‘Jesus announced the Kingdom, and it was the Church that came’. The remark (made by Alfred Loisy) locates, with pin-point accuracy, the place of the Church on the map of salvation-history. Its existence here and now, in the time-span between the Lord’s first and second Comings, is to be a sign of that Kingdom where there will be no more need for Church. By its very being the Church proclaims the comings of that Kingdom and is committed to being a question-mark set against all earthly societies and against any particular form of social organisation, institution or project. Among Christian thinkers few can have rivalled Augustine in constructing their thought within such an eschatological perspective. A sense of the huge distance that divides ‘here’ and ‘now’ from ‘there’ and ‘then’ runs like an axis through his mature thought. The first part of this article attempts a brief summary of his view of the nature of human society ; the second part is a reflection within such a perspective on the political tasks of a prophetic Church in a modern secular society.

Christian thought in the first three centuries was dominated, as it was bound to be, by the Pauline and, for that matter, the rabbinic tradition of thinking about social existence: the Christian, like the Jew, was necessarily an alien in his society, a traveller with no permanent home in it, The one and only just society was that which God would bring about in His Kingdom. In relation to earthly societies, Christians were aliens; in relation to God’s Kingdom they were subjects, awaiting God’s act to establish the society in which they would be gathered, rather than active participants in its creation, still less, its rulers.