God alone has original sovereignty. All other sovereignty is delegated sovereignty by God to his representatives in one of the various jurisdictional spheres He has ordained. In such a way God remains the absolute sovereign over each of the jurisdictional spheres with His delegated representatives answerable to Him if they abandon God’s legislative Word for those jurisdictions.
R2K denies this premise by insisting that God has abandoned his original sovereignty choosing to delegate that sovereignty to the realm of Natural law. As such R2K denies that God’s Word has legislative authority for any realm save the church realm. What this move does is to guarantee that the different jurisdictional realms will be sideways with the Church as a jurisdictional realm as there are two different sovereignties established — (1) God’s sovereignty over the Church and (2) Natural law as interpreted by the autonomous and fallen man as sovereign in all other jurisdictional realms. As autonomous and fallen man begins and ends with himself as his authority, the “theology” of R2K guarantees either conflict between the Church and the other jurisdictional realms or (more likely given R2K’s passivism) the church becomes the tail on the social order dog as Christians are explicitly taught from R2K pulpits that there is no “thus saith the Lord” for other jurisdictional realms. Christianity thus becomes privatized and the social order becomes the incarnation of other theologies that are not so shy to fill the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.
However, this problem is not present in a muscular and Biblical Christianity as all jurisdictional realms find their unity and so a harmony of interest in God’s sovereignty and legislative Word. Each of the representative heads of the various jurisdictional realms is uniquely responsible for their own assigned realm but each finds harmony with one another in the fact that each is bowing to God’s sovereignty via His legislative and authoritative Word.
So, we see, that it is only by maintaining God’s unique, original, and exhaustive sovereignty over all of reality wherein social-orders can maintain a lack of conflict among the various jurisdictions. If, on the other hand, Christians, for whatever reason (R2K, Pietism, etc.) surrender the public realm and its jurisdictions to other competing sovereignties the long-term result will be a conflict of interests. Something the West is now discovering too late.
In Biblical Christianity, God’s original and absolute authority mediated by the Lord Christ is the sovereignty that yields harmony to the many jurisdictional realms. Each realm is distinct in its responsibilities and yet all united by oaths of fealty to the Triune God.
This unity is augmented by the recognition that each of the distinct jurisdictional realms is informed by a shared totalistic theology. Theology — and the Biblical world and life view it creates — in submission to the God of the Bible is the subterranean aquifer out of which bubble forth the various springs which we label the various jurisdictional realms and social-order institutional structures and procedures. In this understanding Law, Education, Arts, Law, Family, Church, Politics, International relations, etc., are merely theology by other means. There is unity between these not only because of God’s original and absolute sovereignty but also because man, in submission to God’s legislative Word, owns a shared theology that manifests itself in a myriad of ways like light through a prism produces various colors — all authored by the original light.
It will never do, contra the Amsterdam philosophy, to suggest that these various jurisdictional realms and social order institutional structures and procedures each have their own locus of original and legislative authority. Cutting off each of the jurisdictional realms from the common aquifer that is a shared theology as “the Queen of all the sciences,” is sure to render a kind of polytheistic hodgepodge as each jurisdictional realm and social order structure and procedure seeks its own independence at the expense of all the others. That independence could never be arrived at apart from some other God and some other theology/philosophy informing these putative independent jurisdictions.
We see again that the only way to keep Education at peace with family, family at peace with Law, Law at peace with Education, Courts at peace with the Church, the Church at peace with the Arts, Politics at peace with family, etc., is for each and all to come in glad submission to God’s original and absolute sovereignty while at the same time each taking up theology as the Queen of the Sciences as applied to their particular fields and callings.
