Before getting into this next installment wherein we disembowel R2K and Dr. David Van Drunen we want to make sure that the readers have the link so that they can listen for themselves the kind of ideas that are being advocated under the banner of Christ and His Kingdom.
https://www.wscal.edu/resource-center/politics-after-christendom
“The only thing I can do is to say to the people read my Biblical-Theological argument and if you have criticisms of that then make them on Biblical-Theological grounds. I mean I recognize we are all affected by our cultural context. We are all affected by certain biases we have and so yeah, there is always a danger that each one of us have to look out for that we try to make arguments that support positions that we want to hold. for other reasons. I have tried my best to make a kind of new Biblical-theological argument for why there needs to be a generous measure of tolerance and religious liberty and I am happy to hear back from other people who want to engage that argument seriously. So, that is what I would like to hear from others. It seems to me that to simply say, ‘Well you’re capitulating to modernity,’ — Well, prove it by showing flaws in my argument. You know, I’m not trying to be cocky when I say that, I’m just saying that I’ve tried to make a rigorous argument and so I hope people will deal with it on its own terms.
I would say, and this is the way my book presents things; God established in the covenant with Noah this idea that political communities are to be common communities in which believers and unbelievers live together in some measure of peace and order and when God entered into covenant with Israel at Sinai and brought them into the promised land that was … a kind of parenthesis. This was an unusual situation Now we recognize that a big chunk of the Bible is talking about life in this situation and so I think that might distort the way we think about things a little bit but I think there are all sorts of evidence in Scripture that the way things operated in the promised land under the law of Moses for the old covenant Israel was very specific for old covenant Israel. As we were talking earlier, I Peter comes along and says your ‘exiles’ and ‘sojourners’ it is actually point us to ways of living that are different in important respects from way Israel in the Promised Land experienced. So, the way I would see it is that for us under the new covenant in a number of important respects our lives are are more like the sojourning Abraham, more like Israel under exile than Israel in the promised land in which, granted there was not anything like religious liberty in the way we know in which there was a God ordained politically confessionally unified society.
Dr. David Van Drunnen (DVD)
Politics after Christendom
Interview w/ Dr. R. Scott Clark
Office Hours program
1.) In these responses, DVD, we have looked at your Biblical-Theological grounds. Mene mene tekel upharsin. We have shown the flaws. We have overturned the idea that there is anything rigorous about what you have done.
2.) DVD says something quite profound here as it pertains to biases. We have to keep in mind that the eschatology of DVD is a rabid Amillennialism. R2K is what it is because of its strenuous Amillennial character. What DVD has done with R2K is he has taken his negative expectations of future Kingdom development and progress and he has reasoned backwards from those negative expectations so as to develop a system (R2K) that insures the negative outcome that the man is theologically wedded. Being rabidly Amillennial DVD has contrived a reversed engineered system that guarantees that the pessimistic anticipations that Amillennialism teaches comes to pass.
3.) Notice the bold print. This is another key admission. Forever, R2K has flip-flopped on the issue of whether their version of “Christianity” is the faith once and forever delivered unto the saints or something completely innovative that no Christian has ever seen before. Here, in the bold print, we have admission from one of the key architects of R2K that what he has done is completely innovative. No Christian who has ever lived as ever seen what DVD has done with R2K. I find this beyond significant.
4.) In previous entries we have demonstrated that tolerance and religious pluralism is a myth. In any political community there is always a reigning religion. That is an inescapable reality.
5.) The whole notion of a Mosaic parenthesis is troubling because it yields a Marcionite theology where God changes. God deals with man one way in the Old Testament but in the New Testament He has different expectations. In the Old Testament God required His people to cast out the leaven in their political communities but in the New Testament God requires His people to allow the leaven to continue to spread in their political communities. What DVD gives us here is that Jesus died on the cross, in part ,so that men would become religiously tolerant in their political communities and so that men no longer had to walk in terms of God’s revelational law in the common realm.
6.) Note the appeal to dispensationalize large chunks of the Old Testament.
For DVD’s appeal again to “living as exiles and sojourners, per I Peter, see previous installments of this response.
“For one thing, I think it is important for us to remember as Christians that supporting some generous measure of religious toleration and liberty is good for us as Christians as we seek to evangelize the world. We don’t really have a vested interest in having political communities that are religiously intolerant because we are a missionary religion calling for people to leave their old faiths and to come and to join us in the Church of Jesus Christ. So, I do think there is something pretty powerful to be said that the more we appreciate the missionary character of of the Christian religion the more friendly we should be to a kind of religious tolerance in our broader societies. So, I think, on the one hand we as Christians — we as Churches — want to be zealous evangelistically. So that is part of our perspective. At the same time it seems to me as we think about our political responsibilities I think we need to make a distinction between those responsibilities and our call to evangelize. There are times we have to talk to our unbelieving neighbors about practical problems — challenges that we share in common — and how is that we can have conversations with them? How can we try to work through a property dispute? How can we work through a two lane or a four lane road? As well as more weighty questions of law and politics. How can we do that even as we recognize that we disagree about some fundamentally important questions about God, the world and human beings?
The last chapter I reflect on the liberal and conservative traditions. I think it is really important to remember that people use the terms “liberal” and “conservative” sometimes in very different ways and I discuss this in this (final) chapter (in my book). I try to offer what I mean by liberal and conservative. By the ‘Liberal’ tradition, I’m essentially getting at this idea that all political communities are made up of people with different worldviews or theologies or whatever term you want to use. and that we are called in some way to live together. To find ways to have a political polity without forcing our neighbors to convert to think like us about these most important things. By the ‘conservative’ tradition I am getting at the idea that we ought to have a kind of respect for our traditions. We have learned things over time and we have gained a certain knowledge of the importance of certain institutions like family for example. What I suggest is that we can become kind of comfortable with a conservative liberalism. A liberalism not in the sense of left wing progressive politics. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a liberalism that is content to live in communities in which we try to live in peace with all sorts of different people. It is a conservative liberalism in the sense that it respects traditional institutions. It respects the wisdom of the ages. I hope that gives just a little bit of enticement by saying that conservatism and liberalism both have some aspect of of the truth. I hope that can bring some type of perspective on these things that readers haven’t thought about.”
Dr. David Van Drunnen (DVD)
Politics after Christendom
Interview w/ Dr. R. Scott Clark
Office Hours program
1.) I have no idea why religious tolerance helps in our missionary efforts. I would think that a Christian political community would be the very essence of positive missionary efforts for newcomers to that political community.
Secondly, I think all the evidence is in that we need that our religious tolerance has most certainly not helped our missionary efforts. In point of fact just the opposite has occurred. It is the Christian community, because of Religious tolerance whom has become the target for missionary success. All the statistics are saying that we are becoming, with each half-generation, an increasingly pagan people. This, no doubt, is in large part due to our religious tolerance. The pagans have successfully evangelized Christians to their faith(s) because they were given the room to do so via religious tolerance. On the other hand think how successful the Christian missionary Boniface was with religious intolerance, in the 8th century, as he wielded the mighty ax which hewed down the sacred oak and who then used the oak to build a Christian chapel dedicated to St. Peter. Fortunately, for the Germanic pagans, St. Boniface had never heard of R2K or religious tolerance.
Note also that DVD is demanding his own version of intolerance. DVD is intolerant of Christians who won’t refuse to embrace his teaching of tolerance. You know that if DVD could, he would make it so every Christian who is intolerant of his call for tolerance would be removed from our political community so that the work of evangelizing all those pagans via a mighty tolerance could be achieved. DVD is all about tolerance until he is faced with people who will not tolerate his views. Maybe if DVD just prays harder all of us non-tolerant non R2K people will convert to R2K.
2.) Honestly, DVD’s bringing up property disputes and four or two lane highways is a red herring. Nobody thinks that one has to have confessional unity in a political community in order to deal with those issues. However, whether or not to build Minarets so that the Muezzin’s can issue the Islamic call to prayer or whether to require special Muslim chapels in airports, or whether Sharia in Dearborn Michigan can supersede all other law, now these are issues that begin to get us closer to the damage that a R2K belief system will do if given its head. (And it has already been given its head.) The fact is that no political community can survive the balkanization that comes with have a pluralism of gods in the public square and if Christians thing that tolerance is the answer to the problem of the plurality of Gods then Christians and Christianity will be the faith that is snuffed out.
4.) All I see in DVD’s blather about Conservative vs. Liberal is the Marxist Hegelian dialectic. Thesis (Conservatism), Anti-thesis (Liberalism), Synthesis (DVD’s Utopia).
5.) The idea that one can define liberal as those” content to live in communities in which we try to live in peace with all sorts of different people,” is a howler if there ever was one. Did DVD never read any 20th century history while he was getting his Jesuit endorsed Ph.D? The very definition of Liberal is someone who is not content to live in peace with all sorts of people. Ask the Kulaks in the Ukraine how well the Bolsheviks lived in peace with all sorts of different people. Ask the Chinese how well Mao’s Communist hordes lived in peace with all sorts of different people. Ask the French Catholic Church how well Robespierre, Marat, and Danton lived in peace with all sorts of different people. Ask the Spanish Nationalist during the Spanish Civil war how well the Rojos lived in peace with the Nationalists.
Honestly, this is really what turns my temperature up when it comes to R2K. It’s as if these people know nothing about history and how their proposed theories are going to get Christians and others killed. It is a shorter distance between the kind of political and religious tolerance these people advocate and Madame Guillotine then these people realize. Tolerance is merely the stage for Christ haters between seeking to gain the ascendancy in a political community and actually achieving that ascendancy in the political community. One can be sure that once the Christ haters reach that ascendancy they will be pulling up the ladder of tolerance so no one can replace them.
6.) Liberalism has zero aspects of truth.
With that I am finished. I can only pray (and I do pray) that Christians will see in R2K the certain apostasy that is contained therein. I do not doubt that many of these people have fine intentions but as the maxim goes, “good intentions pave the road to hell.” These people, intentionally or unintentionally, are a blight on the Church and are the guarantors that Biblical Christianity will go into abeyance if they are ever to gain the ascendancy.
I am convinced that in the Reformed world they are close to gaining the ascendancy.
