possesses particular rights which the farmer does not have, while in the most democratic republic the minister possesses privileges not granted to the night guard, and so on, even though they are all equal before the law, which determines both the common rights of all and the particular rights of each). Likewise, in God’s commonwealth (in civitate Dei) different peoples can have different privileges depending on their particular historical position and national calling, provided that no harm would be done to mutual love and solidarity. Consequently, no inevitable contradiction obtains between the Christian and Hebraic theocratic ideas. If the Jews hold a claim to a special status and role in the universal theocracy, we have no a priori need to reject this claim, especially if we recall what the apostle Paul said about this subject: “to them belong the sonship, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, is the Christ, the God who is over all. … Or has God rejected His people? By no means! … God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. … But lest you not pride yourselves, I do not wish to leave you, brethren, in ignorance about the mystery, that a blindness has come upon Israel, in part, until the full number of the Gentiles come in. … And then all Israel will be saved.”

Until God shall be all in all (1Co 15:28), until every human being becomes a receptacle for the deity, so long will divine government over humanity necessarily require specific organs or mediators to act within humanity.

In general, theocracy aims at the actualization of religion (i.e., the union of God with man) in the whole of life of the nations. The successful fulfillment of this task necessitates three conditions: (1) the complete independence of the religious principle in society, for this principle constitutes the essence and goal of the whole task, and if the religious element should occupy in common life a subordinate and a dependent status, then theocracy would be robbed of all its meaning; (2) a correct subdivision of the social body and a firm order in its government, since without this, religion would lack the permanent and purposeful means to influence life and guide it theocratically; and (3) the free and energetic activity of personal forces, since without such activity the best social organization in the world would remain an empty form.

… divine government must extend over all human life and cannot be confined to some one particular sphere of this present life. For this reason, the organs of divine government must also be present not only in specifically religious but also in the political and social spheres. The specifically religious sphere has its theocratic organ in the priest (or rather archpriest, since a priest presupposes a consecrator); the political sphere has its own theocratic organ in the tsar, as God’s anointed; while finally, the social life of the people has its own theocratic organ in the person of the prophet, that is, in the free preacher and teacher. Each of these three representatives of theocracy has his own sphere of operation but exists, in virtue of the nature of these spheres, in distinct reciprocal relations with the others. The priest directs, the tsar governs, the prophet redirects. In the economy of divine government, the priesthood possesses authority, founded on tradition, the tsar possesses power, grounded on law, and the prophet exercises the freedom of personal initiative.

The fullness of the theocratic ideal demands a consistent and concordant development of these three instruments of divine government.

The entire matter consists in the fact that the church on earth must not only safeguard the sacredness of faith but also unceasingly fight for it with external enemies; it must fortify, protect, and strengthen religious life. … Struggle requires a sufficiently independent, concentrated, and energetic church power. The dependence of the spiritual power upon the secular and the lack of an inner core paralyze the church’s external activity and undermine her ability to influence national and social life. … A church which is deprived of a sufficiently independent representative cannot exert any real influence either upon government or upon society.

The true Jewish and Christian prophet does not rise up against sacerdotal and royal authority but adheres to them and helps them by his admonitions and exhortations. The true prophet is conscious of his vocation not as a natural right common to him and all and, likewise, not as his own private privilege but as a special divine gift, which demands moral cultivation on his part. … the Hebrew prophets, as we know, did not revolt against the lawful priesthood … the Hebrew prophets preached justification by faith and by works, and not by faith alone.

… Christian tsardom, significant as it is, is only a part of the theocratic idea. Its one-sided development would impair the other theocratic elements; its prevalence over them could imperil God’s work on earth. Thus it happened in Byzantium. … the abuses of Byzantine Caesarism bore … profound consequences, for they distorted the very life of Christian society in the East. Given that the spiritual authority in Byzantium lacked sufficient independence, strength, and capacity to restrain royal authority, the latter bore down with all its weight upon social life and suppressed in it every energetic personal initiative and any independent activity. … In Byzantium, the theocratic task of Christianity, the establishment of a just society, was decisively destroyed.

For if in Byzantium the principal cause of all evils consisted in the excessive predominance of imperial autocracy, then the root obstacle facing the theocratic task in the West lay in the weakness and fragmentation of state authority. … With the annihilation of imperial autocracy, the Western church lost its main instrument for implementing its theocratic task. This church, united by and concentrated in the Roman altar, did not fear the strong empire of Charles the Great but utilized its might. The ensuing weak and fragmented empire turned out to be hazardous and dangerous for the papacy, …

The true Jewish and Christian prophet does not rise up against sacerdotal and royal authority but adheres to them and helps them by his admonitions and exhortations. … By rejecting these two necessary conditions of true prophecy — submission to lawful authorities and the striving to be worthy of the highest vocation — Protestantism essentially distorted the third theocratic principle, and by separating prophecy from priesthood, it even failed to give the world any true prophets.

The division of the churches, having upset the balance between the first two formative principles of Christian theocracy — priesthood and kingship — facilitated, by the same token, an unlawful manifestation of the third theocratic principle: prophecy. … the real, albeit remote, cause of Protestantism, the division of the churches, undermined the universal character of Christianity and gave the upper hand to national and tribal conflicts.

The German world also, in its turn, displayed its own specific theocratic idea and adversely set it over and against the theocratic idea of Catholicism. Taking its stand under the banner of free prophetic ministry, Protestantism represented, to a well-known degree, a return to Hebraic principles. But concomitantly there remained between them an immense difference favoring Jewry. For first of all, the Hebrew prophets, as we know, did not revolt against the lawful priesthood as Protestants did; and second, the Hebrew prophets preached justification by faith and by works, and not by faith alone.

As in Judaism so in Protestantism, but even more speedily, prophecy was replaced by teaching. … Protestant biblical studies turned into criticism and criticism became negation. … Initially, the leaders of the Protestant world moved from being prophets to being teachers; now, in turn, the religious academy concedes its place to scholastic erudition with a predominantly anti-Christian tendency. And here there remains not even an imprint of that distinctive though false theocratic idea which inspired the first Protestant leaders.

This collapse of the Christian idea was not confined solely to the Germanic countries in which Protestantism triumphed. Although the religious cause of the Reformation did not succeed in Latin or Romance Europe, its practical result — universal secularization, that is, the separation of all spheres of human activity — of politics and public administration, of science and schools, of art and social life — from religion and from the church, this universal secularization also spread itself over Latin Europe. As represented by their ruling classes, the Romance countries also followed the example of the German in repudiating the theocratic idea.