RSSRE:Does anyone really read the WCF
Darryl, there you have it.
Christ is Lord over both secular and sacred. We are agreed.
You insist that Christ is as much Lord over Saddam Hussein or Hilary Clinton. I say Amen. He was Lord over Nero and thus Christians were called to submit to their secular rulers in all things lawful and/or indifferent. Psalm 2 pictures Christ reigning over rebellious nations. So again we are agreed.
Your book insists that Christian liberty and American political ideas of liberty are of a different species and that confounding them is dangerous. I agree. Submission to tyrants because we are free in Christ is the biblical command. Political liberty arises out of historical development and is not the God given gospel right of every Christian in every place in every time. We are again agreed.
Do we agree on this… the rebellious acts of individuals who have rejected Christ will ultimately be judged? I suspect we do. Just so.
But if we can agree on that… can we agree that nations (which is a more important category that that of states) will be corporately judged? As Roger Scruton notes, “Like a firm or a church, a nation-state is not merely a collection of individuals. It is a moral and legal person, which acts on its own behalf and is liable for what it does. The nation-state can therefore be praised and blamed, hated and loved, and the form of membership that it offers is also a bond of trust between individual citizens and the corporation in whose decision-making they share.” (West and the Rest, pg. 135).
D Hart
April 7th, 2007 at 11:02 am
My first response is: I don’t know what the Lord will do on judgment day with either the Kingdom of Lesotho or the U.S. of A. I’m willing to listen to arguments from the Bible about what God will do on judgment day to princes and rulers. But the exegesis could be faulty.
My second response is: I don’t think God will judge nations (individual rulers like GWB and Hitler is another matter)in the same way he will judge persons. This may be where we disagree, but it is where I see Bill veering off toward Kuyperianism and the notion of redeeming politics. I believe that redemption is only relevant to men and women, boys and girls who can confess Jesus Christ as Lord. That’s what sessions do when they admit persons into membership in the visible church. I see no provision in my BCO for admitting nations. How would you possible administer the Lord’s Supper to a nation?
Is that where we disagree? If so, is Scotland still under discpline?
W.H. Chellis
April 7th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I do see, in Rev. 21, the existence of nations bringing their glory into the New Jerusalem. This is not the same as a state having a redemptive aspect. Yet, I do not think that the New Heaven’s and earth will be populated by a homogenized “heavenly race” but will continue be inhabited by the grand diversity of nations in their glorified state.
As for judgment on the last day. I am not God waits. The trash heap of history is littered with nations that have refused to kiss the son. Maybe Tolkien is right, history is the “long defeat”. Maybe all nations as they represent the kingdoms of men are doomed to ultimate rejection of Christ and ultimate rejection by Christ. Cultures decline, Empires fall, nations disappear. But defeat is ends in glorious victory on the last day, no? What brought glory to Christ will be restored and enjoyed forever? Just so.
D Hart
April 7th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Populated with citizens of different nations is one thing. That is something relatively easily accomplished without a Christian state or magistrate. But nations kissing the son as in Scruton’s idea of nation is entirely different. I see no warrant for it and it makes little sense of the personal ideas of redemption that have developed in the West.
I think this is a major sticking point. I feel like the word nation keeps being used differently and the larger sense of nation seems to validate the idea of faith-based/ faith-inspired politics.
Please come clean.
W.H. Chellis
April 7th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
I have as clean as a whistle. I have been making the case of the corporate duty of nations toward the kingship of Christ all year in the pages of the Witness and on this blog.
This is where we differ. Of course it is the individual that is justified, sanctified, and glorified. So? Is heaven a cosmopolitian mishmash? Or will the redeemed of the nations continue to enjoy the physcial implications of “blood and soil” even in the New Heaven and New Earth.
This raises our second disagreement. In fact, as you began by suggesting, it turns on an eschatological question. Not a difference of postmillenialism vs. amillenialism (I am have happy amillenialist and have a romantic fascination with “fighting the long defeat.” Lost causes are the only ones I raise my sword to defend, it would appear. Rather the difference is between our respective views of continuity vs. discontinuity between this world and the next.
My expectation of glory is of a place that I know quite well. The place that I was born, the place where I raise my children, bury my dead, and live my life. This place, only without sin having been glorified as the distinction between heaven and earth has forever erased.
Nations, family (ok no marriage… family is complete), nations, culture, worship all tied together in eternal bliss.
D Hart
April 7th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
But Bill, think about the discontinuity between Israel and the church. That discontinuity was what threw so many Jews off. They were expecting the Messiah to be a national political figure. It wasn’t happening. A very new order emerged and it was one that made no sense of a holy land or a phyical Jerusalem. I can’t imagine why the next stage of redemptive history will be any less dramatically different. (Just think — having bodies that could procreate but won’t. That’s pretty different.)
And as far as coming clean, I think you need to go back and wash your mouth out. On the one hand you insist on the corporate duties of nations toward Christ the king. On the other hand you glide into persons from the nations. I see these as two different ideas, realities, something. And yet I think we keep stumbling over what I consider to be an elision of concepts. Yes, I believe the elect will come from every nation. To quote Bill Chellis, “So?” Just because individual Canadians may be elect, I’m not expecting Ottawa to make Christ king. Even more, I’m not sure how you make Christ king corporately — unless, that is, you are talking about the church.
There I’ve said it, we disagree on this point — you think Christ can be king in his work as mediator over corporate bodies other than the church (read: states and families). I don’t. And appealing to the word “nations” in the Great Commission doesn’t convince me.
Peace Out.
Andrew Matthews
April 10th, 2007 at 2:42 am
So Dr. Hart, you don’t think Jesus’ mediatorial (i.e., messianic) kingship applies to corporate bodies other than the Church. Redemption is only applicable to concrete individuals, men and women, boys and girls.
But are you really being candid here? Haven’t you already allowed that the Church is a historic corporate entity and that redemption therefore has societal scope? The seven (historical) churches of Revelation were certainly treated as corporately responsible for their characteristic sins.
The institution of the family is also a challenge to your theories. Children are baptized on the basis of God’s promise to Abraham: “I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you” (Gen. 17:7).
Notice that God unilaterally established an “everlasting” covenant with the faithful ethnic descendants of Abraham. God’s promise, fulfilled in the circumcision of Christ, is the basis on which children of believers are incorporated into covenant. This is precisely where continuity between Israel and the Church is located.
Since familial relations are incorporated into the covenant, what obstacle can there possibly be to extending the covenant further to include clans and nations? In Romans 9-11, Paul treats ethnic Israel as a corporate entity that God still has dealings with. Unless we are dispensationalists, we must allow for the inclusion of Israel in the Church!
It is perfectly possible for a corporate entity (the Church) to include other corporate entities (nations) in its scope.
So, how would you possibly administer the Lord’s Supper to a nation? Simple: the public representative of a nation acts on behalf of his people as the covenant head. At his coronation ceremony, the crown prince receives communion. As long as he is king and continues to confess faithfully, everyone in his realm who receives communion has fellowship with him.
Like circumcision, baptism represents one’s entrance into family membership and national citizenship, as well as ecclesiastical affiliation.