Trying to think my way through different views of Church, Kingdom and World

I realize that this still needs work.

I.) Roman Catholicism & Kingdom of God

Since the Kingdom of God is closely identified with the Church, if any institution or cultural phenomenon is to be part of the Kingdom of God it must come under the authority of the Church. The Church is the Kingdom in this world and holds within its power and jurisdiction every aspect and domain of life.

All in the Church were considered part of the Kingdom but there developed theoretical moral standard distinctions between clergy and laity. Such accounts for the rise of monasticism within the Church. All within the church was clean but the monastic orders were the Holy that kept all else clean. All outside the church was unclean.

In Christian countries this resulted in the entire social life being covered by the wings of the institutional visible Church.

So thorough was church control that the Roman Catholic Church had guidelines for the days when husbands and wives could consummate their marriage.

As a natural result the world corrupted the Church, and by its dominion over the world the Church proved an obstacle to every free development of life. Nothing was allowed to develop independently according to its nature under the hand of God.

Three distinctions here then …

1.) Church / Kingdom

a.) Holy — Monastic orders / Church proper
b.) Clean — All else in the Church

2.) All outside the Church / Kingdom

This gives us a minor dualism within the Church (between Holy & Clean) and a major dualism between the Church and all outside the Church.

In the church we live and move and have our being.

II.) Anabaptism & The Kingdom Of God

Whereas for Roman Catholicism if anything was to be part of the Kingdom of God it had to come under and be supervised by the Church, for anabaptists the Church and the Kingdom of God were co-extensive.

For the anabaptist the Kingdom of God is a believing community where all members are to be part of the monastic orders that existed in Roman Catholicism conceptions. All in the believing community must be separate and holy the way that the monks and certain clerical orders were separate and holy.

The anabaptists believed that the unbaptized world was under the curse and for that reason anabaptists withdrew from all civil institutions.

If civil life was to be participated in it must be brought under the guardianship of the anabaptist kingdom community and remodeled.

Two distinctions here then

1.) Church / Kingdom in which all is Holy

2.) All outside Church Kingdom is evil and wicked

This is a dualism.

In the Church we live and move and have our being.

III.) Radical Two Kingdom & The Kingdom of God

Two Kingdoms

God’s Right Hand — The Church / Personal individual ethics

Spiritual — meaning non-corporeal

Uniquely Holy

Ruled by Scripture

God’s Left Hand — Everything else

Material realm

Ruled by Natural Law — No, appeal to Scripture allowed

Uniquely Common

Church is silent though Christians are involved as long as Christians don’t appeal to the Bible for their convictions.

Dualism —

All in Church is Holy
All Outside of Church is common

No such thing as christian culture. Christendom is bad.

Never the twain shall meet.

Very similar to anabaptist with these exceptions ….

Anabaptist see all outside the Church as wicked and so not to be involved with by their people. R2Kt see all outside the church as common and to be involved with by their people as long as their people don’t seek to Christianize the common realm. In different ways both see the non-Church realm as hopeless. One says that there is to be no involvement with the realm of hopelessness while the other says that involvement with the realm of hopelessness is allowed.

IV.) Calvinism & The Kingdom Of God

“The Kingdom may be said to be considered a broader concept than the Church, because the Kingdom aims at nothing less than the complete control of all the manifestations of life. It represents the dominion of God in every sphere of human endeavor.”

— Berkhof, Systematic Theology, pg. 570

Calvinism denies that the church can be equated with the Kingdom: The church is not the Kingdom, but is in the Kingdom.

Calvin’s conception of the Kingdom eliminated the church as the manifest Kingdom and made the individual Christian, in his activity, the citizen of that eternal order by virtue of divine grace.

A key notion of Calvinist concept of Kingdom is the reality that the Kingdom has differing expressions. Calvinism believes that God is sovereign over all, and that no one sphere captures the exhaustiveness of God’s sovereignty or Kingdom.

In the Calvinist concept the one (unity) and the many (diversity) is honored. The one is honored because it is recognized that God is sovereign over all. The many is honored because it is recognized that God’s omnipresent sovereignty is expressed multilaterally.

All is Holy or unholy dependent upon how the life of each is governed by individual Christians handling faithfully the Word of God. No mediatorial institutions remain. Institutions are ministerial at best. Christian culture and Christian institutions can come to pass as Christian people incarnate their Christian faith in all that they do.

The Church’s, “as institution” role is to herald and minister Christ and His grace and to faithfully handle the keys of the Kingdom. Ministering Christ and His grace means to faithfully set forth both the indicatives and the imperatives of Scripture. As the Church faithfully sets forth the whole counsel of God, the Church as organism is equipped to take that counsel and apply it to their respective callings.

Try to look at it as kind of a reverse pollen gathering reality. The member bees come into the Church and gather the pollen whereupon they take that pollen out into their respective callings giving their respective callings the aroma of Christ.

The Church’s authority outside of its sphere as such is merely spiritual and persuasive. The Church has no sword to force itself upon the other spheres.

There is no dualism here.

God is sovereign over all.

There is nothing that can’t be brought under that sovereignty and be made uniquely Christian.

However there are distinctions here between the way God’s sovereignty is expressed in differing Kingdoms / Realms / Spheres.

Because God’s sovereignty is emphasized, only here do we find that it is in God that we live and move and have our being.

Sources

Kuyper — Stone Lectures
Rushdoony — Politics of Guilt & Pity
Berkhof — Systematic Theology
Verduin — The Reformers & Their Stepchildren

This Is What Confuses Me About The Race Thing

http:www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/04/16/garofalo_tea_parties_about_white_power.html

“The mainline media concludes that the tea parties were attended by “all white” people who were “a bunch of racists,” and it was all about “hating a black man in the White house.” Again, the attendees were all “tea-banging rednecks.” MSNBC broadcast the opinion that any minority conservatives who did attend the tea parties were identified as “those suffering from Stockholm syndrome.” Stockholm syndrome is the syndrome where a kidnapping victim begins to psychologically identify with their kidnappers.”

I quote this because I believe this mindset is typical of many Americans who consider themselves not racist.

In this banal interview we learn that in order to avoid being considered a white racist one cannot oppose command and control, centralized governments. Indeed, the interview seems to suggest that what makes racist white people racist is that they are opposed to being enslaved by the Federal government.

So, what it means to be typically white and a part of typical white culture is to be for individual freedom and individual responsibility. Anybody who is a minority that is for these things must have a psychological disease. Hence, minorities that attended the tea parties were, according to MSNBC, acting like white people. White people who act this way are to be pilloried and insulted. Minorities who act like white people are apparently to be pitied. This attitude explains the hatred that many black people had and have for Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas, according to this theory, is behaving white by believing in individual responsibility.

It would seem necessary then to conclude that the superior non-white people and non-white culture is that people and culture that desire to be in slavery to the state, and that which opposes individual freedom and individual responsibility. If a white person wants to be part of the superior non-white culture they have to abandon notions such as personal responsibility and be in favor of some form of collectivism.

Do minorities really desire that what it means to be “Black” or what it means to be “Hispanic” be defined as a culture that is dependent upon the state, as a culture that is for personal irresponsibility, as a culture that desires to be forever beholden to handouts, and as a culture that defines racism and prejudice as being that mindset that opposes those very same things?

You see, I’m confused by all this because if that is what racism means then I am a racist and it would seem to my thinking that everybody should want to be a racist.

The Reality Behind Tea(ing)

“If you are receiving government payments in any of its redistributive forms, then you have no business going to one of these events (Tea-Parties). Food stamps, student loans, subsidized housing, public schooling, and so on — your time would be better spent just staying home and trying to figure out how to disconnect the oxygen hose yourself. Refuse the benefits first.”

Doug Wilson

This is why the tea parties, while stirring, won’t accomplish much. We already are past the entitlement tipping point. How many social security recipients were out 15 April? How many school teachers were out 15 April? After all, Government schools are the biggest works programs this nation has. Do protesting school teachers really desire to reduce the size of Government? How many veterans were out 15 April? Do veterans really desire to reduce the size of Government?

Obviously, this is not to say that some ways that Government spends money are legitimate and as such some employees who receive government money are legitimate. All of this is only to suggest that as a nation we are already compromised. To many piglets trying to get to the teats to really want to kill the sow.

Mind you, I don’t fault all the piglets for trying to get the milk of government largess anymore then I would fault a crack baby for desiring the drug it was hooked on quite apart from his or her choice. Many people are government dependent quite apart from their choice. One has to only think of not only children eating off of groceries coming from food stamps, but also one needs to remember the cottage industries that grow up around Government largess. Think of all the copying machines and office supplies that private businesses sell to public schools and government offices. Government money and dependence on government largess in the private sector is ubiquitous. Trying to pull apart the culture of government benefits from the US citizenry and the private sector would be like trying to pull juicy chewing gum out of stringy hair.

The Church struggles with providing a solution to all this. Ideally, we would try to care for our own, but since the individuals in Churches are already taxed at such a high rate, it is difficult to expect members to give enough, beyond a tithe, so that the Church can care for her own. It is expecting a great deal of people to finance, through their taxes, the States irresponsible social services while at the same time finance, through their offerings, the Churches responsible social services. One can only spread butter so thinly over humongous portions of bread.

We have created a entitlement culture, replete with all the cottage industries that spring up around any major job and benefits supplier. We have forced many people to either suck at the teat of the Government sow or die. (If you doubt this imagine what would happen to elderly people who refused to take the government benefits associated with prescription drug use.) If and when the State nationalizes health care there won’t be anybody left who won’t getting milk from the Wet Nurse State. Because of this there are no easy answers in how to extricate ourselves from this tar baby entitlement culture we’re stuck on and with. Because of this our Freedom as a people is completely compromised. None of us are really free.

To be honest it is our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who should have been out Tea(ing), but many of them were to busy voting for Johnson’s Great Society or Roosevelt’s New Deal or Teddy Roosevelt’s square deal. The, so called, “greatest generation” failed us miserably on this score. It was these generations that laced our tea with arsenic and now we have naught to do but bravely drink it down.

Of course, none of this means we shouldn’t fight to the very end. But we must fight with eyes wide open. We are a defeated people and culture in the twilight of our eclipse. The best we can hope for is to make some kind of glorious last stand that some minstrel might capture in song, and that might be remembered by generations yet to come, who, remembering our final effort, might use it to inspire future generations to build Christ honoring culture.

Some will suggest that this is overly pessimistic. I will be accused of having lost my postmillennialism. However, postmillennialism should not require us to be Pollyanna about reality. One can be a postmillenialist and at the same time believe that the West will fail. There is nothing about the West that guarantees that God won’t continue to bring the judgment we deserve.

Historical Misrepresentation

“Over the last decade I have witnessed more slurs and misrepresentations of Reconstructionist thought than I have the heart or ability to count, and I am thinking here only of the remarks made by Christians in positions of leadership; elders, pastors, instructors, writers – those who bear the “greater accountability” since they lead Christ’s sheep as teachers. This has forced me as an educated believer to stand back and look more generally at what is transpiring in the Christian community as a whole with respect to its scholarly integrity. And I am heart broken…..The difficulty is magnified many times over when believers offer public, obvious evidence of their inability to treat each other’s opinions with careful accuracy….Over the last decade we have seen some extremely strong words of condemnation uttered about Reconstructionist theology. Those condemnatory words, however, have repeatedly proven to be tied to gross misrepresentations of the Reconstructionist perspective. When those counterfeit portrayals are laid aside, the cautious student will find that not one substantial line of refutation or criticism has been established against the fundamental distinctives of Reconstructionism – a transformational worldview embracing theonomic ethics, postmillennial eschatology, and presuppositional apologetics. These theological underpinnings can be shown to be sound and reliable.”

Dr. Greg Bahnsen
Foreword to The Debate Over Christian Reconstruction

Georgetown Covers Jesus’ Name For Obama Speech At Obama’s Request

“Amidst all of the American flags and presidential seals, there was something missing when President Barack Obama gave an economic speech at Georgetown University this week — Jesus.

The best photos of President Obama and his family captured during the first few months in office.

The White House asked Georgetown to cover a monogram symbolizing Jesus’ name in Gaston Hall, which Obama used for his speech, according to CNSNews.com.

The gold “IHS” monogram inscribed on a pediment in the hall was covered over by a piece of black-painted plywood, and remained covered over the next day, CNSNews.com reported.”

“If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

-Mark 8:38