Marxism, Sovereignty, and R2K

Eternally speaking, God is absolutely sovereign and holds all sovereignty as His own. No one can challenge God’s sovereignty, though many imagine that they can and do. God, in His infinite wisdom, has appointed certain spheres where Federal Representatives are delegated temporal sovereignty in order to rule in God’s stead in the spheres to which God has appointed them.

So then, temporally speaking, there is only so much sovereignty to go around. Reality doesn’t expand, and as such temporal sovereignty over reality does not expand either. What this means is that no matter how temporal sovereignty is sliced up and divided at the end of the doling out of temporal sovereignty if one was to add all the temporal sovereignty together its total amount could be neither increased or decreased. Hence, if any one agency is able to accrue an increase in its temporal sovereignty that agency does so at the expense of some other agency losing some sovereignty.

To put this in concrete terms, if the State increases its total amount of sovereignty the result is that it does only at the expense of the family or the church losing the sovereignty that it formerly exercised before the state successfully seized the amount of sovereignty it lost from the state. Similarly, were the family to increase its total amount of sovereignty it could only do so at the expense of other agencies.

All this is background to consider how it is that Marxism is a sovereignty sucking plausibility structure. Marxism, by its nature, consistently seeks to seize sovereignty from all other social order spheres in order to locate all sovereignty in the state. By doing so Marxism, seeks to attack all other temporal sovereignty not delegated to it so that it might ascend to the most high in order to convince itself that the sovereignty it wields is of the eternal type.

By its very tenets Marxism consistently attacks two of the basic spheres God has ordained and it does so because these basic spheres of family and religion impede the state’s attempt to garner into its fists a monopoly on sovereignty, power, and authority. The Marxist state attacks the family through tax policy, education policy, and its ongoing attempt to take away the family’s ability to own private property. The Marxist state attacks religion by cordoning it off from the public square and by drawing the circle ever tighter as to where and when religion can be displayed. The Marxist state, regardless of what degree of Marxism it is currently at works to confiscate property, break up families, and legislate against faith expressing itself in the public square.

Marxist states, given their dialectic philosophy, may, from time to time, enter into detente with family or religion but if it does so it only does so as a way to prepare itself for the next blow against these spheres. Such politically calculated detentes are akin to a hammer lifting itself away from the nail. The hammer is not in retreat but is only building energy for another blow against the nail. If Marxist states are successful in this seizing of sovereignty it may allow family and / or religion to exist but only as satellites that serve as a pretense that the Marxist state has not seized all sovereignty, and as to lend credibility to the Marxist totalistic rule.

The attempt to seize sovereignty may be violent as in communist take overs or it may be more benign and incremental in its methodology as is found in Fabian socialism, progressivism, Corporatism, Liberalism, Welfarism, or the Nanny State. Whereas communism advocates the seizure of sovereignty by cutting of the head, different forms of socialism prefers to slowly, silently suffocate those who will not surrender their sovereignty.

Of course this Marxist seizure of sovereignty as it becomes more and more totalistic ends up stealing another sovereignty and that is the sovereignty found in self-government. As Marxist and collectivist approaches succeed in sucking up temporal sovereignty the end result is that the individual likewise loses his / her self sovereignty and they themselves become effective wards of the state. Individuals, no longer being independent agents and no longer having personal sovereignty are reduced to being cogs in the Marxist civil-social order machine. Individuals become merely extensions of the state.

All of this explains why radical two kingdom theology is such a poison pill for the church because radical two kingdom theology insists that the Church as the Church has no role in declaiming against the Marxist state’s attempt to seize all temporal sovereignty. R2K “theology” would stand silent as the state seeks to absorb all temporal sovereignty so that it becomes the idol state that has raised itself up against the almighty God. In R2K “theology” the only time the Church can protest this seizure of sovereignty is when the state seeks to dictate to the Church about its formal worship patterns. But if the Church is only concerned about its formal worship patterns then why would the state ever have any reason to want to absorb a sovereignty that it views as irrelevant? In point of fact if the R2K church is telling its people that they must obey the state, the state may very well view the R2K church as already effectively one of its agents.

Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him. View all posts by jetbrane