RSSScott Clark throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
Our friend R. Scott Clark continues to slay the Federal Vision (and soon he will have an opportunity here at DRC) but he is helping to confirm one of my fears today… that the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater. At first I assumed the baby in question would be a high Presbyterian ecclessiology (but that would not be a Scott Clark mistake… but plenty of PCA folk will be tempted in this unfortunate direction). Rather, it is a confessionally Reformed view of the civil magistrate that got shot out the window!
Here is what Scott wrote over at the Heidelblog:
Theonomy, theocracy, Christendom revived are all important elements behind the FV movement. I’m not sure that all the FV proponents are theonomic, but most of them are and all of them support the revival of Christendom and the civil enforcement of the first table of the decalogue.
“As I’ve said many times, Christendom was a mistake. Jesus didn’t institute a civil kingdom. I thought he made the pretty plain to Pilate. He didn’t call down angels. He died. He rose. He poured out his Holy Spirit. He instituted the preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments and discipline in a the visible, institutional church.
Where did the apostolic church seek to “take back” the Roman Empire for Christ? Where did the earliest church institute its program of cultural transformation.
That’s what I thought. Didn’t happen. Why not? Because it’s not appropriate to the New Covenant people. The national, temporary covenant was instituted with Israel and expired with the crucifixion. It’s done. Christendom (and priestcraft) is an attempt to revive what’s been fulfilled and discarded.
Back of the whole “transformationalist” agenda is also back of the pietist/mystical agenda: to make the faith really “true” again, as if it isn’t really true if one hasn’t had an immediate encounter with the risen Christ or if it isn’t kicking heinies and taking names. In other words, its a form of unbelief. It’s impiety dressed as piety. It’s seeking a kingdom whose builder and maker is not God. It’s seeking an abiding city in this world. It’s the inverse of Heb 11. It’s Judazing.
Other than that, it’s good fun.”
I am not a transformationalist, I am a conservative. To claim that the last 1800 years of Western History was a mistake is a liberal form millenialism!!! It smacks of Peasent revolts, Jacobin clubs, and starting the world anew.
That said, I have but one question for Professor Clark…. were the members of the Synod of Dort judaizers?
Daniel Howe
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Can’t help but feel that there’s a bit of clericalism behind this idea that there is nothing to Christianity but the ministry of the word and sacrament. It’s as if the activity of teaching the word was most important–not the life-transforming word itself (yes, I said transforming). I have been irritated for years by the many sermons ABOUT preaching that I have heard from conservative Reformed pastors. Maybe it’s an unfair assessment, unfaithful to the reformation tradition, whatever, to say so, but pastors and theologians reducing Christianity to only the work of pastors and theologians is shameless self-promotion. Every week a sermon on the pastor’s job’s legitimacy. “Why I deserve my salary.” No wonder the world looks on preaching as irrelevant.
Sorry to vent my spleen: no doubt Scott et al. mean something completely different.
Phil
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:39 pm
It’s misguided to claim that Jesus made W2K “pretty plain to Pilate.†Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world.†He did NOT say, “My kingdom has nothing to do with this world.†Rather, the origin of his kingdom does not come from this world; that’s a far different claim from Scott’s.
On a related note, I was a bit shocked when I recently revisited Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture on what he calls the “dualist†position, Luther’s view. I would have thought that W2K would belong under this umbrella. My surprise, however, was Niebuhr’s several pages showing how the “dualist†sees the results of sin everywhere, yes, in both kingdoms. For instance:
“The dualist differs from the synthesist [Thomist] also in his conception of the nature of corruption of culture. . . . Thus in the dualist’s view the whole edifice of culture is cracked and madly askew; the work of self-contradicting builders, erecting towers that aspire to heaven on a fault in the earth’s crust. Where the synthesis [Thomist] rejoices in the rational content of law and social institutions, the dualist, with the skepticism of the Sophist and positivist, calls attention to the lust for power and the will of the strong which rationalizes itself in all these social arrangements. . . . Hence the dualist joins the radical Christian [the Anabaptists, but later he includes Calvin and Augustine] in pronouncing the whole world of human culture to be godless and sick unto death†(pp. 153–156).
The problem for W2K is that if the left hand kingdom inescapably demonstrates the effects of the Fall, then it also is in need of a Savior. Given that Christ finished his work on Calvary, redemption then can have an effect in the left hand kingdom.
This lack of a social hamartiology is why some have taken Niebuhr’s model to link cultural Christians (liberals) with the synthesists (Thomists): both fail to observe the structural effects of sin in the left hand kingdom. On this dimension, then, W2K properly belongs with liberalism and Thomists in its view of sin in the left hand kingdom. (Scott thinks this implies Manichaeism, but Niebuhr explicitly rejects this claim; cf. p. 149 in C&C.)
GAS
August 2nd, 2007 at 6:43 pm
One word: Anachronnistic
sixteenninety
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:10 pm
I agree that to “claim that the last 1800 years of Western History was a mistake is a liberal form millenialism”. However, a portion of Dr. Clark’s argument rings true as well, viz. that we we don’t need programs per se to “take back” anything.
As I understand it, the turning of men’s hearts by the work of the Holy Spirit, will effect the social change we all desire. With much more efficacy than the sword, no doubt.
I agree with Montesquieu that “The Christian religion, which ordains that men should love each other, would, without a doubt, have every nation blest with the best civil, the best political laws; because these, nest to this religion, are the greatest good that men can give and receive.”
[look Bill, I quoted a papist!]
stevez
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:08 am
Well what else are you supposed to do with illegitimate children?
Steve