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“One of the things that was important to me in developing some of the arguments in my book was in I Peter 2 when he calls us, as Christians, ‘sojourners and exiles,’ and I think that is really fascinating because when you hear those terms you’re supposed to think back to the Old Testament. Sojourners; you think about Abraham and his family — they were sojourners in the world. Abraham was not living in a confessionally Christians — or whatever you would call it at that time –sort of society. And then ‘Exiles;’ that makes us think of the Babylonian exile in which the Israelites were taken out of their land and living in a land controlled by pagans and So, in both instances Abraham and later the Israelite exiles had to live in common with their unbelieving neighbors and try to find their way and live godly lives in that context. So very fascinating that Peter would say to us as New Testament Christians, ‘this is actually what you are like — this is what your experience is like in this world and I think that is a very different way of thinking about things than saying ‘you are called to be creating a kind of Christendom in which actually you are not so much a sojourner or you’re not really an exile, you’re in charge this is your society. That’s not what we are called to do it seems….’
Most Reformed Christians today, in one way or another, reject certain aspects of the way the early Reformed thinkers thought about society. You know what we would think of and what we would actually value as say the 1st amendment paradigm in the united States is something that our Reformed forefathers would not have accepted. They would not have believed in the ‘freedom of religion’ in the way we would think of it. They would envision civil government that would affirm the one true faith as they understood it and believed that government officials had responsibilities to be suppressing heresies and blasphemies and non-Christian religions and so I’m thankful that, say your church, the United Reformed Churches and my church the Orthodox Presbyterian Churches I mean we’ve actually revised our confessional documents to reflect these things. We haven’t done that with the vast majority of our confessional statements. We affirmed the basic theology still today but this is something we have re-thought and I think it has been helpful for us to re-think these things. We always have said as Reformed Christians that the Scriptures are inspired, inerrant, and infallible but our own theology is not and that just as in the 16th century we had to reform the theology of the Medieval Church we may not have gotten a 100% of things right at that time and I think this is just an area where we just have to be honest and say that ‘we made mistakes here,’ and I think it is proper for us in all humility to recognize that we are Christians on the way and we sometimes don’t get things right. and I think it is better for us just to acknowledge if we in the Reformed tradition didn’t get something exactly right and if we need to repent and to do better, so be it. But I would say the idea the idea that the civil magistrate has to in some way enforce and support the true Church, it’s not a fundamental doctrine that changes the way we think of the atonement or the way we think of the sacraments or the way we think of our ordo salutis. We can think ‘Church-State’ relations without touching all those other important areas of Reformed theology.
Dr. David Van Drunnen (DVD)
Politics after Christendom
Interview w/ Dr. R. Scott Clark
Office Hours program
A brief preface to this entry. Some may wonder why I spend all this effort in disemboweling DVD and R2K. The answer is that this is personal to me. I have a child who is in a R2K church and this child will periodically report to me what she is hearing from the pulpit. Now, my child is not going to be fooled by all this skubala but my heart breaks for how this doctrine of demons is affecting the congregation in which my child sits. Because of my love for Christ and His doctrine I continue to play Don Quixote tilting at R2K windmills for His glory and for love of His people across the West.
1.) DVD attempts to take two metaphors that Peter uses in addressing 1st century Christians and absolutize those metaphors as the only metaphors that Christians should own for their relation to the times in which they are living. Of course the Scripture uses other metaphors for our lives. Scriptures tells us that we are “more than conquerors.” Scripture tells us that Christians are Christ’s body over which he is the head. Scripture tells us that Christians are seated with Christ (a picture of ruling) in the heavenly places. Scripture tells us that Christians are confessors. The Heidelberg catechism, following the Scripture speaks of Christians as being prophets, priests, and kings. As one can see from this list of metaphors we should be careful not to absolutize any one or two metaphors so that they eliminate the impact of the other metaphors.
2.) God gave Israel revelation through the prophets to settle in Babylon as exiles. God has not given us revelation that we are to settle in our various communities as exiles. God has not given us revelation that we are to be always ruled by anti-Christ magistrates and that we should be good with that. Indeed when we look at Acts 19 and Paul’s effect on the community in Ephesus we see a political community troubled by the Christians who are not leaving the pagans alone. The economic structure of the Ephesus community is threatened by the Christians. The theological structures of the Ephesus community is threatened by the Christians. Indeed the whole law and order structure of the Ephesus political community is threatened there in Acts 19 and the pagans didn’t like it. When one reads Acts 19 it doesn’t look like the Christians in Ephesus are being strangers and exiles the way DVD is “teaching.”
3.) DVD says explicitly that Christians are not to be in charge and implies that Christians are not to have their own society. Now when this man says these kinds of things all that is left is to conclude that he is “teaching” that those Christians who do believe in Christendom and who do desire to exercise godly rule as magistrates under Christ’s authority are in sin. If Scripture teaches we are to be exiles and sojourners as DVD “teaches” then what else can it be but sin to say the contrary? We need to be very clear about this. Those of us who disagree with DVD do believe he is in sin for teaching these things and we should understand that he and those of his stripe do believe that those of us who disagree with him are likewise in sin and so displeasing God. There can be no tertium quid here between R2K and Biblical Christianity. Either R2K is pleasing to God or Biblical Christianity is pleasing to God. Either we are to be exiles and sojourners or we are to be ruling or seeking to rule as under Christ’s authority.
4.) DVD tells us that our Reformed forefathers would not have accepted the Liberal worldview where putatively pluralism reigns. Someone who would have accepted this though is the Anabaptist Roger Williams. It really is the case that DVD is pushing the Reformed Church to take Roger Williams and his Rhode Island project as a Reformed saint. Who could have ever guessed that the Reformed world would canonize Roger Williams? The Puritans are spinning in their graves. Indeed, with the idea that Reformed theology should provide the underpinning of the Liberal Worldview we find the Anabaptistification of the Reformed faith.
5.) I wonder if DVD realizes that the 1st amendment as originally constructed protected the States in their decisions to be Erastian as it pertained to their colonies? The 1st amendment was never intended as originally crafted to turn the whole political community into Rhode Island. The 1st amendment meant as originally crafted meant that the FEDS could not dictate to the States what would be each State’s denominational expression of Christianity. Still, having said that I am convinced that the 1788 American Revision of the WCF was a significant error.
6.) Let us be clear that to accept what is now understood as the 1st amendment paradigm of freedom of religion is a myth. As I have already argued in this response to DVD, the idea of freedom of religion is a myth that supports the myth of pluralism. The idea of freedom of religion and pluralism is that we invite all the gods into the public square and in that way all the adherents of the different religions can be assuaged. The problem with this reading is that there has to be some mechanism whereby the competing gods can find their limits when they conflict in the political community. In pluralism that mechanism is the State and as such the State becomes the God over the competing gods and is in fact the ruling God over all the gods and the State is thus seen as the one true God in the putatively pluralistic political community. So, we see freedom of religion is a myth and of course the implication of this is that multiculturalism is a myth. The Anabaptist and Liberal Worldview has failed and all the R2K Humpty Dumpties won’t be able to put it back together.
7.) This leads us to say that we still live in a social order where the civil government affirms the one true faith as they understand it. (Just not the Christian faith.) We still live in a time where government officials have the responsibility to be suppressing heresies and blasphemies that are contrary to pluralism and multiculturalism – so called. And what are those heresies and blasphemies? Why, most routinely the heretics are Christians who say that “pluralism is a myth” or that “Christianity should legally be in ascendancy over all other religions.”
8.) The changing of the confessions (1788 WCF and then in the 20th century the BCF) did indeed alter the Reformed faith to be something that wasn’t Reformed. What these alterations did was to reduce the Christian faith to be a personal and individual faith. These alterations took the corporate and social-covenantal stuffing out of the Christian faith. These alterations allowed the social order backdrop scenery of our Christian political communities to be changed out so that new social order backdrop scenery could be erected and that had the effect of re-orienting the personal-individual to create a Christianity that was consistent with the new corporate and social-covenantal and alien religion backdrop scenery. Like the chameleon who fades into whatever background that he is pressed up against, the changing of the social-order covenantal backdrop led incrementally to changes in the Christianity of the individual. DVD, and R. Scott Clark (the host and interviewer of “the Office Hours) are just flat out in error when they say that changing the confessions here didn’t effect the Reformed faith. Indeed, this change eventually destroyed the Reformed faith. We should have listened to the Father’s here.
9.) Now it may be the case that short term changing the Confessions in the area of Church and State didn’t immediately effect our understanding of the Atonement, or the sacraments or the ordo-salutis the change did over time dilute our understandings of those doctrines if only because with the new social-covenantal backdrop very few people cared. Secondly, as all political communities will have a doctrine of the Atonement a political community that does not have a Christian doctrine of the atonement (answering the question of how to get rid of sin and guilt) will adopt non Christian doctrines of the atonement. So, for example, in our social order we seek to get rid of our sin and guilt by placing all our sin and guilt on the rich, or the poor, or the minority, or oppressive Whitey. All of these are attempts of our social order to provide atonements since we no longer accept, as a social order, the atonement as found in Jesus Christ.
Clark and DVD (and W.Cal) are not thinking through the implications of having changed out our historic Reformed doctrine of Church and State and the consequence is our current pandemic in the modern Church
