See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. — Colossians 2:8
I have labored in this volume to demonstrate by teasing out a host of reasons that Radical Two Kingdom theology is a false gospel and so a false Christianity. Should one wholly embrace R2K the consequence is a un-biblical epistemology (chapter 1) which in turns yields the dualism of a “hyphenated-life” (chapter 2). Should one have a presuppositional epistemology for the R2K grace realm and a Natural Law epistemology for the R2K common realm the consequence will be a raging Platonic dualism. Every single time. The owning of R2K also yields a warped soteriology, (chapter 3) where Jesus Christ’s office of King and Liege Lord is reduced to a Gnostic reality. R2K fanboys end up turning into a militant Amillennialist (chapter 6). The only place R2K will fight for the Kingdom is when it is fighting those who hold to a optimistic eschatology. Together we have considered the covenantal malfeasance of R2K (chapter 4) and we remind ourselves again that per Reformed giant Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield federal (covenant) theology is the, “architectonic principle” of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647).Chapter 4 is important because if you get your covenant theology wrong (which R2K does) then the rest of your theology is going to be seriously skewed. In chapter 5 we noted the failures of R2K to understand that religion – even in their “common realm” is an inescapable category as it pertains to both magistrates and states. R2K, in good Jeffersonian fashion seeks to erect a wall of separation between Christianity and State quite without realizing that all laws invoke a moral order and all moral orders in turn rely upon religious tenets. Sans R2K it is not possible to have a religiously naked or neutral public square. Cult and culture deriving from the same root word as they do reminds us that what a culture forbids or sanctions reveals the religious orientation of the culture. Religion is an inescapable category for both Magistrates and States and since it is the religion of the realm and of Magistrates needs be Christian and not neutral or naked as R2K advocates. Together in chapter 7 we listened to the R2K gurus in their own words and discovered the reason for the “R” in the R2K. Radical is a understatement. As chapter 8 unfolded we learned that R2K does not believe it is possible that families should be, or even can be “Christian.” In chapter 9 we explored the theocratic fears of R2K. We demonstrated that R2K needs to get over its fears since all social orders are organized, either explicitly or implicitly as theocracies. In chapter 10 we exposed some of the spoof texting of R2K. It really is not possible to expose all their spoof texting since R2K runs all of scripture through their R2K grinder with the consequence that R2K reads all of scripture as proving R2K. The best approach to defeating the spoof-texting of R2K is to go after it from a systematic theology approach. As we worked together through chapter 11 we examined the fears of R2K when it comes to the idea that Christianity is to be a transformational faith. R2K, locking Christianity away into the Church realm, becomes nervous when Christians begin to speak of Christianity leavening all areas of life and being salt to all callings. As we traveled through chapter 12 we noted that R2K has some strange ideological soulmates in places as diverse as Marxism, Anabaptist theology, classical liberalism, and other strange bedfellows. Chapter 12 reveals how R2K has been taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition. In chapter 13 we provided a better way to handle the issues that seem to bother Radical Two Kingdom theologians.
The matters that we have mapped out in our time together are matters that others have seen and are seeing. In July of 2022 Dr. Rev. Sacha Walicord raised a warning similar to what can be found in this volume. Walicord offered in his sermon, “Two Covenants, One Law;”
“Christ is the mediator of this covenant of grace and here is something we need to hear — especially have to hear in the United Reformed Churches, as increasingly our people are being confused with a false understanding of exactly this topic. You have to understand that the Law and the Gospel are not opposites. They are in full harmony as Paul in vs. 21 reiterates … He asks exactly the question that has been plaguing the United Reformed Churches and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church for a along time; ‘Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not’ he says. How much clearer do we want it? How crafty does it get with our enmity against the law of God? How deception can preachers become in luring our people away from the truth – away from a wonderful benefit of the covenant of grace, (of God’s dictated order of life) and changing the Gospel into something else?
And Paul continues, ‘If a law had been given that could give life then righteousness would indeed be by the law.’ Now this describes exactly the trap in which many of the contemporary Reformed have fallen. They do rightly understand that we have been saved through faith in Jesus Christ but they go ahead and say, “Since it is the promise and not the law that saves we have to abandon the law’ and they become anti-nomians. They become enemies of the law – discarding the law altogether. They portray the Law and the Gospel as contrarians – as competitors and they pit the two, as it were, against each other, just like the Marcions of old did with their heresy. That’s in its core the fasle understanding and the false doctrine — the so-called Radical Two Kingdom doctrine, which is being heavily promoted by a seminary on the west coast and by many of its graduates almost cult like — even in our Federation and we have to begin of calling this out this as what it is. It is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But it is another Gospel.
There I said it with all the possible repercussions and consequences. It (R2K) is another Gospel.
Because that is clearly not what the Bible teaches and that is not Gospel that Paul preaches who driven by the Holy Spirit says just the opposite.
Dr. Rev. Sacha Walicord
https://www.sermonaudio.com/solo/walkerurc/sermons/8722150511983/
Begin at 19:00 Mark
Dr. Walicord has lifted a battle cry that needs to echo from Reformed Churches across the West. If we, the Church, do not excise Radical Two Kingdom theology from the Reformed Church the consequence will be that the Reformed Church will become the enemy of Jesus Christ. The task before us upon defeating R2K is to follow the words of Reformed Theologian Dr James Orr and to realize that;
“The Church has another and yet more difficult task before it if it is to retain its ascendancy over the minds of men. That task is to bring Christianity to bear as an applied power on the life and conditions of society; to set itself as it has never yet done to master the meaning of “the mind of Christ,” and to achieve the translation of that mind into the whole practical life of the age — into laws, institutions, commerce, literature, art; into domestic, civic, social, and political relations; into national and international doings — in this sense to bring in the Kingdom of God among men.”
James Orr
The Progress of Dogma — pp 353-354 (1897)
Consistent with Orr, a generation later, J. Gresham Machen could write in his essay Christianity & Culture;
“We may preach with all the fervour of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root. Many would have the seminaries combat error by attacking it as it is taught by its popular exponents. Instead of that they confuse their students with a lot of German names unknown outside the walls of the universities…. What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combatted; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mould the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity….
The real difficulty amounts to this—that the thought of the day, as it makes itself most strongly felt in the universities, but from them spreads inevitably to the masses of the people, is profoundly opposed to Christianity, or at least—what is nearly as bad—it is out of all connection with Christianity. The Church is unable either to combat it or to assimilate it, because the Church simply does not understand it. Under such circumstances, what more pressing duty than for those who have received the mighty experience of regeneration, who, therefore, do not, like the world, neglect that the whole series of vitally relevant facts which is embraced in Christian experience—what more pressing duty than for these men to make themselves masters of the thought of the world in order to make it an instrument of truth instead of error? The Church has no right to be so absorbed in helping the individual that she forgets the world.”
R2K, in ignoring men like Dr. James Orr and J. Gresham Machen would turn Christianity into a faith that will, in this life and world always be a minority voice laboring away in the catacombs of irrelevancy. R2K, with its avowed convictions creates conditions where the faith once and forever delivered unto the saints will always be a marginalized voice begging just be allowed to exist so it can demonstrate to all with eyes to see how fabulous it is for its great ascended and triumphant Liege-Lord to always be in subjection to pagan Kings and Magistrates. R2K with its theology guarantees that Christianity will always be a private religion not allowed to walk in the public square and taken up only by old women, fools, and people who have a masochistic tendency. R2K sells itself as that elixir that promises to keep the Christian faith irrelevant, defeated, and supine. R2K promises your soul to God while giving your body to the State.
The stakes are high in this debate. Should the Reformed Churches not rid themselves of Radical Two Kingdom theology the consequence is going to be that a theological/ideological vacuum is going to come to the fore in the Reformed Churches and that vacuum is going to be filled by cultural Marxism – the predominant worldview du-jour today. The inevitability of this is guaranteed due to the fact of the R2K soy boy pulpiteers refusal to give a “thus saith the Lord” on moral issues facing Christians in the R2K common realm. If there is no voice from the pulpit about what pleases God on issues ranging from abortion to economics (Heidelberg Catechism Q. 110) to trannie-ism to the idolatry of putting children in Government schools, to God’s mind on the New World Order, etc. then the voice that God’s people in the pews are going to be hearing is going to be the voice of the Cultural Marxists. If the R2K Church will not give a “thus saith the Lord,” then the consequence is the laymen is going to absorb the worldview zeitgeist on these issues. R2K guarantees that the Church will eventually tack to the hard left.
One wonders if that is in part what all this R2K emesis really is about. Has R2K been just a clever way to emasculate the Church in the face of the belching of Hell? Anecdotally speaking, it seems that so many of the R2K fanboys tilt to the left in their thinking and speaking (see chapter 7). Is R2K just providing cover for the Cultural Marxists? Silent the pulpits and the slime of Cultural Marxism can more easily ooze into the Church?
This has never been the way that the Reformed Churches, when healthy, have functioned in the past. When healthy the Reformed Churches were always at the front of cultural battles. When healthy the Reformed Churches have warned Kings, refused to bow to threats of Magistrates, and insisted on the law of God as the norm that norms all norms for all men in all settings.
We end with a statement that brings together the best of historic Reformed Christianity in its missionary impulse. The best of historic Reformed Christianity has always been evangelistic to the individual while holding out God’s standard to nations, social orders, and cultures. R2K tries to half that equation and by doing so ends up losing the best of the historic Reformed faith.
“In giving the Church a mission to the nations, Jesus does not diminish the importance of the individual. The offer of the Gospel must be sincerely extended to individual persons in all times and places. After all, at stake is the salvation of human beings, called to repent and believe. But also at stake is the salvation, well-being, and peace of the nations, that is, societies as God would have them. The Son of God must ‘rule all nations’ (Rev. 12:5). The nations must bow down before the Lord and come to walk in His light (Rev. 15:4; 21:24). These nations, with their cultures, traditions, and religions turned away from the God of Holy Scripture, are called to be converted to a sure salvation. This conversion of a nation does not happen apart from the individual lives of faithful Christians, but precisely through the influence of such lives. Moreover, each nation’s conversion is to reflect the uniqueness of that nation.”
Pierre Courthial
A New Day of Small Beginnings — pg. 112
Let God be true and every R2K theologian a liar.
Am I correct in assuming you written and published a book on R2K? If so I would love to purchase some copies.
Dave,
Due to be published within the next few months. I’ll keep you informed.
Bret
Excellent article. Much to chew on & very much appreciated since I was not familiar with R2K, even though I have been pursuing a deeper understanding of the covenantal aspects with regards our current situation…both Biblically as well as Constitutionally.