Critiquing a Reconstructionist Critic

Several years ago Dr. J. Ligon Duncan published a paper titled ‘The Intellectual and Sociological Origins of the Christian Reconstructionist movement.’ Recently somebody sent me this paper with the purpose of challenging Reconstructionist thinking. While, I do not consider myself a gung ho Reconstructionist, I must admit that I have certain sympathies for some of their thinking. As such, I have taken it upon myself to provide a brief critique of Dr. Duncan’s critique of Christian Reconstructionism.

I should say immediately that I found very little to be critical of in terms of Dr. Duncan’s summarization of this Biblical movement. It is only when Dr. Duncan begins to critique the movement that I have some difficulties.

First Dr. Duncan mentions a number of terms that have an inherent negative connotation and although he does define what he means by those terms one is left with more of the negative connotations then the definition that he gives.

For example Dr. Duncan can write,

Christian Reconstructionism is theoretically a positivist, fundamentalist, Calvinist response to the moral political forces unleashed by modernity…

Now nobody wants to be known as positivist or fundamentalist and so by using those terms Dr. Duncan subtly prejudices the conversation even though he goes on to give some (questionable) definitions to those terms.

Now as I have read Dr. Duncan in other places I think he would define himself as both Calvinist and Fundamentalist given the way he defines those terms in this paper. His major problem seems to be with the putatively positivist approach to Reconstructionism. First, it should be said that Reconstructionists don’t consider themselves to have a positivist approach to the law insisting instead that their approach is merely a Biblical approach. We must observe that many Calvinists through the centuries have objected to the items that Dr. Duncan notes Reconstructionism objects to in what he calls their positivist view of the Law. Dr. Duncan fails to note that Calvinists have lodged complaint with social contract theory at least since the time of Dabney and opposition to Natural law theories has found opposition in recent decades due to the insistence that Natural law is influenced by Aristotelian / Thomistic categories that are inherently un-natural to consistently Reformed ways of thinking.

The issue of prejudicing the debate by the choice of adjectival descriptors is seen again on page 3 where Dr. Duncan talks about the desire of the Reconstructionists to “formulate a right-wing alternative to more liberal evangelical social ethics.” No Biblical Christian ever thinks that they are offering “a Right wing alternative”. Instead Reconstructionists believe themselves to be only Biblical. Being referred to as “Right Wing” is problematic.

Also on page 3 Dr. Duncan says that

“Reconstructionism is attempting to make a systematic and exegetical connection between the Bible and the conservative ideology of limited government and free market economics.”

Now, we will only briefly note that the phrase “conservative ideology” once again seems to me to be an attempt to prejudice the debate. Who wants to be a practitioner of “conservative ideology?” More importantly what Dr. Duncan says in the quote above is only partially true. It would be more accurate to say that Reconstuctionism is resurrecting the preexisting systematic and exegetical connections between the Bible and the Biblical ideology of limited government and free market economics. Those connections existed long before Reconstructionists came on the scene. Reading Charles McCoy’s “Fountainhead Of Federalism” or John Witte’s “The Reformation of Rights” are two books that establishe that reality. Also, looking at Puritan theory regarding the Holy Commonwealth likewise shows systematic connections between limited government and free market economics that long predate the Reconstructionists. The point here is that Reconstructionists are not creating these connections between Biblical Christianity and Limited Government and Free market economics, but rather those connections existed long before Reconstructionists came on the scene (compare also Rutherford’s ‘Lex Rex’ when it comes to Limited Governments). Besides is Dr. Duncan really suggesting that the Bible is mute when it comes to Centralized and oppressive governments and planned economies?

Dr. Duncan notes Reconstructionism’s opposition to State financed education. Yet, people the caliber of R. L. Dabney, A. A. Hodge and J. Gresham Machen, to name only a few, likewise had grave reservations about State financed education, and Dabney, Hodge and Machen were no Reconstructionists (though they may have been proto-Reconstuctionists). I think because of the work of men like of Dabney, Hodge, Machen and the Reconstructionists there is a basic understanding that education is faith based driven. In short though Dr. Duncan identifies this aspect of the Reconstructionists he says nothing about how this is pretty standard fare for Reformed Christians.

On page 5 and again on page 7 Dr. Duncan seemingly subtly complains about Dr. Van Til’s emphasis on the anti-thesis as it manifests itself in operating autonomously or theonomously, and yet Jesus Himself said … “He who does not gather with me scatters,” and “He that is not with me is against me.” We find ourselves desiring to ask Dr. Duncan if he thinks that these verses only apply in the religious realm. (However that realm may be defined.)

Throughout the essay from page 7 on Dr. Duncan once again suggests that the Reconstructionists propensity to pay attention to the case law is unique to them. Yet Turretin who preceded the Reconstructionists by about 400 years likewise paid attention to the case laws. The only difference it seems between Turretin and Bahnsen is that Turretin was willing to allow other punishments for crimes to be implemented than those designated in the OT case laws to be levied against particular crimes while Bahnsen insisted that the penalties set forth in the Scriptures should be maintained. What they both agreed on though is that what the OT case laws said were crimes were indeed crimes. In short both Turretin and Bahnsen paid close attention to the case laws with the only difference being how ‘general equity’ was to be understood when it came to punishment.

On page 8 Dr. Duncan says that Dr. Bahnsen’s case for a twofold division of the law as opposed to a threefold division is not convincing, but the argument that he uses to reach that conclusion is itself not convincing. Dr. Duncan uses a kind of ‘you to’ argument to make his case. Dr. Duncan suggests that Bahnsen’s unraveling of the traditional three fold separation of the law (Moral, Civil, Ceremonial) is not legitimate because Dr. Bahnsen does the same type of thing in his methodology that Dr. Bahnsen points out in what he is attacking. The problem with Dr. Duncan’s argument here is that it is not a rebuttal of Dr. Bahnsen without at the same time being an admission that Dr. Bahnsen’s analysis is correct. It sounds like what Dr. Duncan is saying is, “Well, Dr. Bahnsen may be right in his fault finding analysis of the typical methodology but he does the same thing in his methodology.” If Dr. Bahnsen does the same thing it doesn’t prove that the traditional three fold methodology is right. At best it only proves that they are both wrong. At that point it seems that we are left to examining the underlying rational or principle of God’s Word as it pertains to the Law.

Next, Dr. Duncan argues for the end of what has been called the civil law by arguing that the changes transpiring in redemptive history negate the civil law. If this is so then it seems that we are left with the dichotomizing of the Sacred and secular realms. In Dr. Duncan’s arrangement we see that in the Old Covenant God was clearly over all areas of life as he ruled through the Nation-State-Church Israel. However with the coming of the New Covenant God apparently has not clearly spoken as exhaustively as He did in the old and worst covenant. According to Dr. Duncan God’s speaking is now restricted to the New covenant institution of the Church, where we find according to Dr. Duncan “a superior institutional expression of God’s will.” Clearly what seems to be implicit in all of this is that while God rules perspicuously in the Church, we are left to kind of ‘making it up as we go’ in the putatively ‘secular realm’ where because of the ‘change in redemptive economy’ God’s rule and eternal standard for the State is no longer as much of a concern. That this is true is seen in the eclipsing of the civil law with the change in redemptive economy.

On page 9 Dr. Duncan does a turn about in this Criticism of Dr. Bahnsen. Whereas earlier on page 8 Dr. Duncan complains that Dr. Bahnsen’s “own categories are based not on explicit Scriptural testimony but on what Bahnsen calls an ‘underlying rational or principle,'” yet just a few paragraphs later Dr. Duncan takes Dr. Bahnsen to task because ‘Bahnsen’s case is often dependent upon a sort of fundamentalist, proof-texting approach to exposition. One is left asking which criticism we should take seriously. Is Dr. Bahnsen to be faulted because he doesn’t use explicit Scriptural testimony or is Dr. Bahnsen to be faulted because he does use explicit Scriptural testimony?

In conclusion we must say that we are grateful to Dr. Duncan for this synopsis. Dr. Duncan’s summary on Theonomy is spot on at various points. Unfortunately when Dr. Duncan goes from summary to critique in this paper his points sometimes are not what we might hope they would be.

The Church And Reformed Magistrates

” Whoever shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and blasphemers to death will knowingly and willingly incur their very guilt. This is not laid down on human authority; it is God who speaks and prescribes a perpetual rule for his Church. It is not in vain that he commands paternal love and all the benevolent feelings between brothers, relations, and friends to cease; in a word, that he almost deprives men of their nature in order that nothing may hinder their holy zeal. Why is so implacable a severity exacted but that we may know that God is defrauded of his honour, unless the piety that is due to him be preferred to all human duties, and that when his glory is to be asserted, humanity must be almost obliterated from our memories.”

John Calvin
Tract Defending Action Against Severtus

Quoted in P.Schaff; History of the Christian Church vol 8 :791f.(Eerdmans 1981). The context is the defence of the execution of Servetus

Where Does Homosexual Marriage Lead?

Recently I came across somebody who was for homosexual marriage but who insisted that the allowing of buggery marriage wouldn’t allow other abominations like marriage between groups, or marriage between man and beast or marriage between adults and children. Below is some of the interaction.

Maggie,

That having been said, I would like to throw out a couple points of (respectful) disagreement or, at least, commentary. First, I think the United States was well down the road of removing a Biblical justification for disallowing anything a long, long before gay marriage was ever on the table. Gay marriage doesn’t accomplish this removal of Biblical justification for our laws, since that was already a done deal long before the Massachusetts and other state courts considered whether prohibitions on gay marriage violate constitutional equal protection clauses.

Bret,

Maggie, you’re right about this. Gay marriage is just the latest consequence from being consistent with moving law off the only rational basis that it has. Law presupposes a lawgiver. Get rid of the idea of a transcendent lawgiver and what replaces the basis for law is an immanent lawgiver which in turn yields the consequence of relativism in the legal realm. Gay marriage though, perhaps exhibits most clearly that These United States has removed the Biblical justification for law.

Maggie

The premise behind the court decisions prohibiting laws against gay marriage is an old one. The premise was that any law that makes distinctions among categories of people must have a “rational basis,” and the rational basis cannot be God’s Word, since basing legislative decisions on God’s Word would be a state endorsement of religion in violation of the first amendment.

Bret,

First of all what standard shall we use to describe “rational basis.” I would contend that the only way to find a “rational basis” is by using God’s Law-Word as the transcendent standard. I would go one step further and say that the concept of “rationality” itself cannot be consistently arrive at apart from an appeal to God’s transcendent Law-Word.
Second, I don’t know why using God’s Word as the rational basis is a violation of the first amendment but using man’s autonomous law word as the rational basis isn’t likewise a violation of the first amendment. Indeed, as the law order is always reflective of and descends from religious a-priori commitments there is no possibility of having any rational basis that isn’t a violation of the first amendment.

Maggie,

(I don’t mean to imply that God’s Word cannot be rational; rather, that an argument that boils down only to, “God said so,” does not meet the “rational basis test” under our laws.) It seems that the heart of the argument is really about whether church and state should be separated in the manner I have just described. I think it should be, and I am guessing that you think otherwise!

Bret,

Maggie, it is not possible to separate Church and State. Our defacto State Church in our country today is the Government schools, and our defacto officially state religion is humanism.

Still, I agree that we need to do better than arguing by saying “God said so” though that certainly is always the place we must start. We start with “God said so” and we move on to explain why God’s saying so is the stuff of which the good life is made of.

Magie,

I disagree that the Bible is the only possible basis for proscribing certain activities such as bestiality. Many other moral codes (probably most moral codes) abhor cruelty and unnecessary suffering. A corollary of those principles is that one should not engage in sexual relations without meaningful consent from the other being involved. I don’t think you have to be a Christian to be morally opposed to animal cruelty, such as torturing an animal for sport (as opposed to killing it for food) or subjecting an animal to sex for the sole purpose of sexual gratification (as opposed to breeding an animal for purposes of increasing one’s livestock).

Bret,

Apart from a transcendent God it is not possible to define what cruelty. For that matter, apart from a transcendent God who cares about cruelty or suffering? Apart from a transcendent God I don’t know why anybody would be concerned with meaningful consent.
Now its quite true that you don’t have to be a Christian to be morally opposed to animal cruelty but you do have to be a Christian to be able to be consistent about any moral opposition in regard to the cruelty of animals.

Maggie,

If there ever were a push to legalize bestiality in the United States, I would be happy to join with the readers of this forum in vigorously opposing it.

Bret,

Your problem Maggie is you’re so yesterday. If you had been alive 100 years ago I suspect your biblically conditioned moral instincts would have said the same about homosexuality. But now you live in times where the winds of morality have changed and so you find homosexual marriage acceptable. I suspect if you had been born 50 years in the future you would be for bestial marriage. You’re simply a reflection of your times and culture.

Alexandar Solzhenitsyn — The World Was Not Worthy Of Him

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) died last night of an apparent stroke. Since prophets are desert dwellers, and are often as angular as the God they serve, their deaths usually don’t make a great amount of news. Those with the prophetic voice often live in isolation and are seen to be an irritant to those cultural gatekeepers who are often in the sites of the prophetic voice. Last night one of the greatest prophetic voices the West possessed in the twentieth century met his Maker.

Solzhenitsyn’s life included spending the years of 1945-1953 in the Soviet slave labor camps –- the infamous Gulag Archipelago — and the years of 1953-1956 in exile in Soviet Russia. Much of Solzhenitsyn’s writing was committed to telling the story of those eaten alive by the communist system and whose stories would have never been known had it not been for Solzhenitsyn’s pen. Out of fear of what would happen if his works were seized by Communist nekulturny, Solzhenitsyn’s writings were smuggled out of Soviet Russia and published in the West.

In mysterious providence, God used his enemies in the Western media to make a celebrity out of Solzhenitsyn the prophet. The contrast between the media-manufactured celebrity and the prophet Solzhenitsyn could have not been more stark, yet God used the media-manufactured celebrity status, based upon Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Peace prize in 1970, to check the communist desire to destroy Solzhenitsyn. The whole world’s eyes were on Solzhenitsyn and as such the communists were loathe to make the new celebrity disappear. Checkmated in their desire to do to Solzhenitsyn what it had done to so many other dissidents, communist Russia played the part of Jonah’s whale and after arresting and charging Solzhenitsyn with treason the communists exiled him by spitting him out on the dry land of the West along with his family.

Once in the West, Solzhenitsyn picked up where he left off while in the repressive USSR. In the USSR Solzhenitsyn’s theme grew out of a Russian proverb that said, “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.” This was the kind of theme that one would expect a prophet to have. Solzhenitsyn spoke this word of truth for those he called the “forgotten people” -– for all those who disappeared and dropped alive down the communist memory whole.

The word of truth that outweighs the whole world continued to be spoken once Solzhenitsyn arrived in the West. In a series of speeches that were later collected and published as Warning to the West Solzhenitsyn stepped up to the microphone and told the West, from a worldview influenced by Christian categories, what was happening in the world and why. Once the Western news agencies, which at that time were Fabian socialists in their belief system, began to realize that the words of the Russian prophet would, if taken seriously, not only bring the Communists down but also the Socialist West, they began to turn off Solzhenitsyn’s microphone and gave him the silent treatment.

Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address is a bracing example of his penchant to speak the “one word of truth that would outweigh the world.” In 1978, Solzhenitsyn mounted the rostrum at Harvard and speaking to and of the West said things like,

“Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected.”

Here Solzhenitsyn is decrying that the West’s worldview included the absurdity that man was inherently good and that all evil came from the individual’s environment.

Speaking of the press in the West,

“Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.”

Here Solzhenitsyn is faulting the press for only giving “news” that serves its own deformed worldview.

Speaking of the West’s herd mentality,

There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons…but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.

Here Solzhenitsyn speaks of how only approved majority opinions are discussed in the West.

Volumes of similar prophetic declamations could be quoted from Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was a man for the times. The fact that so little is being said of him on the day of his death reveals that the times ignored him and went on their merry, God-hating way.

Oh, God of the prophets, show thy grace to raise up another prophet for our times.

Calvin On The Reformed Magistrate

John Calvin 1509-1564

“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

Note in this quote that Calvin would have found it quite strange to contend that there could be a theocratic arrangement that was not at the same time theonomic in some sense. I mention this because I have read some “smart” people try to make the case that while Theocracy was a part of Reformed tradition Theonomy never has been. This quote makes shreds of that proposition. Still, it must be admitted that the kind of theonomy that was advocated by the Theocratic Reformers would have been an altered form from what was developed in the 20th century. BUT not so altered that there are not touchstones of commonality.

Secondly, note that this was a sermon which means it was preached in a Church. Calvin, speaking as the voice of God in the pulpit, was clearly violating Escondido notions of radical two kingdom theology. In this sermon he is instructing the State how it should operate.

Could Calvin be ordained by R2Kt virus men?