Old Blog

Force Becomes Structure: David Bentley Hart on the Cause of Controversy

Brad Littlejohn — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:58:00 +0000

July 14, 2010

More pressing matters have delayed me from saying more about the controversy conference, but I do want to return to it and say a bit about some of the other lectures while the memory is still fresh. The afternoon of the first day of the conference was graced by the presence (via videoconference) of David Bentley Hart and Robert Jenson, both titans of the American theological landscape and both known as well for their colorful personalities, which came through even from 5,000 miles away.

Hart’s lecture was entitled a “Penitential Approach to Controversy,” though that was not really its main focus. The penitence referred to was his own, coming to us as he did with a legendary reputation for bombastic theological rhetoric. We can, he said, invoke the prophets as a model for dramatic controversial pronouncements, but we must acknowledge that most of us are not called to be prophets in this way, and that went for him as well.

Hart proposed in his lecture to offer us not so much an argument as an intuition of why it is that ferocious controversy has been such a perennial feature of the Christian Church’s life, despite the New Testament’s clear calls for peace and unity. His suggestion was provocative and intriguing, disturbingly similar to liberal reconstructions of the early Church of the von Harnack variety, and yet refusing to grant their apostate conclusions.

There is a deep tension at the heart of the Christian faith, he suggested, between its apocalyptic other-worldiness and its need to become assimilated to history, to life in this world. Dogma and cult were the means by which the Church had to tame, as it were, the apocalyptic inbreaking of the Gospel and make it suitable for millenia of waiting for the consummation. Christianity entered history not as a set of doctrines, but as an apocalypse; it constituted an overturning of history and nature as we know them, or as we think we know them. There could be no simple return to the sacred as formerly understood, and there didn’t have to be, because history was coming to an end. Christianity thus accords ill with any purely cultic rationality.

It would take some time, and some adjustment of expectations, for so singular an interruption of the eschatological into the temporal to be recuperated into a stable institution of words and practices. Christianity had to become historical again, cultural again, cultic again. Christianity was forced to take on the morphology of the religions which it had replaced, without compromising its content. What began as force had to become structure--the event had to crystallize.

Now thus far, this has a great deal of similarity to certain liberal narratives, but Hart does not take all this to mean that the assimilation to history was wrong, or something that we need to undo. It is necessary and valuable--dogma and cult and all the rest. Nonetheless, there is a tragic element to this accomodation between apocalypse and cult. The apocalyptic force of the Christian revelation, its newness and power, its difference from all that came before, is too volatile to permanently and comfortably sit at ease within its own institutional boundaries. It is for this reason, suggests Hart, that Christianity has proved so uniquely fissile, and creative even of a militant atheism and nihilism. There is an ungovernable destructive energy at the heart of Christianity that is always at tension with its constructive impulses.

Dogma, therefore, the Christian event’s assumption of a fixed, historical, and institutional form, although it can be the poetic discovery of language for speaking about God, is also in some sense the language of disenchantment. It wants to recuperate the force of a cosmic disruption in the form of institutional formulae. This is not something to be lamented--we must accept the workings of providence. But dogma always has some quality of disappointment about it. We speak in these formal terms because we have not yet seen with our eyes and felt with our hands. And with this disappointment comes an impulse to anger.

It is this anger, this spiritual discontentment, and not merely the mixing of the Church with politics, that explains part of the violence of the controversy witnessed in the early Church. Theological hatred, Hart suggested, may be at some level a reflex of fear, fear that the Gospel, exposed to the corrosion of ordinary time, may be reduced only into history.

Another phenomenon might also be going on: there is something in the pursuit of theology that is a constant frustration of human pride, and thus calls forth ever more assertive expressions of human pride. We are thwarted by the surfeit of truth over the limits of human language. But even more importantly, all our attempts to speak about God are overwhelmed by God’s speaking of Himself in time. It challenges and cancels our customary attempts at meaning, and destroys the human ambition to ascend unaided to the summits of truth. Theology thus carries with it a certain measure of resentment, a resentment toward grace.

It is from this resentment, our unspoken recognition of our inability to gain a true grasp of that of which we speak, that leads to the anger that bursts forth so intemperately in the midst of theological controversy. Controversy must therefore always be carried on in penitence, penitence for our resentment against God.

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I have nothing to add to this fascinating and powerful thesis, except the objection that was voiced by several in the Q&A afterward--namely, that Hart’s thesis is perhaps better seen as a paradigm for understanding what is always true about the Christian revelation, than as a historical explanation of how the Church evolved. Indeed, that is more how I have presented it here. But, although he was counseling no return to primitivism, he did seem to claim that the Church was in the beginning characterized by this apocalyptic otherworldiness, in constant expectation of the end of the world, and then only after a century or so realized that it had to settle down and develop doctrine. This obscures the fact that controversy over doctrine and the institutional shape of the Church is present already in the New Testament itself. Nonetheless, with this caveat, I find that Hart’s intuition seems to ring true, and promises to perhaps shed a lot of light on the theological experience.

Barth's Christological Corrective (VanDrunen Review VIII)

Brad Littlejohn — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:19:00 +0000

July 12, 2010

There is, I’m afraid, very little to say about this chapter. Actually, I’m not afraid--that is rather a relief, given how much there has been to say about the previous seven chapters. This chapter marks a dramatic shift from the chapters thus far, because heretofore, VanDrunen has been attempting to claim a certain tradition--to say, “Here’s what X said, and here’s why it’s part of the Reformed tradition, and (implicitly) that’s why I’m all for it.” But now, all of a sudden, he isn’t. Finally, our narrative has a solid villain. Barth is the fellow who decisively rejected the Reformed consensus, as VanDrunen sees it, who rejected the notion of natural law, who substituted one kingdom of Christ for two kingdoms, and who insisted on a unified Christology, rather than one bifurcated into two mediatorships.

Now, there is little to say here because I don’t really disagree with this picture; Barth did reject the Reformed consensus, or at least, how VanDrunen has portrayed that consensus, and I have already argued with where I think that portrayal is flawed, so there’s not much point in rehashing it here. I simply think that those points at which Barth does disagree with this consensus are generally healthy correctives, whereas I’m sure VanDrunen thinks the opposite. Moreover, in saying that Barth is the “villain” of VanDrunen’s narrative, I don’t mean to imply that VanDrunen is harsh or unfair to him; he is quite objective and even-handed, so there is not a great deal for me to say in terms of contesting his portrait of Barth. This is especially so as I am, despite spasmodic attempts to reconcile this shortcoming, woefully inadequate in my knowledge of Barth. So there were a few points at which VanDrunen’s summary didn’t entirely make sense to me, but that was probably my fault, not his.

My only big question about his portrayal of Barth is that he sees Barth as rejecting the “commonality amidst antithesis” of the Reformers in favor of much greater commonality between believers and unbelievers. However, my understanding of Barth has always been that he highlighted the antithesis; others that I know have seen his antipathy toward natural law and his Christocentrism to have the result of implying that outside of specifically Christian truth, there is very little discovery of truth, and so as having a sort of “fundamentalist” edge. But perhaps I am mistaken here.

In any case, given that there is little need for extended interaction, I shall just return, like a dog to his vomit, to the question of Christology, for it is Barth, of course, who makes precisely the objection to the dual mediatorship doctrine that I have been making, and it is worth attending to VanDrunen’s comments at this point, given that this is the theological fulcrum underlying this book.

On page 342, VanDrunen says, “For Barth, affirming that God, but not God in Jesus Christ the redeemer, is the creator is tantamount to ascribing creation to a false God.” That is precisely right, I think. Unless the God who creates is the God who is revealed truly and fully in Jesus Christ the Redeemer, unless this work of creation aims toward the same end as the work of redemption and manifests the same gracious character of God in Christ, then the Creator God is not the Biblical God. Another way of saying all this is that for Barth, God is defined by his telos, and all God’s works may be read, nay, must be read, in light of the final end of his works--redemption in Jesus Christ. This endpoint provides the full meaning of all the earlier works, and so it cannot be abstracted out of them. This seems to me to ring absolutely true, and I’d be interested to hear why, for VanDrunen, it does not.

Now, let’s hear how VanDrunen contrasts Barth and the Reformed tradition on the “two reigns of God.” He begins by recapitulating the “Reformed tradition”:

“For the earlier tradition, the two kingdoms doctrine consisted in a distinction between two reigns of God, one a redemptive reign over his church and the other a providential, non-redemptive reign over civil society and the broader cultural realm. This distinction often involved the corresponding distinction between the Son as eternal God (and, as such, the creator and sustainer of all things) and the Son as the incarnate mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ (and, as such, the redeemer of his people). As the eternal Son of God he reigns over the civil kingdom and as the incarnate mediator of redemption he reigns over the spiritual kingdom. Connected to this basic theological framework was the conviction that creation was an act of God, and therefore an act of the Son, but not a redemptive act of the mediator Christ. The older Reformed perspective viewed creation as well as redemptive ‘christologically’ or ‘christocentricially’ in this sense.”

First, I must protest against the continued hypocrisy here. You may recall that at the end of the previous chapter, VanDrunen berated Kuyper for his terminological confusion in using the name “Christ” to refer to the Logos the Creator and Jesus the Redeemer, when in fact the name only applies to the latter. I pointed out, with a bit of annoyance, that VanDrunen himself (like pretty much every other theologian in history, I might add), had used “Christ” and “Christology” to refer to both, earlier in the book. And now we see him again indulging in the same ambiguity: early Reformed thought, we are told, had a “christological” or “christocentric” doctrine of Creation, because it taught that the second person of the Trinity was involved in creation. But, if VanDrunen is to be believed, it taught that, although the second person of the Trinity was involved, He was involved precisely not as Christ, but merely as “Son” or “Logos.” He wants to have his cake and eat it too. And this is not a minor point. VanDrunen seeks to rest a great deal of theological weight on the fact that it was not “Christ” who created, since “Christ” is the Son’s title as king of the mediatorial kingdom, and that kingship has nothing to do with his kingship over creation. The Son creates, and rules over creation, only insofar as he is “eternal God”--he does not rule as the God-man, but only as God. Therefore, what we have is a theological account of creation, and the civil kingdom, and a Christological account of redemption, and the spiritual kingdom. Exactly what we do not have is a Christological account of creation.

Now, I don’t think this is for a moment theologically coherent, because it effectively treats the Logos asarkos and the Logos insarkos as separate persons, but if you’re going to opt for something theologically incoherent, at least don’t make things worse by making it inconsistent too. And it is, so far as I can tell, inconsistent for VanDrunen to claim that the Reformed teach that God did not create as Christ, and then to claim for them a “christological” doctrine of creation.

Second, what is at issue here is not a “distinction” between the Son as eternal God and the Son as incarnate mediator, nor a “distinction” between the two kingships this entails. Distinctions are fine. Distinctions are useful. Not always, of course; often they are harmful. But in principle, there’s nothing wrong with this distinction. The question is: what kind of distinction is this? Is this a heuristic distinction, useful for limited conceptualizing, or is it an ontological distinction, positing separate realities in the life of the Logos? And if it is the latter, then just how separate are these? This, you see, is the problem--not that VanDrunen (or the Reformed) perceives a distinction here, but how much they want to rest on the distinction. VanDrunen at least wishes to use the distinction as the argument for the complete autonomy of the two kingships from one another, so that neither has any effect on the other or any dependence on the other. This is not the same as just making a distinction. For instance, we might want to distinguish between me as writer of my book on the Mercersburg Theology and me as writer of this review. These are two separate works I have done at different points in time, for different purposes, in different manners, etc. And so we can draw some useful distinctions, rather than blurring them together. But you would be foolish to pretend that the one work couldn’t tell you anything about the other, or that they didn’t depend on certain common assumptions or manifest a common set of goals and a common personality. Of course, I might’ve changed my mind a lot in between, but this doesn’t happen to Jesus; he is the same yesterday and today. But, of course, the connection between creation and redemption is much closer than that, because, if Scripture is to be believed, the latter is the restoring and bringing to fulfillment of the former. So the analogy would be more like the distinction between my writing this initial rambly review and my final refined review of VanDrunen.

But with that remark about ramblyness, I should perhaps stop rambling and move on.

Now, I don’t really think that VanDrunen thinks that redemption is the restoring and bringing to fulfillment of creation; but if that isn’t the case, then I can’t really guess what redemption is for him. In summarizing the “Reformed tradition,” he says.” “After the fall, God not only initiated the covenant of grace for the purpose of establishing the spiritual kingdom but also preserved the creation order through the establishment of the civil kingdom” (344). Now, notice this language: God “initiated the covenant of grace for the purpose of establishing the spiritual kingdom.” See, I’d always been under the impression that God initiated the covenant of grace in order to redeem creation, and in particular mankind its head, from the sin and death into which it had fallen, implying a certain measure of continuity with the original creation. But now we learn that actually, God decided to whip up some Plan B--this new thing called a “spiritual kingdom,” having decided, apparently, that creation wasn’t really the best place for man after all. I’m probably distorting things here, but I really don’t know how to make sense of this narrative that VanDrunen is giving me--what is redemption, if not new creation?

To move on, VanDrunen says that, in contrast,

“Barth distinguished God’s work of creation from his work of redemption, but he did so only while insisting that they are both Christological in a way such that they can never be separated. The orders of creation and redemption are united in Christ and to know God as creator is also to know him as redeemer. To deny this, according to Barth, is to speak of two gods, to combine Yahweh and Baal.” (344)

Exactly! Thank you, Barth! Yahweh and Baal--I couldn’t have said it better! Distinguishing without separating--exactly! Now, what part of this does VanDrunen disagree with? I want to understand, but I don’t.

Perhaps this is what he didn’t like: “Barth himself understood that the older Reformed ideas about a pre-incarnate Son (the so-called logos insarkos), the distinction between a protological covenant of works and a subsequent covenant of grace, and the natural law were intertwined and to be rejected together” (345). Now, if Barth really had rejected the idea of a pre-incarnate Son (who, by the way, is the logos asarkos--the logos insarkos is the incarnate Son...this faux pas does not reassure me about VanDrunen’s grasp of Christology), then we should have serious objections. But of course Barth did no such thing, and I’m not sure where VanDrunen got that from. Perhaps all he is saying is that Barth rejected the particular things that the older Reformed said about the work of the pre-incarnate Son, but, if so, the phrasing was rather too ambiguous.

In any case, that pretty much wraps up the Barth chapter. I apologize that this review was not very well-structured, but at this point, I’m just in a hurry to get on to the end of the book. And we’re almost there. Two chapters on the neo-Calvinists, an epilogue on the recovery of a Reformed two kingdoms theory, and then I can go back to the beginning and write the concise review.

The "Christian" vs. "The Secular Person" (Sermon on the Mount IV)

Brad Littlejohn — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:39:00 +0000

July 10, 2010

In Luther's later treatise, entitled “The Sermon on the Mount,” we see an unfortunate shift from the promising (if somewhat disorganized) start of “On Temporal Authority.”

Having started with the Beatitudes, he asks,

“What does it mean, then, to be meek? From the outset here you must realize that Christ is not speaking at all about the government and its work, whose property it is not to be meek, as we use the word in German, but to bear the sword (Rom. 13:4) for the punishment of those who do wrong (1 Pet. 2:14), and to wreak a vengeance and a wrath that are called the vengeance and wrath of God. He is only talking about how individuals are to live in relation to others, apart from official position and authority.”

This is not an uncommon route to take--insisting that different ethical standards apply in private life vs. public life--and I am not going to contest that there must be some difference, because there is still a provisional task of judgment to execute until the fullness of the Kingdom comes. The question we must ask, though, is whether it is an absolute difference; should the commands of Christ have no effect on how a government decides to execute vengeance? Do the priority of peacemaking and the value of mercy have no purchase in the public sphere? Moreover, we must beware of articulating this eschatological distinction in terms which suggest it is simply a public/private distinction, as Luther appears to do here: do Christian ethics cease to have any relevance once we move from the individual level to the level of any institution? The CEO of Enron had “official position and authority,” he was working not as an individual, but as representative of an institution. Did the same ethics no longer apply? As we go on, we will see that our concern here is not unwarranted.

Luther goes on to draw a sharp distinction between office and person:

“The man who is called Hans or Martin is a man quite different from the one who is called elector or doctor or preacher. Here we have two different persons in one man.” Jesus, is not talking about the office-person: “He is not talking about this person here, letting it alone in its own office and rule, as he has ordained it. He is talking merely about how each individual, natural person is to behave in relation to others.”

See, now this is a very troubling move. We have shifted from contrasting civil government and private life to contrasting any “office” such as “doctor or preacher” with private life. While clearly every man has certain functions which belong exclusively to a particular office that he executes, and are not relevant outside of that office, it is rather more problematic to assert that different ethical principles apply within and without the office. Moreover, if we are speaking about “offices” of this sort, it seems that very little of our lives indeed lie under the commands of Jesus.

All this is simply under the discussion of meekness. Later, as he turns to consider the difficult commands of 5:38-40, he insists that this doesn’t mean a literal turning the other cheek--

“it was enough for a person to be ready in his heart to offer the other cheek....We say, therefore, that all it does is to proclaim to every Christian that he should willingly and patiently suffer whatever is his lot, without seeking revenge or hitting back.

“But the question and argument still remain. Must a person suffer all sorts of things from everyone, without defending himself at all? Has he no right to plead a case or to lodge a complaint before a court, or to claim and demand what belongs to him? If all these things were forbidden, a strange situation would develop. It would be necessary to put up with everybody’s whim and insolence. Personal safety and private property would be impossible, and finally the social order would collapse.”

This new move is also quite troubling. To take Christ “literally” here would mean that we would constantly have to suffer from “everybody’s whim and insolence,” and so it is clear that Christ merely means that we should turn the cheek of our hearts, so to speak, that we should be willing to suffer passively, but should not actually do so. Such bifurcation of action and intention seems to rob these commands of most of their force, relevance, and value.

In the following paragraphs, Luther combines the two approaches he has taken here--the distinction of civil government and private life, and the distinction of heart and outward action. The earthly regime, we are told, must continue to “administer law and punishment,” maintain distinctions of ranks, etc.

“But the Gospel does not trouble itself with these matters. It teaches about the right relation of the heart to God, while in all these other questions it should take care to stay pure and not to stumble into a false righteousness. You must grasp and obey this distinction, for it is the basis on which such questions can easily be answered. Then you will see that Christ is talking about a spiritual existence and life and that he is addressing himself to his Christians. He is telling them to live and behave before God and in the world with their heart dependent upon God and uninterested in things like secular rule or government, power or punishment, anger or revenge.”

We begin, it seems, with a distinction between civil government and the kingdom of Christ, but this latter gets defined as “the right relation of the heart to God,” suggesting that, as Luther has already ventured, what matters is not that our actions conform to Christ’s commands, but that our hearts do.

Of course, it is possible to read this at first in an Anabaptist way; Christians are to be “uninterested in things like secular rule or government, power or punishment” because they live according to a different kingdom. However, we are going to see that he does not mean that Christians are to stay aloof from such things--of course they are to be involved in such things, but as secular persons, not as Christians. As a Christian, we must love our enemies. But Christian could be, in addition to being a Christian “a prince or a judge or a servant or a maid--all of which are termed ‘secular’ persons because they are part of the secular realm.” One’s identity in relation to other people, in this portrait, is not part of one’s being a Christian--one is a secular person inasmuch as one stands in relation to other people. We may then ask how it is that a Christian could love his enemies, because inasmuch as he relates to his enemies, he must do so as a secular person. You will see soon that I am not overstating the problem...Luther just plunges further and further into it.

He expands upon the bifurcation of person and office, and considers the office to be a “secular person”: “There is no getting around it, a Christian has to be a secular person of some sort.” In this role, “your name is not ‘Christian,’ but father’ or ‘lord’ or ‘prince.’ According to your own person you are a Christian; but in relation to your servant you are a different person, and you are obliged to protect him.”

He continues,

“You see, now we are talking about a Christian-in-relation: not about his being a Christian, but about this life and his obligation in it to some other person, whether under him or over him or even alongside him, like a lord or a lady, a wife or children or neighbors, whom he is obliged, if possible, to defend, guard, and protect.”

In such cases we are told that it is wrong to apply the turn-the-other-cheek principle. Is it wrong because the principle is in abeyance when you are acting in an office, or because the principle is about self, not others?

He no longer draws the distinction clearly. Observe, for instance, where he says:

“What kind of crazy mother would it be who would refuse to defend and save her child from a dog or a wolf and who would say: ‘A Christian must not defend himself’? Should we not teach her a lesson with a good whipping and say: ‘Are you a mother? Then do your duty as a mother, as you are charged to do it.”

Rather than taking the obvious route with this example and saying, “Christ says a Christian must not defend himself, but clearly he should defend his child, so there is no contradiction,” Luther imagines that we must, as it were, suspend the Sermon on the Mount because we are talking about someone acting as a secular person. We are to neatly distinguish two different identities for the Christian and two different sets of ethics for these identities: “Now, with this distinction of the boundary between the province of the Christian person and that of the secular person you can neatly classify all these saying and apply them properly where they belong, not confusing them and throwing them in one pot, the way the teaching and the administration of the pope has done.”

What, we must ask, remains in the province of the Christian person, if we have bracketed out every aspect of his life that is in relation or in obligation to others? It would seem that Christ’s commands are still to apply when it is solely oneself who is threatened, and Luther says so. But having said this, he then immediately flip-flops and says, “It is permissible to use orderly procedure in demanding and obtaining your rights, but be careful not to have a vindictive heart.” It’s fine to use the law simply for your protection, only not for vindictivenss. “When the heart is pure, then everything is right and well done.”

So the Sermon on the Mount does not offer us instruction when it comes to living in relation to others, and, even addressing us as individuals, it should be taken only as speaking to our hearts, our intentions, not our outward actions. This is because any of our outward actions, it appears, are part of our “secular person.”:

“He lives simultaneously as a Christian toward everyone, personally suffering all sorts of things in the world, and as a secular person, maintaining, using, and performing all the functions required by the law of his territory or city, by civil law, and by domestic law....A Christian should not resist any evil; but within the limits of his office, a secular person should oppose every evil. The head of a household should not put up with insubordination or bickering among his servants. A Christian should not sue anyone, but should surrender both his coat and cloak when they are taken away from him; but a secular person should go to court if he can to protect and defend himself against some violence or outrage.”

Since we are all secular people, we should all go to court to defend ourselves, but in our hearts, we should still live as Christians. Here is an ethics that has been entirely emasculated and robbed of any livable form. Here the Catholic counsels/precepts distinction gets turned on its side, separating each individual into a spiritual person who inwardly follows the counsels--the hard teachings of Christian ethics--and outwardly follows the precepts--more basic, natural law teachings.

This is, of course, not Luther at his best, and we mustn’t imagine that Luther actually consistently applied such a bizarre and schizophrenic ethic. Nevertheless, this sort of inward/outward ethical dualism has exerted a very strong influence on Protestantism and we must be alert to its presence. A common form it takes in the modern world is in the dual standards we apply to the world of business: as a private individual, I am not greedy, nor combative, I seek peace with all men, but as a businessman, I can be a cutthroat competitor, seeking to destroy the competition and wring the last cent out of my customers, always seeking more and more profit.

For Luther, the attempt to escape the hard words of the Sermon on the Mount has led him to destroy the foundations of Christian ethics. Clearly, we need a better interpretive solution.

"Theology and the Peace of the Church"

Brad Littlejohn — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:47:00 +0000

July 8, 2010

John Webster kicked off the proceedings at the Controversy Conference with his lecture “Theology and the Peace of the Church,” and as one might’ve expected from a man like Webster, it was profound, sophisticated, systematic, and rooted thoroughly in the doctrine of God. I might add that it was rooted in a thoroughly metaphysical doctrine of God, though I do not mean that pejoratively (a caveat one has to make in this anti-metaphysical age). His argument was essentially methodological, and sought to make two main points.

First, attempts to discuss the issue of controversy and conflict in the Church generally move immediately to the ethical, the imperative, without first establishing the theological, the indicative. Exhortations to overcome conflict thus degenerate into empty moralizing. Instead of this, we must, like St. Paul, first establish who God is and what He has done, and then we can construct ethical imperatives to act in accord with what is already the case by virtue of God’s character.

Second, this theological account which we must first provide is one in which peace is ontologically prior to violence, where being is good and evil is a privation of being, not a counter-being, in other words, the venerable Augustinian account of evil, enriched by his discussion of peace from City of God 19. Anything else ends in Manichaeanism, in which conflict is just as basic to the world as peace, intrinsic to the Church’s life and inescapable.

Webster began by contesting the common claim, mentioned in the introductory post about this conference, that it is through conflict that truth comes to light, that conflict makes clear what would else have remained obscure. We may think this is so, he said, but this is an illusion that comes from the dramatic oversimplification of the options that conflict engenders. In the midst of conflict, we artificially draw black-and-white distinctions that, while they appear to facilitate a triumph of rationality, are actually its downfall. We have two basic options, according to Webster: either we can see conflict as the natural condition of reason, or else it is an aberration from God who is the principle of order and peace. We must see it as the latter, because peace is ontologically prior to violence, and is indeed the guarantee of the possibility of reason. “An account of peaceful conduct,” he said, “rests upon a dogmatic account of the peace that God is and bestows.”

God is both the principle and the pattern of creaturely peace, but the former, said Webster, is generally ignored in favor of the latter. In other words, we exhort ourselves to be ethically conformed to the pattern of God’s peacefulness, without first meditating on how God provides the source and foundation for peaceable being. To do this requires that we reflect on who God is in himself. But of course we run into an immediate problem--we cannot know God as he is in himself. We must, said Webster, let this inhibition stand, but nonetheless recognize that God summons us into his inner presence by his outward activities.

In his account of the immanent Trinity, Webster’s hidden interlocutors were surely modern “dynamic trinitarians” (to coin a phrase, if it isn’t already one) like Moltmann and Jenson. The works of the Trinity, he said, are fully harmonious; there is no disorder, disruption, or contradiction in God’s making of the world, and thus not also in the inner life of God. At this point I found myself torn; on the one hand, of course--how could it be otherwise--God is perfect peace and harmony. On the other hand, I have learned too much at the feet of “dynamic trinitarians,” people who emphasized the ways in which the Godhead is also the archetype of diversity and creative tension, to be wholly satisfied. No disorder in God’s making of the world, sure; but could we say there was tension? And likewise in the inner life of God.

But let us let these objections rest for a moment, and follow Webster’s account out into the world of created being. Here he founded his case firmly on the Augustinian premise: Peace is intrinsic to creaturely being. Chaos is not a mode of being, but a declension from being. Conflict is devoid of ontological weight, because created nature is peaceful. Because of this, peace is first a property in the order of being, and only secondly a precept in the order of obligation--this is his recurring point about the indicative preceding the imperative.

In the New Testament narrative, peace is integral to grace; it is the chief product of Christ’s work of reconciliation. Peace is not first announced as a precept for the Church, but as a condition of the Church. The Church exists in peace as a function of the reconciliation of peace accomplished by Christ on the cross. This statement seems to locate the true being of the Church behind the visible church, and this will be troubling to many. The church that matters, many will object, is the actual visible church, and this is not peaceful; it is torn by conflict; we must seek to address this conflict, rather than offering ourselves false comfort that the Church really does exist in peace. An understandable objection, said Webster, but one that falls into the error of making practical ecclesiology the first theological science.

The summary precept of peacemaking, he said, is “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts”--and this is not directed toward making peace real, but toward making peace visible. We must insist upon this, that our task is simply to make visible a peace which already defines the Church’s being, instead of manufacturing a peace where one does not yet exist; otherwise, our task is hopeless from the start. To be sure, conflict remains a present ecclesial reality, but what kind of reality? We must not assume, said Webster, that we can straightforwardly interpret the reality. We must read it in light of the illumination of the gospel of peace, by which we can see conflict for what it is: sin against peace. We must remember that vice is always contra naturam; it is not an ugly mode of being, but as a contrary to the mode of being. Conflict must not be described in a Manichaean way, as an eternal parallel to peace.

This all sounds great, but what does it really mean in practical terms? Does the rubber here ever meet the road? I was skeptical at this point in the lecture, but Webster went on to draw some very fruitful applications.

First, we must deploy intelligence to penetrate through the phenomenon of conflict to the peaceful nature underlying. That is to say, we must remember that, despite our conflict in the Church, we share a unity in Christ, and because of that, there is much else that we share. We must seek to discover this source of peace and unity that underlies our disagreements, and recognizing our conflict as a temporary aberration, seek to uncover its cause and dispel it.

Second, we must not attribute to conflict an irreducibility that it does not possess. If we get too worked up about conflict, then we attribute to a being that it lacks. If evil is non-being, then ultimately it is nothing to fear. If conflict is but a temporary aberration, then we can rest in confidence that it will be dispelled by faithful waiting upon Christ. We must see conflict for what it is, which is to say, as Webster put it with surprising eloquence, “The afterlife of what the gospel has already excluded, the lingering shadow that the rising sun has yet to chase away.” Therefore, in a sense, we do not need to make an assault upon conflict, but rather to reassure ourselves in confidence that no such assault is required.

None of this means that we are to blithely and complacently dismiss the fact of conflict, the fact that we may need to enter controversy at times to defend the peaceable kingdom, but it dramatically changes our attitude to it.

It means that we can lay down these three basic precepts for conflict and controversy:

It must be a work of charity, for the Church and our neighbors.
It must be exercised in common pursuit of divine truth.
It must arise from and attend toward peace.

In order to approach controversy in this way, what kind of person does the theologian need to be? Webster asked.

Theological science requires grace-character. It requires tranquillity of mind, lack of ambition, competitiveness, and vain curiosity.

At this point, Webster paused to reflect on zeal--is zeal a virtue or a vice? How may zeal promote the peace of God in the Church? Zeal is a righteous form of anger, but an unstable one. What is the distinction between righteous and unrighteous anger? Corrupt anger corrodes both rational and common life; it reduces controversy to a hopelessly conflictual affair, and destroys the clear vision of intelligence. Righteous anger is cooler and more objective. It follows a judgment of reason. It is a public passion for Gospel truth. Anger through zeal does not destroy the operation of reason, but nevertheless it may impair its performance; therefore, zeal must be moderated by our recognition of the ontological priority of peace.

What should the conduct of theological controversy be? The Church does not dispute according to the fashion of the world. Four rules for edifying controversy can be laid down:

First, it must display and magnify the truth of the Gospel, whose author is peace. Controversy will only serve peace in the Church if it has an external orientation, toward an object outside of the disputing parties. It must not become reduced to a simple party strife.

Second, theological controversy must not allow divergence of opinion to become divergence of will. Concord in the Church is a union of will, not of opinion. We must recognize that those who differ from us in opinion often share the same will toward the same good. There are of course, cases in which this is not the case, where we do not share a common object of love; but when this is the case, these are disputes not in the Church, but about the Church, and here we must await the converting work of the Spirit.

Third, it must recognize the catholicity of the truth, a truth that exceeds any representation that we may make. This object of love over which we contend is one too profound for us to rightly grasp. We cannot ever “end our dealings with it.”

Fourth, it must be undertaken in tranquil confidence that the Spirit will illuminate the Church. We often let ourselves fall into a barren naturalism, in which appeals to Scripture founder on irreconcilable exegetical conflict. We lose faith that there is an efficacy in the Word, a Word that will make itself clear to us, and will resolve this conflict. We may be confident that exegesis, rightly pursued, will, by Christ’s aid, lead us to peace and resolution.

-----

All that by way of exposition. Now some evaluation is in order. First, some words of ringing endorsement:

Although I might’ve wanted to put it in somewhat different, more Christocentric terms--Christ has conquered, he has brought us peace and guaranteed us peace--I thought his insistence on the priority of peace over conflict, the essential impotence of conflict, was fantastic. Too easily we get depressed over the conflicts all around us in the Church, or mired down in the midst of them, and forget that they are ultimately frivolous and insubstantial, Christ will preserve his Church, the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it, and any divisions that appear to loom large for us now will ultimately be reconciled in perfect harmony. Or else some of us get so intoxicated with the fumes of conflict that we come to imagine it as a positive good, as a joy to be indulged, rather than an aberration to be deplored. Certainly Webster provides us a wholesome corrective here. Conflict must never become an end in itself, but must be oriented toward peace, and that a just peace, not the peace of the merciless victor who has silenced all opposition. Nor is conflict inevitable or irresolvable--patient waiting upon Christ will reveal a resolution.

In particular, I liked Webster’s final point about the efficacy of the Word. Too true it is that, for all our passionate insistence on the authority of Scripture, we treat it as a dead letter. One side alleges texts that prove their point, and the other side insists upon other texts, or demands a better exegesis of the opponent’s texts. Both seem trapped by certain hermeneutical assumptions, and conclude that it is hopeless; the text remains silent about its interpretation, and so the quarrel will never be adjudicated. But in Scripture we do not have a dead letter to reckon with, but a living Word, a Word continually made efficacious by the Spirit who breathes it and the Son about whom it speaks. This Word will reveal itself to those who wait patiently upon it in faith. The perspicacity of Scripture is not immediate, perhaps, but it is in the end real.

But then there are some objections to raise, or rather, not objections, merely questions.

First, on a minor note, although I liked his point about recognizing that there can be concord--unity of will--amidst diversity of opinion, so long as we share the same object of love, this leaves a large part of our question unsolved. After all, at some vague level, we share a “common object of love” with anyone who seeks truth, or wants to serve some kind of God. If the presence or absence of a common object of love determines whether we have a dispute within the Church or a dispute about the Church, as Webster so meaningfully put it, then how do we define this common object of love? I talked to him about the problem afterward, and he recognized that this object “had to have some shape to it”--a creed, for instance. But then, how do we know that we are merely united in will and that we are not confessing the same words with very different concepts or intentions? The problem is not so easily resolved. This is not a fault with Webster’s presentation, merely a call for further elaboration.

But there is a much more significant objection, one that I knew Leithart was going to raise, so I asked it for him and beat him to it: while it may be true that God is peace, and that Christ’s redemptive work is a work of peace, how do we maintain this while simultaneously doing justice to the fact that this is not exactly how Scripture often speaks. The Old Testament is full of war, and Yahweh is described as a warrior; even in the New Testament, Christ says that he comes not to bring peace, but a sword, and Revelation pictures him as a conquering warrior destroying his foes. Or, to put this problem as Webster preferred to put it--how do we reconcile the immanent reality of peace with the economy that is dominated by drama and conflict? Leithart pursued the same point further with Webster after the formal Q&A session, and the three of us discussed it on the way over to lunch. In some ways, this is merely a methodological question, but it seems to make a lot of difference to our paradigm. After all, if conflict is integral to the economy of redemption, then perhaps we should embrace it with more gusto than Webster would seem to advocate, perhaps seeking peace with the serpent, as Adam did in Genesis 3 (Leithart’s example) is a failure, and seeking conflict is a truer imitation of the divine character.

Webster acknowledged that it was a thorny problem, and did not want to minimize the fact that, whatever may be the case on the immanent plane, on the level of the economy, peace is only reached through a great deal of “drama and conflict.” However, he wanted to insist that the crucial point is that peace is the starting point, and peace the endpoint, and conflict is an aberration, it is not eternal, it is not integral. It all comes down, he said, to whether you accept a privative account of evil, or not. On a phenomenal level, such an account is deeply unsatisfactory, because it seems to deny the reality of the evil we encounter, but ultimately, he didn’t see how you could do without it; otherwise you end in Manichaeanism. And he didn’t want to risk going there.

I am quite sympathetic to this outlook, and it does seem that you have to maintain a privative account of evil, but it also seems to me that you have to be careful about not letting that affirmation loom too large in your theology, or else you end up minimizing large sections of Scripture. I suggested that perhaps this was just one of those many paradoxes that we have to live with in theology, affirming both seemingly opposing truths--God is peace, God is a warrior--without ever satisfactorily synthesizing them. I think both Webster and Leithart were, at some level, satisfied with this way of putting it

Yet, a real difference of theological method persists. For Webster, we must begin with the immanent and let that condition our interpretation of the economic; we must begin with an account of who God is in Godself, and then use this as an interpretive grid for making sense of what Scripture says that God does. A cynic would say that this means we begin with philosophy and let this set the parameters of Scripture. Webster stated his determination to avoid that error, but nevertheless insisted on what he called “a very dangerous, but a very important principle”: the proportions of dogmatics do not have to match the proportions of the economy. Scripture may tell us very very little about who God is in Godself, but dogmatics needs to talk about it quite a great deal. As he charmingly put it: “Your conclusion will in the end be that of Job--‘God is great, and we know him not.’ But you still have to spend a few hundred pages saying ‘God is great, and we know him not.’” Ultimately, I wouldn’t want to deny any of that, and I don’t think Leithart would either. But Leithart, I know, would be a lot more comfortable starting from the economy, learning that Yahweh is a warrior, that we are called to imitate him in that, and only then seeking to establish the senses in which God is peace, and we are to imitate him in that (of course, it is also possible that one could take Leithart’s method of starting with the economy, but still argue that in the economy, God reveals himself as peace much more than he does as warrior).

In any case, some of the crucial lessons of Webster’s lecture would remain--conflict is not the starting point or the endpoint, peace is. Conflict is not therefore irresolvable, it is not to be sought for its own sake, and it must only be engaged in with patient faith that God is a God of reconciliation.

Luther on the Sermon on the Mount

Brad Littlejohn — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:11:00 +0000

July 6, 2010
Now, let’s turn to look at Martin Luther’s expositions of the Sermon on the Mount. We find the first of these in his treatise Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, and the second in, unsurprisingly, The Sermon on the Mount. The first, while troubled by a number of inconsistencies (some simply the result of Luther’s characteristic lack of rhetorical caution), offers a much more satisfactory account than the second. I shall resist the temptation to dwell on the inconsistencies and will stick to the core argument.

In this treatise, Luther beings by rejecting the “counsels of perfection” idea. We must, he says, find a way to make these words “apply to everyone alike, be he perfect or imperfect.”

All Christians then are bound by the commands of the Sermon on the Mount, and for themselves have no need of “prince, king, lord, sword, or law.” However, the majority of those who live here in the world are not Christians; they do not observe Christ’s commands, but are full of violence and evil. We cannot insist on applying these commands across the board in a society that is not ready for them. “Certainly it is true that Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject neither to law nor sword, and have need of neither. But take heed and first fill the world with real Chrsitains before you attempt to rule it in a Christian and evangelical manner.” And so it is necessary that for such people there be a temporal sword “to bring about peace and prevent evil deeds,” while the spiritual does its work of “producing righteousness.”

Now, at this point, the argument is looking quite unsatisfactory. You are tempted to scribble in the margin (as I did), something along the lines of, “But Martin, Jesus knew that not everyone would do good when he gave the command to resist not evil; otherwise, there would have been no need for the command. He’s presuming that we’re surrounded by violent men, but we’re supposed to overcome by love, not a sword.” But then things become much clearer. Luther says,

“Since a true Christian lives and labors on earth not for himself alone but for his neighbor, he does by the very nature of his spirit even what he himself has no need of, but is needful and usefu to his neighbor. Because the sword is most beneficial and necessary for the whole world in order to preserve peace, punish sin, and restrain the wicked, the Christian submits most willingly to the rule of the sword, pays his taxes, honors those in authority, serves, helps, and does all he can to assist the governing authority... Although he has no need of these things for himself--to him they are not essential--nevertheless, he concerns himself about what is serviceable and of benefit to others.”

In other words, Christ has forbidden his followers to use the sword to defend themselves, he has counselled them to give up their own cloaks when demanded, but he has never said that they cannot defend others, or track down and punish the thieves who take the cloaks of others. He finally states this clearly a couple of pages later:

“From all this we gain the true meaning of Christ’s words in Matthew 5:39, ‘Do not resist evil,’ etc. It is this: A Christian should be so disposed that he will suffer every evil and injustice without avenging himself; neither will he seek legal redress in the courts but have utterly no need of temporal authority and law for his own sake. On behalf of others, however, he may and should seek vengeance, justice, protection, and help, and do as much as he can to achieve it. Likewise, the governing authority shoud, on its own initiative or through the instigation of others, help and protect him too, without any complaint, application, or instigation on his own part. If it fails to do this, he should permit himself to be despoiled and slandered; he should not resist evil, as Christ’s words say.”

Now this is quite interesting, and in fact, quite different from what he started out by saying. You will see that as he reaches his conclusion, the two kingdoms schema he had begun with proves irrelevant. For it is not that Christians don’t use the sword, and unbelievers do, or that Christians mustn’t use the sword against one another, but must against unbelievers who do, or even that Christians don’t use the sword for themsleves, but do use it for unbelievers. Rather, it is quite simply, no Christian uses the sword for himself, or is anxious for his own rights and well-being, but all are anxious for the rights and well-being of others, Christians or worldlings, and will use the sword to protect them if necessary.

This solution then qualifies, under the schema identified in the first part of this essay, as the fourth approach to dealing with the Sermon on the Mount. It has the strength of having not added to or detracted from Christ’s words there--he means exactly what he says: “If you are attacked, turn the other cheek. If you are stolen from, give to your enemy.” However, Luther does not stick to this solution, as we will see in the next segment.

Church and Controversy Quick-Takes

Brad Littlejohn — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:23:00 +0000

July 5, 2010

(This post is not about VanDrunen--can you believe it?)

I just returned from an immensely fruitful weekend in Aberdeen, attending the conference “Theology, the Church, and Controversy,” hosted by the wonderfully hospitable Francesca Murphy and featuring such luminaries in theology and ethics as John Webster, Robert Jenson, David Bentley Hart, Brian Brock, and the inimitable Peter Leithart. The conference featured an excellent lineup of papers exploring how the Church ought to engage in controversy from historical, ethical, and theological angles, and a fantastic roundtable discussion at the end that wrestled its way through the question of how we ought to engage the homosexuality controversy today. (Not to mention, of course, the “Church Controversy Charades” that featured such once-in-a-lifetime experiences as watching John Webster attempt to visually act out the heresy of universalism, or Peter Leithart reenacting the castration of Abelard.)

A recurrent question that seemed to go back and forth during the conference in an irresolvable tug-of-war was: is controversy a blessing for the Church or an aberration that should be avoided wherever possible?

A couple months ago this question was highlighted by Davey Henreckson at Theopolitical a couple months back, who pointed to an article in Christianity Today comparing an N.T. Wright conference in Wheaton with a simultaneous neo-Reformed conference at Louisville. For the neo-Reformed,

“protecting disputed doctrines against heresy is where good theology is born. Clear thinking comes from friction and protestation, from Hegelian dialectics (R.C. Sproul spoke on this), but not from compromise. The Patristic Fathers got it right whenever they were ironing out disputed doctrines and fighting against heresy, said Ligon Duncan in his talk. But on matters that were not disputed, he said, their thought sometimes got muddled up.”

This is a common sort of claim to make, especially in Reformed circles. Controversy is necessary to bring truth to light; without it, we would grow dull and lose our grip on the Gospel. Fighting, then, is a necessary and desirable part of the life of the Church, suggesting that, if we ever find ourselves without fights, we should perhaps stir some up to get ourselves back in shape.

Although no one at the Aberdeen conference put things quite that combatively, there were certainly a few talks that sought to emphasize a bit more the positive side of theological controversy. Robert Jenson, for instance, argued that “provocations” are an important part of the Church’s life, and although some of these will be wholly destructive, and some would have been destructive but for God overruling and bringing good out of evil, some are clearly constructive, despite painful side-effects, such as when some Christians began preaching against segregation in the 1960s. Peter Leithart, too, despite being the gentle irenist that we all know and love, sounded a rather combative note in his defence of Athanasius, so much so that he was quickly type-cast by some who did not know him as the stereotypical pugnacious Presbyterian.

Brian Brock, on the other hand, taking as his subjects Stanley Hauerwas and the French philosopher Michel Serres, argued that Hauerwas’s combative, intentionally provocative style stood at odds with his pacifistic convictions, and that Serres’s pursuit of peaceful discourse was a more consistent pacifism. This was not to say that there was no legitimate place for Hauerwasian provocations, but it must be a very subordinate place. The most powerful account of the negative role of controversy was given in a brilliant and sophisticated paper by John Webster, “Theology and the Peace of the Church,” which came first, and set the tone for much of the rest of the conference, culminating in a fascinating exchange between Leithart and Webster at the roundtable discussion at the end of the conference over the doctrine of God and theological method.

Intriguingly, the flamboyant and combative David Bentley Hart sounded, if anything, a more Websterian note, appearing before us as a public penitent for his own propensity to violent rhetorical outbursts against error. (Needless to say, I hope that he does not overcome this vice too quickly, as it makes for jolly entertaining reading!)

That’s just a little taste for now; I hope over the next few days to be posting reflections from each of these talks and a couple others, with particular attention to Webster and the discussions he engendered.

Kuyperian Tug-of-War (VanDrunen Review VII)

Brad Littlejohn — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:09:00 +0000

June 30, 2010

In keeping with my new commitment to keep this review concise, I’m going to try and cover this chapter in just one installment (though it will be a very long one). This shouldn’t be too difficult, moreover, as it is a shorter chapter, its argument is generally rather clear and straightforward, and where there are difficulties in the argument, they’re at points already discussed in this review. Also, having officially and publicly lost patience with VanDrunen in the last chapter, I have regained my composure, and don’t expect there to be any more outbursts of that sort, although from here on out the focus of the reviews will be essentially critical, rather than expository.

VanDrunen’s basic point in this chapter is to argue, that even when it comes to Abraham Kuyper, the father of “Kuyperianism” and thus of modern “neo-Calvinism,” neo-Calvinists do not have a firm foundation for their views. Kuyper, he wants to argue, remains by and large in the two kingdoms, natural law camp, despite--you guessed it--some lingering inconsistencies.

My complaint, as you might have expected, regards VanDrunen’s continued certainty that all these historical Reformed figures simply could not make their practice consistent with their theory. This is plausible at first, but as the inconsistencies pile up, the most persuasive conclusion is simply that their theory is not what VanDrunen insists it must be. Admittedly, VanDrunen says that the inconsistencies in Kuyper’s case are somewhat different than those we’ve seen in the previous chapters--Kuyper is no Erastian. But there still seem to be some assumptions VanDrunen is foisting on the discussion that make it inevitable that he will find “inconsistencies.”

One assumption that I am still trying to figure out is exactly what he thinks modern “neo-Calvinists” think. This is a problem that is coming to dog the discussion more and more insistently, as the polemical target of this book becomes ever more prominent--who is the target? If he intended to write a book against the “neo-Calvinists,” as he clearly intended to do, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain what precisely he thought they were. The opening chapter made some stab at doing this, but it was a stab in the dark, if there ever was one. No particular “neo-Calvinist” was ever cited, but instead what we had was a vague mosaic containing figures as diverse as John Howard Yoder, N.T. Wright, and John Milbank, who have few things in common except for the fact that none of them are Reformed. So, we begin the book with almost no idea of what these Reformed neo-Calvinists look like, except that they want “to construct specifically Christian world views, bring Christ’s kingdom to exprssion in every area of life, and level radical critiques of non-Christian thought.”

Now, as it turns out, VanDrunen is planning to turn in chapters 8 and 9 to examine these neo-Calvinists, and I am eager to see what he has to say. However, the fact that he has not clearly identified them earlier makes many of his contrasts between true Calvinism and neo-Calvinism vague and unhelpful at best. This becomes particularly true in this chapter, where he seeks to claim that Kuyper was not like a modern neo-Calvinist because he still saw that there were essentially two kingdoms, rather than one kingdom of Christ, even if he didn’t exactly use this terminology. Now that VanDrunen has allowed for a little flexibility in terminology, then we may fairly ask why the mere fact that some neo-Calvinists use the terminology of “one kingdom” puts them in an entirely different paradigm. After all, all neo-Calvinists that I know of would still affirm many important distinctions between the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and they would all (at least, all the ones with whom I have any familiarity) insist that the Church remains the kingdom of God in a uniquely important sense. So it seems a bit disingenous when VanDrunen says something like, “Kuyper maintains a distinction between the two realms, and identifies the Church as the focal point of God’s redemptive activity; therefore he’s with the old two kingdoms paradigm, not the new neo-Calvinist paradigm” (leaving aside of course the problem of VanDrunen’s failure to offer us a clear portrait of the “old two kingdoms paradigm” in the first place).

I’m a bit suspicious that when VanDrunen speaks disparagingly of the modern neo-Calvinists, he has something like theonomy and Christian Reconstructionism in mind. If so, this clarifies a lot, but it also greatly cheapens the value of his critique, given that there are probably about 15 Christian Reconstructionists remaining in the US. Ok, I’m joking, and there are certainly still circles with a strongly theonomic bent; however, they do not represent most “neo-Calvinists,” and in any case are on quite an opposite pole from the Milbanks, Wrights, and Hauerwases in many important respects. Here’s why I have that suspicion: VanDrunen acknowledges that Kuyper sought to apply the Bible to all areas of life, including politics, since Scripture “clarifies the things revealed in nature and allows people again to perceive ‘the ground rules, the primary relationships, the principles that govern man’s life together and his relationship to the most holy God’” (282). But then VanD lays great stress on the fact that Kuyper distances himself from “biblicism” and denies that Scripture can be used to make concrete decisions in the political realm, saying, for instance, “A state polity that dismisses and scorns the observation of life and simply wishes to duplicate the situation of Israel, taking Holy Scripture as a complete code of Christian law for the state, would, according to the spiritual fathers of Calvinism, be the epitome of absurdity” (283). VanDrunen seems to think he has established a significant point in the argument, and repeatedly seeks to build on it. Kuyper thought that Scripture provided only general principles for the political realm, that must be applied differently in different times and places; it did not provide a detailed theonomic blueprint--ergo, Kuyper was not a neo-Calvinist. However, I don’t think this is a tremendously significant point after all, because hardly anyone except a few die-hard theonomists would say otherwise. Even hard-core theonomists, in fact, would recognize that many features of the OT law should be adapted to changing circumstances in line with their “general equity.” Necessarily, Scripture’s teaching with reference to life in the civil realm is a matter of rational deduction and flexible application, not a matter of a timeless detailed blueprint.

But--and here’s the kicker--so is Scripture’s teaching on many matters, including many matters that are clearly within the ecclesial realm. Scripture does not, despite the desperate attempts of hard-line regulativists, provide us a detailed timeless blueprint for worship. It provides us with certain general instructions and illustrations, which we must use our reasons to adapt and apply. In fact, it does provide a detailed blueprint, but in the Old Testament, which we generally recognize cannot be applied directly to our current situation--rather, it must be sifted and applied in light of New Testament revelation and common wisdom. Or how about church polity? Here too, although clearly Scripture should be our authority on the subject, it is not terribly helpful in laying down the law with precision. Centuries of polemical struggle have failed to make the New Testament any clearer on how the government of the Church is to be organized. Oh, to be sure, we can figure out a number of things from the New Testament, rule out a number of possibilities, and, I think, establish the likelihood of certain conclusions. But ultimately, we must conclude that we do not have a detailed blueprint, and the Church must rely on its general wisdom, illumined by the Spirit and the light of nature, to ascertain how the general principles of Scripture are to be applied, and how much of the Old Testament can be carried over.

Note, then, that on two hugely significant issues about the spiritual kingdom of God, the “visible Church”--its worship and its polity--Scripture leaves us with general principles and with suggestive illustrations, but requires us to work out specific applications on our own. This does not seem to me all that different from how Kuyper envisions Scripture’s testimony on matters of culture, politics, and society--it gives us “ground rules, primary relationships, and general principles” without giving us “a complete code of Christian law.” Now don’t me wrong. There are still some important differences between these kingdoms, but I cannot understand VanDrunen’s argument: “If you grant that Scripture does not give us a detailed blueprint for X, then you commit yourself to saying (if you want to be consistent) that natural law, not Scripture, is the authority for X, and Scripture is in fact wholly unnecessary.” This is in fact a sort of reductio ad absurdum in favor of the theonomists. Theonomists, you may recall, were fond of arguing that if we did not allow that Scripture was, on its own, the sole, absolute, detailed standard for civil law, then we were erecting in its place another standard, a higher standard, so that reason, and not Scripture, was our highest authority. If this is true, then any time you use reason to help you interpret and apply Scripture, you are no longer letting Scripture be the highest authority! And yet VanDrunen here seems to happily accept the theonomic charge, and wants to insist that if Scripture does not provide us a precisely detailed standard, then it can provide us with no standard.

But, we have digressed far from Kuyper. It is also worth observing, briefly, that eager as VanDrunen is to rescue Kuyper from the neo-Calvinists and throw him into the camp of Reformed orthodoxy, this merely serves again to highlight the incommensurability of VanDrunen’s own commitments with Reformed orthodoxy. You may recall in the last chapter that VanDrunen chided even Thornwell for not sufficiently recognizing that the Church must refrain from offering any guidance on civil affairs, since Scripture offers no guidance for them. But Kuyper here has insisted that Scripture provides various principles for life in the civil kingdom, a position that VanDrunen has had to acknowledge ase consonant with the historic Reformed position. He has also provided us, incidentally, with a rather helpful and clear position on the relationship of natural law and special revelation, one which for the most part fits with historical Reformed reflection on these issues. This position can be briefly summarized thus: there is a natural law, implanted in creation--it provides the principles by which God intended creation to operate. However, because of the fall, creation no longer operates as it was intended to, and we are no longer able to properly grasp how it was intended to operate. Special revelation helps show us what natural law is supposed to look like, and corrects the misunderstandings into which we would be prone to fall if relying on our sinful intellects alone. The Gospel, then, does not try to divert the creation toward some new purpose, but helps show us what creation’s original purpose was supposed to be, and gives us the tools we need to realize that original purpose in this fallen world. Now, this is how Kuyper sees natural law, and this is, so far as I can tell, how most of the earlier figures that VanDrunen discusses saw it. And yet VanDrunen thinks that, on the whole, this provides evidence for his case. “See, they believed in natural law!” he shouts and waves; “See, they believed that creation had its own purpose, which it continues to have even after the Gospel!” Well, yes, but they believed that the gospel, that special revelation was necessary to help us realize all that. They did not believe that just because there was a natural law meant that it was completely self-interpreting and self-authorizing even in a sinful world. This is the lacuna that VanDrunen has never filled in his historical analysis--his idea that the natural law alone was fully sufficient for life in the civil kingdom. The earlier Reformers did not seem to make this claim, becuase they understood that sin got in the way of our understanding of natural law. VanDrunen continually gives lipservice to the problem of sin, but he never explains how his understanding of the sufficiency of the unilluminated natural law squares with a robust doctrine of human depravity.

Now, given that VanDrunen seems reasonably happy with these aspects of Kuyper’s thought (even when it is hard to see why), where does he identify the problem? Where is the tension in Kuyper, the tension that neo-Calvinists resolve in the wrong direction? The answer comes in the past couple pages.

First, VanDrunen says, “Kuyper believed that societies and nations could be ‘Christian’ even if few true Christians were in them, so long as Christianity had had a formative influence on the character of their culture. The point of tension is that the cultural life of such a society is then both ‘common’ and ‘Christian’ simultaneously. Since it exists on the terrain of common grace there is never anything new in it, as it simply develops the potencies inscribed on the original creation. Special grace, that is, the ‘Christian’ influence, serves merely to help the common realm develop these potencies better than it otherwise would. This is therefore a non-redemptive ‘Christian’ influence, a ‘Christianization’ that does not save or pertain to re-creation. Though Kuyper here is careful not to confuse the salvation or re-creation that is administered in the institutional church with the common preservation of the original creation in the other spheres of human endeavor, his use of ‘Christian’ terminology for both seems at best confusing.” (312-13)

Now, in objecting in this way, VanDrunen seems to want to put a wide chasm between the original creation, which is simply preserved, has its original “potencies” developed, and is not redeemed, and the “re-creation,” salvation, which is something entirely different. This isn’t how Scripture speaks: “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.” (Rom. 8:19-23) Sure, we could say that creation only has its original “potencies” developed, because the glorified new creation is what creation was built to become. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need outside help, just as a child will not develop the “potencies inscribed” on him without good parenting--thus grace must perfect nature (even in the absence of sin, I would tend to argue). But after sin, creation has been subjected to futility, and needs this redemption even more. Its redemption, its bringing-to-fulfillment, is bound up with our redemption, says Paul here. When Scripture speaks of “new creation” or “re-creation,” when Christ says, “Behold, I make all things new,” the picture is of a “renewed creation,” not of some totally new project that Christ decided to undertake. This is why, for all his problems and tensions, Kuyper can legitimately speak both of something being “Christian” in the sense of being itself within the locus of redemption--the Church--and of something being “Christian” in the sense of being in the sphere of common grace, of the original creation, as it is being renewed by redemption.

This problem is related to the second, which has come up before--this issue of the dual mediatorships of Christ. I have charged VanDrunen with latent modalism at this point, and he is not giving me much opportunity to back down from that charge. Kuyper too uses the language of dual mediatorship, but in a way that seems to me safe from heresy, as he makes a distinction without a separation--these are two distinct works of Christ, but they cohere in the same person and so are ultimately related and inseparable. But VanDrunen won’t have it:

“But once Kuyper makes this distinction and seeks to use it to construct his cultural and political program, theological coherence and clarity require considerably more precision in language than Kuyper exhibits. To distinguish between the Son as creator and the Son as redeemer entails that the title of ‘Christ,’ or ‘Messiah’--the Anointed One--in his special mission of becoming incarnate for the particular work of saving his people. The Son redeemed the world, but did not create the world, as the Messiah, the Christ. Therefore, for Kuyper to make the traditional distinction between two mediatorships and then defend the idea of the ‘Christianization’ of the common grace realm because it is the work of ‘Christ,’ is to confuse categories and language precisely where categories and language are at issue. If the Son of God creates in a different capacity from his capacity as redeemer, then he does not create as ‘Christ,’ and the terrain of common grace, grounded in the creation order, is not ‘Christian,’ no matter how noble it becomes.”

In other words, not only can you not attribute the same office to the person who does both of these works, you can’t even attribute the same name to the person, because that might lead us to think that there might be some kind of connection between these two things that he does! Let us not fall into the danger of attributing any more unity than necessary to this bifurcated person of Christ! In any case, VanDrunen is being exceptionally disingenuous in chalking this up to a confusion of language, because he himself has indulged in this same confusion repeatedly in this book (e.g., p. 180: “as creator and sustainer, Christ rules the temporal kingdom as the sovereign lord of all; as incarnate redeemer, Christ rules the spiritual kingdom as a tender savior”) as do all the major figures he cites. VanDrunen, immediately after this quote, grudgingly acknowledges that Turretin spoke this way, but, it was different, he says, because Turretin did not use this language in support of error. Ah, ok. Well, what about the Apostle Paul, who repeatedly uses the name “Christ” to refer to the Son in his eternal role of upholding creation and ruling every principality and power (e.g., Col. 2:2-3, 8-10), and Paul seems inclined to use this unity of name and person as a device to--God forbid!--confuse the offices: “He has delivered us from the power of darkness and confeyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence.” (Col. 1:13-18) Here Paul moves seamlessly between Christ as eternal mediator, ruler of the nations, to Christ as saving mediator, ruler of the Church. Paul wants us to see these two works of the one Christ in close relationship, as complements of one another. But, let’s not get overly distracted by the Bible, now. This is after all supposed to be history.

Just in case there’s any confusion, I should make clear that I am no Kuyperian, just as I am no Erastian. I would’ve identified myself self-consciously as a Kuyperian for a brief span between, if you really want to know, the eighth month of my seventeenth year (i.e., the year when I was 16) and roughly the fourth month of my eighteenth year. Since then, I have considered Kuyperianism a serious problem, indeed, for some of the same reasons VanDrunen does. One of the strongest points in this chapter was his criticism on the marginalization of the visible Church in Kuyper’s life and thought. I am wholeheartedly against that, and I think that an overemphasis on Christ’s kingship over the nations instead of his kingship over the Church is part of the problem. But here’s the rub. VanDrunen thinks he can solve this problem by completely separating Christ’s kingship over the nations (Oh, forgive me...I meant to say, “the Son of God’s kingship over the nations”) from Christ’s kingship over the Church; whereas I think, rather, that we need to much more closely bind Christ’s kingship over the nations to his kingship over the Church, and make the latter the source, so to speak, for the former. This is, after all, what Paul seems to do in 1 Corinthians 15, Ephesians, and Colossians, and what the author of Hebrews seems to do, so I’m pretty comfortable taking that route.

Taking Off the Gloves

Brad Littlejohn — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 20:10:00 +0000

June 26, 2010

In chapter 6, this book turn a turn from the wearisome to the farcical, and I’m afraid I lost my patience. I no longer have the patience to write 10,000 words slowly and politely deconstructing the argument of each chapter. Chapter 6, although massive (65 pages) and full of details crying out for attention, does not merit such time. So, I’m going to whip through it in one rather tempestuous segment. I’m going to promise to keep this under 2,500 words, though methinks I can dispose of it even quicker than that.

VanDrunen’s argument in this chapter seems to be that, although the universally-held position of the Reformers and their heirs for 150 years on the two-kingdoms was always hobbled by blatant inconsistencies, that they were unable or unwilling to recognize or expurgate, that finally, 270 years after the Reformation, in a new land across the sea, under the sunny influence of Enlightenment philosophy and still reeking of gunpowder from a recently successful revolution, the Virginian heirs of the Reformation finally realized what their forefathers had been trying to say but hadn’t been able to enunciate properly, and embraced the true, pure form of the two kingdoms doctrine--separation of Church and State. It turns out, though, that this isn’t his argument; it is only Stuart Robinson’s, a Civil War-era Kentucky Presbyterian who constructed this narrative so as to make his own bizarrely innovative position look historical. VanDrunen begins by appearing to endorse Robinson’s narrative, but on a closer look at the historical evidence, dismisses it for a still more fantastic one. No, it turns out, the Virginia Presbyterians in the 1780s did not consistently embrace two kingdoms teaching either, for they still thought it was fine for the Church to give its input on civil affairs. No, it wasn’t until another 80 years later, 350 years after the Reformation in the midst of an attempt to defend Negro slavery from ecclesiastical censure, that the true meaning of the two kingdoms doctrine was finally understood, in the idiosyncratic and novel teaching of Stuart Robinson and James Henley Thornwell. Finally, upon closer examination of these figures, VanDrunen concludes that, although they got close, these men too failed to purge the two kingdoms view of its inconsistencies and realize its true genius, because they too still felt that the Church might have something to say at least on the moral dimension of civil affairs. The true meaning of the Reformation view, it seems, continued to remain hidden to its heirs, until God brought VanDrunen himself along to purge it of its inconsistencies, and present it pure and unspotted before the world.

Purged of its inconsistencies? What a joke! How, I must ask, is one to make sense of the claims that the Church must limit its preaching, teaching, and application to the prescriptions of Scripture only, and that therefore the Church must confine itself only to spiritual affairs, offering no insight on civil affairs? What Scripture, I must ask, are we talking about, if it is one that speaks only of “spiritual” matters and has no insight to offer on “civil” matters, whatever those two terms might mean (and VanDrunen has yet to offer us anything coherent they could mean in his usage)? I’d best quote the whole paragraph in which this claim transpires, because you have to see it to believe it: “Thornwell suggests a position quite similar to Hodge’s, namely, that though there may be a relatively small class of ‘purely political’ issues, there are a wide range of issues for which the church and state have overlapping jurisdiction, namely, civil issues about which the Bible has something to say. Perhaps one cannot blame Thornwell too much for tripping on this matter, for the matter of assigning respective jurisdictions to church and state had tripped his Reformation and Reformed orthodox predecessors as well. As discussed in previous chapters, their incoherence involved enunciating the two kingdoms doctrine and then trying to find a civil aspect to religious concerns and thus entrusting magistrates with protecting religious purity as a civil responsibility. The issue here with Hodge and Thornwell entailed the reverse scenario. American Presbyterians had in significant ways (though not entirely) rejected the idea that the state was to enforce religious purity as a civil task. But Hodge, despite his stance against the Spring Resolutions, held on to common American Presbyterian notions that the church should project its voice directly into political and other cultural affairs. Insofar as Thornwell echoed similar concerns after enunciating his spirituality doctrine, he lapsed into incoherence by finding a religious aspect to civil concerns and thus entrusting the church with promotion of civil good as a spiritual responsibility. Thus, Thornwell’s thought illustrates the continuing difficulty with which Reformed theologians sought to apply their two kingdoms doctrine in a theoretically and practically consistent way.”

Well, I bet he lapsed into incoherence, because it’s impossible to enunciate something like Thornwell’s spirituality doctrine without doing so. But tell me, Dr. VanDrunen, why it is incoherent to find a “religious aspect to civil concerns?” Oh wait, you can’t do that, because you’re just a historian, right? Could’ve fooled me.

The root problem here is, as I have insisted before, the methodological separation of Reformed political theory from Reformed political practice, as if the former could be established without reference to the latter, and then used to prove that the latter was incoherent. Notice how VanDrunen puts it above: “their incoherence involved enunciating the two kingdoms doctrine and then trying to find a civil aspect to religious concerns and thus entrusting magistrates with protecting religious purity as a civil responsibility”--as if there were a temporal sequence: first they enunciated this pristine “two kingdoms doctrine” and then they tried to find a civil aspect to the religious side of it. But of course, it wasn’t like that...it was all part and parcel of the same theory. And, simply as a matter of historical probability, it is extraordinarily unlikely that for hundreds of years, all the proponents of this theory consistently failed to say what it was they meant to say, consistently failed to see that their “real” theory differed from the one they sought to propound and apply. As it turns out, unsurprisingly, it was not. Their real theory simply wasn’t what VanDrunen tries to make it out to be, as Steven Wedgeworth very neatly summarizes here: http://www.credenda.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=218:two-kingdoms-critique&catid=96:theology&Itemid=122. Again, I can’t really imagine how it could’ve been, because I still can’t find a way to actually make coherent sense of what this “pure Two Kingdoms” theology is, in VanDrunen’s mind.

Essentially, then, what VanDrunen is asking us to do is to suspend our historical disbelief in order to try and imagine a fictional real doctrine lurking hidden behind the stated Reformed teaching, and he asks us to make this leap into historical incoherence in service to a theological proposition that he has never made any effort to establish the coherence of, because he’s supposedly just a historian. I’m sorry, I just can’t go with him along that road any longer.

The worst part is that the would-be heroes of the fantastical narrative of this chapter just aren’t very good heroes. John Cotton appears as the villain, because after all, he persecuted Roger Williams and wouldn’t allow religious freedom. In the words of Brian Regan, “Wow, you’re breakin’ some new ground there, Copernicus.” VanDrunen makes little effort to go beyond traditional prejudices here. That doesn’t mean I’m a fan of John Cotton; no, but I’d much rather go with him, a man of principle, than the next set of actors that strut across the stage--the Virginia Presbyterians in the 1760s-80s. These men, VanDrunen wants to say, finally broke free of the bonds of inconsistency that had tied up the Reformed tradition for centuries by espousing the separation of Church and State. But then, it turns out, as even VanDrunen must regretfully admit, that actually they didn’t do this out of principle, but simply because they happened to be the religious minority in Virginia, and “Separation of Church and State” was a way of getting the Anglican establishment off their backs. When the opportunity presented itself of them being co-established alongside the Anglicans, they jumped at the opportunity, before lapsing back into separationist mode as soon as the opportunity disappeared. Hardly the most principled lot. In any case, VanDrunen is unhappy with them himself, because they failed to see that, as a corollary of freeing the Church from state control, they needed to keep the Church from, on its part, giving advice to the state. Oh, heaven forbid that the Church might ever want to do anything like that--that would be too much like...oh, I don’t know...Isaiah? Elijah? John the Baptist? Jesus Christ?

So onto the stage strut our pair of arch-heroes, Negro servants in tow, grovelling as appropriate--James Thornwell and Stuart Robinson. VanDrunen momentarily entertains some doubts that perhaps their motivations in keeping the Church out of anything besides “spiritual affairs” were more a matter of trying to protect slavery than of theological principle, but tries to gloss over these objections: “The consistency of and motivation for Southern Presbyterian advocacy of the spirituality of the church are interesting and difficult questions, but this section will delve into them only lightly.” (249) Wait, hang on a second--it might well be that the masterminds of your pet doctrine actually just cooked it up so they could hold onto their African slaves, but you don’t see that that really matters to your point? Actually, it makes sense that VanDrunen would not think that it matters, because this kind of mind/body dualism has been an operating principle all along--if he can just distill the intellectual theological essence of the doctrine, it does not matter what ugly practical applications it was wrapped up in. This is perhaps understandable for a systematic theologian, but it is just bad history. A footnote acknowledges the debate over Thornwell and Robinson’s motivations, but while it lists six sources that have been written to make the case that slavery was their chief motivation, it lists only two for the contrary position, one of which hardly counts, because it is by D.G. Hart, a buddy of VanDrunen’s who has the same polemical axe to grind.

But again, whatever we are to think of the ignoble heroes VanDrunen has scripted for us, we come back to the same mystifying question--just how is it that Scripture--we are talking about the same Scripture, right? Genesis through Revelation, 66 books and all that?--does not have anything to say about, to use Robinson’s words, “wrong moral views of social and civil affairs,” and not just wrong moral views, mind you, but wrong moral practice? (If you think that was a convoluted sentence, at least it wasn’t as convoluted as this paradigm.)

Essentially, what VanDrunen leaves us with are the alternatives either to accept his historical narrative and grant that the Reformers must’ve chucked Scripture out the window as soon as they started thinking about these matters, or else to trust that the Reformers must’ve had a few ounces of Biblical sense and so discard his historical narrative. I’m no big fan of the Reformers’ political theology, but I know which alternative I’ll take.

(There, only 1914 words..)

The Procrustean Paradigm (VanDrunen Review V.4)

Brad Littlejohn — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:04:00 +0000

June 25, 2010
If you're getting tired of VanDrunen, I don't blame you. I did too, as you'll see in the next installment after this one that I'm going to post. The new website is still under construction, but should be up soon. In the meantime, anyone out there who's really into two kingdoms theology in the 17th century can read on.

In the concluding section, VanDrunen endeavours to reconcile this two kingdoms theory with its practical application in seventeenth-century Reformed political thought. At this point, he finally turns to take note of documents such as the National Covenant, and cites passages in Althusius, Rutherford, and Turretin where they insist upon a relationship of mutual harmony and support between Church and State, each assisting it in its duties, and correcting it if it fails. VanDrunen is certainly troubled by all this, and regarding the Church’s instruction toward the civil authority, he says, “if there are even different primary standards of authority in the civil and ecclesiastical realms (natural law and Scripture, respectively), then there seems to be reason to doubt that ministers, whose training lies in spiritual things, have the competence to offer useful and even authoritative instruction on political matters” (195).

However, he does not want to simply dismiss these figures as completely inconsistent; while acknowledging that there was certainly some inconsistency, he wants to show the way they articulated this relationship is in many ways consistent with the kind of two kingdoms theology and natural law theory they propounded. I appreciate VanDrunen’s honesty at this point, though as I argued earlier, his flawed methodology inevitably distorts the picture, since, instead of trying to understand their doctrine in light of their practical application of it, he tries to establish it on independent theoretical grounds, and only at the end makes certain adjustments and concessions in light of the practical application. This means that the significance of these adjustments and concessions is easily lost, and in the conclusion, VanDrunen quickly moves to reassert his master-narrative, suggesting that these thinkers were hindered by their Christendom context from drawing the proper conclusions from the theological groundwork they had laid.

What are some of the adjustments/concessions made in this section? Well for one, we find that these thinkers reconciled the magistrate’s care for religion with their two kingdoms thinking by distinguishing “between caring for religious affairs civilly or spiritually, externally or internally, with respect to the body or the soul. Repeatedly, Reformed orthodox writers permitted the magistrate care of religion only in a civil, external, bodily way, never in a spiritual, internal, or soulish way” (199). In other words, yes, these thinkers did believe there were two kingdoms, but the division between the two kingdoms was drawn between oversight of the body and its actions on the one hand and oversight of the soul and its actions on the other, not between “secular” affairs on the one hand and “religious” affairs on the other. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that drawing the distinction this way is a very problematic way to draw the distinction, and one that will land you in contradictions before long, but this is clearly how these thinkers intended to draw the distinction. It will not do for VanDrunen to come along and say, “Well, what they really meant to say was that one kingdom was civil and therefore secular, and the other was spiritual and religious.” Reformed theologians gave an enormous amount of thought to political theology, and had a good idea of what they wanted to say about it, and that is clearly not what they meant to say. Now, if VanDrunen wants to say, “The Reformers provided certain categories and arguments which we can use in order to argue that one kingdom is civil and therefore secular, and the other was spiritual and religious,” well, then, more power to him, but in that case, he needs to very clearly separate his historical claims from his contstructive theological claims, something he has yet to do.

Another adjustment/concession regards the use of natural law. Natural law, claims VanDrunen, particularly in the form of the Decalogue, rather than Scripture (the irony in that sentence is not lost on me, but I’ll leave it to VanDrunen to try and resolve it) was the source for their teaching that the magistrate should have the care of religion. Now, even if VanDrunen can successfully make that argument (which does not prove very easy to make), what are we left with? Well, we’re left with a doctrine of natural law that tells us rather a lot about how religious affairs should be conducted, not a natural law that restricts itself to secular civil affairs, which is clearly the kind of natural law that VanDrunen wants to propound. Again, it will not do to say, “Oh, well, what they meant to say regarding natural law was that it tells us simply of moral, civil duties toward our fellow man, and not of how we ought to conduct ourselves toward God and in the Church.” That is clearly not what they meant to say.

To my mind, these fellows are not very inconsistent with themselves, at least not in the ways that VanDrunen feels compelled to admit; however, they are very inconsistent with the alien paradigm VanDrunen seeks to foist upon them. In his concluding remarks, VanDrunen laments that “Reformed orthodoxy, like Calvin, seems to waver between two ways of speaking. It speaks in Diognetian, Augustinian terms of a civil realm whose characteristics imply a common area between Christians and non-Christians, and it speaks in Gelasian terms of the civil realm as part of a unified Christian society which, alongside the spiritual realm, is governed by two complementary authorities” (207). Perhaps there is a simpler way of putting it. Perhaps what all these thinkers are trying to say is that Christianity is not of the esse of the civil realm, but it is of the bene esse. Yes, it is possible for unbelievers to form a civil society, and to function passably within it on the basis of what they can grasp of natural law; however, for those who have the benefit of Christian truth, it is clear that civil society will function much better if it it oriented toward the pursuit of the true religion. This is a fairly clear, consistent way of putting the matter, and certainly seems to make sense of everything these fellows are saying. And yet, VanDrunen seems unwilling to put it this way, as he seems personally convinced that the bene esse of civil society consists in remaining formally secular. Once again, the historical task gets clouded by the constructive theological task.

Two Kingdoms=Two Christs? (VanDrunen Review V.3)

Brad Littlejohn — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

June 24, 2010

In the section on the doctrine of the two kingdoms in the age of Reformed orthodoxy, my suspicion is immediately aroused by VanDrunen’s invocation of the Scottish Presbyterians as leading proponents of two kingdoms thinking. These Scottish Presbyterians are often known as “Covenanters” for their signing of the National Covenant in 1638, a document that united both civil rulers and churchmen in the task of protecting the Reformed religion in Scotland. This document repeatedly blurs together civil and ecclesiastical concerns, going so far as to cite passages such as these from Parliamentary Acts:

“Seeing the cause of God's true religion and his Highness's authority are so joined, as the hurt of the one is common to both; that none shall be reputed as loyal and faithful subjects to our sovereign Lord, or his authority, but be punishable as rebellers and gainstanders of the same, who shall not give their confession, and make their profession of the said true religion” and “That all Kings and Princes at their coronation, and reception of their princely authority, shall make their faithful promise by their solemn oath, in the presence of the eternal God, that, enduring the whole time of their lives, they shall serve the same eternal God, to the uttermost of their power, according as he hath required in his most holy word, contained in the Old and New Testament; and according to the same word, shall maintain the true religion of Christ Jesus, the preaching of his holy word, the due and right ministration of the sacraments now received and preached within this realm, (according to the Confession of Faith immediately preceding,) and shall abolish and gainstand all false religion contrary to the same.” These passages are quoted, mind you, not in order to contest them, but as the legal basis upon which the Covenanters take their stand. They go on to pledge their resolve to faithfully serve both the King and the cause of true religion, since these two are inseparably conjoined, and to resist equally enemies of the king and of the true religion.

Documents like this should be enough to tell us that, whatever the sense in which these fellows may speak of “two kingdoms,” it is certainly not in the sense VanDrunen has in mind. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that some of these fellows have some troubling things to say. For instance, we again find some strikingly dualistic language. Turretin is at pains to state that the redemptive kingdom “is not mundane and earthly, but spiritual and celestial” (177) and “Rutherford distinguished between one kingdom ruled by God as creator (and hence temporal and mundane) and the other kingdom ruled by God as redeemer (and hence spiritual and heavenly)” (177). Now this “and hence” befuddles me--both of them do. Why should creation necessarily be merely “temporal,” and thus, in this context, temporary? In this picture, it is as if God just created a physical world for kicks as something he was just going to dispose of a little later on in favor of a “spiritual, heavenly” world. On such a model, how are we to take the current creation seriously at all, or attribute any significance to life in the body? And why should redemption be necessarily “spiritual” and “heavenly,” as if God could not possibly redeem this earth or our earthly existence, but could only redeem us out of it, or redeem some “spiritual” dimension of our existence that floats uneasily above this world? This sounds more like Manichaeanism than Christianity. Of course, Turretin and Rutherford are far from the only Christians to speak this way--such dualism has been a long-standing malady in the Church. But inasmuch as much recent theology has helped us to break free of it and return to a more Biblical, creation-affirming stance, I find it bizarre that VanDrunen wants to lead us back into captivity, as it were.

But there are still more troubling problems in this section. Remember that whole scary bit about the extra Calvinisticum and the dual kingship of Christ back in the chapter on Calvin? Well, VanDrunen finds all this more systematically and explicitly stated by Turretin. He summarizes Turretin’s statements thus: “Christ rules the one kingdom as eternal God, as the agent of creation and providence, and over all creatures. Christ rules the other kingdom as the incarnate God-man, as the agent of redemption, and over the Church. The latter kingdom is redemptive, the former is non-redemptive. The latter is exclusive, the former is inclusive” (177). This kind of sharp separation of two distinct roles in Christ raises significant questions of Christology and Trinitarian theology. Such sharp discontinuity implies that these two different kingships of Christ have no essential relation to one another; they are just two different offices that happen to be filled by the same person, just as (to use the example I used above in chapter 3) I happen to be both an investment advisor and also a research student in Reformation political theology, two widely distinct roles that have little effect on one another. Such hat-wearing may be common enough in human affairs, but orthodox theology has long recognized that it is problematic for theology. The heresy of modalism was condemned precisely for such a hat-wearing view of God. God, the modalists claimed, was not really three distinct persons, but was one person who opted to reveal himself under three different guises, carrying out three different offices. Now, that’s not what’s going on here, but the same basic concern presents itself. The problem with modalism, orthodox theology contended, was that it asserted a sharp discontinuity between the immanent and economic trinity, between who God was and how he revealed himself. God manifested himself in history as three agents, and yet he was only one agent--if this was true, then God had not truly revealed himself. Don’t we have the same the same problem with this bifurcation in Christ? Christ manifests himself in Jesus of Nazareth as redeemer, and this self-revelation bears little or no relation to his pre-existent role as the eternal Son who governs a creation without redeeming it. How does Jesus Christ faithfully reveal to us the Father, then, if he is not even a faithful witness of himself?

Moreover, we might well ask, what exactly is the theological point in asserting that it is Christ, the second person of the Trinity, who executes this kingship over creation, “as eternal God, as the agent of creation and providence, and over all creatures”? This office bears no relation to his distinctively Christological work, to his distinct second-personhood within the Trinity, but rather appears simply as a function of his generic God-ness. In what sense is it Christ who exercises this particular kingship and not rather God the Father? This turns out to be no mere idle question when we see how Samuel Rutherford assigns the two kingships--to “God as creator” and “God as redeemer.” VanDrunen takes note of the distinction in language: “while Turretin speaks of the temporal kingdom as ruled by Christ as God, with the Father and Spirit, Rutherford simply speaks of this kingdom as ruled by God (the creator). But the theological idea expressed by these theologians is substantively identical” (178).

He returns to it later, at more length: “Rutherford’s language is similar though not identical to Turretin’s, and their substantive theological claims are the same. As noted above, Rutherford put the temporal kingdom under ‘God the creator’ and spiritual kingdom under ‘Christ the Redeemer and Head of the Church.’ In speaking futher about the former, he writes that it is ‘not a part’ of Christ’s spiritual kingdom and thus states bluntly that the civil magistrate ‘is not subordinate to Christ as mediator and head fo the church.’ Along similar lines, he says later that ‘magistrates as magistrates’ are not ‘the ambassadors of Christ’ but ‘the deputy of God as the God of order, and as the creator.’... In light of this evidence, I suggest that Turretin and Rutherford teach the same doctrine in these passages, though from somewhat different angles. Turretin answers Yes to the question whether Christ rules the temporal kingdom, but with qualifications (i.e., that he does so only as eternal God, with the Father and Holy Spirit, as creator/sustainer); Rutherford answers No to the same question, but with qualifications (i.e., that God the creator does rule this kingdom). When the qualifications of each are compared to the other’s, the effect is the same. To put it as precisely as possible, they both teach that the Son of God rules the temporal kingdom as an eternal member of the Divine Trinity but does not rule it in his capacity as the incarnate mediator/redeemer” (181).

In his haste to reconcile Turretin and Rutherford here, VanDrunen has, in my view, stumbled headlong into what looks like serious Trinitarian heresy. Rutherford’s viewpoint, whatever its weaknesses, seems to me to at least be theologically coherent and safe, if I am correct in interpreting “God the creator” to mean for him “God the Father.” In this model, God the Father creates and governs the world, and delegates authority to magistrates as governors of the world, and God the Son redeems this creation, and delegates authority to the Church as a redeemer of the world.” This basic model certainly needs work, but it is reasonably stable and has been frequently employed in political theology. But what Turretin (and certainly what VanDrunen) is saying seems different. They posit a disjunction between what the Son does in his own person, and what he does as a member of the Trinity, as generic God. This suggests that there are four agencies in the Godhead--one for each of the persons, and one for “eternal God”--the unity of the three persons, thus turning the three-in-oneness of orthodox theology into a three-plus-oneness. Moreover, it suggests that, while one of the Son’s offices is executed coordinately with the Father and Spirit (that of governing creation), another is unique to him as Son (redeeming the world), thus violating the fundamental dictum of Trinitarian orthodoxy: “in the opera ad extra, the works of God are undivided.” We must affirm that, in all his work, the Son works both uniquely as himself, and coordinately with Father and Spirit as a member of the Trinity. Finally, we have here what looks like undisguised modalism: a sharp rift between what the Son does (and thus, who he is) as incarnate mediator, and the Son as “eternal member of the divine Trinity”--in other words, the incarnate mediatorial work of Christ turns out to just be a hat-wearing, an identity fundamentally separate from the eternal life of the divine Trinity, and of the Logos himself. To put it simply: for VanDrunen, Jesus Christ the Son of God does not even really show us himself, the Logos, much less show us the Father, as he claimed to do. He is merely an avatar.

The only way to avoid this frightful conclusion, it seems to me, is to insist, with the New Testament, on the deep unity between Christ’s work as creator and as redeemer, as the one “by whom all things were made” and the one who “makes all things new.” The opening to the Gospel of John makes this all as clear as one could wish (what follows is my own translation, as literal as possible):

“1 In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

2 This one was in the beginning with God.

3 All things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be that came to be.

4 In him was life and the life was the light of men.

5 And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness overtook/understood it not.

6 A man named John came to be, being sent from God.

7 He came for a witness so that he might bear witness concerning the light that all might believe through him.

8 That man was not the light but he came that he might bear witness concerning the light.

9 He was the true light who lightens every man who is coming into the world.

10 He was in the world and the world through him came to be and the world did not know him.

11 He came unto his own and his own received him not.
12 As many as received him, to them he gave power to become sons of God, to those who believed in his name,

13 those who not from blood nor from the will of the flesh nor from the will of man but from from God were born.

14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the unique one from the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 John bore witness concerning him and cried out, saying, "This was of whom I said to you that he coming behind me should become before me, because he was earlier than me."

16 And from his fullness we have all received and grace because of grace.

17 For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth through Jesus Christ.

18 No one has seen God at any time, but the unique Son, who is in the bosom of the father, that one has exegeted him.”

This passage is uncompromising: it is the Word who was God and through whom all things came to be that himself became flesh, whose glory, that is to say, whose true dynamic identity, we witnessed, from whose fullness we received grace. In him from the beginning was the life that by his life he brought to the world. From the beginning he shed the light of his grace in the world, and finally he came to offer in himself the fullness of grace to the world which he had created. In so doing, he perfectly revealed (“exegeted”) not only himself as he had been from all eternity, but also God the Father. This Word who becomes flesh is not only the Creator from all eternity, but is redeemer from all eternity, and comes into the world so that men his creatures might become “sons of God”--what they were created to be in the beginning.

Now, how exactly all this cashes out in terms of the nitty-gritty of political theology, and of Church and State, still needs a lot of work. But it is at least clear that, however we cash this out, we cannot do so in a way that seeks to drive a wedge between Christ the creator and Christ the redeemer.