RSSRethinking National Confession
To the RPCNA I owe my new life in Christ. She is my mother and I dearly love her.
In loyalty to my mother I have tried to work through her doctrine of the mediatorial Kingship of Christ over the nations and to defend its 20th Century application National Confessionalism. I have always found National Confessionalism more acceptably moderate than the radicalism of theonomy.
Finding very little content to the RPCNA’s doctrine, I have used the DRC to work out a biblical theology to defend the National Confessional position. Keeping in mind past excesses and failures, I hoped to root a renewed National Confessionalism in the fertile soil of broader Christendom. I looked to Edmund Burke, T.S. Eliot, and Russell Kirk to guide my efforts.
Today, I acknowledge something of a failure. Not that my work at building a biblical theology of Christ’s Kingship has failed. Rather, I have failed to convince myself that National Confessionalism is a worthwhile outworking of the doctrine. I have talked myself out of the National Confessionalist position.
I remain whole heartedly committed to Christ’s Kingship over the Nations. I remain wholeheartedly committed to the belief that nations are moral persons, corporately responsible to God and His anointed King. I stand behind almost every word I have written in my DRC column. Yet, as I have worked through the relationship between corporate responsibility of nations and the doctrine of the two kingdoms I cannot help but think that I have developed a more convincing biblical theological justification for the traditionalist understanding of the American religious settlement within our own Constitutional order.
Further, had the preamble of the US Constitution reflected the Kingship of Christ, I believe that we would be waging the exact same fight as we are fighting today. The Christian amendment was always a purely symbolic gesture. In itself neither harmful or helpful. I will not waste another drop of ink defending it.
The belief that nations are a morally responsible community of souls binding the dead, the living, and the unborn, a robust doctrine of the two kingdoms, the Spirituality of the Church, the continuing relevance of the moral law, and a traditionalist conservatism rooted in the wisdom of the West… these things I will continue to defend against all foes.
C Brown
March 14th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Bill,
This is a good and honest statement. I think the key here is “the belief that nations are moral persons, corporately responsible to God and His anointed King.” That’s the doctrine we can’t lose, and that’s the doctrine we have in common with much of historic Christendom. However, national confessionalism doesn’t necessarily follow from that belief. You’ve tried to make that connection, but have not been able to. I can’t make that connection, either. I’m open to hearing an argument for national confessionalism from someone else, but our church seems to be largely silent on the matter. You’ve been a lone voice in the wilderness. Good work in the DRC columns.
W.H. Chellis
March 14th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Thanks Charles. I cannot help but come to the conclusion that Edmund Burke is a better guide than William Symington. Messiah the Prince is a good read but Burke fought back the foes of Christendom.
Andrew Matthews
March 14th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Bill, I’m sorry you’ve lost faith in the traditional RPCNA position. I disagree that a national confession would be purely symbolic because a formal commitment to the Kingship of Christ would be but the beginning of a corporate commitment to the observance of his laws. Further, it would make it more difficult for secularism to pass itself off unchallenged as the de jure cultural authority.
Your statement assumes that the American religious settlement has been maintained in an objective reality outside Russell Kirk’s brain. Certainly, Burke defended the American experiment, but did he really turn back the foes of Christenom?
Traditionalist writer Jim Kalb has writen:
“As an explicit political view, traditionalism in America has most often taken the form of reverence for “the ideals of the Founding Fathers,” that is, for liberalism as it stood at the time of the American Founding. By suppressing the development of liberalism that reverence minimized the harm it did.
“The American state, especially the federal government, has primarily been a contract for material ends. Traditionalism has therefore needed arrangements that tend to make popular habits and customs independent of the state, and those arrangements were a prominent feature of the regime established by the Founders. They included limited government, decentralization, local democracy, and informal social control through a combination of nondoctrinal Protestantism, moralism, and traditional habits and prejudices.
“While logically weak, this compromise between liberalism and traditionalism worked, and held up remarkably well in the face of Lincoln’s war against the South, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the foreign wars of 20th century internationalists. Both sides gained from it; traditionalism needed liberalism for legitimacy, and liberalism needed traditionalism for survival and stability. The result was a political order that could satisfy both liberal and traditionalist impulses as long as neither went too far.
“In recent decades the great compromise at the heart of American political life has fallen apart. In spite of resistance, liberal principles came to be understood and applied more and more comprehensively, until social unity could no longer be based on the moral authority of those long-dead white propertied slave-owners, the Founding Fathers. A destructively pure form of liberalism became authoritative in American public life, and ruling elites came to understand traditionalism as a threat to public order and denial of political morality.”
Kalb also writes:
“Established liberalism relies on the traditional relationships and understandings it despises, and on the way of life of the ordinary men whom it insults and attacks.
“The results of the opposition between liberal aspirations and the permanent conditions of human life include liberal guilt and the slow self-destruction of liberal societies. Because social compulsion must rely on inequality and on cultural values that are not fully rationalized, liberals view their own societies as fundamentally unjust. When in control they therefore use their power to destroy the social order they dominate.
“As the liberal state develops, so does its opposition to traditional arrangements. [The current attempts to eradicate "racism," "sexism," "homophobia," "classism," and] the like are attempts to destroy normal moral ties — those consisting in obligations to particular men based on specific affiliations such as family, ethnicity and religion — and replace them with abstract bureaucratic arrangements thought more rational and just. A problem with such attempts is that bureaucracy and abstract altruism simply do not have the force of concrete obligations to family and friends. The attempt to rationalize social life therefore weakens men’s sense of mutual obligation, leading to soaring crime rates and welfare costs, social ill-feeling, and other serious ills. Since the liberal state can not recognize the source of its ills without very seriously weakening its claim to legitimacy, they remain unremedied and grow worse.”
The entirety of Kalb’s essay “Traditionalism and the American Order” may be found at http://turnabout.ath.cx:8000/node/15
W.H. Chellis
March 14th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Thank you Andrew, for your thoughtful response.
I am afraid that to accept your critic one has to accept that the American founding was inherently liberal event to be damned in the name of authentic crown and alter Toryism. This is the path that looks back to Monarchism as the only true conservatism… and of Divine Right to boot.
The problem is that this demands a form of conservatism that is essentially un-American. For better or worse, American conservatives must make their peace with Whig Republicanism and chose the ordered liberty of Burke/Machen over the Spanish/Austrio-Hapsburg fascination of the L. Brent Bozell and the Triumph crowd.
Re-Thinking the National Covenant « Heidelblog
March 14th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
[...] 14, 2008 in Reformed Ethics, Two kingdoms Tags: national covenant, Reformed Ethics, two kingdom I think I could live with this. Maybe Bill will get me to join the RPCNA [...]
Andrew Matthews
March 14th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Yes, Bill, this is correct. My judgment is that the founding was inherently liberal in principle, containing within it the seeds of the destruction of the Western tradition. This is because our only common creed is the unimpeded right of the individual to follow his bliss. Freedom has become the only ethical value honored by our society.
I would be content to accept the American settlement as a lesser of two evils if I thought it was still honored by the moderate progressives in our midst. However, it appears the only people committed to it are on the right, who are increasingly being pushed to the periphery and viewed as reactionary.
mtuininga
March 15th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Bill, thanks for your earlier link to my essay. I’m wrestling with some of the same questions in my series at CorC, though perhaps from a slightly different perspective.
I’m curious, where in your current opinion, does this put Psalm 2?
W.H. Chellis
March 15th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Thanks for the question Matt.
The answer is that my opinion has not changed. Nations must kiss the Son and Western Christendom was not a mistake. I remain a champion of the West as it includes the Ancient patrimony of Israel, Greece, and Rome, the synthesis of these things in early Christianity, the restoration of the gospel at the Reformation, the ordered liberty of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Kiss the Son includes obedience to Christ as King. The question to me is- what does this obedience look like? I find the simplistic answer of a Constitutional Amendment to be reductionist and kind of silly. It is, to say the least, not the battle of our day.
Iohannes
March 16th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Pastor Chellis, in light of this conclusion, is the RPCNA justified in continuing her existence as a separate denomination? Boston’s sermon on “The Evil and Danger of Schism” already had me wondering about that question, and this post leads me to think about it some more. If Durham was right that the “making up of a breach is no less a duty than the preventing thereof,” might the RPCNA serve Christ better by seeking unification with other similarly confessing churches like the OPC?
W.H. Chellis
March 17th, 2008 at 7:38 am
Good question. The short answer is probably not. Not because of my conclusion about constitutional amendments. Rather, because covenanter culture and a peculiar people as so degraded. This is partly a failure to thrive on the part of the Blue Bloods and partly an immigration problem from all of us new folks. At any rate, worship… psalm singing… is really all that we have that sort of makes us distinct. It may be enough to re-root and reestablish a credible community with respectable boundaries.
Unions lead to liberalism in Protestant churches so I am wary. I would certainly listen to a proposal for NAPARC union. Especially is it allowed for some of the organic differences to be cherished and not abolished.
Peterjg
March 17th, 2008 at 10:59 am
My assumption is that the peculiar doctrine of National Confessionalism rests on the idea of Christendom as its foundation. The ideal of a Christian European culture is the bottom, at its top is the political implication - NC.
W.H. Chellis
March 17th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Well, let me reiterate that my own peculiar doctrines rest upon the idea of Christendom rooted in Christian European culture. I am just not interested in offering novel amendments to the American Constitution.
D Hart
March 18th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Bill: I appreciate the candor. Where I differ is still with the idea of Christendom. I think it admirable in many respects, but I also think it contains the seeds of the church’s dissolution. But we’ve been here before.
What in a nutshell is your “more convincing biblical theological justification” for traditionalism? It doesn’t sound like your theology has changed really. Just that the policy proposal of a constitutional amendment is no longer necessary.
I wish I could welcome you into the Truly Two K club, but I need further clarification.
W.H. Chellis
March 18th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Indeed. My theology has not changed only a break with the RP policy project. I affirm the social Kingship of Christ and all that I wrote under the banner of the corporate responsibility of nations. At the end of the rope I find all that I have written proves only that nations are moral persons greater than the sum of their parts… and that therefore morally responsible to God (and therefore to His Christ).
I understand what you mean about the seeds of the churches dissolution. I am afraid that the church in this age is always sowing seeds of its own dissolution and depending on Christ to provide renewal and blessing.
One problem is that Christendom is not self-defining. I suspect we agree on much even on this question. Still, I cannot help but cling to something so vital to the tradition of the West. What would we be conserving without it?
W.H. Chellis
March 18th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
DGH: I actually think that we are not that different in our actual theology. One of the greatest defenders of Christ’s Mediatorial Kingship over the nations was that champion of the spirituality of the church James Henley Thornwell. Actually, I think that Southern Presbyterianism represents culturally and socially something of a high water mark of Protestant Christendom even if their ecclesiology sometimes left a bit to be desired.
My conception of Christendom is deeply Protestant, staunchly two kingdom, and uniquely Anglo-American. I view America as more of a tradition than an experiment. A tradition with deep roots in the ancient world, the medieval synthesis, the Anglo-Scottish Reformation and the Enlightenment. America is the West. Not a revolt against Christendom but a maturation (mixed with a bit of rebellion and innovation some of which worked well and some of it not so well).
It seems to me that the corpus of D.G. Hart fits well into this tradition. I think he is also a friend of this Christendom, no?
D Hart
March 18th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Bill: since you’re getting evangelical and giving a testimony I’ll join in and say that I am a friend, ally, and defender of the West. Obviously, Christendom is crucial to those developments. But I fear that Christendom ended up denying Christ. That’s why I’m skeptical about Christendom and more partial than any good conservative should be to Locke.
DavidVance
March 19th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Beloved Brethren, I believe the DRC is a very important forum for the discussion of so crucial (though so amazingly neglected) a subject as the mediatorial kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ and its implications. Would you please allow me a brief bit of constructive criticism? Although the topics being debated are of the greatest importance, I have noticed that the arguments and opinions are generally expressed with very, very little reference to Scripture. Unlike many of you who were blessed by the preaching of an RP church, I had to come to these doctrines on my own with very little outside help. But it was definitely the overwhelming exegetical support for the various “RP” doctrines that convinced me. And people in the church will not be convinced–and how much more will the world remain convinced!–until ministers especially can make a powerful case from the word of our God. Instead, capable and godly people outside the RP (such as our wonderful contributor and scholar D. Hart) will remain absolutely unconvinced; and even ministers inside the RP (such as our gracious host W. Chellis) will gradually abandon these precious doctrines.
Doctrines which are foundational to the position and which are the most trivial to establish according to Scripture, such as the corporate judgment of heathen nations (e.g. deregnochristi.org/2007/04/07), have been challenged and left completely undefended by God’s word. Speaking as an outsider, the national confessional position will never be reached unless the “steps” leading up to it are established and firm. Instead, more people can be expected to abandon it.
Therefore, allow me to propose that at least the posts which begin these important discussions could offer some Biblical basis for the doctrines proposed for discussion, and then the subsequent comments may follow with more holy light. Hopefully, the whole site could become a persuasive apology not only to outsiders like myself who more recently found it, but even to its leading contributors.
I hold the leading contributors to the blog in the highest honor, and I do not think my name is even worthy to follow the name of “D Hart” on this post. You men are much, much more capable students of the Scriptures and the ones who should rightly debate these issues. I only hope that the perspective of an outside reader and a minister of the gospel will be helpful to you and to the glory of the King.
W.H. Chellis
March 19th, 2008 at 10:29 am
David Vance: Thanks for your note. Can you let me know when you find a passage that says that nations are only Christian nations if they have thus stated in the preamble of their written Constitutions? As Fisher Ames reminds us, written constitutions are just words on parchment.
DavidVance
March 25th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Thanks, Bill. I would be very glad to give extended Scriptural support for the national confessional position. But before I expend my short time as a minister providing documentation and arguments–perhaps selling some RP-coal to RP-Newcastle–I’d like to have your buy-in on what this position actually is.
I realize that you had your tongue firmly planted in your cheek in your reply–and I appreciate the humor. But just for the record, you don’t really think the NC position is that “nations are only Christian nations if they have thus stated in the preamble of their written Constitutions,” right? The position up for debate is, of course, summarized in the RPCNA Testimony 23.1-31, right? And if you wish, you could help me further by noting the part(s) you’ve actually “talked yourself out of,” and would allow me to try to talk you back into.
Perhaps I could just begin by offering Scriptural support that heathen nations did and should confess subjection to our God? And then we can proceed to debate whether “every nation ought to recognize the Divine institution of civil government, the sovereignty of God exercised by Jesus Christ, and its duty to rule the civil affairs of men in accordance with the will of God” (23.4).
And as I said, I would much rather discuss the word of God than the word of people like Fisher Ames. But maybe your quote is getting to the root of your actual objection. Are you really, in fact, arguing that a nation’s rulers do not truly serve the Lord and kiss the Son (Ps 2:12) if they ONLY confess it but do not ACTUALLY practice it according to the Scriptures? I certainly will not debate that!
Aren’t you really objecting that the “cities in the land of Egypt” might indeed “swear by the LORD of hosts”–as they ought to!–but then not truly fulfill (Isa 19:18)? Hence the real national confessional position is that “a true recognition of the authority and law of Christ in national life can only be the fruit of the Spirit’s regenerating power in the lives of individuals” (RPT 23.2, see whole chapter).
Perhaps the argument should turn on whether it WAS right for kings officially to confess both personally (Dan 4), and nationally (Dan 6), and even to exhort their whole nation to bow before the Lord (Jonah 3)? Were they not required to GIVE glory to to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Dan 5:18-23, Isa 10:15, Acts 12:22-23), and not simply obey Him? Mustn’t the nation obey the first and second commandments, depart from heathenism and idolatry (wow, where to start here among almost all the prophets, but take Dan 5 again, Amos 5:26, Isa 2:17ff, 19, Jer 46 esp v. 25, 50:2,38, Rev 18:3, etc), but rather bow before the King of kings (Isa 49:7, 52:15, 60:3, Ps 72:10-11, Rev 21:24)?
I hope we can both agree that not only must the national tongue confess, but the national knee must actually bow–because no matter what is officially done in the past, what is actually done in the present is essential for nations to avoid the superscription of the divine judge: “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.” Jer 18:7-10!
– David
“I make a decree that in every dominion of my kingdom men must tremble and fear before the God of Daniel. For He is the living God, And steadfast forever; His kingdom is the one which shall not be destroyed, And His dominion shall endure to the end.”
W.H. Chellis
March 25th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
David,
I find nothing to disagree with in your post and have argued this position here at DRC and will continue to do so. Nations are moral persons. Christ rules.
I do not understand National Confessionalism to be the same as the RPCNA Testimony’s position but the 20th Century name for what is essentially the Christian Amendment movement. No real good ever came out of this movement. It was essentially the lobbying arm of the RPCNA (and I am flatly opposed to churches being involved in political lobbying even through back door operations like the NRA (National Reform Association) or the CAM (Christian Amendment Movement). The National Confessional position was argued for in the 1986 God and Politics discussion at Geneva College and published by P&R. Bill Edgar gave a credible stab and I find nothing objectionable in his position.
The problem with the position is that it has always simply aped the Scottish Covenants (National and Solemn League) which were political disasters. It gave an ideological edge to the Covenanter’s Whiggish politics that I am supremely uncomfortable adopting as my own.
I prefer to defend Anglo-American Christendom, warts and all, as an improvement on what came before and worthy of being preserved against what may follow. My objections are not to anything that can be proved or even sited in Scripture but how these things are applied.
The odd thing is that although I am with the National Confessionalist’s every step of the way on Scripture, when it comes to application and policy I am almost always in agreement with the Darryl Hart’s and David VanDrunens. That is the problem with application, isn’t it. It almost always goes beyond the Scriptures themselves and incorporates a lot of precommitments and philosophical assumptions.