The Dominion Mandate in This Age, to Infinity, and Beyond

If you have been following Doug Wilson's posts on my book Dual Citizens, you will have noticed that the theme of dominion has come up quite a bit, especially among his commenters. The complaints usually go something like this: Genesis 1:28 talks about how Adam was to take dominion over creation, and yet Stellman's focus on the believer's identity as a pilgrim and exile fails to do justice to the dominion mandate given by God at creation."

Assuming that this is a faithful summary of the critique, I would like to offer a response.

I agree that God told Adam to exercise dominion over creation, and I agree that Adam's dominion-taking would have helped usher in God's eternal kingdom, a kingdom which would have brought with it eternal life and Sabbath rest for Adam and his posterity. But where many go wrong, in my view, is in the fact that they seem to stop reading at Genesis 1.

After the Fall, God tells man that the elements of prelapsarian life, such as marriage, childbearing, and labor are to continue on, albeit in a context of curse. In a word, these aspects of life will now be perverted to reflect the curse sanction that God had pronounced on creation due to Adam's rebellion. Marriage will now be a power-struggle, childbirth will now be painful, and bread will now be produced through sweat and an uncooperative earth. The same is true of the dominion mandate.

The dominion motif comes to the fore again after the flood, only now Noah is to practice his mastery over creation in the context of a covenant that is not redemptive but common, a covenant made "between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations" (Gen. 9:1-17). As shown by the inauguration of the kingdom of man in Genesis 4, the cultural work of human hands is valuable for building a temporal, common kingdom, but due to the Fall, our cultural endeavors cannot bring about the kingdom of Christ (a kingdom which Jesus said "is not of this world").

What, then, of the dominion mandate?

We read in Psalm 8 a divine commentary on Genesis 1:28, one in which David speaks of man thus:

You have made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet... (vv. 5-6).

Sounds great, right? It sounds like the dominion mandate is still in force, reiterated in all its prelapsarian glory. But again, we need to keep reading. When we come to Hebrews 2, which is a commentary on Psalm 8 (which is a commentary on Genesis 1), we see a truly Christocentric interpretation of the dominion mandate. According to the writer,

Now in putting everything in subjection to [man], [God] left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see Him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone (vv. 8b-9).

Talk about an already/not yet hermeneutic! According to the author here, there is a promise to man of dominion that is still outstanding and unfulfilled, one which we do "not yet see." But what do we see? "We see Jesus" who, like Adam, was made for a litte while lower than the angels. He is the One who exercises dominion, the One to whom has been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Will we, the men and women whom Jesus represented and whose nature he assumed, ever get to share in this dominion? Indeed we will, but the writer to the Hebrews insists that this dominion is "not yet." Immediately preceding the quotation from Psalm 8, Hebrews says:

Now it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking (v. 5).

The implication is that though this present fallen order is not under man's control, the world to come will be. The conclusion, then, is clear: The dominion mandate of Genesis 1 has not been revoked, but due to the Fall, man cannot by his own cultural labors usher in the power and glory of the kingdom like Adam could have. Rather, this promise is now reformulated Christocentrically, with Jesus experiencing "the dominion of the resurrection" now, as demonstrated in his ascension to the Father's right hand. We, on the other hand, do not see these things with our eyes, but only embrace them by faith and hopeful cross-bearing. The day will come, however, when faith will give way to sight and the cross will give way to glory. On that day, and not before, "the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ," and we will reign with him forever and ever.

I Like My Ecclesiology Salty and Subversive

Chapter Two of Dual Citizens: Worship and Life Between the Already and the Not Yet is titled "The Irrelevance of Relevance: Grits, Salt, and the Assembling of the Saints." I begin the chapter by drawing a contrast between grits, the southern delicacy that has no taste of its own but instead takes on the flavor of what is added to it, and salt, the condiment that Jesus described as "good for nothing" if it loses the distinctness of its flavor. The purpose of this culinary observation is to show that the Christian church should be more like salt than like grits; in other words, instead of chameleonically changing our colors to adapt to the world around us, the church should seek to retain its distinctiveness and peculiarity in the culture.

Our sacred activity, such as hearing God’s Word and receiving the Lord’s Supper, therefore, is about as unique and countercultural as we can get, while our secular activity is just the opposite—it is thoroughly common. It is primarily on Sunday, therefore, rather than on Monday through Saturday, that believers display their peculiarity and distinc­tiveness from the world.

This means that the church’s main task, as simplistic as it may sound, is to be the church, to be, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, “a new people, an alternative polis, a countercultural social structure.” They con­tinue: “The church does not exist to ask what needs doing to keep the world running smoothly and then to motivate our people to go do it . . . The church has its own reason for being, hid within its own mandate and not found in the world. We are not chartered by the Emperor.” This does not mean that the church ceases to be influential, but that the church’s influence is of an altogether different—and often unwanted—variety. “[We] seek to influence the world by being the church, that is, by being something the world is not and never can be.”

It seems to me that the evangelical church gets things precisely backwards at this point. Rather than being distinct from the culture on Sunday and part of the culture the rest of the week, they seek to be as distinct from the world as they can during the week, but as familar and non-threatening to the world as possible on Sunday. Hence the demand for Christian T-shirts and bumper stickers in order to stand out from the culture when they should be participating it it, and hence the market-driven desire to supply tailor-made worship experiences for Christian consumers (be they traditional, contemporary, or emergent) when they should be expressing their otherworldliness. Michael Horton is spot-on when he describes this approach as "ecclesial apartheid."

Darryl Hart has argued that the church's attempt to be relevant inevitably results in our sacralizing the secular and trivializing the sacred. Instead, argues Horton, "genuine relevance is found not when the church tries to be relevant, since repeating what people already think is rather boring. Genuine relevance is found in contradicting the wisdom of the world that we entered the church with on Sunday morning."

When the church fails to embrace this salty and subversive role in the culture, then, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon (quoting Barth), "God is reduced to 'MAN!' said in a loud voice."

Tyrants in the Pulpit, Victims in the Pew

There is a pastoral element to the two-kingdoms model that many people fail to appreciate. One of the main functions of this way of thinking is to protect the congregation from ecclesiastical tyranny, and more specifically, from being subjected to a constant onslought of extra-biblical opinions being forced upon them by their ministers.

The reason for the failure to appreciate this, I think, is that when a theory is being implemented properly, you just don't really notice when it avoids potential problems. I mean, if I had cancer or leprosy or some other such malady, I'd probably notice that I suffer from them. But how often do I notice my not-having-cancer-or-leprosy condition? Pretty much never.

Now a pastor could never actually pull this little stunt off, but I think it would be a fun experiment for a minister who holds to the two-kingdoms model to subtly depart from it for a few months without telling anyone. Preach the cross and empty tomb a little less, and preach about social issues a little more. This would work especially well if said pastor's views on cultural matters were not exactly the "correct" ones that the congregation would agree with.

Can you imagine it?

"OK, this Sunday at Random Presbyterian we're beginning a new 16-week series of sermons entitled 'The Christian Worldview.' In the weeks to come we'll be considering from Scripture such exciting topics as 'War ON Terror or War OF Terror?', 'Love Thy Neighbor: A Defense of Universal Healthcare,' and my favorite, 'Nike: Shoe Company or Babylon Mother of Harlots?'"

As silly as this sounds, it demonstrates precisely what the doctrine of the two kingdoms protects the church-goer from. In other words, it's all fine and dandy to beg your minister to speak out against cultural evils, but what happens when he takes your advice and rails against issues you support and defends the ones you decry?

We have six days out of every seven to "do earth," so on Sunday you'll just have to pardon my heavenly-mindedness and forgive me if I want to focus on things like Word, water, and wine. If this is "irrelevance," sue me, because the day I become "relevant" as defined by this age is the day I quit pastoring and take up professional punditry.

On Elves, Centaurs, and the Ease of Cultural Eutycheanism

I'd like to follow up on something I said in my review of C.J. Mahaney's Worldliness.

I certainly appreciate the way Worldliness concludes with some instruction concerning how to love the world without loving it—affirming, as it were, that “This Is My Father’s World” and that “This World Is Not My Home”—but I still feel that the world gets a bit short-changed by Mahaney and the other contributors.... The Reformed distinction between the sacred and secular realms can be understood within this framework, with the former referring to heavenly realities and the latter denoting earthly ones. But Worldliness explicitly denies this distinction, with Purswell actually calling for its “demolition.” According to him, the dominion mandate should guard us from being “plagued by the tendency to compartmentalize some aspects of our lives as spiritual, good, and holy and others as unspiritual, unimportant, and amoral” (p. 155). Setting aside his failure to read the dominion mandate through the lens of New Testament eschatology, Purswell’s forcing us to choose between an earthly pursuit’s being either “holy” or “unimportant” is a false dilemma that omits the option of “common.” If art, sports, or cooking are neither demonic nor divine, then there is no reason why they cannot be enjoyed for their own sakes without the added pressure to baptize, redeem, or in some sense Christianize them.

If we "demolish" the distinction between the sacred and secular, it seems to me that all we are doing is allowing the former to swallow the latter, with all of life now becoming holy. The problem here is that the very definition of "holy" is "set apart." Now, if something, whether a place or a day or a vessel, is to be "set apart," there must be something it is set apart from. But if everything is holy, then does this not empty "holiness" of all its meaning?

(Kind of like how for Calvinists God's mercy only makes sense in the light of the doctrine of reprobation, Rom. 9:22-23.)

I really appreciate Chesterton's point about the core doctrine of Christianity, the hypostatic union, involving two seemingly antithetical ideas (the human- and divine natures of Christ) perfectly united in one Person. Jesus wasn't an elf (a non-man) or a centaur (a half-man), but he was at the same time truly Man and truly God. Taking this and applying it more broadly, Chesterton argues that when the prophecy that the lion will lie with the lamb is fulfilled, it will not be due to the lion's becoming lamb-like (which would be brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb). Rather, the lion will retain its ferocity while choosing not to give expression to it at that moment.

What does this all have to do with the sacred and the secular? Well, allowing one to swallow the other is easy, but it's also a kind of cultural Eutycheanism (which, when done in Christology, is heretical). Rather, we ought to be true lovers of the world and true haters of it, affirming that "This is My Father's World" and that "This World is Not My Home" (which, when you think about it, sort of necessitates two kingdoms).

Paradoxical, yes. But what about our religion isn't?

Is the Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms the Historically Reformed Position?

In his essay titled "The Two Kingdoms Doctrine and the Relationship of Church and State in the Early Reformed Tradition" (Journal of Church and State, Autumn, 2007), David VanDrunen points to Calvin as advocating the position that has become known as the doctrine of the two kingdoms (hereafter 2K).

The Geneva Reformer explicitly distinguishes between what he calls the civil and spiritual kingdoms, highlighting three distinctions between them. First, the spiritual kingdom is redemptive in character while the civil kingdom is a realm of God’s providence rather than his redeeming grace. Second, the spiritual kingdom is heavenly while the civil kingdom is earthly. Lastly, Calvin argues that the spiritual kingdom finds its present expression exclusively in the church, while the civil kingdom expresses itself in such realms as government, science, and the arts.

VanDrunen then turns his attention to theologians from the heyday of Reformed orthodoxy. Rutherford, for example, distinguishes between "the kingdom that is of this world" that "fights with the sword," and "the kingdom that is not of this world" that "fights not with the sword." He calls the former "the magistrate’s kingdom," while referring to the latter as "the church and kingdom of Christ." Elsewhere, Rutherford speaks of "the kingdom of this world" and "Christ’s other kingdom, that is not of this world."

Turretin also follows Calvin in distinguishing the two kingdoms: "Before all things we must distinguish the twofold kingdom belonging to Christ; one natural or essential; the other mediatorial and economical." The "natural" kingdom, writes Turretin, is "over all creatures," while the "mediatorial" kingdom is "terminated specially on the church."

One can say what one will about the 2K doctrine, but he will be hard pressed to demonstrate that it was not held by Calvin and the seventeenth-century theologians who followed him. Look where you please, what you will find is a distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the civil and spiritual, and between cult and culture.

So I guess my question is, If the 2K position is thoroughly Reformed, why are those who hold it today looked upon with such suspicion?

What Hath Washington To Do With Northhampton (Or Bush With Westminster)?

In a back issue of Modern Reformation magazine, D.G. Hart reviewed two recent biographies of George Washington (George Washington’s Sacred Fire by Peter A. Lillback and Washington's God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country by Michael Novak and Jana Novak). Hart pointed out a bit of irony that a cynical Gen-Xer like me can really appreciate. After remarking that “Washington's conventional Anglicanism is the main reason for Lillback and the Novaks' joint conclusion that our first president was not a deist,” Hart says:

The effort to recover the orthodox Christian Washington has a remarkable unintended consequence…. In building a case for his exceptional character and integrity, [both authors] mention that “it would be a happy event if all presidents conducted themselves, to at least the extent that Washington did, as good Christians ... in private and in public.”

The argument of Lillback and Novak, then, is that Washington’s devout Anglicanism demonstrates the important and beneficial role his Christianity played in shaping his presidency. Yet there’s a problem.

But in recovering a place for orthodox Anglicanism in the formation of the United States, these authors have also unwittingly undermined the heart religion promoted during the revivals of the eighteenth century that continue to set the pace for American Protestantism. For if Washington's faith was sufficient to pass the litmus tests of orthodoxy and sincerity, then the extra credit demanded by revivalists that believers not simply believe but demonstrate faith visibly in their daily lives was unnecessary. In other words, if Founding Father’s faith was truly Christian, then revivalism’s criteria for true holiness was excessive. Proponents of the Religious Right have rarely seen that to have a Christian George Washington is to ignore an enthusiastic Jonathan Edwards, or that to retain born-again Christianity is to abandon the religion of the founding generation of American statesmen. This is the unintended benefit of these books, an outcome that shows again the curiosities that result from mixing politics and religion.

Darryl is absolutely spot-on here. The Religious Right can’t have its cake and eat it too, for if George Washington exhibited true Christianity then Jonathan Edwards was a fanatic, but on the other hand, if Jonathan Edwards described true Christianity then George Washington was merely one of those cold, dead, unconverted pretenders that Whitefield and Tennant made careers out of denouncing.

*

We see a similar trend in our own day, albeit in the opposite direction. Confessional Reformed types will argue until they’re blue in the face (or red, to be more precise) about the benefits of having a Christian president like George W. Bush, while at the same time their own confessions describe a Christianity that is churchly and covenantal, and that is characterized by such doctrines as infant baptism, Sabbath keeping, and a high view of the work of Christ (things which President Bush shows little sign of esteeming).

And to add to the irony, the same people who will go to the mat to prove the sanctified status of Washington’s soul stood vehemently against Barack Obama and overwhelmingly favored John McCain, though the latter clearly disliked the Christian Right and the former is a devout church-goer.

Maybe the fact of the matter is that we just like who we like, but we are too incapable of arguing for good earthly policies on their own terms that we need to find biblical justification for every extra-biblical preference we have. If we would only recognize two distinct but legitimate kingdoms, we could save ourselves the hassle of joining together what God hath put asunder.

Grace Elevating Nature, Heaven Legitimizing Earth

In the Modern Reformation article entitled "Church or Political Action Committee?", Michael Horton contrasts the Reformed position concerning the church's role in society with that of Catholicism. He writes:

"In its doctrine of creation, Rome ranges reality on a hierarchy of being. As a consequence, human beings are consituted hierarchically, with the rational spirit at the top of the ladder, animal soul somewhere in the middle, and the body at the bottom. This hierarchy plays itself out in Christendom, with the pope at the highest rung, followed by the magisterium, the priesthood, monks, and the laity, with its own sociopolitical hierarchy of emperor, nobility, gentlemen, and serfs."

The Catholic position with respect to the relationship of the sacred to the secular, according to Horton, is rooted in the Church's "scale of being" ontology. He continues:

"In Rome's view, the purpose of grace is to elevate nature toward the supernatural--away from the lower self (the body with its senses and emotions) toward union with God. The married life is good, but the celibate life is better; the state is legitimate, but only because it participates in the divine grace of the church; the active life of the laity is acceptable, but the contemplative life of the monk or the spiritual service of the priest is better."

Contrariwise, Reformed theology teaches that the "dualism" that Scripture highlights is ethical (sin /grace) and eschatological (earth/heaven) rather than ontological (body/spirit). The result of this is the idea that God is sovereignly exercising lordship over this world by means of divinely-ordained institutions like the state without the need to transform the state or legitimize it with a holy errand or identity.

I am curious to hear your thoughts on this issue. While I am very familiar with the Reformed view on these matters, I would like to hear if the Catholic view does indeed see a connection between "grace elevating nature" and "church validating state" or "heaven legitimizing earth."

On Overlap and Eschatology

I mentioned earlier this month that on one level it is impossible for anyone to hermetically seal off her theology from her views on matters civil and earthly. This is not due, however, to the line separating the kingdoms being blurred or erased, but to the fact that the believer herself straddles that line.

The overlap, then, exists not within the earthly and heavenly kingdoms themselves, but within us as we attempt to navigate them in this age.

For my own part, the overlap is probably most evident in my thoughts being drawn to the identity of the underdog, the powerless, and the oppressed. I recently re-read the words of black writer Langston Hughes in his 1930s poem "Lenox Avenue Mural":

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet?

Or maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

There seems (to me at least) to be an affinity between the status of the civil and spiritual underdog. I'm not saying that to be powerless in one sphere is to be the same in the other (the two kingdoms remain distinct), but I am saying that it is not without significance that Jesus described the blessed man as the one who is spiritually poor, mournful, thirsty, and persecuted.

Since my theological convictions—particularly my amillennial eschatology, which I regard as simply code for "suffering now, glory later"—are such that I have come to consider the church's underdog status to be normative and even conducive to her health, it is only natural that my thoughts are also drawn to the powerless in the civil kingdom as well. In a word, I tend to side with the weaker of the two sides in most disputes.

And the flipside of this is that I can't help but wonder how those whose earthly affinities lie with the wealthy and powerful cannot necessarily be uncomfortable with a poor and powerless church?

Maybe others can be more "regally schizophrenic" than I can, but I would have a much easier time with the War on Terror if I were a postmillennialist.

On Hermetic Sealing, Overlap, and Boys Who Cry "Wolf!"

I have been noticing some misunderstandings with respect to the doctrine of the two kingdoms that I'd like to try to clear up, if I may.

First, two-kingdoms theology does not teach that one may not factor in any of his Christian presuppositions when considering an a-religious topic. As some of my faithful readers have ably pointed out, no individual can seal his various viewpoints off with such hermetical precision.

While we distinguish between what the Bible clearly teaches and that to which it may be loosely applied (think the Trinity and economics respectively), we still may say that my view of the latter may be informed by certain theological presuppositions about, say, the imago Dei. But we must also allow that another who shares those presuppositions may come to a different conclusion about the issue in question.

Secondly, two-kingdoms thinking does not deny that there is cultic/cultural intersection and overlap in discussion about difficult issues. But it is crucial to remember that the tension does not lie in the kingdoms themselves. The kingdom of Christ is concerned with spiritual and eternal affairs and advances by Word and sacrament. The kingdom of man, on the other hand, is furthered by carnal weaponry for earthly and temporal ends. Both are legitimate and God-ordained, but distinct nonetheless.

I, however, happen to live in both of them, and hence the tension. Though for the most part I can distinguish a secular issue from a sacred one, that doesn't mean that I can as easily identify where my own existential lines are drawn.

Finally, we must realize that the more contemporary issues to which we seek to apply the Bible, the less authoritative the Bible will become in the eyes of the world. In the same way that paying off our nation's debts by printing a few trillion dollars will devalue our currency, so citing chapter and verse to prove both justification by faith alone and the value of laissez faire economics will only serve to lessen rather than increase its relevance. If you're going to cry "Wolf!", there'd better really be one, at least if you want the townsfolk to take you seriously.

Is God Libertarian, Green, or Somewhere In Between?

In my post entitled "Eschatology Precedes... Pretty Much Everything" I raised the question of whether political activism would be more prominent in a transformational church, or in a church holding to a two kingdoms paradigm.

My guess is that most readers assume that my own position is that transformationists are more likely to be politically involved than 2K folks. I'm not so sure, though....

When the universal Lordship of Chirst over "every square inch" of the universe is (mis)used as an excuse to collapse the various spheres of his sovereignty (effectively forcing upon the Church the responsibility to transform every facet of culture from the arts to plumbing), politics becomes a lot more daunting than it would be if those spheres were properly recognized.

Think about it: If we jettison common grace (and common sense along with it) and convince ourselves that the Bible is our only source of economic and politcal wisdom, then any view that we adopt about anything, if it is to be considered a valid option for Christians to hold, must necessarily be the divinely-sanctioned position. Every political debate, then, will be over whether the Bible's vision is Libertarian, Green, or somewhere in between.

But if we are content to let the Bible be determinative only for those issues that it actually addresses in detail (like, say, the gospel), then the believer will be free to allow his conscience, study, and overall experience of the world to play a role in the forming of his own political opinions and involvement (or lack thereof).

Ironically, then, it is when the church refuses the burden of fixing the world that her members can be freed to play a role in improving it. But beware, their cars may not all display identical bumper stickers in the months leading up to November '08.

But then, what does that have to do with Christian unity anyway?

Cultic Worship, Cultural Withdrawal, and the Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms

The history of American Presbyterianism is largely a history of Sabbatarianism. "If you would destroy the Christian religion," Voltaire is quoted as saying, "you must first detsroy the Christian Sabbath."

The various attempts to protect and preserve the Lord's Day—from the forming of The General Union for the Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath in 1828 to the institution of "blue laws"—all serve to reinforce the sentiments of the 1814 petition from the Presbyterian General Assembly to Congress urging Sabbath observance based upon the claim that it "contributes to increase the amount of productive labour, to promote science, civilization, peace, social order, and correct morality." In the minds of American Presbyterians, as goes the Sabbath, so goes the nation.

Now for something completely different....

For nineteenth-century postmillennialists, a rationale for Sabbath observance that focused upon its benefit to America's health and vitality makes good sense. But what about those of us whose understanding of the Church's mission does not include cultural transformation? If going to church and eating home-cooked meals on Sunday is not connected to winning the War on Terror, then why bother?

As I've been arguing, one's eschatology informs all of his Christian life. In keeping with this, why must an amillennialist need to see corporate worship as a means to furthering the American Dream? Why can't our cultic worship and cultural withdrawal on the first day of every week serve to subvert, rather than supplement, the grand visions of the rulers of this age?

If the Church seeks to be truly different from the world, then perhaps observing the Lord's Day is the way to do it. As Michael Horton has written, "This sort of observance would proclaim to the world that we are not slaves in Egypt, for we refuse to surrender this day to the tyranny of the clock and to the gods who amuse us."

To those who seek to commandeer the Lord's Day for the purposes of the kingdom of man (even if they are good), we answer that the Sabbath is not for sale.

The Noetic Effects of Grace: Pagan Ethics

When we consider the Bible's assessment of pagan ethics, we are forced, once again, to pause before we press the antithesis between the believer and unbeliever too far.

Jesus says plainly that "sinners" love and do good to others (Matt. 5:46; Luke 6:32-33); he also commends the scribes' and Pharisees' teaching of Torah, encouraging their disciples to obey their instruction despite the fact that their lifestyles are not always in conformity with what they teach (Matt. 23:2-3); Paul actually holds up pagan morality as a means to shame the Corinthians for the perversity allowed in their midst (I Cor. 5:1-2a); In Athens, Paul employs arguments from the intellectual tradition of Greece to demonstrate the folly of pagan idolatry, first quoting Epimenides of Crete, and then the Stoic authors Cleanthes and Aratus of Soli (Acts 17:28, [Apparently, these pagan philosophers had a sufficiently robust understanding of the nature of God to expose the futility of idolatry]). And finally, Paul quotes the Cretan poet Epimenides in his letter to Titus (1:12-13a), adding that the pagan poet's estimation of the morality of his contemporaries is "true."

To what can we attribute all of these things but to God's common grace?

What all of this amounts to is the conclusion that in common, non-redemptive fields such as art, music, philosophy, agriculture, architecture, and even ethics, the believer and the unbeliever are more similar than different due to their both sharing the imago Dei.

Moreover, if we mistakenly insist that the these fields of interest are under the jurisdiction of redemption and are therefore to be considered "holy," then not only ought all Christians to withdraw completely from culture into ghettos or compounds where the world's wicked influences can't touch us, but we also run the risk of dilluting the Bible's authority when it comes to the things it actually does address, like, say, the cross and empty tomb.

"Rights": Civil and Spiritual

To be sure, the question of the Christian's obedience to the civil magistrate would be pretty easy if the state were simply totalitarian. In other words, if conformity were commanded with all loopholes abolished, then in the spirit of Romans 13 we would just suck it up and "obey their lawful commands" (WCF XXIII.4).

But when the powers that be confuse the matter by actually inviting challenges to their authority when or if it is abused (such as the insistence of the Declaration of Independence that a government should be "abolished" if it fails to secure the rights of the people who established it), then that changes things dramatically.

Here's where the distinction between the ethics of the civil and spiritual kingdoms is so striking, and, further, what makes appeals for "civil rights" that are peppered with biblical language so troubling. When one quotes Jesus to bolster his demand for the better treatment to which he feels he is entitled, not only is he misconstruing his Christian liberty as civil liberty (contra WCF XX.1, 4), but he is demonstrating a woeful ignorance of the cross. If Jesus did not invoke his unalienable right not to be killed, and if "the servant is not greater than his Master," then who are we to appeal to him to avoid suffering? If the kingdom of God teaches us anything, it is that following Jesus means foregoing our rights for his sake.

But the kingdom of man does afford its subjects certain "unalienable rights" (at least in this country’s expression of it). If, therefore, we feel that those rights are being violated, and further, if we choose to fight for them, then appealing the Scripture while doing so would seem to do more harm than good.

"Carnal weapons for earthly warfare" – sounds about right....

Is All of Life Worship?

Although many believers in Methodist, Lutheran, and Anglican traditions might find the Reformed articulation of the Regulative Principle of Worship (whatever elements of public worship that are not biblically mandated are therefore prohibited) rather stifling, Professor John Frame sees the RPW as not being strict enough. He writes:

"But when you think about it, the regulative principle is not limited to worship services. It is God’s regulative principle for all areas of human life.... How do we find out how to glorify God in all of life? The same way we find out how to glorify God in worship: we consult His Word. So the sufficiency of Scripture is for all of life, not merely for one segment of it" (A Fresh Look at the Regulative Principle, 1).

So according to Frame, the RPW's jurisdiction should be expanded to cover "all of life" (from which "worship" shouldn’t be separated in the first place).

But as T. David Gordon has pointed out in response to Frame, the reason why the RPW was initially formulated was to answer the question about the limits of ecceliastical power (a question Frame fails to address):

"The issue was not... 'worship' versus 'the rest of life,' but those aspects of life governed by the church officers versus those aspects of life not governed by the church officers.... Frame's attempt to put 'all of life' under one umbrella... is doomed to futility, because it does not address the very issue the regulative principle was designed to address, the limits of church power and the liberty of conscience."

So here's my question: Ought we to distinguish between the sacred and the secular so as to limit the church's jurisdiction to what we may and may not do in worship? And if not, should we either A). Give the church's officers power to dictate all of life as strictly as they do worship, or B). Allow them to govern worship as loosely as they do all of life?

One Market, Under God – Part Two: How Sociopaths Love Their Neighbors

The next section in Dick Doster’s “The Kingdom Work of the Corporate World” (byFaith Magazine, October 2006) is entitled “Business Is How We Love Our Neighbors.” The author writes:

“God has placed most of his people in business because it is there, working with others in a common purpose, that we [‘Love God and neighbor’].”

But as Joel Bakan has powerfully highlighted in his book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Big Business is anything but a Samaritan, let alone a “good” one.

Legally speaking, the corporation is a person entitled to all the rights that other individuals share. As a legal entity, a corporation has as its edict one, and only one, goal: To create profits for its shareholders, without legal or moral obligation to the welfare of workers, the environment, or the well-being of society as a whole. Competition and self-interest dominate, and other aspects of human nature, such as creativity, empathy, and the ability to live in harmony with the earth, are suppressed and even ridiculed (taken from the editorial review on amazon.com).

To put the matter bluntly, if the corporation’s identity were not just legally that of a person, but if it were an actual flesh-and-blood human being, we would lock him up and throw away the key. After all, we have a word for people who relentlessly pursue their own interests with contempt for the suffering or harm it inevitably causes others – they’re called “sociopaths.”

My point is not to demonize those who work in the business world, but simply that the desire to Christianize every aspect of society requires a pretty large list of assumptions about what a Christian society would look like.

And (lo and behold!) it usually looks a lot like a free market democracy with an eagle as its mascot.

Countercultural Contextualization?

The dialogue over the last couple days has been both helpful and lengthy (we've had a combined 350 unique visitors and 750 page views since Tuesday morning, but I suppose that's to be expected when Darryl Hart and Tim Keller are joining the conversation)....

But one area that needs to be clarified, I think, is the nature of counterculturalism.

When a ministry such as Redeemer in New York makes a claim to both counterculturalism and contextualization, I must admit that, initially, I have trouble wrapping my mind around such strange bedfellows (kind of like the first time I saw a photo of Kevin Federline). How can a church both contextualize the gospel to the tastes of its surroundings and claim to subvert them at the same time? And what was Britney thinking when she hooked up with K-Fed anyway?

But I think I'm beginning to understand the Redeemer Model: Christians are to be markedly different when they interact with unbelievers at work, for instance, but then in public worship they are to make every effort not to stumble those same visiting unbelievers unnecessarily. So to use Keller's example from the comments below, a Christian CEO won't seek to maximize profits if workers' rights are violated (counterculturalism), and his church won't use the Trinity Hymnal if the unbelievers' tastes are violated (contextualization).

But this seems to be doing things in precisely the opposite way than the Scriptures tell us to.

It is not in the cultural kingdom that Christians are to be countercultural, but in the cultic kingdom. When we are engaged in common grace, kingdom-of-man activity we are to go about our business quietly, honestly, and with all diligence. We pay our taxes, we respect our fellow man, and we obey the powers that be (I Pet. 2:12-17; Rom. 13:1-7; I Tim. 2:1-2).

But on the contrary, when we are summoned into the heavenly Jerusalem each Lord's Day we give expression to the subversive, otherworldly, and countercultural characteristics that define us as a community (and if you ask me, eating the flesh and drinking the blood of our murdered Leader is a tad more revolutionary than caring about workers' rights... just ask any member of the Green Party).

So contextualization and counterculturalism can coexist. But believers should practice the former in the secular realm and the latter in the sacred....

Mercy Ministry and the Two Kingdoms, Part Four: The Christian Individual

Another important qualification to the (undisputed) notion that churches should have ministries of mercy concerns the role of the Christian as an individual. The position that many adopt (but rarely attempt to prove) is that passages like the parable of the Samaritan in Luke 10:30-37 or Paul’s instruction to “do good to everyone” in Galatians 6:9-10 apply to the institutional Church as such, rather than to the individual believer.

Indeed, this distinction has not even occurred to many Christians.

But it must be admitted that there are countless activities in which individual believers may feel called to engage, yet which do not fall under the purview of the Church’s mandate, properly understood. For example, if the majority of the members of a local congregation believe that a particular political candidate promotes a more healthy vision for his constituents than his opponent, those believers, as citizens of the civil kingdom, are perfectly free to do whatever is in their power to trumpet his cause. But then to assume that the local church to which they belong should cast its vote accordingly is to make a huge—and illegitimate—leap. One Christian’s hero may be another Christian’s villain. Therefore for a church to align itself with a political party is to assume that the Bible favors a particular ideology which it never intended to address.

In short, the Church’s Great Commission (the preaching of the Word and administration of the Sacraments) is more limited than the various spiritual, social, and political causes in which individual believers are free to engage.

With respect to mercy ministries, it would be naïve to think that the issues of who should be the recipients of church-sponsored financial assistance, and what form that assistance should take, are cut and dry. What may appear as compassion for the disenfranchised in the eyes of one could easily look like an irresponsible handout to the lazy in the eyes of another. The age-old debate about whether it is better, in the long run, to give a hungry man a basket of fish or a pole and bait remains unsettled, with sincere believers on both sides of the issue.

My point, then, is simply that there is a place for the believer to act according to his own individual conscience without those actions becoming the official ministry of the Church. And if you think about it, for the Church to commandeer benevolence and trademark mercy is somewhat insulting to all the kind, caring Muslims, Catholics, and atheists out there.

Mercy Ministry and the Two Kingdoms, Part One: Pick a Sphere, Any Sphere

The idea that the Church's mandate includes alleviating the woes of the world's poor is axiomatic for many. Part of Bono's appeal for Africa, for example, includes the fact that the Old Testament is replete with references to the poor and Israel's responsibility to care for the disenfranchised within her borders.

But as with most discussions about cult and culture, the issue is rarely as simple as our prooftexts suggest.

Crucial to a proper understanding of this topic is the recognition of the various spheres that God has ordained to meet the manifold needs of his creatures -- these spheres being the Family, the State, and the Church. But it is also important to note that these spheres reflect a "divine reordering" that necessarily took place after Adam’s fall. As Meredith Kline writes, "[From the beginning] the originally mandated temple-city of Adam encompassed the totality of life and activity of humanity within its assigned jurisdiction." Or to de-Klineanize it a little, before Adam's fall, there was one holy kingdom and one holy sphere.

In the postlapsum situation, however, "the… aspects and functions of the original city were distributed among several nonconcentric authority structures that replaced the one original universal kingdom." Thus "along with the institution of the State in this common grace realignment stands the institution of the Family, with its own share of the redistributed functions and its own sphere of authority" (Kingdom Prologue, p. 172).

In short, after the fall the holy aspects of life are consigned to the spiritual kingdom of Christ, while the institutions of the Family and the State are the vehicles for the furtherance of God's temporal, common grace agenda.

So the questions that remain include: Is material aid for the poor a common or redemptive errand? Which sphere(s) -- Church, Family, or State -- bear(s) responsibility for the poor? Is the poor's claim upon the Church only valid if those in need are believing members?

What think ye?

How to be Missional and Countercultural

Well, I've spent (more than) enough time describing what the Church is not to do under the guise of contextualization, but lest I fall prey to Moody's quip ("I like the way I do evangelism more than the way you don't do it") I will do my best to describe what a missional church would look like under a two kingdoms rubric.

First, I draw a distinction between being missional and being contextual. "Missional" is a mindset that believers should have at all times. The goal of missional churches is to send, not necessarily to attract. "Contextual," on the other hand, seems to describe the tone and ethos of the actual worship service rather than the behavior of the saints Monday through Saturday.

But here's where a two kingdoms paradigm comes into play: During corporate worship on the Lord's day, we are no longer American, Asian, black, white, rich, poor, barbarian, Scythian, bond, or free. In other words, it is our unique folk culture that we are to unabashedly display in public worship, with all its ancient and countercultural glory. Our "context" for worship, therefore, is Mount Zion and the heavenly Jerusalem, and our primary concern is not pleasing the culture, but pleasing Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant, whose blood speaks better things than that of Abel (Heb. 12:22-24).

So when God, through his minister, calls the saints heavenward to worship, the purpose of the remainder of the gathering is just that: for the saints to worship. But when the service culminates with God, through his minister, commissioning his people to go forth in his Name and with his blessing, these redeemed people, having just experienced the Lord's calling, cleansing, consecration, and communion, are now to go out into all the world and make disciples of all nations.

So our missional calling does not mean that we adapt divine worship to the presuppositions, trends, and tastes of this passing age. What it does mean, however, is that we cease trying to attract people to church with our pandering and programs and start living our most holy faith before the eyes of a watching world.

This is the kind of mission I am excited about, for it is this, and not cultural mimicry, that will compel postmodern cynics to ask us a reason for the hope that lies within us.

The "Already," the "Not Yet," and the Transformation of Culture

John the Baptist promised that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 3:2). But grandiose predictions such as this tend to suffer when the supposed "King" displays an appalling lack of ambition, and then, to top it off, gets executed. It's safe to say that at this point the whole "kingdom venture" was called into question (Matt. 11:1-19). So what's the deal, is the kingdom here or not?

It is here that the phrases "already" and "not yet" must be introduced into the discussion. In some sense the kingdom has been inaugurated, but in another, the promise is still outstanding. The question for us is, "Where is the kingdom's power, and what does it look like?"

Or to stay on topic: Where is the "transformation" of culture that we desire?

Well, let's look to Christ and see if we can answer these questions. Did Jesus receive his promised crown, or didn't he? According to the biblical testimony, the answer is yes (John 12:13; 18:36; Rom. 1:4; I Tim. 1:17). But the Scripture is also quite clear that our Lord's kingdom is not earthly but heavenly (John 18:36). Throughout his earthly ministry he was subject to all of the limitations of life in this age: He had a physical body, he endured temptation, and he suffered in the flesh.

Here's the rub: As followers of Jesus, we have to endure the same things he endured.

This means that, like Jesus our Forerunner, we must patiently wait for the resurrection and manifestation of the kingdom's fullness and power (Rev. 1:9). Like Jesus, we must be content "for a litle while... to suffer various trials" (I Pet. 1:6). Like Jesus, we must be sown in weakness before we are raised in power (I Cor. 15:43).

In a word, we must carry our crosses, just as Jesus carried his.

The kingdom's power is hidden in this age, being glimpsed by such foolish means as the preached Word, the waters of baptism, the bread and the cup, and the indwelling Spirit whose presense secures our final glorification.

This means that it will not be until the day when "the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ" that our ultimate hope will be realized (II Pet. 3:12-13; Rev. 11:15).

As the Jewish theocracy foreshadowed, the two kingdoms of this present age will become one in the age to come, and righteousness will cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea.

This is a properly-realized, amillennial eschatology. This is true transformationism. And this is something worth waiting for.