Category: Apologetics

Matthew 10:32-33 — RHV — (Revised Hart Version)

“32 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, unless in the context of having to protect the State employer from a lawsuit, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. 33 But whosoever shall deny me before men, unless they are working for the State to insulate children from truth about me, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.”

First the story:

In mid-December, six-year-old Isaiah Martinez brought a box of candy canes to his public elementary school. Affixed to each cane was a legend explaining the manner in which the candy symbolizes the life and death of Jesus. Isaiah’s first-grade teacher took possession of the candy and asked her supervising principal whether it would be permissible for Isaiah to distribute to his classmates. The teacher was informed that, while the candy itself might be distributed, the attached religious message could not. She is then reported to have told Isaiah that “Jesus is not allowed at school,” to have torn the legends from the candy, and to have thrown them in the trash.

Such is the account of Robert Tyler of Advocates for Faith & Freedom, who is serving as media spokesman for the Martinez family. Organizations such as Fox News and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze latched onto the story with purple prose and pointed commentary to rally the base. The Daily Caller described the teacher as having “snatched” the candy from Isaiah’s hands, “and then—right in front of his little six-year-old eyes—ripped the religious messages from each candy cane.” Fox News said “it takes a special kind of evil to confiscate a six-year-old child’s Christmas gifts.”

Turns out the teacher in question is a putative Christian and her former “pastor” explains what may have happened:

Such behavior would be entirely unbecoming of Christians even if the teacher in question were all the things she has been called. In fact, she is herself a pious and confessional Christian, though it would be impossible to discern as much from the coverage of much Christian media.

I know this because I was present at her baptism; I participated in the catechesis leading to her reception into the theologically (and, overwhelmingly, politically) conservative Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod; I preached at her wedding; my wife and I are godparents to her children, as she and her husband (who is himself on the faculty of a Christian university) are to our youngest. Needless to say, I have complete confidence that her far less dramatic version of events is much the more accurate account.

Some will say that precisely as a Christian she should have had the courage of her convictions and allowed the distribution of a Christian message in her classroom. And yet, precisely because she is a catechized Christian, perhaps she understands that in her vocation she serves under the authority of others.

Perhaps it was wise in the litigious context of America’s public schools to confer with and defer to the supervising principal. Indeed, a lawsuit arising from virtually identical circumstances is still, ten years on, bogged down in the courts. If the answers to the pertinent legal questions are not immediately obvious to the dozens of lawyers and judges involved in this previous case, one can hardly expect them to be **self-evident even to an intelligent primary school teacher. Thus, those critics who have dismissively counseled her simply to “read the Constitution” betray (in addition to a lack of charity) either an unhelpful naivety or a willful ignorance.

Now we add Dr. D. Gnostic Hart’s brief observation,

Of course, if you want to score points in some sort of publicity competition, demonizing this woman is not a bad strategy, though why Reformed Protestants also resort to such behavior (yes, I’m thinking the BeeBees and Rabbi Bret) is another question. But if you want to think through the layers of significance in such occurrences, maybe it’s better to check if as in this case the teacher belongs to a church and what her pastor thinks.

A few observations,

1.) Note that the teacher in question, the Pastor who came to her defense, and the Darryl by extension, while perfectly fine with keeping the Lord Christ out of the Government schools are perfectly fine with protecting the place of the God-State in the Government school. The Allegiance of the teacher, the Pastor, and the Darryl are all to the State as the God who can determine how far other competing gods can walk in their domain.

2.) It makes little difference what the Teacher and her Pastor thinks, or what the Darryl thinks since the Scriptures explicitly teach that we are to confess Christ before men. The Scripture does not teach that if we are working in the common realm we at that point can on longer be concerned with confessing Christ. The Scriptures do not teach, contra the Teacher, the Missouri Synod Lutheran Pastor, and the Darryl, that in the common realm one confesses Christ by not Confessing Christ.

3.) The Pastor, the Teacher, and the Darryl are all evidence of a Christianity that is no Christianity. This kind of pietism that practices a narrow other-worldly and predominantly effeminate spirituality is actually suggesting that it is the responsibility of pietistic Christians everywhere to make sure that the rest of us non effeminate Christians not confess Christ in the common realm.

4.) Why did the Pastor bother Catechizing this Teacher when she was a girl? It doesn’t take a great deal of memory work to learn that there is one realm where you are to be Christian and one realm where being Christian means not being Christian. It doesn’t take a great deal of memory work to learn that Christ is absolute Lord over the grace realm but only one of many lords in the common realm — all of whom are under the authority of the true Lord; the God-State.

5.) The Pastor, the Teacher, and the Darryl, are suggesting that it is God’s will, when under Christ hating authorities, to bow the knee to the Christ hating authorities instead of bowing the knee to Christ.

6.) Referring to the Missouri Lutheran Pastor’s argument about matters “**self-evident.” People argue that it is not self-evident that life in the womb is life. Does that mean that therefore it is difficult for Christians to see it as self-evident that life is life? All because Lawyers and Judges are so brain-dead that they can’t see the “self-evident” doesn’t mean we as Christians can’t see the “self-evident.” The Pastor is using a lame rationalization here to cover the Teacher’s sins and his own sins. The Teacher denied Christ before men and the Pastor and the Darryl are justifying her denying Christ before men and so are themselves denying Christ before men.

7.) Of course, if you want to score points in some sort of publicity competition, demonizing Pastors who believe that Jesus meant what he said in Mt. 10:32-33, then it is not a bad strategy, though why Gnostic Reformed Protestants also resort to such behavior (yes, I’m thinking Dr. Darryl Gnostic Hart here) is perfectly understandable. But if you want to think through the layers of significance in such occurrences, maybe it’s better to check if as in this case the teacher belongs to a church and whether the Church is Biblical and whether the Pastor and the Darryl supporting the Teacher are orthodox.

Look, this is serious stuff. We are seeing the Pastor and the Darryl here instruct people that it is fit and proper to deny Christ.

Matthew 10:32-33

32 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. 33 But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.

As a minister, one spends his share of time reading Theological Journals and thick theological tomes dealing with theological minutia. Often one comes across in these readings in house debates over particular subject matter between different camps. Usually (though not always), such debate in the Academic tomes is muted in terms of criticism. When an Academic says something like, “my opponent perhaps has not been as thorough as they might otherwise have been,” what one has just read is an explosive polemic for the Academic journal world. Typically Academic Journals and Tomes are not known for their polemical food-fight nature. They are typically restrained and dry as dust.

However, in the Fall 2013 publication of the Westminster Theological Journal ones finds one of the most pointed and denunciatory articles that I’ve ever seen in a Academic Journal. It is still pretty mild by Iron Ink standards but by the standards of Academia it is red hot. I’ve extracted just a few of the quotes below in order to reveal how sizzling this peer review article is.

And of course, the reason I’m doing this is that the peer review article under consideration is an unraveling of Radical Two Kingdom Theology. This peer review article especially zeroes in on R2K guru David VanDrunen’s, “Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought.” The peer review article is written by William D. Dennison, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Covenant College.

For those who are keeping track, this is now at least the third devastating major academic peer review article written surrounding the pseudo-theology called “R2K,” by eminently qualified people. There was a peer review by Kerux. There was a peer review by Dr. Cornelius Venema. And now there is this peer review by Westminster Theological Journal. One can only hope that R2K is running out of friends.

What this post is concerned with is exposing the repeated frustrations of Dr. Dennison at how inadequate Dr. VanDrunen’s work has been. Later post’s here at Iron Ink may go into the substance of Dr. Dennison’s critique. Keep in mind I have been far from exhaustive in noting every expression of frustration by Dr. Dennison in his column in the WTJ.

NL for Dennison = Natural Law. NL2K = R2K (Natural Law Two Kingdom).

“How effectively does VanDrunen accomplish the enormous task he has set out in this volume? The breadth of VanDrunen’s volume and the scholarly material selected convey impressive intentions; the depth of his scholarly analysis, however, remains elementary and exhibits a number of shortcomings ….

In spite of these intentions, however, VanDrunen provides no indication that he grasps the methodological issues gripping the field of interdisciplinary scholarship over the past century. In fact, the work unfolds in a typically amateur manner; it yields to the popular outlook that any study involving more than one area within the academic curriculum qualifies as an interdisciplinary study. In light of this attitude, he exhibits no comprehension of how an approach of interdistiplinarity (moving from particular disciplines to integration) must be viewed and implemented into a final integrated interdisciplinary study. This failure results in serious limitations in his producing a profound academic integrative study….

Although VanDrunen mentions that classical non-Christian writings had an influence on the tradition of NL, nowhere
does he unpack the substance of their effect, a critical omission. VanDrunen teaches at an institution that states her continual devotion to the work of Cornelius Van Til and, yet, in his writing, he exhibits little understanding of Van Til’s transcendental technique….

This latter domain of natural rights is crucial in connecting NL from the medieval period to the Enlightenment, but VanDrunen ignores it entirely in its medieval construction. Simply put, natural rights are sometimes attributed by scholars solely to the seventeenth century (e.g., rights of property, permissive rights of government, rights of self-protection, marriage rights), but these rights in fact have their roots m the medieval era, specifically the canonists of the twelfth century. In this regard, VanDrunen provides no evidence that he has any scholarly comprehension of the patterns of constitutional thought that tie together the canonists (twelfth century), the conciliarists (fifteenth century), and the constitutionalists (seventeenth century)….

… VanDrunen’s volume provides no credible reason to adopt his thesis that NL is a necessary canon to relate to the civil kingdom (culture). After all, nowhere in the volume does VanDrunen provide his reader with a precise and concrete definition of NL from the Reformed tradition….

With this explanation of sin missing, VanDrunen’s study has done nothing to differentiate itself fully from medieval Roman Catholic scholasticism and what Van Til calls “less-than-consistent Calvinism,” a form of Calvinism that traces its theological roots to a classical synthesis between reason influenced by antiquity and Christian revelation (e.g., Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield at Old Princeton). VanDrunen may try to deny this, but any close reading of the corpuses of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Van Til will clearly demonstrate that VanDrunen’s construct of NL fails to sidestep the pitfalls described by these three premiere Dutch thinkers regarding the extension of medieval scholastic thought through Old Princeton. In fact, this reviewer is certain that Van Til would view VanDrunen’s assessment of NL serving as a common point of contact to discuss ethical responsibility in the context of a common culture as having compatibility with Roman Catholic Scholastic thought….

VanDrunen has failed to display the transcendental or interdisciplinary work necessary to claim that the Reformed tradition only accepted from the pagans those ideas that, through common grace, had affinities with the truth of biblical revelation. Until VanDrunen exhibits that he has done this work in examining the concepts of reason and nature in Greek and Roman thought, his claim that autonomy has had no place in the Reformed tradition with respect to NL is, at best, worthy of skepticism (p. 133)….

VanDrunen’s failure to contend with the inner effects of sin within the construct of NL in the Western tradition leads to two further problems in his work….

Although VanDrunen realizes that the present conception of NL functions within a fallen world, ironically he does not seem to grasp the practical interdisciplinary ramifications of that fact….

Only one who is truly enclosed within an academic ivory tower or who naively isolates the immediate life of the church could suggest that the 2K doctrine can truly serve as a serious directive for the Christian’s relationship with culture. In the providence of God over four centuries, we have already witnessed the horrifying results of this doctrine in the hands of sinful believers. To even suggest that a consistent application of principles found in Meredith Kline’s view of the covenant as well as his view of common grace—whether correctly or wrongly represented by VanDrunen— can present the Christian with a fitting path to follow in responding to culture is further evidence of a naive understanding of a fallen world….

VanDrunen is either ignorant of this state of affairs or willingly avoids the issue which would challenge the theoretical construct of his 2K thesis….

Specifically, VanDrunen’s study shows no familiarity with Kuyper’s Romantic appeal to the Calvinistic appeal to the Calvinist roots of the Republic….

Again, VanDrunen’s failure to apply a transcendental critique upon the historiography in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought prevents him from elucidating the dynamics a” work in Kuyper’s philosophy of history….

Surprisingly, however, VanDrunen’s volume never really deals with this key figure (Herman Bavinck — BLMc) in the contemporary agenda of his thesis. Finally, perhaps, one of the most serious and problematic contentions of
VanDrunen’s thesis appears in his assessment of the 2K doctrine as an essential component of confessional Reformed orthodoxy as portrayed in the West minster Confession of Faith (pp. 189-92)….

In the overview of this section of the Confession (chs. 20-23), however, VanDrunen makes some questionable dogmatic statements…

In the judgment of this reviewer, VanDrunen is here superimposing his understanding of the 2K doctrine on the
Confessional Standards….

As VanDrunen superimposes his dogmatic view of the 2K upon the West minster Standards, his evaluation and interpretation of the Confession for the life of the church should raise enough alarm that anyone intending serious
scholarly use of his volume should proceed with grave caution. This review has offered serious questions about whether VanDrunen truly understands the concrete historical, cultural, and interdisciplinary context of the thinkers and writers to whom he refers in his analysis of NL2K. Although he has shown adequate dependency upon English editions of primary texts, questions remain about whether he grasps these authors’ intentions. In addition, doubts linger as to whether VanDrunen has examined enough of the corpus of various individuals’ writings to present a fair and correct assessment of those investigated. From Augustine and the Epistle to Diognetus to Van Til and the Van Tilians, VanDrunen to a certain degree has imposed upon almost every individual with whom he deals his own analysis of NL2K. For this reason, anyone consulting VanDrunen’s work must add their own primary document investigation to test VanDrunen’s often revisionist scholarship. We still await, therefore, a definitive work on NL2K in light of Reformed orthodoxy; at best, VanDrunen’s study serves as a minor footnote to any sincere historical study of the subject.”