R2K Virus (Radical Two Kingdom Theology) – Page 40

R2K’s Inherent Pessimism

“Christians have always lived in pessimistic times. That’s the nature of being aliens and exiles. That’s what happens when you worship in the church militant. Sure, Christians are optimistic about going home to be with their Lord. But they’re not optimistic about making their home here, this side of glory….

… 2kers, in fact, know that we are always in a battle and that culture wars often distract from the real warfare which is spiritual and that can only seen by faith and not by sight.”

Darryl G. Hart
R2K Connoisseur
https://oldlife.org/2013/09/06/making-difference-even-bill-evans-cant-see/

1.) I for one am glad that not all Christians have agreed with Dr. Hart on this matter when he says that Christians have always lived (and, by way of implication, “always will live”) in pessimistic times. For example, Dr. J. Gresham Machen did not agree with Darryl on this score. Machen could look forward to times that would be absent of pessimism,

“God still rules, and in the midst of darkness there will come in His good time the shining of a clearer light. There will come a great revival of the Christian religion; and with it will come, we believe a revival of true learning…”

2.) Note that it is Darryl’s worldview that forces him to conclude that Christians have always lived in pessimistic times. Darryl’s apriori militant amillennialism requires him to look at all history and all the future as “pessimistic times.” If Darryl did not have this worldview component, then Darryl wouldn’t be interpreting all of history through these pessimistic lenses. I especially note this because Darryl insists that he has no use for Worldview thinking and yet here we find Darryl engaged in Worldview thinking at its finest. In point of fact, R2K Theology is Worldviewism at its finest.

3.) Can you imagine attending a party with Darryl? He makes Eyeore and Oscar the Grouch look like winsome dinner guests. Darryl makes Schopenhauer and Voltaire look like guys you’d like to invite to your next garden party to hand out party favors.

Imagined conversation with Darryl at a party,

Guest — “So what do you do for a living Darryl?”

Darryl — “I write books and articles trying to convince people how pessimistic the times are in which we live.”

Guest — “Well, that sounds interesting.”

Darryl — “It depresses me and everyone who reads me but I press on.”

4.) Note that for Darryl, that the “not yet” of his eschatology completely obliterates the “now” of his eschatology. We can be optimistic about the sweet bye and bye but what is required now is pessimism. Now, R2K types will object and say that their “now” is Spiritual and that the problem with people like me is that my eschatology is “over-realized.”

Which brings us to our next point,

5.) R2K really is platonic or neo-platonic or, if one prefers, gnostic. We see this in the quote above that contrasts real warfare (spiritual) with non real (non spiritual) warfare. This is neo-platonism. Neoplatonism is the idea that the “spiritual’ (i.e., non-physical, ethereal eternal) aspect of life (Darryl’s Church realm) is superior to the more physical aspects. The Neoplatonic R2K perspective implicitly denies the biblical facts that man is a unit, and that God is concerned with the whole of our being and with all of life. R2K Neoplatonism leads to a spiritual contempt for God’s material creation and for the laws God has ordained in such areas as education or social order issues.

For Darryl and R2K, the really important part of life is in the realm of the Church. In the Church alone one finds the Spiritual. Outside in the common realm all one finds is the temporal and the carnal. In R2K thinking the temporal realm suffers soul sleep upon the consummation of all things. As such the temporal realm only finds its importance as it supports those working in the Spiritual realm.

If one wants to glory in pessimism, R2K is the way to go. However, if one optimistically believes, along with Machen, that Revival is coming, one will want to eschew R2K’s call for eternal pessimism and embrace the confidence and optimism of Machen.

Machen, The Worldview Thinker … The Machen Hart Never Told You About

“What has Christianity to do with education: What is there about Christianity which makes it necessary that there should be Christian schools? Very little, some people say (R2K “Christians, for example — BLM). Christianity, they say, is a life, a temper of soul, not a doctrine or a system of truth; it can provide its sweet aroma, therefore, for any system which secular education may provide; its function is merely to evaluate whatever may be presented to it by the school of thought dominant at any particular time. This view of the Christian religion…is radically false. Christianity is, indeed, a way of life; but it is a way of life founded upon a system of truth. That system of truth is of the most comprehensive kind; it clashes with opposing systems at a thousand points. The Christian life cannot be lived on the basis of anti-Christian thought. Hence the necessity of the Christian school.”

~ J. Gresham Machen

“It is this profound Christian permeation of every human activity, no matter how secular the world may regard it as being, which is brought about by the Christian school and the Christian school alone. I do not want to be guilty of exaggerations at this point. A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearings of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life — those are great central convictions that underlie the Christian school.”

~ J. Gresham Machen

The Second Coming Of Jenny Geddes Stool

Comes now a story as told from 21st century lore
When the Church was living in captivity as Babylon the Whore
Escondido had sworn that R2K would become the new Reformed jewel
They never dreamed they’d be undone by Jenny Gedde’s stool

The Ph.D’s and their sycophants, with printing presses hot
Expected all to genuflect over the theology they had wrought
Meredith Kline had sworn that Westminster 19 would never be the rule
But he passed before he could be introduced to Jenny Gedde’s stool

Kline’s disciples filled his shoes with Academic gravity and pomp
Resolved to cover the Reformed globe with their Republication swamp
VanDrunen, Hart, Horton, Clark, and others among those counted “cool”
Never expected they’d feel the wood of the metaphoric Gedde’s stool

They pushed their books insisting that Recovered Confessions meant
That all the Reformed World must offer up its assent
They introduced saints gone by, claiming all taught the hyphenated dual
But their plans began to crumble when met by Jenny Gedde’s stool

First Machen was trotted out by Hart as crypto Radical 2K
And that floated among the dupes until Machen’s words were displayed
And all the time they gnashed their teeth at the stubborn mules
Who had the temerity to resist R2K with Jenny Gedde’s stool

Then Natural Law was spun by the Magic of Van Drunen’s pen
The common realm was ruled by it, without Scripture’s intoned “Amen”
In the hearts of the saints the blood upwelled with bitter anguish full;
And to their blogs they took as one, casting Jenny Gedde’s stool

Next came covenant republication in this Reformed poison brew
Here the fingerprints of Horton were found creating this ballyhoo
To defend the truth rose warriors to expose this Escondido tool
And the weapon of their choice was Jenny Gedde’s metaphoric stool

Came forth then the sputtering of men not used to being told they’re wrong
Reinforcements did arrive but Gordon and Trueman could not prolong
The inevitable demise of these schoolman’s Reformed Theology re-tool
It was brought to an end by the flying wood of Jenny Gedde’s metaphoric stool

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Machen, The Postmillennialist — Part II

“But this is not the first period of decadence through which the world has passed, as it is not the first period of desperate conflict in the Church. God still rules, and in the midst of darkness there will come in His good time the shining of a clearer light. There will come a great revival of the Christian religion; and with it will come, we believe a revival of true learning: The new Reformation for which we long for and pray may well be accompanied by a new Renaissance.”

J. Gresham Machen
The Modern Use of the Bible
Princeton Theological Review, 23 (1925), p. 81

Machen would have never countenanced the current militant amillennialism as found in R2K. Any representation of Machen that he was no culture warrior — that he was a man uninterested in the Transformation of age — is just idiocy on stilts.

Machen, the Postmillennialist

“At present we are inarticulate; we know the riches of the gospel; we wonder at those who have it already at hand and yet are content instead with the weak and beggarly elements. When will God raise us the man of His choice to give His message powerfully to the world? We cannot say. But the truth is not dead, and God has not deserted His Church. Behind all the darkness and perplexity of the present time we can discern, on the basis of the promises of God, the dawn of a better day. There may come a time, sooner than we can tell, when again we cry in the Church, as every redeemed soul cries even now: ‘The old things are passed away; behold they are become new.”

J. Gresham Machen
God Transcendent, pg. 51

It is funny how R2K claims Machen for its own and yet Machen’s postmillennialism would have found him aghast at the R2K fighting as hard for their pessimism as he was fighting for the PCUSA. It was Machen’s postmillennial optimism that kept him in the fight when all was dark about him. It seems, at times, the only optimism and hope that the R2K advocates have is the optimism and hope that they will defeat the optimism and hope of the postmillennialists and the optimistic amillennialists.