Exposing Dr. David Van Drunen’s R2K Vision of Common Realm

“The book has yet to be written to deliver us from the Kuyperian captivity of the Church.”

Dr. David Van Drunen
Modern Reformation

Here the complaint is specifically against Kuyperian worldview thinking. DVD has spent his career trying to write the book that he lamented had never yet been written. DVD’s objection, being the great advocate of R2K, has been to delimit explicit Christianity to being expressed only in the Church (grace realm). DVD has won the day and now for the modern Reformed church all activity by believers outside the church is no longer to be handled in a specifically Christ honoring manner, since all those activities outside the church are religious free activities. Instead all activities outside the church done my the man who is Christian, when attending church, are now done by men who are conditioned by a Natural Law that conditions Mooselimbs, Bagels, Hindus, Humanists, and Christian all in exactly the same way when they are not at Mosque, Synagogue, Temple, or University. According to Van Drunen and R2K, men across a wide spectrum of religious belief systems can co-exist in harmony in the same social order, since for R2K a common ground can be found in the fact that Natural Law will teach each and all of these men of different faiths, once jumbled all together in the common realm, the same truths. This will result in all these folks from competing religions finding harmony in the common realm.

So, for R2K, multiculturalism is indeed possible because all the tensions that we might think would arise from people of dramatic and distinctive faiths living cheek by jowl in the same social order are removed by the fact that they will all eventually come to understand that their peculiar faith systems will, like this R2K version of Christianity, learn to put aside their distinctly religious convictions once in the common realm and will come to understand that once in the common realm the religious convictions of Islam, Judaism, Zionism, Hinduism, Humanism, etc. fade away in favor of Natural law as being the norm that norms all norms in the religiously neutral common realm. In such a way multi-cultural, multi-faith, and multi-racial social orders can be as common as “peas and carrots.”

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