“Throughout the nineteenth century in the United States there was an unstable synthesis of intense private religion and a public order that officially recognized no god except the people…. Public life was left to the realm of nature, while grace was reserved for private life. This arrangement of private religion and public irreligion produced religious peace for the most part, while American society slowly became secularized….Nature was slowly devouring grace. In other words, the parts of life governed by autonomous human reason expanded, and the areas devoted to Jesus Christ contracted. Worst yet those parts of life left outside of Jesus Christ tended to become hostile to Him.
Dr. William Edgar — Reformed Theologian
God And Politics — pg. 187-188
Immediately we want to note that the one place we disagree with Dr. Edgar is his statement that “American society slowly became secularized. American society did not become slowly secularized. Instead American society became slowly de-Christianized in the direction of the religion of secular humanism.
With that caveat though this is an excellent quote since it so ably exposes the problem of Radical Two Kingdom virus theology. What the R2Kt virus does is to create realms of nature and realms of grace that men occupy. In the realms of nature belongs most of where we do our living. The realm of grace is occupied by the Church and our individual immortal souls. In the realm of nature truth comes through unaided reason as that unaided reason, starting from itself, reads natural law and implements upon the common realm the conclusions reached. The realm of nature is putatively a-religious and is a realm of neutrality where the regenerate and unregenerate can build a common culture.
The problem with this way of reasoning is that it can only work where a people have a shared worldview to begin with. It is the nadir of a disordered ratiocination to think you could slam people from a Hindu culture together with people from a Muslim culture and think that a functional culture could arise due to the variant peoples reaching the same conclusions in the common realm as instructed by Natural law.
And yet that is exactly what R2Kt virus theologians think can happen in our culture as they appeal to Biblical Christians and Secular Humanists to work out their common realm differences by an appeal to Natural law. All this can produce is either conflict in interpretations of Natural law or surrendering by Christians on Secular Humanist interpretations in order to accommodate the Secular Humanists so that they can live quiet and peaceful lives of capitulation to the crown rights of King Jesus.
What always happens in absolutist dualism approaches is that the dualism seeks to resolve the tension. What happened in our history is that we tried to follow the R2Kt paradigm, and as Edgar notes, it worked for awhile, but it only worked as long as it did because Americans shared a common heritage. That common heritage has dissipated as the secular humanism in control of the realm of nature, increasingly uninformed by an increasingly deteriorated public Christianity has expanded to create its own anti-Christian heritage, its own anti-Christian traditions and its own anti-Christian culture. The R2Kt paradigm that was employed by America with success in its early life no longer can provide peace because secular humanism has expanded at the expense of a now contracted Christianity.
Please note, it is not to the blame of the Christian community that this arrangement is ending, unless, of course, you blame wild game for resisting being torn alive by the resident carnivore. Further, more R2Kt as solution will not solve the problem of the massive expansion of the Secular humanist realm of nature combined with the massive contracting of the Christian realm of grace. Such solutions were accepted in the Germany of the 1930’s and we all know how well that worked out.
We continue to insist that while the distinction of Holy and common need to be maintained the way offered by R2Kt is a recipe for destruction of the Church of Jesus Christ.