Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
My first podcast is on Radical Two Kingdom Theology. My podcast comes in the context of a freshly released paper that deals with the core theology of R2K.
This paper, which deals with Mosaic Covenant Republication theory, is the foundation upon which R2K rests. If the covenant republication theory can be shown to be specious then the whole R2K project fails. This paper, written by three OPC ministers, reveals that the whole covenant republication theory is indeed specious.
The curtain is beginning to fall on the whole Klineian Escondido Westminster Ca. R2K project. It is dying the death of a thousand qualifications. It will not survive long among thinking people now that it is being examined closely in more and more quarters. Doubtless it will live on in the lacunae and backwaters of Reformed micro institutions much like one can still find a champion for Amyraldianism here or there.
Let us pray that the Federal Vision comes to the same end.
The West could have and would have never been the West if it had not influenced, informed, and shaped by the categories of Biblical Christianity. Today the West is in a war for its soul because there is a different Worldview that is animating it and that Worldview is at direct warfare with Biblical Christianity. Over the centuries, and especially since the “Enlightenment” the West has been attacked by sundry non Christian Worldviews but with the rise of Cultural Marxism all those previous anti-Christian worldviews have found their nadir and most potent expression. I would even say that with Cultural Marxism one has arrived at the full blossomed fruit of all the Christ hating worldviews that have been spawned since the Enlightenment. It has the emotionalism of Transcendentalism – Romanticism. The Egalitarian impulse of abolitionism. The viciousness of Jacobinism. The sense of inevitable progress of Social Darwinism. The confidence of inevitable victory of Marxism – Communism and the cocksure certainty of Unitarian Deism. Cultural Marxism is the grand inheritor of all the “virtues” of all the Christ hating worldviews that have gone before and by inheriting all those “virtues” it is poised to finally do what each failed to do in their turn, and that is the final destruction of that Biblical Christianity that made the West the West.
Cultural Marxism is of course, like all the worldviews that went before it, an ideology, but it is more than an ideology. Unlike the ideologies that went before Cultural Marxism understood that there was a direct correlation between cultural Institutions and conquering the West. As such, the cultural Marxist have, by design, attacked the cultural Institutions of the West in a “long march through the Institutions.” This long march through the institutions was designed to overthrow the influence of Biblical Christianity in every cultural nook and cranny of the West. So, from Theodor Adorno’s “Authoritarian Personality” which overthrew the idea of the Christian family, to Lord Keynes who overthrow the Biblical idea that debt was bad, thus overthrowing the foundation of Biblical Economics, to Magnus Hirshfield and Alfred Kinsey who glorified sexual perversion, to Franz Boas who advanced the idea of cultural relativism denying that cultures could be inferior or superior according to a Transcendent standard, to Sigmund Freud who anchored the meaning of reality (or such meaning as could be had) in the subconscious and unconscious of the individual, to the Social Darwinism of Frank Lester Ward who argued that man’s evolution and progress could be directed by man himself to the Educational theories of John Dewey and to a host of other examples what Cultural Marxism has done is to overthrow the West by overthrowing the Biblical presuppositions upon with the cultural institutions of the West were based. Now it is true that some of the names mentioned in this paragraph predated the rising of the Frankfurt School in Germany, from which Cultural Marxism arose, but all of the names mentioned above with their respective ideas were put in the toolbox of Culture Marxism unto the destruction of the West.
A key component in the toolbox of Cultural Marxism is its doctrine of Egalitarianism. Cultural Marxism, with its core doctrine of Egalitarianism, is a frontal attack on God’s Law and in how the West has been structured. The Ten Commandments are inoperative in a world where Egalitarianism is at the fore because Egalitarianism denies the very distinctions that God’s law regulates. If one denies those distinctions one denies the very concept of God’s law. Egalitarianism denies all distinctions while God’s law labels and creates the distinctions He demands.
Cultural Marxism with its Egalitarianism destroys the distinction between God and all other gods. God said,
“You shall have no other gods [b]before Me.”
But Cultural Marxism, wearing its officially religious garb, as it has crept into the Church, denies the distinction between the God of the Bible and all other gods. When putatively Chrristian men argue that there are any other ways of salvation besides Christ
they are denying the distinction between the God of the Bible and all other gods. If other gods can provide other ways to the same salvation then the teaching is that all gods are the same. All the gods lead to the final harmony of God.
This idea of denying the distinction of God vis-a-vis all other gods is seen also in R2K as they insist that in the public square all the gods must be given equal playing time. No god is to be before any other god. There must be a egalitarianism among the gods. This is the whole idea behind public square pluralism. There is a whiff of egalitarianism in R2K theology in their reasoning concerning the lack of God’s primacy in the public square.
Cultural Marxism, with its egalitarianism, also destroys the Creator creature distinction. God has said,
“You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.”
Here there is a clear distinction that is being posited between the Creator and the creature. The Creator is of such a transcendent character and nature that the creature is to worship Him in a proscribed and distinct way. The Creator is of such a transcendent character and nature that even His name must not be sullied. Cultural Marxism, with its egalitarianism insist that the Creator creature distinction is a myth and so all law legislating man’s approach to god are irrelevant. Cultural Marxist Egalitarianism is an attack on distinctions and an attack on distinctions is an attack on both God and God’s law.
Though we will get to this in more detail later, it should be said even here, that Egalitarianism both begins and ends with an attack on the Creator creature distinction. All of the distinctions that the Cultural Marxists attack in the second table of the Law have as their goal forever finally destroying the the Creator creature distinction. If man as man is bereft of all the God given distinctions that makes him distinct from other men then there is hardly room for a God who insists that He is God distinct from the creature. In Cultural Marxism all colors must bleed into one. Even the colors that would color man as distinct from God.
In God’s fourth words He establishes distinctions among the days,
“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.”
The Egalitarianism of Cultural Marxism destroys the Cultic Holy Day by suggesting that all days are the same, thus eliminating the distinction that gives Christian meaning to all the days. With the destruction of the Christian cultic holy day, all other days, which are non cultic holy days, lose their meaning. Interestingly enough it is also the case that with the elimination of distinctions between days of work and days of rest what one inevitably finds in cultural Marxism is a culture where there is no rhythm of work and rest. Instead what you find are cultures of sloth or cultures where the tyrant’s motto is “Arbeit macht frei” (Labor makes you free).
In my next post I will go on and look at egalitarianism in terms of the second table of God’s Law. However, we are already seeing that Cultural Marxism with its attack on distinctions is an attack on the authority of God’s legislating law word. On a more macro scale egalitarianism is an attack on all of God’s creative work of distinguishing. Whether we consider how God in His creation ordained distinctions between earth and sky, sun and moon, land and water, man and animal, male and female, what we continuously see is a God who is at war with a worldview that has as its defining center-piece the obliteration of distinctions. Even in the fall we see the first foray of the Cultural Marxist and egalitarianism as the serpent attacked the distinction between God’s legislating law word and Eve’s own legislating fiat law word. From Satan’s first assault on the throne — an assault that found him defying the distinction between himself and God — and an assault that found Satan insisting that “I will arise to the most high” what we find in Satan’s plan is the destruction of all God ordained distinctions. Egalitarianism is nothing less than Satan’s work to un-make God’s creation, God’s law-word, and God Himself.
And the fact that the visible Church is blind and dumb to this frontal assault is more then enough reason to be done with those visible Churches who are trying to baptize this abomination.
If you were an Egyptian Christian Minister and were R2K you would have to tell your congregation that Morsi’s attempt to implement Sharia law upon all Egyptians was none of the Church’s business.
AND you’d have to tell your people that they were sinning by protesting the Morsi government.
“Traditional marriage is part of the created order that God sustains through his common grace, not a uniquely Christian institution, and society as a whole suffers when it is not honored. Christians are responsible to commend the goodness and benefits of marriage in the public square…. To call attention to that evidence in the public square is a way of communicating that marriage is not a uniquely Christian thing, but a human thing, and that all people have an interest in getting marriage policy correct.”
~ David Van Drunen
Chief of the R2K Tribe
There are several problems here before we even get to passages like Ephesians 5
1.) How do we know what “Traditional” is in “Traditional Marriage.” It simply is the case that in order to get to Traditional Marriage you need Christian categories to begin with. One can’t get to Christian categories without the Scriptures.
2.) There is an appeal here to a “Human thing.” And yet, apart from Scripture how do we know what it means to be Human? In point of fact I would contend that those who are outside of Christ are doing all they can to put off genuine humanness in favor of putting on beastliness. Man loses his manishness the further he goes in sin. So, all appeal to a “human thing” are question begging if we can only consistently determine what Human is using Christian categories.
3.) The fact that pagans embrace marriage has more to do with their being inconsistent with their own Christ hating presuppositions than it has to do with “being human.” Would Lamech have denied he was being “Human” when he took two wives? Does Justice Anthony Kennedy (he who penned the Majority opinion in the overturning of DOMA) believe that sodomites are less human for being coupled?
4.) The very fact that we are moving in the opposite direction regarding “getting marriage policy correct,” (i.e. — sodoomite marriage) is evidence that all people do not have an interest in getting marriage policy correct.
5.) It is true that Marriage is a Creational Institution but the mistake here on VD’s part is forgetting the Grace restores Nature. Creation itself has fallen and part of the effect of Redemption is to restore Creation to its original design. Redemption does so buy leaving Creational Creational while at the same time restoring Creational to what it would be minus sin.
Of course all this explains why recently well known Westminster California Seminary Professors have suggested that they could accept sodomite civil marriage. If marriage belongs to the Creational realm — a realm that is completely compartmentalized from the Redemptive realm –then why should the Church pronounce on it?
All in all what R2K is doing is what Van Til talked about long ago when he used the illustration of a child climbing up on their parents lap in order to slap them in the face. R2K assumes stable categories that couldn’t exist apart from Christian thinking and then uses those assumptions in order to deny the Christian faith in the common realm.
. . . There is a widely prevalent theory, that truth may be of the feelings as well as of the intellect; that it may not only come thus from two independent sources, but may be contradictory so that what is true to the feelings may be false to the intellect and visa versa; and that as moral character and so Christian life are rooted in the voluntary nature, of which the feelings are an expression, the Christian life may be developed and, some say, would better be developed, without reference to such intellectual conceptions as doctrinal statements.
This theory is radically false. There is no knowledge of the heart. Feeling can give knowledge no more than can excitement. As Prof. Bowen has well said, “Feeling is a staate of mind consequent on the reception of some idea.” That is, it does not give knowledge; it presupposes it. There must be knowledge by the head before there can be feeling with the heart.
Once more you see the point. The religion of the heart and the theology of the head cannot be divorced. Unless the heart be disposed toward Christ, the head cannot, because it will not, discern the truth of Christ. As our Lord said, “It is only he who wills to obey God, whose heart is right toward Him, who shall know the doctrine whether it be of Him.” On the other hand, zeal in Christ’s cause will be strong and abiding in proportion as the faith from which it springs and by which it is nourished is intelligent. Zeal without knowledge is dangerous and short-lived.
William Brenton Greene, Jr.
“Broad Churchism and the Christian Life,” Princeton Theological Review, 4 (July 1906), pp. 311-13.
… the Scriptures make no distinction between the head and the heart, as if mathematics came from the head and faith from the heart. The Old Testament frequently contrasts the heart and the lips – sincerity versus hypocrisy – but the term heart, at least seventy-five percent of the time in the Old Testament, means the mind or intellect.
Gordon Haddon Clark
What Is Saving Faith — p. 55
The whole idea that, “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing,” has been one of the most injurious wounds ever inflicted upon the Christian faith. How many times, as a Pastor, have I heard people tell me that they had to “follow their heart,” usually with the consequence that they have to break God’s standard in one area or another.
Of course to lift “the heart” up as a extra-sensory means of epistemological knowing is to denigrate and lower God’s Revelation in Scripture as our epistemological foundation. When we insist that there is a knowing which is uninformed by and even unrelated to sound Biblical doctrine we elevate, most usually, our experience or lust at the expense of God’s revelation being lowered. So, when we make “heart knowledge” a co-ordinate authority with head knowledge we end up exalting “heart-knowledge” at the expense of head-knowledge.
The advantage in heart knowledge is that the heart knower does not have to bother to study to show himself approved because what does the heart need with all that head knowledge? Also the advantage to the heart knower is that he or she can never be told they are wrong by the head knower because, after all, “the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”
Heart knowledge is another example of unmediated personal and individual experience being used to trump God’s revelation.
Having said all this I perfectly understand that their is a distinction between passion and cold calculated logic. However, even when passion is white hot it is white hot based on what someone is thinking.