Category: R2K Virus (Radical Two Kingdom Theology)

Debunking Radical Two Kingdoms Theology

Contra Mundum Journal Reviews “Saved To Be Warriors”

http://contra-mundum.org/index_htm_files/McAtte_R2kT.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2sBNBmFnRMagy00IlKH4J8NGe1gW2pAZCMq1G2YyyxH8rx7uHM_7O2kl4

Honestly, whoever wrote this review should write a book criticizing Radical Two Kingdom theology. The author of this piece is masterful at connecting the dots in the faults of Radical Two Kingdom theology. I suspect that this review of the book was written only as a platform to provide the reviewers convictions on the dangers of R2K. I am not opposed to that and am more than glad that the book I wrote could be used as a platform to put yet more lances through R2K.

I wish I know who the author was. Whoever it is, it is obvious that while I may have read my thousands of books so as to assault R2K, the reviewer has read his tens of thousands. The author of this review is informed and erudite and frankly in some instances it is clear that I should be learning from him and not y’all from me. Whoever this reviewer is, it is he who should be writing books attacking R2K. It really is a masterful piece of analysis on his part. I’d like to think whoever this is, he is 75 y/o Professor of theology who is retired humoring himself by reading the lesser lights out there.

He critiques me at several points, and at a couple of those points I might quibble, but the important point is that in the end he is attesting that R2K sucks wind as a theological model.

I might come back to this again with a few of my quibbles but I encourage all of you to read this review to get a even fuller understanding why R2K is heresy.

Announcing the Availability to Order, “Saved to be Warriors”

I am humbled to be able to announce the arrival of “Saved To Be Warriors,” my first, of what I hope to be many more to come, book. There is a link embedded in the link below that informs where the book can be ordered.

In a endorsing statement of the book, that is sure to bring Rev. Sacha Walicord grief from some quarters, Rev. Walicord writes,

“Woe unto the preacher who does not sound the alarm when the Good News is attacked from within the church, when the Law is pitted against the Gospel, and when Christ’s Crown Rights over all of life is disputed. Especially in this day and age when unity is elevated far above purity and when virtue signaling seems to be the order of the day, I am most grateful for this excellent contribution by Rev. Bret McAtee. This work robs the serious reader of every excuse not to stand up against a false and dangerous doctrine – one that is by no means a minor issue, but an assault on the Gospel of Jesus Christ itself. I am most thankful that McAtee has answered the call and dealt with the assailants, not with cheap rhetoric, but by biblically interacting with their own words” 

Rev. Sacha Walicord

Saved to be Warriors

I Had A Dream The Same Night Chris Gordon Had A Dream

 As I sailed on the waters of the Great Lakes, I came to a certain place that seemed like an island, and I laid down in that place to sleep; and as I slept I dreamed a dream…

I was driving through Tekonsha on Mi 60, and I came to a fruit stand that filled me with the urge to listen to some androgynous music. Finally I stumbled across Ziggy Stardust singing,

“Here comes Dick, he’s wearing a skirt
Here comes Jane, y’know she’s sporting a chain
Same hair, revolution
Same build, evolution
Tomorrow who’s gonna fuss?

[Chorus]
And they love each other so
Androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so
Androgynous

The next song I heard in my dream was some kind of rift off of the Eagle’s “Hotel California;

Last thing I remember, I was
Countering their lore
I had to turn their worldview back
To the Calvin it was before
‘Relax,’ said the ordained man,
‘We are programmed to deceive.
You can argue anything you like
But we will never believe!’

And my dream turned even more surreal with men in skirts in pulpits lisping as they read something about being pilgrims and strangers in this land, yet feeling quite at home with their six figure income and book sales. As they deposited their checks they chanted “in this world we have no continuing city.” Koreans pressed for their autographs while they boasted about how they had people in their congregations on both sides of the “gay” marriage issue. In my dream the babies that had been aborted, as the men in skirts had remained silent in their pulpits on the issue of abortion, were now speaking at the men in skirts ordination services mentioning something about how as little ones they had been offended by the silence of Escondido. Chris Gordon was there giving the Benediction while obviously dreaming himself.

And then a great dream arose within the first dream and ate the first dream from the inside out, like Jonah eating his way through the great fish, and in that dream I dreamed I saw all men praising God in the public square. I saw D. G. Hart, Mike Horton, and R. Scott Clark urging their students to become men like John Knox, Samuel Davies, and R. L. Dabney. (I told you it was a strange dream.)

In my dream David Van Drunen and Matt Tuininga sat at a table as tweedle-dumb and tweedle-stupid playing ping pong. The ball they were hitting back and forth had stamped on it “surrender.” In the corner of the room stood Jacques Rousseau and John Locke arguing with Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson over who was the most responsible for R2K theology. Periodically they would suddenly become doubles partners playing against Van Drunen and Tuininga in a round robin ping pong tournament.

Van Drunen, Tuininga, Williams, Hutchinson, Rosseau, Locke, D. G. Hart, Gordon, Horton, and Scott then suddenly were violin virtuosos who played with great dissonance while in the background the cultural Marxists were going all arsonist on the building in which they were playing. But it was all alright because people were getting saved while everything burned down around their violin concert. Van Drunen, Tuininga, Williams, Hutchinson, Rosseau, Locke, D. G. Hart, Gordon, Horton, and Scott suddenly began to laugh maniacally as they played faster and faster and the walls burned hotter and hotter because they had always predicted that this is how it would all end anyhow. The hotter it burned, the more they laughed and the more they laughed the hotter it burned.

Suddenly, in my dream Scrooge was there but as converted to the Escondido Jesus. He was lecturing to me about the desire to reduce the surplus population of theonomists in the Church. He said, and I quote;

“Every theonomist idiot who goes about with ‘God’s Law’ on his lips, should be burned alive with his own copy of Bahnsen’s “Theonomy in Christian Ethics,” and buried with a stake of general equity through his heart.”

Then in my dream I saw, as it were, two air tight compartments which in no wise could be pierced by the other except as by hallucination. As I had one hallucination I was regulated by the Escondido magisterium. As I had another hallucination I was regulated by a unnatural natural law.

 Then I awoke from my dream and opened my Bible and the place where I landed was this:

“Be ye not conformed to this world but be yet transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

I realized that the impulse of the Anabaptists to retreat from the world was exactly the spirit that had overcome me.

In my dream of trying to leave this world I found that there was no way to do that. Every action or lack of action on my part was impacting everything. How was I to be effective if I were to re-build the monastery? Cowardice was driving me and I suddenly remembered that no coward was ever saved. I realized that I must die to my desired retreatism and must once again seek to be a warrior for Christ. I realized that it was I myself, by my retreatist theology, who had created divisions and disunity in the church and that I couldn’t blame everyone else. I must die to my desire to be conquered by this present evil age. I realized that I too must die to myself, along with my own vision of how I want to see Christ’s kingdom come by not coming and by not contending for it.

It was Jesus who said that upon the confession that Jesus is Lord, Jesus would build His Church, and I realized that I was not confessing Jesus in the public square. I had forgotten that the early church had always been arrested for sedition and not because they were worshiping secretly in the catacombs. I realized that, truth be told, I care more about not being persecuted for righteousness sake than I cared for aborted babies.

Back to Tekonsha, Mi, confident in my calling to be a witness to wicked potentates so as to be as a shining star in a dark universe, I decided to go.

 

The Point of Linkage Between the R2K Dispute & The Kinism Dispute

“The R2K crowd is willing to cede the point that Christ’s spiritual kingdom or mediatorial kingdom is synonymous with the church. This is the classic non roman position. But they are unwilling to admit that Christ’s kingdom of power exists at all. The Kuyperians are unwilling to admit that there is a distinction between the kingdom of grace and the kingdom of power at all. Thus they are unable to draw a distinction between grace and the natural order. Or if they do nature is bad and so must be eliminated. Grace eats up nature and your church membership becomes more fundamental to your being than your father’s blood.

Both are errors. Neither comport with magisterial Protestantism or confessional Christianity.”

Robert Hoyle

Over the years here at Iron Ink two of my main foils (though not my only adversaries) have been R2K and “Christian” Alienism. What Robert offers above shows the reason for that. There is linkage between these two errors. Now, Robert and I do not agree on Natural Law scholastic theology but all theologians talk about the relationship between nature and grace. It has been a Reformed motif over the centuries that “grace restores/renews nature.” 

The CREC wants grace at the expense of nature. This is seen in Doug Wilson’s silly diatribes against biblical Kinism…. well, except when it is his Kin who are at stake. When it is his kin at stake then suddenly we begin to smell ethnic puffery. Take for example these two paragraphs from Pope Douglas read back to back;

I.) Doug “I hate white Kinism” Wilson

“We of course reject all such ethnic pufferies, and we do so with just the right amount of loathing…By making absolutely everything about superficial ethnicity indicators, it turns out that some have learned this lesson in reactionary ways, and have embraced their superficial ethnicity indicators. Instead of being ASHAMED of this made-up reality, they became PROUD of this made-up reality. And that’s how we got a collection of Proud Boys going down to heckle folks at an Antifa rally, with the Boys in question made up of Scots, Norwegians, Germans, and a Ukrainian, arms locked, singing a Celtic war song. This is nothing more than playing tribal dress-ups, or ethnic cosplay, and all of it based on nothing more than a shared susceptibility to sunburn. ” –Doug Wilson

II.) Doug “I love me some Jewish Kinism” Wilson

“My affection for Israel is personal, in addition to being theological and political. My wife’s great-great-grandfather was Rabbi Cohn, one of my co-grandfathers is a Christian Jew, my kids and grandkids have cousins who are Israeli, and according to AncestryDNA, I myself am 2% European Jewish. Nancy is 11% European Jew, her mother 26%. What all this amounts to is that our family would be much more involved on an active personal level if terrorists overran Israel than we would be if terrorists overran Vermont.” — Douglas Wilson

At least in the first paragraph nature is just so much “ethnic puffery” that is to be met with just the right loathing of all those ethnic pufferers who share the common trait of susceptibility to sunburn. However, in the second paragraph its all bagels and matzo ball soup serious.

The CREC would replace the ethnic puffery of the first paragraph with ecclesiocentrism and grace. White boy summer ethnic puffery is not important. What is important for the CREC (at least for white boy summer) is grace over nature unless, of course unless all your grandchildren are descendants of Rabbi Cohn. This may be accounted by the wide spread admission of ecclesiocentrism that is found in the CREC.  What is important per the Moscow boys is not the family (the ground zero for ethnic considerations). What is important is the Church. Apparently, for the CREC types it is in the Church we live and move and have our being.

However, not to be outdone, R2K comes along with their famous condescending “tut, tut, tutting,” to remind us that the CREC is wrong. It is not grace eclipsing nature. Rather, it is grace and nature set in dualistic compartmentalization from one another. This explains why the grand Pu-bah of R2K can say things like;

“God is not redeeming the cultural activities and institutions of this world”…“Those who hold a traditional Protestant view of justification consistently should not find a redemptive transformationist perspective attractive.”

David Van Drunen — Westminster Seminary California Professor
“Living in God’s Two Kingdoms”, pp. 13–21.

One readily sees here that grace and nature have been compartmentalized from one another. Grace is an upper story reality and nature is a lower story reality and never the twain shall meet institutionally speaking.

So to reduce to a Venn diagram

CREC = Grace Supplants Nature (No unapproved of ethnic puffery allowed)
Materialism = Nature is all there is (The Cosmos is all there is)
R2K = Grace and Nature exist in a dualistic ying & yang (Secularism forever)
Rome = Nature must come under Grace for Nature to count
(This explains why for Rome everything had to come into the Church to be Holy.)
Animism = Spiritual is all there is

To the contrary, for right-minded people it is the case that the Church is a central expression of the Kingdom but it is not the only expression of the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God, being among us, or in our midst (Luke 17:21) is a Kingdom that is not only redemptive as it works in the Church with its means of Grace in the Word and Sacrament unto the end of opening and closing the Kingdom, but the Kingdom is also authoritarian as it works as under Christ’s Kingship through redeemed Kingdom men, who, by the means of taking every thought captive to Christ and doing all things to the glory of God unto, labor unto the end of the ongoing expansion of the already present Kingdom of God so that one day the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.
The model is found in the Incarnation. Taking seriously the Council of Chalcedon’s definition of the incarnation is how one avoids going off the road into either the R2k ditch or the CREC ditch which in the end both lead to Gnosticism by either over materialization or over spiritualization.

R2K R. Scott Clark Attacks Oklahoma Gov. Stitt For Claiming Oklahoma For Christ

“Gov. Stitt of Oklahoma had no business as governor claiming Oklahoma for Christ. As much as it is his vocation as a Christian and as a private person to advance the Kingdom of God in Oklahoma, through the due use of the means of grace, by prayer, witness, etc., that is not his vocation before the Lord as governor. His vocation as governor is to secure justice for all the citizens of the state and to fulfill his natural, secular responsibilities.”

Dr. R. Scott Clark
Westminster-Cal R2K Professor
Heretic

1.) Note that Oklahoma, per R2K, is NOT to be claimed for Christ. This is classic R2K doctrine. Christ does not rule Oklahoma explicitly but only by means of Natural law. R2K calls this “Christ ruling by He left hand.” Now, keep in mind that all the other gods out there are just delirious with delight over this R2K doctrine because as Oklahoma is not to be claimed for Christ that means the door is open for the adherents of the competing gods of the false religions to claim Oklahoma for their gods. I promise you that the other gods are not shy whatsoever in the drive for hegemony.

And indeed, truth be told, Scott’s god is Enlightenment pluralism and Scott is doing his damnedest to make sure his god reigns. Of course this clearly communicates that Scott’s Christ and my Christ are different Christs.

2.) No Christian who is a public person, per Clark’s R2K, is to be a public Christian. When Gov. Sitt of Oklahoma becomes Governor he is, per Escondido’s R2K, supposed to sit aside his private convictions in order to rule as a public person.

3.) Notice that Scott is defining justice in a non-biblical direction. Justice can only be had by presupposing the rule of King Christ. It is Christ and His Law-Word which defines “justice.” If Christ is not King of Oklahoma it is not possible for Oklahoma to have justice. No King Christ … no law of Christ. No law of Christ … no justice. Justice in Scott’s worldview is a complete abstraction w/ no concrete roots in Biblical Christianity.

4.) Note how Scott and his R2K divides the world into a secular realm and an non-secular realm. Gov. Sitt of Oklahoma has secular responsibilities that should not find his Christian faith impinging upon. Politically speaking this is pure Libertarianism.

5.) How in the world does Scott square all this with the Belgic Confession of Faith which teaches;

“Their (Magistrate) office is not only to have regard unto and watch for the welfare of the civil state, but also to protect the sacred ministry, that the kingdom of Christ may thus be promoted. They must therefore countenance the preaching of the Word of the gospel everywhere, that God may be honored and worshipped by every one, as He commands in His Word.”