Religion is an Inescapable Category; Because of that Pluralism is a Myth

“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.

Reformed Confessions Disagree With R. Scott Clark’s Assertions Regarding Theocracy

“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.”

Cited in Jonathan Beeke’s
Duplex Regnum Christi — FN 30, pg, 74

Cheong In-Wa, Alexander Jun, and R. J. Rushdoony All Agree On Christian Nationalism

“The gospel of Jesus ought to meet the needs of the people in the life and circumstances where each lives; it should give expression to the latent aspirations in the national sub-conscience. Each people has its typical ways of feeling, its different aspirations. These peculiarities should … find expression in the religious life of the people. Here we find the real meaning of Christian nationalism.”

Cheong In-wa
The head of the Department for Religious Education of the Presbyterian Church of Korea, who famously attended the Eleventh World Sunday School Convention in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1932, where this declaration was put forth.

“We are made in God’s image. [As such] we should take the totality of both our Christian identity and our ethnic identity, perhaps in that order, but we are still recognizing our ethnic society.”

Dr. Alex Jun,
Coordinator of the Korean-American Leadership Initiative in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) defending the continued existence of Korean congregations

“The trend towards internationalism is a part of this desire to eliminate all differences, to say that the idea of having different cultures, different standards, different languages is altogether wrong, and so we must eliminate them, return men to supposedly their original one condition, a common language, a common culture, everyone the same; and at the same time we must abolish all differences. It is for this reason that the U.N. Charter declares that it is determined to save men. (Save men) from what (we might ask). From all inequalities and distinctions, and so it says that there must be no discrimination with respect to race, color, or creed. In other words, all religions must be abolished, as well as all races. And so the idea is of course a return to paradise.”

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony
Nakedness — Pocket College Lecture

Those who oppose what In-wa, Jun and Rushdoony are saying here are opposing Christian Nationalism and so are supporting ungodly Internationalism and in doing so oppose Christ and His Word.

R2K Speaks For Itself … McAtee Brings out Implications

“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?

Do these people hear themselves?

T. David Gordon? More like T. David Godless

Rev. Spurgeon and Rev. McAtee Chit Chat on Natural Law

Dear Pastor Bret,

“Couldn’t your criticism  (of natural law) be lobbed at scripture and the fact that different people interpret it differently? The fact that there are (Creedo)Baptists and paedobaptists both arguing from scripture could be used to argue against it (Scripture) being the highest authority. It seems the problem to me is not natural law any more than the problem would be scripture. God’s revelation whether in nature or in scripture is clear. We sinful humans twist it.”

Rev. Joseph Spurgeon
Sovereign King Church
Jeffersonville, Indiana


Rev. Spurgeon,

Greetings.

Before I answer your question I want to make it clear to people my support of your work there in Jeffersonville. Were I not in the ministry and were I living in your area I do believe I could find a home in attending your Church (as long as you kept me away from the Baylys.) According to everything I hear you are doing a good work in Jeffersonville. So, even though we disagree on this matter I would not have people thinking that I do not appreciate your labors for Jesus Christ.The answer to your opening question is definitely, “No.”

1.) You seem to think I deny the reality of Natural Law. I do not. What I deny is that fallen man has the ability to create a proper working social order by usage of only the means of Natural Law, apart from special revelation. This conviction is consistent in what we read and what I affirm confessionally from the Canons of Dordt;

“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.”

2.) If even Christians can’t agree on God’s special revelation at points how much more will it be the case that non-Christians will not agree on general revelation and Natural law? The problem with putting forth Natural Law for social order regulation among a pagan people, as Dr. Stephen Wolfe advocates, is that such a position does not take seriously the noetic effects of the fall.

3.) Natural law can only be consistently read aright and understood properly when read through the prism of special revelation, or at the very least, when read through the presuppositions that arise out of special revelation.

4.) With the Scriptures I have the text right in front of me to appeal to. With Natural Law all there is are impressions and insistence. For example, Yuval Noah Harai, via appeals to Natural Law, can argue for the fittingness of sodomy. Start @ the 2 minute mark.

Therefore I would not say the fact that Christians disagreeing on biblical texts is no different from people disagreeing on the interpretation of Natural Law. In point of fact, to make that argument suggests a putting of Natural Law on the same level of special revelation in terms of clarity. The doing so only has the effect of lowering the importance of Scripture vis-a-vis Natural law.

5.) Of course people disagree regarding Scripture but unlike Natural law the argument is made from the text and not some ephemeral esoteric “out there-ness.”

It is the case that if people disagree while arguing from Scripture that would impress people with the idea that even if there is disagreement at least all believe in the Scripture as being the authoritative source for all truth.

6.) You might counter that “Natural law as a vehicle for social order arrangement was supported by many Reformers throughout history.” And to that I can only concur while offering at the same time that the difference between then and now is that the Reformers (and other Christians) could appeal to Natural law as a vehicle for social order because the culture(s) in which they already were living were largely organized around Christian premises. A people living and saturated in Christendom in the 16th century are going to see Natural Law as teaching Christian principles as more obvious because they have borrowed worldview capital from Christianity without even realizing it. But we in the 21st century no longer live in Christendom, no longer begin with Christian presuppositions, and no longer are living off of the borrowed capital that is necessary to make Natural law work among non-Christian people living in a Christian social order context.

No, Joseph, I might wish you were correct, but the Scriptures and confessions are against such thinking as well as the existential moment in which we live.

So, we see your objection, while understandable, is not well founded.

Thank you for the inquiry.

p.s. — Spend some time investigating Alfred the Great and his book of Doom and see how Alfred relied on special revelation to organize the social order of his day.