”…what sort of religious commitment, if any, should be promoted or required within the social order? The answer, I suggest, is none. A crucial consideration is the fact that God made the Noahic covenant with “you [Noah and his sons] and your offspring after you, and with every living creature that is with you” (9:9-10). The human race generally (along with the animal kingdom) is God’s covenant partner. Not a single distinction is made between believers and unbelievers, but God promises to preserve them in their common social life.”
~ Dr. David Van Drunen, 2012 lecture
How thoughtful of Dr. Van Drunen to give us so clearly and to so passionately advocate his religious commitment for the social order. Dr. VD’s religious commitment for the social order that he is advocating is that the social order should be animated by the religious commitment of no religious commitment. Another way to label his religious commitment for the social order is ” Social Order Atheism. Interestingly enough this is the exact same social order theory advocated by Marxists of all hues and stripes.
Now, some desire to answer Dr. Van Drunen by insisting that the religious commitment of the social order should be all religious commitments. In this thinking the social order should be animated by all religious commitments. This is sometimes called pluralism but I prefer to label it as Social Order Polytheism. Interestingly enough this is the social order advocated by all anarchists.
The main problem with Dr. Van Drunen’s thinking is that it presupposes that man can cease being Homo Adorans (man the worshiper) in his common realm. For Dr. Van Drunen man is no longer a worshiper as he lives and moves and has is being in the social order, and not being a worshiper man can create a social order that is not reflective of any ultimate religious commitment to a god or god concept. Such a thinking puts a severe strain on ones desire to be a irenic.
In both situations of social order Atheism or social order polytheism, even though they each being with seemingly opposite religious commitments for the social order, they end up in the same place. If the social order is to be Atheistic then it will be the autonomous man deified as the State that will create the social order and the citizenry will be required to have religious commitments to the state. If the social order is to be polytheistic then it will require some institution to set the limits on how these competing religious commitments will interact in the social order. That institutions will likely be the State. Both of these positions lead us to the outcome that in the State we will live and move and have or being for the social order.
Frame sees no Social Order Polytheism either. Frame’s responds to a similar comment from VanDrunen in A Biblical Defense for Natural Law.
VanDrunen writes:
“Furthermore, Genesis 9 makes it evident that the covenant of common grace regulates temporal, cultural affairs rather than more narrowly religious pertaining to salvation from sin. …. God has established the civil kingdom in the sinful world, a common realm constituted of all people, whatever their religous commitment, in which tempral affairs of justice,procreatiion, and cultural development are regulated. These affairs are a common enterprise. A Biblical Defense for Natural Law pp 27-28.
Frame responds:
In my view, VanDrunen’s treatment of Genesis 9(based to be sure on that of Meredith G Kline) reads far too much into the passage. God’s covenant here is certainly a covenant with all human beings. But at the same time, “all human beings” consisted of one family, a believing family, who had embraced God’s promise of deliverance through the ark. There is no specific passage in the reference to unbelievers, or to a secular state, or to “temporal affairs”, or to some system of social organization beyod the family.
Noah’s family was a godly family, every bit as much as was Abraham’s later on. The blessing of preservation given to Noah’s family is a gracious promise, which they received by faith. In Genesis 8:20-22 Noah offers a sacrifice to God, and God’s promise to preserve the earth is a response to the sweet aroma. Was this sacrificial anything other than religious?
Indeed, God’s covenant with Noak was religious though and through, even on the narrowest definitions of “religious.” In the New Testament, the the flood is a type of God’s final judgment on sin (Mt 24:37-39, Heb 11:7, 1Pet 3:20, 2Pet 2:5, 3:5-6), and also of the baptism of believers (1Pet 3:21). Noah is for us a model of saving faith. By constructing an ark, “He condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (Heb 11:7). God’s promise to Noah is an encouragement to believers that the apparent delay of Jesus’ return is part of God’s redemptive plan (2Pet 3:4-13).
No doubt that as time progresses the promise also benefits non-believers. In that sense it is common grace. For that matter, all of God’s covenants bring blessing to the world in general. Believers are salt of the earth and light of the world (Mt 5:13-16). God’s bring the elect to repentance delays the judgment on the wicked and thereby benefits them (2Pet 3:9).
But God’s covenant with Noah is an administration of God’s redemptive grace, religious through and through, just as those with Abraham, Moses, David and Christ”
The Escondido Theology pp136-137