I am starting another series with this post. Much of this series will be drawn from previous posts I’ve made on Radical Two Kingdom theology (R2Kt). However, some of the posts will be new. The goal here is to cobble together a book for the purpose of critiquing R2K theology and the R2K movement as drawn from my work on R2K over the years. This needs to be done because R2K is not going to go away. Because of the disintegration of the West and a muscular Christian World and Life view R2K will remain a competing theology as to what constitutes Christianity. As it is, I would say that if R2K or some derivative thereof if not already the majority report in most “Reformed” pulpits across the nation it is a close second.
In this entry we will begin with a definition of R2Kt.
R2Kt is that expression of Christianity that replaces the totalistic expression of Reformed Christianity as being God’s explicit Word for all of life with an expression of Reformed Christianity wherein God’s explicit Word governs only the Church realm (realm of grace). The common realm (or natural realm) is to be ruled derivatively by God’s “left hand.” What this means is that for the common realm (the realm wherein all of life is lived save for our Church lives and our personal and individual ethics) the Christian man as well as the non-Christian man is dependent upon Natural Law to answer the question, “How shall we then live.”
Jesuit trained David Van Drunen defines Natural Law as;
“The moral order inscribed in the world and especially in human nature, an order that is known to all people through their natural faculties (especially reason and/or conscience) even apart from supernatural divine revelation that binds morally the whole human race.”
This Natural law that all men are to be governed by in the common realm is thus accessible to all men and is necessary and sufficient unto ordering the common realm.
The problem here is several-fold and immediately obvious. First, R2K’s problem is that it does not take into account the noetic affects of the fall upon the children of Adam who have refused Christ. R2K treats fallen man as if he is not fallen in the common realm and so still retains the ability to interpret aright, as acting autonomously, with respect to living in God’s common realm. R2K does not take into account the Scripture’s teaching that fallen man is suppressing the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18) of what he knows that he knows from Natural law. Man outside of Christ will never be able to live in harmony in any social order with Man in Christ as men outside of Christ become increasingly consistent with their God-hating presuppositions.
At the point of their reliance on fallen man reading natural law so as to govern the common realm R2K advocates actually act in contradiction to their own confession (Canon’s of Dort) when it teaches of ;
that he (fallen man) is incapable of using it (God’s natural light) aright even in things natural and civil. Nay, further, this light, such as it is, man in various ways renders wholly polluted and holds it in unrighteousness, by doing which he becomes inexcusable before God (Canon’s of Dort III & IV Head, Article 4).
At this point R2K becomes quite non-Reformed and even Arminian in its low estimation of the noetic effects of sin on man dead in his sin and trespasses. This observation alone goes a long way towards dismissing R2K as a serious project to be embraced by Reformed Christians.
Understand here the problem is not that natural law does not exist as God making Himself known in all creation. All Reformed admit the reality of natural law. The problem is that natural man is doing everything in his power to escape God’s testimony to and of Himself in natural law. The Belgic Confession of faith, Article 14 puts it this way;
(Fallen man has) “become wicked, perverse, and corrupt in all his ways, (and) he hath lost all his excellent gifts which he had received from God (Rom. 3:10) and only retained a few remains thereof, (Acts 14:16-17; 17:27) which, however, are sufficient to leave man without excuse; (Romans 1:20,21; Acts 17:27) for all the light which is in us is changed into darkness,12 as the Scriptures teach us, saying: The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth13 it not; where St. John calleth men darkness.”
Belgic Confession of Faith
Article XIV
Ontologically fallen man created in the image of God remains the fingerprint of God but by usage of his epistemological apparatus fallen man does everything he can to escape what he can’t help knowing due to his ontological status as God’s image bearer. This explains why natural law can never be used to form a consensus between regenerated man and fallen man as a consensus builder for social order. This is especially the case as fallen man becomes increasingly consistent with his Christ hating presuppositions as combined with the diminishing of the effects of a Christian shaped and influenced culture pressed upon fallen man.
The second problem with leaning on Natural Law as the norm that norms all norms in the common realm for fallen and regenerated men alike in the “knowing” endeavor is that R2K does not take into account at this point that Natural Law is never read by fallen and autonomous man apart from his presuppositions. This is really an odd fault for the R2K boys since many of them claim to be presupposititionalists and the inheritors of all things Van Til. R2K insists that autonomous man, starting from himself, can, quite apart from any presuppositions read aright and implement aright God’s natural law. Again, we butt into the reality that fallen man has an axe to grind against knowing and admitting what he can’t help but knowing.
Unregenerate man is not reading natural law apart from a Christ-hating bias. As such unregenerate man, especially as he becomes increasingly consistent with his Christ-hating epistemological project, will never be able to form a successful social order with Christ-submitting men by virtue of them both sharing a rational epistemological basis for that shared social order. This is the death knell for the R2K project which believes that in the common realm the Hindu, the Jew, the Muslim, the Baptist, the Confucian, the Satanist can all come together and live in social order harmony because they all have access to natural law and will all use natural law to live in harmony and understanding. The absurdity of it makes one wonder how this project could ever get off the ground.
Just to be clear let us say this directly as possible. The unregenerate reads natural law presupposing his own centrality and own authority with himself as the center of all reality. The unregenerate man does so with ever increasing consistency over the course of time. The regenerate man, on the other hand, reads natural law presupposing the centrality of God and God’s authority as the center of all reality. When the unregenerate man reads natural law aright he is always inconsistent with his self-avowed beginning point. When the regenerate man reads natural law wrongly he is always inconsistent with his self-avowed beginning point. When fallen man reads natural law he reads it as creative. When regenerate man reads natural law he reads it as given.
At this point the R2K boys will protest that there have been many social orders that have appealed to natural law as their epistemic base. I do not deny this. However, what the R2K lads miss here is that the natural law that was being appealed to in Geneva, or in Wittenberg, or even in Rome in its better days was a natural law set in the context of cultures that were largely already Christian. That is to say that where natural law has succeeded apart from a tyrant’s force it has succeeded where the social order was suffused already with Biblical Christianity. Europeans through the centuries could appeal to natural law as social order glue precisely because they together believed in a natural law as read through the lenses of Christianity. As social orders become populated with fallen peoples with those who do not presuppose the God of the Bible there is no way that natural law can or will work.
The third problem of natural law is that there is no such thing as brute facts. All facts are interpreted facts. Natural law posits that all men receive the same brute facts and interprets those facts as they naturally are. However, there is no way that, for example, that a polygynist, a monogamist, and an advocate for sodomite marriage are going to agree on what natural law teaches on marriage. If natural law should find a consensus on anything one would think that the consensus that it could find would be on the alleged brute fact of marriage. However, we see that natural law can not even provide consensus here. All facts are interpreted facts. All facts come to us in terms of some macro philosophy of fact. R2K can write all the tomes they like but the current disintegration of the West along the lines of various interpretations of natural law on something as simple as marriage provides the proof that R2K can at best only provide a lowest common denominator social order cohesion.
The fourth problem with R2K’s natural law insistence that it alone can provide a social order glue is the multitudinous readings of natural law. Which natural law gives the best explanation of natural law? This is just to observe that for every philosophical system extant there will be a corresponding competing natural law. Do the R2K boys really believe that the natural law of Deism, Pantheism, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Darwinism, Marxism, Nihilism, Existentialism, Calvinism, are each and all going to coincide for each and all? Do the R2K boys really believe that a social order populated by the adherents of those competing worldviews are all going to read a shared natural law in the same manner?
So, we see with this entry that R2K has a serious epistemological problem. It has not taken seriously either the impact of the fall in its totality on unregenerate man nor specifically has it taken seriously how the fall has twisted the epistemology of fallen man so badly that there is no way that fallen man, as he becomes increasingly consistent with his epistemological rebellion, will be able to sustain a shared social order regularity with the regenerate.
