Good thinking necessarily requires pulling various strands of thought into something of a poetic amalgamation. Though it is doubtful that my writing could be described as poetic (I’ll leave that to other authors on this blog), I would at least like to take a stab at the amalgamation part. For those new to the two-kingdoms theological grid, the discussion of natural law and the two-kingdoms may seem incongruent. What do these two stands of thought...
We have all heard the mantra by now. Week after week, in pulpit after pulpit, Christians are being called to renew the world that they live in. Called to “renew” or “redeem” everything from governmental structures to the very way we play sports. Leaving aside the fact that this call is often times very confusing from a purely pragmatic standpoint, we ought to consider how massive the theological presuppositions are behind such statements. Yes, this...
A few weeks ago, I introduced an idea that natural law was meant to be the source from which all civil laws flowed. Thus, rather than appealing to biblical texts in order to erect judicial code, one must look to natural law. This post is my effort to establish natural law as the normative seat for the creation of civil law. While this may seem foreign to many, it was in fact the “orthodox” Reformed...
In keeping with the Christmas spirit that has been permeated the blog, I thought I would attempt to meld my two-kingdom series with something relevant for the holiday season. In the secularized west, the constant debate about Christ’s relationship to Christmas provides a fantastic peek into the practicality of the two kingdom’s discussion. Today’s article takes us to a small Texas town in Henderson county called Athens. I ran across a most curious article about...
Over the past couple weeks I have attempted to lay a framework for the one-kingdom v. two-kingdom debate. I have done this by providing a brief sketch of crucial post reformation thinkers on the issue such as Abraham Kuyper and the later neo-Calvinists. Here we saw that while Kuyper was nowhere near an outright departure from earlier Reformed thinking, he did start to make some subtle changes to the two-kingdom framework that would later become...
“…historic Reformed doctrines affirm a sharp distinction between the church as the non-violent kingdom of Christ and the sword bearing, coercive state. Hence, the state is not and cannot be the kingdom of Christ and… the demise of Christendom can be celebrated rather than mourned.” This quote from David VanDrunen in his book Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms will strike much of contemporary evangelicalism as nothing short of appalling. How can any real Christian...
We are less than a year away from the 2012 presidential elections and I suspect that I am not the only one who often finds political pontification in Christian circles (right, left or otherwise) to be an obscene bore. But it’s not just Christian circles. It’s every circle. What makes political discourse so confusing is that a solid foundation of social theory is largely lacking for the vast majority of voters. That includes Christian voters....
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