Dominus Iesus §18

V. THE CHURCH: KINGDOM OF GOD
AND KINGDOM OF CHRIST

18. The mission of the Church is “to proclaim and establish among all peoples the kingdom of Christ and of God, and she is on earth, the seed and the beginning of that kingdom”‌.⁶⁸ On the one hand, the Church is “a sacrament - that is, sign and instrument of intimate union with God and of unity of the entire human race”‌.⁶⁹ She is therefore the sign and instrument of the kingdom; she is called to announce and to establish the kingdom. On the other hand, the Church is the “people gathered by the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”‌;⁷⁰ she is therefore “the kingdom of Christ already present in mystery”‌⁷¹ and constitutes its seed and beginning. The kingdom of God, in fact, has an eschatological dimension: it is a reality present in time, but its full realization will arrive only with the completion or fulfilment of history.⁷²

The meaning of the expressions kingdom of heaven, kingdom of God, and kingdom of Christ in Sacred Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, as well as in the documents of the Magisterium, is not always exactly the same, nor is their relationship to the Church, which is a mystery that cannot be totally contained by a human concept. Therefore, there can be various theological explanations of these terms. However, none of these possible explanations can deny or empty in any way the intimate connection between Christ, the kingdom, and the Church. In fact, the kingdom of God which we know from revelation, “cannot be detached either from Christ or from the Church... If the kingdom is separated from Jesus, it is no longer the kingdom of God which he revealed. The result is a distortion of the meaning of the kingdom, which runs the risk of being transformed into a purely human or ideological goal and a distortion of the identity of Christ, who no longer appears as the Lord to whom everything must one day be subjected (cf. 1 Cor 15:27). Likewise, one may not separate the kingdom from the Church. It is true that the Church is not an end unto herself, since she is ordered toward the kingdom of God, of which she is the seed, sign and instrument. Yet, while remaining distinct from Christ and the kingdom, the Church is indissolubly united to both”‌.⁷³

(68) Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, 5.

(69) Ibid., 1.

(70) Ibid., 4. Cf. St. Cyprian, De Dominica oratione 23: CCSL 3A, 105.

(71) Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, 3.

(72) Cf. ibid., 9; cf. also the prayer addressed to God found in the Didache 9,4: SC 248, 176: “May the Church be gathered from the ends of the earth into your kingdom”‌ and ibid. 10, 5: SC 248, 180: “Remember, Lord, your Church... and, made holy, gather her together from the four winds into your kingdom which you have prepared for her”‌.

(73) John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Redemptoris missio, 18; cf. Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in Asia, 17: L'Osservatore Romano (November 7, 1999). The kingdom is so inseparable from Christ that, in a certain sense, it is identified with him (cf. Origen, In Mt. Hom., 14, 7: PG 13, 1197; Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, IV, 33,8: CCSL 1, 634.