Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
Category: R2K Virus (Radical Two Kingdom Theology)
“Yet, if the Two Kingdoms doctrine (dual-fold kingdom) is biblical (and that’s where my leanings are in this debate), it would seem that we might have to acknowledge that the self-avowed Satanist has a point when he says:
‘Feucht is openly a theocrat who courts the attention of politicians and seeks to proselytize through his performances,’ Greaves said. ‘He has his opinions, and we have ours, but one thing the government can not do is preference his viewpoint over ours by giving him exclusive access to perform a concert on the Capitol grounds. That stage is every bit as much ours as it is his, so, in the name of pluralism and religious liberty, there are some state capitols that are likely soon to be hosting Satanic Planet shows.’
Comment left on R. Scott Clark blog
I unwind this comment because this is, in many respects, the essence of what the R2K ‘can’t shoot straight’ gang is teaching.
The key here is the statement ‘but one thing the government can not do is preference his (the Christian’s) viewpoint over ours, (the Satanists)’ as combined with the invoking of the classical liberal’s sacrosanct principle of ‘pluralism and religious liberty.’ The reason that this is key is because the minute the government begins to not preference religious viewpoints they (‘the government’) at that very minute have violated the sacrosanct principle of ‘pluralism and religious liberty’ because the government at that point is preferencing the religious viewpoint of somebody somewhere that insists that pluralism as a religious viewpoints is his religious viewpoint that should be preferred by the government and so forced on everyone else. Indeed when any government prefers the religious viewpoint that they as the government should not preference Christianity over pagan religions they have at that very moment preferred a religious viewpoint of somebody else’s over my religious viewpoint that Christianity should be preferred as the religious viewpoint over all other religious viewpoints.
Religion is an inescapable category and because of that pluralism is a myth.
Elsewhere Clark writes,
“The secular is not our enemy. It is our friend.“
Dr. R. Scott Clark America’s Reformed Court Jester
The word “secular” falls so easily off of people’s lips, but we must ask… ‘what is it?’
Is it the realm where no religious views are welcome thus keeping those realms clean from endorsing any one faith or is it the realm where all religious views are welcome thus keeping those realms clean from endorsing any one faith?
If it is the first of those two is it really possible to have a common realm that is clean of all faith? If it is the second of those two isn’t it the case that the faith that has been endorsed for the common realm is any faith that allows all other faiths and so a version of polytheism?
The secular is neither our friend nor our enemy because there is no such thing as “the secular.” It is a myth made up by those who are drunk with enlightenment categories. There is in now way that any realm can be faith free. No such thing as a realm that can be “all faiths” because then the faiths that insist that their faith alone is the true faith are not allowed. Those faiths must give way to the faith of “all faiths.”
R. Scott Clark is not a wise man who is really just a representative of the Enlightenment project desiring to reinterpret Reformed Christianity through the ideological lens of Anabaptist liberalism.
Clark and all his R2K ilk are enemies of the Church of Christ.
“All orthodox Christians affirm that God’s moral law is enduring and binding to all people—to deny that is antinomianism. What is at stake here is the magistrate’s role in enforcing that moral law. The framers of the Statement have a plan, to which we have not yet arrived, but it entails some enforcement of the first table, and thus is theocratic.”
R. Scott Clark
Sub-Christian Nationalism? (Part 4)
So, what if it is theocratic? The Reformed Confessions repeatedly call for enforcement of the 1st table and also are hopelessly theocratic. Here is the 2nd Helvetic Confession as just one example of a Reformed Theocratic Confession;
“THE DUTY OF THE MAGISTRATE. The chief duty of the magistrate is to
secure and preserve peace and public tranquility. Doubtless he will never do this more successfully than when he is truly God-fearing and religious; that is to say, when, according to the example of the most holy kings and princes of the people of the Lord, he promotes the preaching of the truth and sincere faith, roots out lies and all superstition, together with all impiety and idolatry, and defends the Church of God. We certainly teach that the care of religion belongs especially to the holy magistrate.
Let him, therefore, hold the Word of God in his hands, and take care
lest anything contrary to it is taught. Likewise let him govern the people entrusted to him by God with good laws made according to the Word of God, and let him keep them in discipline, duty and obedience. Let him exercise judgment by judging uprightly. Let him not respect any man’s person or accept bribes. Let him protect widows, orphans and the afflicted. Let him punish and even banish criminals, impostors and barbarians. For he does not bear the sword in vain (Rom. 13:4).
Therefore, let him draw this sword of God against all malefactors,
seditious persons, thieves, murderers, oppressors, blasphemers, perjuried persons, and all those whom God has commanded him to punish and even to execute. Let him suppress stubborn heretics (who are truly heretics), who do not cease to blaspheme the majesty of God and to trouble, and even to destroy the Church of God.”
___
“In Bullinger’s ‘Decades,’ he expounds the above argument further. Using the likes of Solomon, Asa, and Josiah, Bullinger argued that the care and ordering of religion does not belong to Bishops alone. Contrary to those who might relegate these examples to the old covenant, Bullinger responds, ‘The men of this opinion ought to prove, that the Lord Jesus and His apostles did translate the care of religion from the magistrate unto Bishops alone: which they shall never be able to do.’
Both the Reformed theologians Francis Turretin and David Dickson followed this line of argumentation from the example of OT kings.”
“If this [Sinaitic covenant] doesn’t sound like a bargain, recall that the original Israelites did not consider it a bargain either, and they resisted Moses’ efforts to engage them in it. All things considered, many of the first-generation Israelites, who received this covenant while trembling at the foot of a quaking mountain and then wandered in the wilderness, preferred to return to Egypt rather than to enter the covenant with a frightening deity who threatened curse-sanctions upon them if they disobeyed. I do not blame them; their assessment of the matter was judicious and well considered, albeit rebellious. The Sinai covenant-administration was no bargain for sinners, and I pity the poor Israelites who suffered under its administration…I would have resisted this covenant also, had I been there, because such a legal covenant, whose conditions require strict obedience (and threaten severe curse-sanctions), is bound to fail if one of the parties to it is a sinful people.”
Dr. T. David Gordon
The Law is Not of Faith — pg. 251
1.) So God demonstrates His graciousness by being the Lord God who brought them out of the land of Egypt — the house of bondage and yet that same God places Israel under a Mosaic covenant that made the hardships of Egypt look like a life of luxury?
2.) Israel’s proneness to rebel against God and the Mosaic covenant as seen in their preference to return to Egypt was judicious and well considered, even if rebellious?
3.) As New Covenant believers we should have pity on fellow believers in the household of God who lived during the OT epoch since God during that time was not as gracious as the God we serve today? (Can you say Marcionism?)
4.) God put His sinful people under a covenant that He knew and had determined that they would not be able to keep AND had no provision for their forgiveness when they did not keep it. He delighted in doing so?
5.) The OT believers as a party to the Mosaic covenant were a sinful people who were provided no relief in the Mosaic covenant for their sinfulness? All that blood in the sacrificial system meant nothing since our OT brothers could not offer up strict obedience?
People often don’t see the cheek by jowl relationship between R2K and Cultural Marxism. Together they are the positive and negative movements to overthrow Christianity in the Church of Jesus Christ. R2K disallows the Church as from the pulpit to speak contrary to the agenda of the Cultural Marxists. This has the effect of creating a vacuum in the church on many subjects that then allow the input of the broader culture — saturated as it is with the teachings of Cultural Marxism — to take captive the thinking of God’s people in the pew.
So, negatively R2K holds back the Church’s ability to bring a “thus saith the Lord” to the cultural conversation allowing Cultural Marxist to positively fill the gap by giving a word of the Lord from their Lord Beelzebub via Universities, Secondary Schools, Media, and other sources.
Those who embrace and teach R2K hate Jesus Christ and should be excommunicated from His Church.
As God’s people we Christians are created in God’s image and so intuitively
desire to shape the world consistent with the image of God that we are. God has shaped us in His image and so we are rabid to shape the world in the image wherein we have been created.
Because there is no such thing as neutrality people will either seek to shape all of life to the glory of God or they will seek to shape it in rebellion against God. In our living this neither ground that allows us to be neutral nor is there ground that is common in the sense that it neither honors nor dishonors the Creator God.
The church has failed to teach this simple truth robustly, leaving many Christians empty and desiring something that will shape the world in a God honoring direction. The Church, via God’s revelation, has answers to the problems that people can’t help but see but the Church has grown silent under the whip hand of Radical Two Kingdom Theology and the result is that God’s people look for answers from others who see the problems that the Christian sees only to be disappointed because Christ haters, even if they analyze the problem correctly, will always give incomplete solutions.
Marxism in it’s various forms offer terrible solutions, but because it actually seeks to do something about problems in the world, people flee to it. The church has the answer, but has failed God’s people in providing it because she has failed to preach the whole counsel of God to the whole of life.
Cultural Marxism will never be defeated and consigned to the sulfur pit until R2K in the Church is first cast into the lake of fire from which it originated.
In what remains in repudiating R. Scott Clark I will turn to a fisking methodology, taking Clark apart paragraph by paragraph.
R. Scott Clark writes,
De Young speaks positively of “cultural Christianity,” but it is not clear to me that what De Young wants is actually Christian. What he wants is for Christian leaders to “fight” the cultural decay of the West:
BLMc responds,
RSC mentions that Kevin DeYoung desires Christian leaders to “fight” the cultural decay of the West, but we have to ask, what standard are we using to define cultural decay? Clearly, as well will see, RSC will answer that by saying the standard needs to be a human standard. In other words, per RSC, there is no need to fight the cultural decay of the West via special revelation but rather the cultural decay of the West can be fought via Natural Law with an appeal to what can be considered a “common culture” that all humans share. The problem with that is that dog won’t hunt as Yuval Noah Harai reveals in this youtube clip where he argues that Nature teaches that sodomy is natural;
So, what will RSC do here? Yuval Noah Harai stands as a exemplary of cultural decay and yet here he is arguing for sodomy from the same standpoint which RSC argues against cultural decay. How will we resolve this authority conundrum? Will we appeal to Natural Law to answer if we should own RSC’s natural law or if we should own Yuval Noah Harai natural law?
No, an appeal to Natural law will not help us fight cultural decay
RSC expands on his position;
But people want to see that their Christian leaders—pastors, thinkers, writers, institutional heads—are willing to fight for the truth. You may think your people spend too much time watching Tucker Carlson, or retweeting Ben Shapiro, or looking for Jordan Peterson videos on YouTube, or reading the latest stuff from Doug Wilson—and I have theological disagreements with all of them (after all, some of them aren’t even Christians)—but people are drawn to them because they offer a confident assertion of truth. Our people can see the world being overrun by moral chaos, and they want help in mounting a courageous resistance; instead, they are getting a respectable retreat.
BLMc responds,
And the ironic thing here is that Clark and R2K are the one’s leading from the front in a highly non-respectable retreat. They are the ones insisting that there is no “thus saith the Lord” on issues from sodomy to tranny-ism to child grooming and surgical abuse, to cultural Marxism, to economic theft via redistribution theft schemes run by the FEDS, to etc. etc. etc. These issues demand a complete and total retreat and withdrawal from pulpits all across America. R2K pulpits are confidently asserting their “truth” that the Church must be silent on these issues.
It is breathtaking to here RSC lament the respectable retreat that the laity rank and file are receiving from their leaders in the Church when he is at the front of the line demanding the pulpits be silent on matters where God has clearly spoken.
RSC writes,
Here, the classical distinction between nature and grace would really help us. Nothing De Young desires here needs to be Christianized, as it were. The cultural resistance for which he is calling can be done under the rubric of nature. In the culture wars, Christians have the same concerns as non-Christians. This is because these are issues about the creational (or natural) order. This is what our founders understood but we have forgotten.
BLMc responds,
The bottom line is that nature is an inert thing if it is not informed and conditioned by grace. As Yuval Noah Harai demonstrates above nature is not static but requires interpretation. Cornelius Van Til might put have it this way; “There is no nature as fact without and apart from interpretation of fact.” The only reason that Natural Law ever worked in what was once Christendom is because those reading Natural Law were reading it as starting from Biblical presuppositions that were gained from knowing special revelation. Yuval Noah Harai, not having Biblical presuppositions reads natural law very differently, as one might well expect. That is because fallen man suppresses the truth of natural law in unrighteousness.
This is precisely what the canons of Dordt teach;
THIRD AND FOURTH HEADS OF DOCTRINE
Article 4
“There remain, however, in man since the fall, the glimmerings of natural light, whereby he retains some knowledge of God, of natural things, and of the differences between good and evil, and discovers some regard for virtue, good order in society, and for maintaining an orderly external deportment. 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. Nay, further, this light, such as it is, man in various ways renders wholly polluted and holds it in unrighteousness, by doing which he becomes inexcusable before God.”
When R. Scott Clark advocates for this Natural Law nonsense as he does he is in violation of his oath to uphold the canon’s of Dordt. Of course Clark weasels his way around Article 4 by making it say what it doesn’t say.
RSC writes,
Christians have a corner on theological truth, on saving religious truth—Jesus alone is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:6). There is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12) but we need neither “Christian Nationalism” nor “cultural Christianity” to get what we want. The LGBTQ agenda can and should be resisted on the basis of nature, reason, and natural law. Homosexuality is patently unnatural. The case for a genetic/biological cause for it has collapsed. It is the result of the corruption of nature, and most often the result of some sort of abuse or neglect.
BLMc responds,
Here we see Clark’s Thomistic/Aristotelian dualism on full parade. There are two paths to truth. There is a theological path to truth which yields salvation for the elect and then there is non-theological natural truth which yields all other forms of “truth.” And never the twain shall meet. Francis Schaeffer was right in his analysis on this subject in his little book, “Escape from Reason.” Clark and R2K are full on epistemological dualists. They bifurcate the realm of grace (church) from the realm of nature (common realm) and so impermeable is the barrier between nature and grace that there is no way that the great Reformed principle “grace restoring nature” dies on the vine.
And once again referring back to the youtube clip of Yuval Noah Harai, R. Scott Clark clearly doesn’t know what the blue blazes he is talking about when he says here, “The LGBTQ agenda can and should be resisted on the basis of nature, reason, and natural law. Homosexuality is patently unnatural. The case for a genetic/biological cause for it has collapsed.”
But you have to give Dr. R. Scott Clark credit. He excels in not knowing what the blue blazes he is talking about. At least the man is consistent.
RSC writes,
What Christians ought to do is to join with other citizens (e.g., Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) in defending the Bill of Rights and the natural, God-given right to free speech, a free press, free association, and the freedom of religion protected therein.
BLMc responds,
Nobody disagrees with the idea of co-belligerence when it can be achieved. I protest with Roman Catholics all the time against abortion. I could even protest with Muslims against Tranny curriculum in government schools though I might be more inclined to join Muslims in an effort to close down government schools.
However, I would be slow Scotty in getting behind the serial adulterer RFK Jr. If a man can not be faithful to his wife he will never be faithful to his country. Are you arguing Scotty that Christians should vote for a man who has all the morals of a Tom-Cat? Is this what your natural law teaches you Scotty boy?
As De Young notes, most Christians were theocrats in the pre-modern and early modern periods, but there were exceptions that influenced the American founders. He calls attention to Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94), who argued for a form of toleration of religious heretics. Late in his career, John Owen argued for a very limited form of toleration. His fellow Oxford student, John Locke (1632–1704), whose Second Treatise was very influential on the American founders, also argued for toleration. Both argued that it was not the nature or vocation of the state to punish religious heretics. The founders agree. This is why I say that the Christian Nationalism project of Wolfe et al is un-American. I do not mean that they do not have a right to make their case, but I mean that their case is contrary to the ideology under which this nation was founded.
BLMc responds,
I refer RSC to Dr. Stephen’s Wolfe’s book “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” specifically the chapter titled, “Liberty of Conscience” in order for him to see what a fool he is making of himself.
Secondly, it is of interest to note that J. Gresham Machen did not agree with RSC’s line of reasoning. In a letter to the Governor of Pennsylvania Machen wrote in favor or Blue laws (required cessation of activity on the Lord’s Day). Is Clark saying that Machen was being un-American when Machen wrote to the Pennsylvania Governor,
“Will you permit me to express, very respectfully, my opposition to the Bill designated House Bill No. 1 regarding permission of commercialized sport between the hours of two and six on Sunday afternoons?
It is clear that in this matter of Sunday legislation the liberty of part of the people will have to be curtailed. It is impossible that people who desire a quiet Sunday should have a quiet Sunday, while at the same time people who desire commercialized sport on Sunday should have commercialized sport. The permission of commercialized sport will necessarily change the character of the day for all of the people and not merely for part of the people.
The only question, therefore, is whose liberty is to be curtailed. I am convinced that in this case it ought, for the welfare of the whole people, to be the liberty of those who desire commercialized sport.
The widespread prevalence of blue laws in this country put the lie to Scott’s assertion that early Americans were full of toleration for those who violated the first table of God’s law. Also, Scott might want to consider all those blasphemy laws on the books in that States in early America. Again, such a reality testify to the falsity of his claim about toleration in early America.
The idea that R. Scott Clark is a historian is right up there with Bruce Jenner’s claim to be a woman.
RSC writes,
We should agree with De Young’s rejection of Wolfe’s truly dangerous “theocratic Caesarism.” He is correct that Wolfe has quite misunderstood, misconstrued, and misreported the nature and intent of the American founders and he does a good job of showing how that is.
BLMc responds,
Again, theocracy is an inescapable category as we have established in this series and countless other times. Caesarism is more problematic because in my estimation the desire for a Christian strongman prince is likely misplaced until Reformation begins to bubble up from the bottom up. I am not opposed to the concept of Christian strongman unless he exists apart from a solid base of support from the rank and file citizenry. The reason I am opposed to Caesarism is because power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely and I don’t believe that any Christian prince would rule well if there were not checks on his power.
I trust people will see the nuance in the above paragraph.
Finally, in terms of Wolfe and RSC’s accusation that he has misread American history, allow me to say that I would rather be in the leaky ship of Dr. Stephen Wolfe than in the multiplied torpedoed hits of the ship of R. Scott Clark. We have, along the way seen the “abilities” of the historian R. Scott Clark and suffice it to say we have not been impressed in the slightest.
I have issues with Wolfe, which I may take up another time on Iron Ink, but the issues I have with Wolfe pale in comparison to the outright chasm that exists between R2K R. Scott Clark and myself.