R2K Virus (Radical Two Kingdom Theology) – Page 47

McAtee Contra VanDrunen On Religious Commitment & Social Orders

‎”…what sort of religious commitment, if any, should be promoted or required within the social order? The answer, I suggest, is none. A crucial consideration is the fact that God made the Noahic covenant with “you [Noah and his sons] and your offspring after you, and with every living creature that is with you” (9:9-10). The human race generally (along with the animal kingdom) is God’s covenant partner. Not a single distinction is made between believers and unbelievers, but God promises to preserve them in their common social life.”

~ Dr. David Van Drunen, 2012 lecture

How thoughtful of Dr. Van Drunen to give us so clearly and to so passionately advocate his religious commitment for the social order. Dr. VD’s religious commitment for the social order that he is advocating is that the social order should be animated by the religious commitment of no religious commitment. Another way to label his religious commitment for the social order is ” Social Order Atheism. Interestingly enough this is the exact same social order theory advocated by Marxists of all hues and stripes.

Now, some desire to answer Dr. Van Drunen by insisting that the religious commitment of the social order should be all religious commitments. In this thinking the social order should be animated by all religious commitments. This is sometimes called pluralism but I prefer to label it as Social Order Polytheism. Interestingly enough this is the social order advocated by all anarchists.

The main problem with Dr. Van Drunen’s thinking is that it presupposes that man can cease being Homo Adorans (man the worshiper) in his common realm. For Dr. Van Drunen man is no longer a worshiper as he lives and moves and has is being in the social order, and not being a worshiper man can create a social order that is not reflective of any ultimate religious commitment to a god or god concept. Such a thinking puts a severe strain on ones desire to be a irenic.

In both situations of social order Atheism or social order polytheism, even though they each being with seemingly opposite religious commitments for the social order, they end up in the same place. If the social order is to be Atheistic then it will be the autonomous man deified as the State that will create the social order and the citizenry will be required to have religious commitments to the state. If the social order is to be polytheistic then it will require some institution to set the limits on how these competing religious commitments will interact in the social order. That institutions will likely be the State. Both of these positions lead us to the outcome that in the State we will live and move and have or being for the social order.

Michael Horton — 1995 / Michael Horton 2012

Nevertheless, Kuyper did make “Christian” versions of many things in the world: Christian schools, newspapers, and political parties tended to obscure the earlier Protestant confidence in the realm of nature as possessing sufficient life and justification for its existence without having to be organized as specifically Christian. This Kuyperian spirit has been especially attractive in some circles in North America, because it is world-embracing and eschews the pietistic retreat from society, and yet it should not be too hastily concluded that one can find a distinctively “Christian” philosophy, political theory, or aesthetic. If these are indeed realms of common grace and natural revelation, they do not require a specifically Christian explanation. Looking for one will only tend to polarize Christians from non-Christians until believers are at last exiled again from the public square forced to pursue their “Christian” philosophy in their own spiritual ghetto.[1]

Dr. Michael Horton
“Where in the World is the Church? A Christian Viwe of Culture and Your Role in It”
Moody Press, 1995 , page 32.

This is an older quote from Mike and it may be the case that he has changed his mind about this, though I would be surprised if he has. I have my doubts about his having changed any given this quote from Mike that is very recent.

“Christians, of all people, should be concerned about the pressing issues in culture and society today. However, even in the same church, where people share the same faith, worldview, and values, there will be different applications, policies, and agendas.”

1.) Mike speaks of an earlier Protestant consideration, pre-Kuyper, of a nature realm that possessed sufficient life and justification for its existence without having to be organized as specifically Christian.

And yet guys like John Knox, who certainly represent the earlier Protestantism that Mike speaks of, could insist that Mike’s natural realm be organized as specifically Christian.

“For it is a thing more certain that whatsoever God required of the civil magistrate in Israel or Judah concerning the observation of true religion during the time of the Law, the same doth he require of lawful magistrates professing Christ Jesus in the time of the Gospel, as the Holy Ghost hath taught us by the mouth of David, saying (Psalm 2): ‘Be learned, you that judge the earth, kiss the Son, lest that the Lord wax angry and that ye perish from the way.’ This admonition did not extend to the judges under the Law only, but doth also include such as be promoted to honours in the time of the Gospel, when Christ Jesus doth reign and fight in His spiritual kingdom, whose enemies in that Psalm be most sharply taxed, their fury expressed and vanity mocked. And then are kings and judges, who think themselves free from all law and obedience, commanded to repent their former blind rage, and judges are charged to be learned. And last are all commanded to serve the Eternal in fear, to rejoice before Him in trembling, to kiss the Son, that is, to give unto Him most humble obedience. Whereof it is evident that the rulers, magistrates and judges now in Christ’s kingdom are no less bound to obedience unto God than were those under the Law.”

John Knox, The appellation of John Knox from the cruel and most injust sentence pronounced against him by the false bishops and clergy of Scotland, with his supplication and exhortation to the nobility, estates and commonality of the same realm (Geneva, 1558) in idem, On rebellion, ed. R. A. Mason (Cambridge, 1994), pp 91-2.

I could repeat these kinds of quote many times over from Reformed men that long predated Abraham Kuyper and at least call into question Mike’s assertion of a earlier Protestant confidence in a natural realm that could be organized neutrally.

2.) Mike almost dismisses the idea of the possibility of Christian philosophy. With such a casual dismissal Mike dismisses the work of Christian Philosophers who believed that they were advancing Christian philosophy. Mike dismisses the work of men like Augustine, Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, C. Gregg Singer, Francis Schaeffer, Ronald Nash, Greg Bahnsen, and any number of other Christian philosophers who insisted that they were advocating Christian Philosophy. This dismissal made so casually is a bit shocking even considering that it comes from a R2K advocate.

3.) The polarization that Mike warns against arising between believers and pagans is the natural consequence of Christianity contra non-Christianity. Is Mike saying that we should jettison Christian thinking so that we can get on better with the non-Christians? And in terms of ghettoizing isn’t the consequence of clash of belief systems the eventual marginalization of those who lose that clash, whether Christian or non-Christian?

Take R2K for example. It is in the midst of a worldview warfare against Historic Reformed doctrine and should it lose it will be ghettoized. Similarly, if Historic Reformed doctrine loses in this worldview warfare against R2K it will be ghettoized. Ghettoization is always the consequences of those who lose worldview clashes. For example, look how ghettoized that the Church in Russian was as a result of losing the worldview warfare with the Bolsheviks. Were Mike alive then would he have been writing things like, “The Russian Church needs to jettison Christian thinking so that we can get on better with the Bolsheviks?

4.) In Mikes second quote he advances the strange idea that people who have the same worldview will have different applications, policies, and agendas. How is it possible Mike, to have the same exact world and life view and yet contend for different applications, policies, and agendas? Can two people have the same Christian worldview and find that one desires the legalizing of abortion while the other desires that abortion be made a crime?

Certainly there might exist slight nuance differences and strategy differences among those who share a worldview but to say that those with the same worldview have different agendas is quite curious speech.

Ask The Pastor — What Of Immanentizing The Eschaton?

Dear Pastor,

As for the question of immanentizing the eschaton, you vote that we usher in the Christian one; I vote that we wait for Christ to usher in the eschaton.

David,

Thank you for your insightful offering.

In reference to ushering in Eschatons. You seemed to miss the point that I was trying to make earlier when I said,

by insisting that the common realm belongs to common grace and natural law what they (R2K adherents) end up doing is creating a vacuum in which the other adherents of other gods will try to immanentize their respective eschatons. So while at least some amillennialists want to avoid immanentizing the Christian eschaton what their retreat ends up doing is allowing the immanentizing of other non-Christian eschatons. We must remember that it is never a question whether or not if some eschaton will be immanentized but only a question of which eschaton will be immanentized. I vote for the Christian one.

There is no neutrality on the question concerning immanentizing eschatons. The question isn’t, “Will we or will we not usher in a eschaton,” the question rather is, “Which eschaton will we work to incarnate?”

Concerning this matter keep in mind that culture is the consequential manifestation of what we believe concerning ultimate theological reality. Now since all theology is teleological and always has the end (eschaton) in mind, it simply is impossible for humans to build cultures where no consideration (whether epistemologically conscious of that consideration or not) is given of immanentizing the eschaton. The culture that we live in right now is the result of some successful theology managing to bring its vision of the future end into the present.

Let me note, that I quite agree that there can be dangers in non-humble considerations of eschaton immanentizing. However, for all the dangers I see there I see far more dangers in a escapism or retreatism which allows the eschatons of pagan gods to have their way.

We need to keep in mind here the words of A. A. Hodge when he wrote,

If the national life in general is organized upon non-Christian principles, the churches which are embraced within the universal assimilating power of that nation will not long be able to preserve their integrity.

A. A. Hodge, Evangelical Theology, p. 283-84

Now, Hodge doesn’t explicitly reference eschaton immanentizing but he has in mind exactly that which I am trying to get at. If we will not live in such a way that puts the feet to our prayers of “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” thus immanentizing the Christian eschaton, we will, as God’s people be embraced in the assimilating powers of non-Christian principles which are working to immanentize their version of their religions eschaton.

Thanks for the conversation David.

Kline Klatch

Recently, in the comments section David R. from Fla. has been mildly defending R2K theory by quoting Dr. Meredith Kline. I thought I would interact a little with David’s pull quotes. I hope to help pull back the curtain on the problems with this thinking.

Some people might remember Dr. Kline as the man who built a straw man out of Dr. Greg Bahnsen’s Theonomic position and then proceeded to destroy the straw man he had built, insuring before he wrote his unseemly attack piece that Dr. Bahnsen would not be able to respond to his attack piece in the same journal in which Dr. Kline attacked Dr. Bahnsen.

David R. writes,

In Kingdom Prologue, Kline has a very helpful discussion of the common grace city and its relationship to the kingdoms of God and Satan. He describes two aspects of the common grace city, that of religious antithesis and common grace, as follows:

David R. then quotes Dr. Meredith Kline,

“There is in the city a spiritual malignancy, the fatal consequence of the usurpation of the world kingdom by Satan and the prostitution of the city to demonic service. In the lurid expose found in the apocalyptic mode of Scripture, the satanically perverted urban power structure is seen as a beast savagely turned against the citizens of the city who refuse its mark…. The victims are not those disadvantaged in things temporal. It is rather a matter of religious antithesis, an ancient diabolical enmity. It is against the redeemed of the Lamb that the controlling powers of the world kingdom direct their hellish hostility.

“Yet in the face of the bestial aspect assumed by the city and the ensuing religious warfare that rages within it,
Scripture affirms the legitimacy of the city. One thinks of the historical context of Romans 13. The legitimacy of the city is affirmed not because the bestializing of the city is a relatively late historical development. As a matter of fact, the Beast-power is not just a phenomenon of the present church age. The founder of the city was himself the slayer of the first martyr-prophet…. Our positive affirmation of the city structure is not based on a mere chronological priority of positive to negative factors in the make-up of the city. It is due rather to the fact that fundamental structural legitimacy is a matter of divine ordinance, not of the nature of man’s administration of the institution. The frightful religious tension of the city belongs to the story of the apostate direction taken by the city potentates and should not be allowed to obscure the character of the city as a structure founded on the common grace ordinance of the Creator.

1.) Dr. Kline would have us believe that the city (common realm) is prostituted to a demonic service that is a beast that is turned against the redeemed of the lamb who are to endure the hellish hostility of an ancient diabolical enmity and yet despite the fact that these controlling powers have usurped the world kingdom so that common realm is implacably opposed to those who will not receive its mark Dr. Kline’s followers would have us believe that some kind of principled pluralism in the common realm can make it so Christians and non-Christians can function harmoniously despite all this hostility?

Well, I suppose some people can reconcile that position.

2.) Note that Dr. Kline mentions in these brief paragraphs both the idea of “religious warfare that rages within the common realm,” and again, “the frightful religious tension of the city.” This is fundamentally important to critiquing the disciples of Kline (the grand-daddy of R2K). Dr. Kline admits of this religious warfare that rages in the city and yet the disciples of Kline insist that the common realm, at least for Christians, is a religious free zone. Christians, according to the R2K acolytes are not to appeal to their Christianity (their religion) in the common realm but instead they are to appeal to natural law. I’ve even had one R2K supporter tell me that it is only natural religion that is to shape the common realm since Christianity was never intended to be a social order factor. Many of the R2K fellows communicate this same thing when they tell you that “there is no such thing as Christian culture,” or when they rail against the idea of Christendom. So, here is the question. If, in R2K thinking, Christianity is not to shape or impact the common realm, which is instead shaped by common grace and ruled by common law, how can it be that there will be “religious warfare that rages within” the common realm, and how can there be a “frightful religious tension?” If the common realm is common and Christianity does not exist in a public square sense in the common realm then whence this frightful religious tension? Whence this religious warfare that rages within the common realm?

Here we have one of the R2K disciples quoting Dr. Meredith Kline and yet Kline assumes to be the case what R2K insists can’t be the case.

3.) Dr. Kline refers to the city (common realm) as “bestial.” By what standard are we defining the common realm as bestial? Naturally that standard has to be the Scripture. Dr. Kline, looking to the standard of the Scripture, insists that the common realm is “bestial.” So, if the common realm is “bestial” it seems like it would be fair to say that the common realm is also evil. (Bestial and evil do kind of go together.) However, the R2K lads insist on telling us that Dr. Kline’s bestial common realm is NOT evil — not bestial — but rather is merely “common.” The common realm can not have in it a Christian culture the R2K lads tell us and yet their mentor, Dr. Kline tells us that the common realm must remain decidedly non-Christian. (After all, if the common realm remain bestial in hardly seems a stretch to insist that a bestial realm yields non-Christian cultures.)

The reason this is so important is that it was the Anabaptists who insisted that the realms outside of their communes were inherently evil. Dr. Kline’s position, like the R2K position, does sound Anabaptist at this point. Note that Dr. Kline seems to be saying that the common realm is animated by “the Beast power.” One wonders how that common realm can be considered common if it is, by definition, animated, shaped, influenced by “the Beast power?”

Dr. Kline continues

“Over against every tendency to identify the city at its essential core with those demonic powers that seize and manipulate the power of the state we must assert the biblical testimony to the goodness of this postlapsarian institution as an appointment of God’s common grace, beneficial and remedial in its functions.”

So, despite all the apocalyptic language earlier used to describe the common realm, the goodness of this common realm is asserted. This is akin to Alexander Solzhenitsyn writing about the horrors of the Gulag Archipelago and then concluding by asserting the goodness of the gulag.

Biblical Christianity, contrary to R2K dualisms, does believe that there is a present evil age that is every bit as wicked as Dr. Kline describes. However, Biblical Christianity doesn’t teach that the present evil age is good or dualistically permanent. Biblical Christianity teaches that this present wicked age is being incrementally pushed back by the age to come that was inaugurated by the coming and triumph of the Lord Christ. God’s Christ, being victorious over this present wicked age, and having bound the strong man is now, by the work of His Spirit and through the Spirit given obedience of the Church and through His providential orchestration of all things, is going from victory unto victory. The age to come is not yet in all of its manifested authority and will not be until the consummation of all things but the fact that the age to come is not yet seen in all its coming brilliance does not mean that it can not, will not, or should not be incrementally and increasingly turning the desert of the present wicked age into the Oasis of the already present and ever increasingly present age to come.

God’s common grace is seen in the reality that the present wicked age is not perfectly consistent with its own Christ hating presuppositions. God’s common grace keeps the present wicked age from nihilistic destruction so that the age to come, of our Lord Christ’s delegated authority to the Church, has the time and opportunity to be about the mission of teaching the nations to observe all things so that age to come goes from glory unto glory over this present wicked age which resists it at every turn.

Dr. Kline continues,

“Summing up then, the meaning or essential identity of the postlapsarian city is not found in identification either with the kingdom of Satan or with the kingdom of God. Nor is it to be explained in terms of a dialectical seesawing between the demonic and the divine. This divinely appointed institution exists within the sphere of common grace, which is the corollary, the counterpoise, of the common curse. The fundamental shape of the city is the resultant of the interplay of these two correlative principles of divine action, a divine wrath and a divine grace that restrains that wrath according to the measure of sovereign divine purpose. Such is the biblical conceptual framework for defining the basic meaning of the city.” (pp. 168-172)

Dr. Kline has thus given us two dualisms.

1.) The first dualism is the dualism between the City of God and the City of man. (Let’s not even venture into the fact that Dr. Kline’s followers uses these in a non-Augustinian sense.)

2.) The second dualism is the dualism that is found in the second duality of the first dualism. In the City of Man Dr. Kline has suggested that there is a dualism that exists between the ying of common grace and the yang of common curse.

Dr. Kline says that the essential identity of the postlapsarian city is not found in identification either with the kingdom of Satan or with the kingdom of God. Another way of saying that is that the postlapsarian city is found in identification with both the Kingdom of Satan and the Kingdom of God. After all, remember the descriptors earlier that was given to us by Dr. Kline. The City of Man was “Bestial.” The City of man had a spiritual malignancy. The City of man The World Kingdom had been usurped by Satan and the city of Man was prostituted to Demonic service.

After saying all this, how can Dr. Kline turn around and say “the postlapsarian city is not found in identification either with the Kingdom of Satan or with the Kingdom of God?

Yet at the same time Dr. Kline now says that this city of man is a divinely appointed institution. This is why I say that Dr. Kline is saying not only saying that the City of man’s identity is not to be found either with the Kingdom of Satan or the Kingdom of God, but Kline is also saying that the city of man’s identity is found both in the Kingdom of Satan and in the Kingdom of God.

Notice also, that with Kline’s assertion that the city of man is not to be identified with the Kingdom of Satan we are still left asking, “Where exactly is the Kingdom of Satan in Radical Two Kingdom theology?

Finally, note that Dr. Kline can deny his creation of a dialectic in the City of man all he wants but that is exactly what he has given us. In a very Hegelian manner Dr. Kline has given us, for the City of Man, a thesis which is the Kingdom of God and a antithesis which is the Kingdom of Satan and Dr. Kline has left the synthesis to only be arrived at with the consummation. It strikes me then, that the city of man for those who accept this thinking (R2K), is a Manichean reality. The common realm is a place where ultimate good and ultimate evil are perfectly counter-poised so that neither will have conquest over the other. This is perfectly consistent with Amilliennial eschatology that insists that good and evil grow together and evil only begins to triumph finally on the brink of Christ’s return.

Now keep in mind that this is the quote that was given to me by David R. I have only dealt with that quote which I was given.

One Kingdom for Christ, One Kingdom for Neutrality, But No Kingdom For Satan

Christ’s kingdom is not just sitting alongside Satan”s kingdom (dualistically!), but Christ is in the process of defeating Satan (the usurper) and his kingdom. Sphere sovereignty has to do with how power and authority are limited/distributed and how culture is built. Properly understood, it is not to be used as a way of declaring certain domains “neutral” or outside the authority of Christ and His word

In the Scripture, we are not taught to think of the kingdom of God in some abstract fashion, like a circle in a diagram. The kingdom is described in dynamic and militant terms, as a mountain that fills the earth, or a stone that breaks in pieces all opposition. The kingdom doesn”t float down like a UFO, it breaks into the present order with power and permeates all.

This all seems so obvious but the really frustrating part of this is that in R2K “theology” I can’t really find the Kingdom of Satan. The Kingdom of Satan can’t be in their “Redemptive Realm,” for that is, according to their “theology,” uniquely Christ’s Kingdom. The Kingdom of Satan can’t be in their “Common realm” for that is, according to their “theology,” uniquely the neutral realm, public square that is owned by neither Christ nor Satan. The R2Kt lads have two Kingdoms but no Kingdom for Satan, no place where I can conceptualize a “present evil age,” resisting the leavening effect of the currently invading “age to come.”