Category: R2K Virus (Radical Two Kingdom Theology)

“Mr. Glaser, thanks for quoting that part of the confession. The use of the word “dispensations” suggests that there may actually be a place for Reformed dispensationalism. (And before the charges of Marcionism fly, please remember the hallowed Westminster divines used the word. If you have issues, take it up with them. Don’t bang me over the head with it.)”

Nobody has ever suggested, as Dr. Hart no doubt knows, that there is anything wrong with the word “dispensations.” Reformed Dispensationalism is not serious error because it has the word “Dispensation” attached to the word “Reformed.” No, the problem is that like genuine dispensationalism, Reformed Dispensationalism desires to presuppose discontinuity. This is quite contrary to historic Reformed positions that consistently presupposed continuity understanding that the covenant of grace was one.

In my estimation the Reformed Dispensationalism (synonymous with R2Kt) does leave itself open to the charge of Marcionism. This can be seen when many Reformed faces go ashen when it is suggested that the penal sanctions of the Old Testament should be followed. Does the horror of their response lie in their idea that God was somehow mean to require those penalties enacted in the Old Covenant age but now in this age God has dropped His severe mien and has become kinder and gentler? One thing is certain and that is Natural Law certainly can be easily (and wrongly) perceived by Reformed Dispensationalists as kinder and gentler than what God’s Law requires.

That part of the confession also seems to fly in the face of good, women’s ordination-tolerating, pastor Bret.

God’s judgments against His people are all together just. Part of His judgment against us is the reality of the ungodly practice of ordaining women. Similarly, part of His judgment against us is the reality of the ungodly theological system that is R2Kt. Until God lifts his hand of judgment against the Church we must labor under those judgments as faithfully as possible. I don’t like women being ordained. I don’t like R2Kt. But each are part of the terrain of the current Church in which I must be as faithful as possible.

“The WCF says that with the church the gospel is “administered with more simplicity, and less outward glory” than the old dispensation. It seems to me that theonomy is not content with the simplicity and lack of glory in the current arrangement of the church. But then take a number on that discontent. Plenty of Presbyterians are not content with the churches spiritual weapons. They seem to want the outward glory of universities, cities, nation-states, modern medicine, art — you name it — to carry the name Christian.”

And that simplicity was seen in the Churches that the puritans built as well as the style of speaking they developed. Nobody disagrees on this.

But in the other spheres the Gospel isn’t being administered, so I am not quite sure what Dr. Hart’s point here is in raising this part of the WCF. Nobody from the theonomy school has suggested that the civil or familial realm should be administering the Gospel in Word & Sacrament. All we have contended is that what Dr. Hart styles “common realm” is not neutral. For my part I am quite satisfied with the more simplicity and less outward glory of the administration of the Gospel in this dispensation. I would join Dr. Hart in locked arms in the admonishing of those who desire a gospel that partakes of a theology of glory in the Church.

Dr. Hart’s complaints about Christians desiring “the outward glory of universities, cities, nation-states, modern medicine, art, is just another example of his presupposing that the common realm can only be neutral. Hart makes a curious and unwarranted jump in his reasoning from the administration of the Gospel being less outwardly glorious to both the idea that education, nation states, modern-medicine and art can’t be Christian and to the idea that having Christian education, nation state, modern-medicine and art is somehow glorious in a sinister and God dishonoring kind of way.

“Please be clear, Bret, I never said the state doesn’t exist. I said the Christian state doesn’t exist, and if we had a Christian state, it was Israel. Israel as a Christian state no longer exists.”

Of course a thousand years of Christendom gives quite excellent contrary testimony to the wrong headedness of Darryl’s assertion.

If you populate a region with Muslims you will get a Muslim state. If you populate a region with Jews you will get a Jewish State. If you populate a region with Secular Humanists you will get America. Similarly, if you populate a region with Christians you will get a Christian state. Any denial of that simple premise is just a determined stubbornness in the face of “self-evident” truths. (A little Natural Law lingo there.)

You’re living in denial if you want to reclaim it. You’re living what Calvin called a Judaic Folly.

You mean the same Calvin who said,

“But this was sayde to the people of olde time. Yea, and God’s honour must not be diminished by us at this day: the reasons that I have alleadged alreadie doe serve as well for us as for them. Then lette us not thinke that this lawe is a speciall lawe for the Jewes; but let us understand that God intended to deliver to us a generall rule, to which we must tye ourselves…Sith it is so, it is to be concluded, not onely that is lawefull for all kinges and magistrates, to punish heretikes and such as have perverted the pure trueth; but also that they be bounde to doe it, and that they misbehave themselves towardes God, if they suffer errours to roust without redresse, and employ not their whole power to shewe a greater zeale in that behalfe than in all other things.”

Calvin, Sermons upon Deuteronomie, p. 541-542

I should add that the Christian state that does exist is the Church, which practices the only Christian form of government in this age, jure divino Presbyterianism.

Calvin doesn’t agree with you on that point Darryl,

Psalm 2

“…without a doubt he is speaking of the kingdom of our Lord Jesus. He admonishes all kings and authorities to be wise and to take heed to themselves. What is this wisdom? What is the lesson He gives them? To abdicate it all? Hardly! But to fear God and give homage to His Son…Furthermore, Isaiah prophesies that the kings will become the foster fathers of the Christian church and that queens will nurse it with their breasts (Isa. 49:23).I beg of you, how do you reconcile the fact that kings will be protectors of the Christian Church if their vocation is inconsistent with Christianity?”

Calvin, Treatises Against the Anabaptists and Libertines, p. 79

Anyway, all theonomists, hard or soft core, living in the United States are functional 2k Christians, unless they are trying to overthrow this current regime.

I would say that praying that the current regime might be overthrown counts as trying to overthrow this current regime.

The Covenanters even knew this and that’s why they forbade their members from voting or holding pubilc office. (The RPCNA also capitulated sometime around 1980 and reversed these positions.) But if you vote, pay taxes, say the pledge of allegiance, stand for the Star Spangled banner an an MLB game, you are submitting to an idolatrous and illegitimate regime. Even more, if you use the means of this constitutional republic to secure a Christian state in America, you are also committing a form of idolatry (by your logic) because by running for office or passing laws or voting within the structures of a government that does not recognize Christ as Lord or the Bible as the basis for law, you are feeding the beast.

I don’t stand for the Star spangled banner and I don’t say the pledge of allegiance.

When I vote I vote for those who are committed to overthrowing the current regime that has overthrown the constitution.

I don’t make enough to pay taxes so that is not a concern, and if I did I’d pay taxes because the state can beat me up and so I choose to be wise as a serpent on this score.

I have no intent to feed the beast but earnestly desire to give it a belly ache.

“So which is it, Bret, are you against King George or are you for him? If you’re against, as you suppose in trying to out me as not being a supporter of the American revolution, then you are for the godless U.S.A., a nation conceived in the idolatry of the Enlightenment (as Daniel argues), a nation that will not recognize Christ as Lord.”

I would disagree with whoever argued that America was conceived in the idolatry of the Enlightement though I would concede that the Constitution is a synthesis document between Enlightenment and Christian ideas. I read it as a Christian and so I believe it is a Christian document. I would say that the War for Independence was a conservative counter revolution born of Christian beliefs on the consequences of violated covenants.

So, I quite disagree with your premise that being against King George is being for the godless U.S.A. as she was originally constituted.

Next, as the 9 of 13 colonies at the signing of the Declaration of Independence had established Churches I don’t know how anyone could say that these United States were godless in their origin.

You’re premise, as many of them are in general, is, once again, mistaken here.

So once again the $64k question: how do you live with yourself? Your infidelity is legion by your own logic. (Reed and other moderators, I am not trying to call names. I am trying to get the theonomists to come clean and see how they are implicated in the very names they call the 2k advocates. Daniel encouraged me at one point to “shut up.” I’d reiterate that point a little more politely and ask the theonomists to keep their convictions a little more quiet until they have the nerve to use their vitriol against the very state they honor and to which they submit.)

You keep asking about this $64.00 question and I keep answering it. You somehow seem to think it is some type of clincher. I assure you it most certainly isn’t.

The answer is that we submit until God raises up lesser magistrates to lead against this current regime, such as he did in the War for American Independence. This is a idea with long historical Reformed legs and one that makes your $64.00 question not worth a plug nickel in terms of somehow being a clincher argument.

But there is one more thing I want to note here before moving on. Recently I went to a play titled “The Rose Of Treason.” The thrust of the play was resistance to the German government in 1943 by young university students. There was one scene in the play where the students, having been captured, are tried. During the trial one of the judges severely lectures the students for their treason in light of all that the National Socialist system had provided for them. Sometimes Darryl you sound like that Judge in the play. You constantly insist that it is inconsistent to take advantage of a culture that one is praying that God would overthrow. You mistake, like the Judge in the play, the difference between loving your country and loathing the State.

“Word of warning: theonomists be careful how you react here. The Patriot Act is still in effect and the FBI could be looking for expressions of sedition.”

Well, the state only need to worry about me if they think that praying for its overthrow is something that they seriously need to be worried about.

“This is the difference between theonomy and Christian orthodoxy, one of continuity and discontinuity between the OT and the NT. For a good statement of the discontinuity I suggest you read WCF ch. 7. God’s people no longer have a state.”

The first sentence is so correct that some (not originating with me) have referred to Hart’s form of Reformed thinking as “Reformed Dispensationalism.” The discontinuities in the R2Kt school seem to be every bit the equal of the discontinuities you find in Dispensationalism.

The second statement is of course nonsense. WCF ch. 7 does not say of what Hart thinks it says. In order to find Hart’s conclusions of WCF ch. 7 you must begin with Hart’s presuppositions for the text itself gives him no support. This statement by Hart also reveals his inability to understand that every nation is a theocracy of one type or another. If justified, regenerated people who are being transformed by the renewing of their minds gather together to live in community what they will produce, by God’s grace, under the Spirit’s illumination, as guided by the Scriptures is a Christian nation. This is no different then saying, on a smaller scale, that if a justified, regenerated people who are being transformed by the renewing of their minds are gathered together by God to live under one roof what they will produce, by God’s grace, under the Spirit’s illumination, as guided by the Scriptures is a Christian family. If Christian families can exist then so can Christian nations.

It is only Hart’s presuppositions that force him to say that the common realm is neutral and so cannot be Christian. The reality of like minded people of the undoubted catholic Christian faith gathering and organizing together to build a Sate and live in concert with God’s Word suggest that the common realm is not neutral. Certainly the reality of this simple idea can be seen in differences in common realms as built by Muslims, Hindus, Secular Humanists as compared to those built by Christians.

“The only Christian state in the history of the world was Israel. When Christ rose from the dead, that state ended and transferred her rule to the church, an institution that knows no national boundaries or governmental regulations. The church is a spiritual institution with spiritual weapons for enforcing her standards and prosecuting her mission. I know some don’t like that loss of outward glory. The Corinthians were among the first. But since we are called to be content, being content with the church’s means is what we should do.”

First, note is admitting that the Old Covenant had a greater outward glory then the new and better covenant brought in by the Lord Jesus. This constant denigrating of the quality of the new covenant is passing strange in light of the reality that it is described in scripture as a new and better covenant. (See a previous post that examines how public square ethics in the new and better covenant are of an inferior nature to the public square ethics in the old and worst covenant according to R2Kt thinking.)

The next problem is how Hart uses the word “spiritual.” For Hart the Church is superior because it is spiritual while the realm of nature (common realm) is inferior (yucky) because it is not spiritual. This sure sounds gnostic to me.

Third the state did not end with the resurrection of Christ. Where is the scripture that would ever suggest such a thing? Israel, as God’s people had a Church and State (among other institutions). When Christ died He insured that His redeemed Churched people would organize redeemed cultures, part of which is laboring to build states that are infused with the spirit of redemption precisely because they are animated by a redeemed people. Hart, quite apart from any textual considerations, simply asserts that “the State ended.”

Fourth, no one disagrees with Hart when he says that the church is “an institution that knows no national boundaries or governmental regulations. The church is a spiritual institution with spiritual weapons for enforcing her standards and prosecuting her mission.” I would merely say that when by God’s grace a spiritual institution (Church) is successful at prosecuting her mission so that the elect are brought in by droves to King Jesus one result will be that the elect will want to build Christian culture which includes building Christian states. In other words the spiritual presence that empowers the Church for its mission when successful always incarnates itself into the corporeal world thus revealing that while the spiritual is always prior and primary the incarnation of the spiritual as seen in the corporeal cultural outworking remains God’s working and so is not “yucky.” Just as God gave dust the spiritual breath of life and so it lived, so when God makes a people spiritually alive in great enough numbers in any given culture so they live and that living is seen by their building of culture that is in obedience to King Jesus. Neither the dust or the culture is anything in itself until God breathes in in the breath of life and then it is to be prized as being touched by God.

Finally, nobody is arguing against being content with the means that the Church has been given for its spiritual work as Hart implies. Conversions do not happen by the sword.

“But you also seem to suggest that we should live quiet and peaceful lives only under Christian magistrates. Is that correct? But Paul and Timothy weren’t living under Christian magistrates. The rulers the Bible is concerned with raging against are the Christian ones, first in Israel, now in the church. So if you have a bad pastor, rage away. But a bad magistrate? Submit. Having to endure non-believing rulers reminds me of Gaffin’s great piece about theonomy, that it had no room for suffering because of its inherent theology of glory.”

Christians should live quiet and peaceful lives under magistrates of any faith as long as those magistrates don’t insist on them obeying man rather than God.

Second, Gaffin was quite wrong in his piece that Hart references. Theonomy has tons of room for suffering since those who desire the rule of God suffer, among other things, the calumnies of those like Gaffin and Hart. Further, they suffer physically with persecutions when they refuse to pinch incense and say “Caesar est Kurios.” To be quite honest I would say given our times it is only theonomist who suffer because it is only theonomists who are resisting wickedness in high places and so represent a threat to the anti-Christ authorities. The R2Kt crowd doesn’t worry about suffering because nobody has any reason to persecute them because they are not a threat to anybody. You want suffering? Come be a theonomist.

I am beginning to wonder, given Dr. Hart’s advice to submit, if he isn’t descended from a long line of Tories. King George III would have loved to have had him in a Presbyterian pulpit around 1775.

“Throughout the nineteenth century in the United States there was an unstable synthesis of intense private religion and a public order that officially recognized no god except the people…. Public life was left to the realm of nature, while grace was reserved for private life. This arrangement of private religion and public irreligion produced religious peace for the most part, while American society slowly became secularized….Nature was slowly devouring grace. In other words, the parts of life governed by autonomous human reason expanded, and the areas devoted to Jesus Christ contracted. Worst yet those parts of life left outside of Jesus Christ tended to become hostile to Him.

Dr. William Edgar — Reformed Theologian
God And Politics — pg. 187-188

Immediately we want to note that the one place we disagree with Dr. Edgar is his statement that “American society slowly became secularized. American society did not become slowly secularized. Instead American society became slowly de-Christianized in the direction of the religion of secular humanism.

With that caveat though this is an excellent quote since it so ably exposes the problem of Radical Two Kingdom virus theology. What the R2Kt virus does is to create realms of nature and realms of grace that men occupy. In the realms of nature belongs most of where we do our living. The realm of grace is occupied by the Church and our individual immortal souls. In the realm of nature truth comes through unaided reason as that unaided reason, starting from itself, reads natural law and implements upon the common realm the conclusions reached. The realm of nature is putatively a-religious and is a realm of neutrality where the regenerate and unregenerate can build a common culture.

The problem with this way of reasoning is that it can only work where a people have a shared worldview to begin with. It is the nadir of a disordered ratiocination to think you could slam people from a Hindu culture together with people from a Muslim culture and think that a functional culture could arise due to the variant peoples reaching the same conclusions in the common realm as instructed by Natural law.

And yet that is exactly what R2Kt virus theologians think can happen in our culture as they appeal to Biblical Christians and Secular Humanists to work out their common realm differences by an appeal to Natural law. All this can produce is either conflict in interpretations of Natural law or surrendering by Christians on Secular Humanist interpretations in order to accommodate the Secular Humanists so that they can live quiet and peaceful lives of capitulation to the crown rights of King Jesus.

What always happens in absolutist dualism approaches is that the dualism seeks to resolve the tension. What happened in our history is that we tried to follow the R2Kt paradigm, and as Edgar notes, it worked for awhile, but it only worked as long as it did because Americans shared a common heritage. That common heritage has dissipated as the secular humanism in control of the realm of nature, increasingly uninformed by an increasingly deteriorated public Christianity has expanded to create its own anti-Christian heritage, its own anti-Christian traditions and its own anti-Christian culture. The R2Kt paradigm that was employed by America with success in its early life no longer can provide peace because secular humanism has expanded at the expense of a now contracted Christianity.

Please note, it is not to the blame of the Christian community that this arrangement is ending, unless, of course, you blame wild game for resisting being torn alive by the resident carnivore. Further, more R2Kt as solution will not solve the problem of the massive expansion of the Secular humanist realm of nature combined with the massive contracting of the Christian realm of grace. Such solutions were accepted in the Germany of the 1930’s and we all know how well that worked out.

We continue to insist that while the distinction of Holy and common need to be maintained the way offered by R2Kt is a recipe for destruction of the Church of Jesus Christ.

“If the scholastics, with all their fine distinctions, had been careful…they would not have fallen into the error of giving as much credit to natural and to rational theology as they did. Natural and rational theology were never meant to function, even in paradise, apart from theology proper.”

Cornelius Van Til
An Introduction To Systematic Theology — pg. 74

The same sort of argument applies to the doctrine of the sacraments (29:5). The divines assume that we know what bread and wine are and what their nature is. Scripture does not teach us what is the “substance and nature” of bread and wine, only that they remain substantially bread and wine. We need Scripture to teach us what the sacraments are but nature teaches us what bread and wine are.

Does nature teach an anorexic what bread and wine are? Also what if we were pantheist? Would a pantheist who believes that god is everything and everything is god, if he were consistent, think that the nature of bread and wine are what Natural law teaches they actually are or would the suppression mechanism work in such a way that he would worship the bread and wine instead of eating it? No doubt nature and natural law teach a good number of things, but the issue that Dr. R. Scott Clark is not dealing with is the issue of suppression — an issue that the Scripture teaches on. Or would R. Scott Clark accuse the Apostle Paul of being Barthian?

Later in his comments D. R. Scott Clark launches the accusation at Theonomists that we do not believe people can know anything. This is nonsense because any theonomist worth his salt would tell you that a person who insist they can’t know anything has at the same time insisted that they know they can’t know anything. Second, the theonomist does not believe that people can’t know anything. The theonomist heartily agrees that people are culpable for their sin because they sin against a better knowledge. The theonomist does not insist that truth can’t be known. The theonomist insists that that truth can’t be known apart from presupposing God, and that the pagan, because of the suppression mechanism picks and chooses what he will admit to knowing. Dr. R. Scott Clark, in his argumentation denies total depravity. Clark seems to insist that man only suppresses the truth in unrighteousness in spiritual categories but in non spiritual categories he can interpret aright. And Clark believes this in the teeth of the twentieth century which built culture after culture in direct defiance of Natural law. Ask the Soviet Checka about Natural Law. Ask the German Einsatzgruppen about Natural Law. Ask the Chinese who lived through “the great leap forward” about Natural Law. Come visit the Soviet Gulags, or the Ukrainian Harvest of sorrow, or Bergen-Belsen, or the Cambodian killing fields and then make an argument with a straight face about Natural Law theory.

The Canons of Dort (RE 1.4) make a similar distinction between what “the light of nature” can and cannot do. The light of nature is insufficient for salvation, but it is sufficient for the ordering of common civil life. This teaching is explicit in CD 3/4/.4:

Who would ever disagree that the light of nature is sufficient for the ordering of common civil life? Absolutely the light of nature is, considered only in and of itself, sufficient for the ordering of common civil life. However, when fallen man reads that which is sufficient, because fallen man’s epistemology is insufficient, he reads that which is sufficient in such a way to make it insufficient. The problem is not in the light of nature. The problem is with he who reads the light of nature.

What shall we say, then? Is Natural law not true? Certainly not! Indeed Natural Law was one agency that God used to teach me of my sin. For I would not have known what suppressing the truth in unrighteousness really was if Natural law had not proclaimed the necessity of God to think aright. But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by Natural Law, produced in me every kind of opportunity to suppress the reality of God wherever such denial became convenient.

For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the Natural law,
deceived me. So then, Natural Law is holy, and what it teaches is holy, righteous and good. Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

There remain, however, in man since the fall, the glimmerings of natural light, whereby he retains some knowledge of God, and natural things, and of the difference between good and evil, and shows some regard for virtue and for good outward behavior. But so far is this light of nature from being sufficient to bring him to a saving knowledge of God and to true conversion that he is incapable of using it aright even in things natural and civil. By no means, further, this light, such as it is, man in various ways renders wholly polluted and hinders in unrighteousness, which by doing he becomes inexcusable before God.

Again, no Theonomist would disagree with this. By the way, don’t miss the parts in bold. Fallen man is incapable of using the light of nature aright even in things natural and civil.

There remains in postlapsarian man glimmerings of natural light but as fallen man becomes more and more consistent in working out the anti-thesis in the direction of God hatred that glimmering, while never completely extinguished, becomes increasingly faint.

WCF 10.4: “…be they ever so diligent to frame their lives according to the light of nature and the law of that religion they do profess” The Confession assumes that it is possible for human beings to order their lives according to the “light of nature.” A life thus lived is lived according to natural law. This law keeping is insufficient for salvation, but civil life is about law it is not about salvation.

Dr. R. Scott Clark left out the italicized part in the above blockquote. Since Dr. R. Scott Clark suggest that WCF 10:4 proves living a life guided by the light of nature is sufficient for the civil realm, does this mean that living a life guided by false religion is sufficient for the civil realm? If we as Christians are to esteem the light of nature for the civil realm, given Dr. R. Scott Clark’s appeal to WCF 10-4 should we also esteem the “law of that religion the pagans do profess,” for the civil realm? The Divines in WCF 10-4 combine the light of nature with the rules of pagan religion thus perhaps suggesting that they understood that the light of nature would always be read in relationship to “the law of that religion that pagans do profess.” This in turn is suggestive that when the Christian faith challenges “the law of that religion that pagans do profess,” they at the same time challenge their reading of the light of nature in the civil realm. The antithesis lies not only in the law of that religion that pagans do confess but also in the way that pagans read the light of nature because of the law of that religion they do profess.

WCF 20.4: …for their publishing of such opinions, or maintaining of such practices, as are contrary to the light of nature….” On Christian liberty, the divines connect “the powers” ordained by God to maintain order (which was a problem during the English civil war!) with this troublesome expression, “the light of nature.” This language and way of thinking about civil life was well and deeply ingrained in Reformed orthodoxy in the 16th and 17th century.

Absolutely it was! You would expect no less among a people living in the context of Christendom. It is the unity that Christendom brought to thinking that allowed for a commonly understood appeal to “the light of nature.” Take away the unity brought about by the existence of Christendom (as Dr. R. Scott Clark desires) and you take away the foundation upon which their notion of Natural Law was built. People who have different faith and cultural foundational presuppositions are going to likewise have different “lights of nature,” and different versions of Natural Law.

The contest here is not whether or not Natural Law exists. It does. The contest here is whether or not Natural Law can be used as a basis to build a common sphere among people of genuinely different faith systems and cultures. It can’t, because non-Christians read Natural Law through the prism of their faith and culture system and so distort it.

Unlike our theonomists, the divines believed that there is a natural law, that it can be and is known, that it contains specific precepts that are revealed with sufficiently clarity to be applied, even by the unregenerate, to specific instances. The skepticism that our theonomists have demonstrated toward the perspicuity of natural law is not only downright late modern (who can know anything really?) but contra confessional.

Yes, Yes, let us remember how well the unregenerate Communists applied Natural Law in their legislating against Christian Ukrainians. Let us remember how well the unregenerate National Socialist judges applied Natural Law to the legal realm with their rulings on the non-humanity of Jews. Let us remember how well the unregenerate Americans did in applying Natural Law to the decisions to fire bomb Dresden or Tokyo. Yes, all of these are instances where the Natural Law had sufficient clarity to the pagan so that even the unregenerate could rightly apply it to specific instances.

Those poor stupid Theonomists. Why can’t they just get with the game and see how wonderfully this R2Kt virus stuff and Natural Law works.