I heard the bells on Christmas day
Ring out their warnings to keep away
from clergy “thought”
that Marxist twat
Denying peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought I, as the day had come,
The enemy would swallow Christendom
They belch and fume
Good men consume
Denying peace on earth, good-will to men!

Still ringing, singing so as to betray
The evil intent of Clergy dziggetai
Beware their sin
And counsel grim
Embrace peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, hexed vile text file
Their manifestos truth revile
And with the sound
Of truth uncrowned
Denying peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The sanity of Christ’s advent
And made me swear
At clergy everywhere
Who deny peace on earth, good-will to men

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth I said”
For clergy are headstrong
And confuse the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;”
Clergy will fail
Good men prevail
Bringing peace on earth, good-will to men.

“One must be born again to the see the Kingdom of God, from this it follows that this sphere and everything pertaining to it, factually lies outside the horizon of the civil government and will always have to lie outside it, even when the magistrate is born again because the office does not get born again.”

Abraham Kuyper

1.) Kuyper makes the mistake of equating the Kingdom of God to the Church so that they are entirely synonymous. This is seen by his assertion that the civil Government can never belong to the Kingdom of God.

2.) The civil government and the Church both belong to the Kingdom of God. That the Church and the civil Government are distinct even when the magistrate is born again is based not on the fact that they are alien to each other as if one belongs to the Kingdom (Church) and the other doesn’t (Civil Government) but rather because the born again civil Magistrate is responsible in God’s Kingdom for justice while the born again Minister is responsible in God’s Kingdom for grace.

3.) The office is not born again because it is not possible for an abstract idea (an office) to be born again. That is just a stupid statement on Kuyper’s part.

“Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.”

Samuel Adams

Here is a historical fact.

It is Calvinists more than any other expression of Christianity who have drawn the tightest connection between being spiritually free and insisting on being free in the civil realm. The Calvinists, throughout history, have reasoned that no man who has been spiritually set free from his sins should in any way live under tyrants who would seize the civil freedom of those spiritually set free.

You are no Calvinists if in this climate you are content to wear the chains of those tyrants who would take your civil liberty and enslave you again to the sins of some Christ-hating tyrant. And have no doubt, the squashing of our civil and religious liberty is exactly what this fake Wuhan narrative is all about. We are now being ruled by tyrants whose hatred for all those who would raise the banner of liberty is off the charts.

Given the docility of the modern Reformed Church in America one is forced to ask, “Are there any historical Calvinists left?”

Throughout history the last people that Sovereign Tyrants wanted in their Kingdoms were Calvinists. These Christ-hating tyrants would harry and harass Calvinists out of their Kingdom since the Potentates knew that Calvinists could not be broke to the chains the elite sought to place upon their subjects. Tyrants knew that their desire to enslave their people would never succeed if a strong Calvinist minority existed in their kingdom. Roman Catholics they could enslave. Lutherans they could enslave. Anabaptists they could enslave. But the Calvinists were a people that tyrants knew they would be broken if they sought to break their Calvinists to their bondage.

Doubt me?

Ask Mary Queen of Scots how well she did in breaking John Knox. Ask Catherine de Medici and the Duke of Guise how well they did putting the harness of oppression on Admiral Coligny and the Huguenots. Ask Charles I how well it went with enslaving Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads. Ask the Roman Catholic Spaniards how well the Dutch Calvinists took to be enslaved. Ask the English Parliament and King George III how well it went trying to enslave the colonial Calvinists. Ask Abraham Lincoln and the Jacobin North about how easy it was to enslave the Calvinist South. Ask the English how easy it was for their Mighty Empire to put down the Boer Reformed in the Boer Wars.

Calvinists have always demanded their civil freedom and any denial of that demand led to either utter destruction for Tyrants or deep wounds inflicted on their Kingdoms as the price paid to crush Calvinists.

So, having said all this where are the Calvinists in America raising a hue and cry about our Governor Tyrants seeking to enslave us by this whole phony Wuhan narrative? Instead of raising Knox like battle cries modern Calvinists have become the biggest Tyrant arse kissers going (yes R2K, I’m looking at you… AGAIN).

What has happened to Calvinism that it has become so tame?

“The civil government, God’s servant, finds the revelation of God’s holy will in that Scripture. On that basis, Groen Van Prinsterer taught that ‘the state, i.e., the organic whole of all the nation’s interests, cannot be built upon an atheistic or pantheistic system, but only on the authority and will of Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church, and ruler of the kings of the earth. Upon that basis, the states of 1618 ‘let all kings and princes know that the foundation of that Republic was the …. true religion.’ On that basis, we now repeat what Groen reminded us, ‘that religion not only was a desirable attitude of citizens but the foundation of legislation and the administration of justice.’

This would possibly be otherwise if one could say that religion, the doctrine of faith and morals, and philosophy had no influence whatsoever on the nature of legislation and public policy. The question could then be reduced to what Dry Kuyper posed: what is the true relation of church and state? But only as long as one equates Holy Scripture with the gospel, and the way he repeatedly does in his essay. In that case, one, in fact, robs Holy Scripture of authority in matters concerning public power and the public life of the people. But now that it has become clear that the rights and duties of prince and people, the vocation of husband, wife, and child, the rich and the poor, the propertied and the laborer, all must be determined either according to and from out of the Word or from reason, it does not help at all to put Holy Scripture to one side, in or with the Confession.”

Dr. P. J. Hoedemaker
Article 36 of BCF Vindicated Against Dr. Kuyper — 77-78

Hoedemaker, with the observation above, gives key insights into the “theology” of R2K. R2K, like Hoedemaker’s charge against Kuyper reduces the definition of the Christian Scriptures to be exactly coterminous with the definition of the Gospel. Now certainly one finds the definition of the Gospel in the Christian Scripture. Indeed one may even say that the most important part of Christian Scripture is the communication of the Gospel. However, to say that the Gospel is the most important part of Christian Scripture is a very different thing than saying that Christian Scripture = the Gospel. By reducing the Scriptures to be only exactly equivalent to the Gospel one rules out, apriori, the notion that the Christian Scriptures provide a revelatory Word for public life.

But our best theologians never reduced the Christian Scriptures to be exactly equivalent to “the Gospel.” Consider Dr. Herman Bavinck,

The Gospel is temporary, but the law is eternal and is restored precisely through the Gospel. Freedom from the law consists, then, not in the fact that the Christian has nothing more to do with the law, but lies in the fact that the law demands nothing more from the Christian as a condition of salvation. The law can no longer judge and condemn him. Instead, he delights in the law of God according to the inner man and yearns for it day and night.

The Christian Scripture includes the continuing eternal law as speaking to the public realm. This was observed by Dr. J. Gresham Machen,

“The Christians can not be satisfied so long as any human activity is either opposed to Christianity or out of connection with Christianity. Christianity must pervade not merely all nations but also all human thought.”

Christian Scripture cannot be reduced to being exactly coterminous with the Gospel because when one does that one amputates the leaven and impact of Christianity on all areas of life. The Christian Scriptures may first answer the question, “What must I do to be saved,” but from there it goes on to answer the question, “How shall we then live in the public square.”

R2K has a nasty habit of reducing the Christian Scriptures to the Gospel. They are forever asking, “Is this or that a Gospel issue,” as if the negative answer “no, it is not a strictly Gospel issue” therefore means it is not an issue to which the Christian Scriptures speak and so upon which the Christian must take a stand.

Note the connection here between R2K reductios. First, the Christian Scripture is reduced to “the Gospel.” Then R2K reduces the Kingdom to be exactly synonymous to the Church. Well, if one reduces the Christian Scriptures to the Gospel, it only stands to reason that the next reduction is the reduction that shrinks the Kingdom to only the Church. In such a manner the Christian Scriptures, which are reduced to the Gospel, would indeed uniquely belong to a Kingdom that has been reduced to the Chruch. The first R2K reduction implies the second R2K reduction.

But Christian Scripture can’t be reduced to the Gospel as if it does not speak to all of life and all aspects of life and as the Christian Scripture speaks to all of life all that it speaks to can be brought underneath the canopy of the Kingdom of God.

___

This post elicited the following conversations with one of my learned friends (LF). I post it for your ability to see the ebb and flow of this issue.

LF

I see what you are getting at. However, the R2k folks would deny they reduce the Scripture to just the “gospel”, but clearly argue for a law/gospel distinction in all of Scripture. They would say the Law is scripture too, but it just doesn’t have authoritative effect on the civil sphere.

BLM

I see them (R2K) saying that the law is Scripture but is overcome by the Gospel and then the law is only personal and individual and really only serves the purpose of making us flee to Christ as opposed to being a guide to life in the public square.

LF

Correct, but some of them (R2K) would still say it is a guide to the “individual’s” life as he lives in the public square, but not a guide for any “institutional” life in the public square. There is no Christian family, state, school, etc.

BLM

But no individual lives his life as divorced from the public square. This private vs. public life is a non-biblical distinction I’m beginning to think. Institutions are comprised of people living in the public square. I don’t see how one can talk about an individual living in the public square as distinct from Institutions in the public square.

LF

I know, makes no sense. I just know they would say all 66 books are Scripture. It just what they do with that Scripture, dichotomizing it with law/gospel is what is maddening.

BLM

Hoedemaker accuses Kuyper of making an Anabaptist move in matters of Church and state.

LF

Seeing that more now.

BLM

Yeah… more and more I’m seeing R2K as a Reformed attempt to save the classically liberal (Libertarian) worldview.

“There is, in other words, no radical dichotomy between the mind and the universe. Logos is common to both, or as Aquinas would say, ‘the light of reason is placed by nature in every man to guide him in his acts.'”

E. Michael Jones
Logos Rising — p. 96

Jones is Roman Catholic and the problem here for Roman Catholics– and the problem for all Natural Law aficionados (R2K; I’m looking at you) — is that Natural Law doesn’t take into account the noetic effects of the fall. It is true that Logos is common to both the mind and the universe but the mind because it ‘suppresses the truth in unrighteousness,’ will not have Logos except in the most accidental manner until man is converted. Natural law is like a radio station putting out a signal on the airwaves but fallen man insists on pushing every other radio button except the button that would hone in on the signal of Natural law.

Our Fathers restricted the value of Natural law to the knowledge of God’s existence and the inescapable awareness of sinfulness while conceding that it provided the ability to give some knowledge of God with a bare subsistence of information touching living in this world.

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.

The problem we are facing in many Reformed quarters today is that Natural Law is being looked to as all that is sufficient and necessary in order to live in the common realm. For these “Ministers,” and Professors teaching this view, Natural Law goes beyond “some knowledge” to be all that which is necessary to order the public square. These same men even insist that Natural Law teaches that the Magistrate is not responsible to uphold the first table of God’s law in the social order they rule over. For these men, God’s revealed Law is cordoned off from the common realm because natural law is all we need in the common realm. This despite the fact that the Canon’s of Dordt even says the because of sin man “is incapable of using it aright even in things natural and civil.“

One of the most intelligent men in the 20th century gives us a good insight into how useless natural law is. Betrand Russel testified that he didn’t even know himself. If Natural law cannot give fallen man sufficient knowledge of himself how can it give fallen man sufficient knowledge of anything? Russel wrote,

“Even when one feels nearest to other people, something in one seems obstinately to belong to god and refuse to enter into any earthly communion—–at least that is how I should express it if I thought there was a god. It is odd isn’t it? I feel passionately for this world and many things and people in it, and yet………what is it all? There must be something more important, one feels, though I don’t believe there is. I am haunted! Some ghosts from some extra mundane regions, seem always trying to tell me something that I am to repeat for the world, but I cannot understand the message.”

Bertrand Russell
Autobiography


“Feels” “Seems” “If I thought” “disbelief” “haunted” “ghosts” “extramundane” “trying to tell me” “cannot understand.” Russell was the consummate natural man and yet the sensus deitatis and Natural Law elicits nothing in him but confusion. It is ridiculous speculation that apart from the divine revelation of God’s word one has sufficient and necessary knowledge even to operate in the common realm or even to understand himself. If Russell cannot even understand himself via Natural law then how could he understand anything else?