The Two Kingdoms Continues to Unravel

I've long noticed in 2KT literature a breezy and confident assumption that the doctrine is essentially a continuation of Augustine's "Two Cities" motif. I've also long thought this wrong, but now comes James K. A. Smith to decisively put it into words.

Michael Horton has been in the habit lately of saying that opposition to 2KT just rests on a big 'ol misunderstanding and caricature of the view. Is he going to say Jamey Smith is misrepresenting their view?

Impossible, I dare say.

An Interview Involving Herman Bavinck

Laurence O'Donnell with the Herman Bavinck Society was gracious enough to do a lengthy interview with me. You can find it posted here.

The Perseverance of a Juvenile Generation

Rachel Held Evans is really tired of the culture wars.  So tired, in fact, that it appears in larger font, italicized, and bolded:

"My Generation is tired of the culture wars."

This appears in a blog post responding to the overwhelming victory in North Carolina for Amendment 1, defining legal marriage as the union of one man and one woman.  This is very, very upsetting for Rachel and many others like her.

She thinks that the costs of winning the culture wars will be losing an entire generation.

Memo to Rachel:

1.  Culture wars, alas, are not optional.  I'm sorry that she finds it uncomfortable that the Kingdom of God inevitably produces cultural conflict (read the Sermon on the Mount), but that is not a bug: it's a feature.  We are to consider it "pure joy" when we are faced with trials of many kinds, including the cultural kinds like being viewed as bigoted Neanderthals, because we know that the testing of our faith "develops perseverance" (James 1:3).

2.  Got that?  Perseverance.  But poor Rachel and her generation are just plain tired.  James goes on to say that "Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete."

3.  Got that?  Maturity.  Exhibit A of James' thesis may well be the childishness of Rachel's post: "But they won't like us!"  Yep.  I think Jesus and his Apostles kind of like, you know, took that into account.  Take Paul, for instance.  Writing to the sexually promiscuous society of Corinth:

Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.  And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

I guess Paul wasn't too worried about being disliked.  He kept right on preaching even after getting stoned and left for dead.

4.  The real root of Rachel's discontent reveals that she wants to quit the culture wars precisely because she's already a fatal casualty in the culture wars.  The architects of the GLBT cultural movement (yes, there is such a movement) purposely planned to shame Bible-believing Christians by relentlessly portraying the GLBT community as the persecuted victims, even while they were aggressively assaulting the broad moral consensus of the culture in media, entertainment, politics and (most importantly) law.  You can read all about it here.  This is the only mode of moral evaluation Rachel knows: GLBT are the persecuted minority and Christians are the bigoted oppressors.  Score one for the opposition.

5.  Rachel's entire post is laced with sentimentality.  Don't we know that these people are real people?  Don't we care about them?  Yes, Rachel, we do.  Greatly.  And we believe, on the authority of Christ himself, that the lifestyle and the fallout from the cultural agenda is harmful to them and harmful to society.  As irritating as it might be to Joe Biden, many of us did not get our education from Will & Grace.

6.  Rachel is tired of "drawing lines in the sand."  Is there anywhere she won't blur the line for the sake of peace?  The polygamists and NAMBLA are patiently waiting for their legal openings.

There really isn't much more to say.  I read Rachel's post with a great deal of sadness.  The dissonance between her sentimentalism and the claims of the gospel in the New Testament is extreme.  Listen: the early church grew in the midst of the Roman Empire.  Can we please stop this whole "things are so different now!" mentality?  Religious pluralism, sexual autonomy and license is nothing new.  The church has faced the situation before.  This is not some unprecedented turn of events.  

And many people were literally fed to lions because they refused to give up their "culture war," opposing things like worshiping the Emperor and gladiatorial contests and polygamy and homosexuality and infant exposure.

It is pathetic that merely being disliked is enough to get Rachel and her whole generation to shut up.

Theology & Origins

Justin Taylor has helpfully linked to two book reviews of Pete Enns's new book, The Evolution of Adam. The reviews, one by Jack Collins and the other by James K. A. Smith, are simply excellent and I commend them to you.

I have written about Enns before, particularly calling into question the legitimacy of his scholarship. Unlike honest-to-goodness scholars in the academy, I find that he is unusually immune to criticism. Even though he has written a lot of material of a controversial nature, he has, to my knowledge, never acknowledged a single area, single point, single argument where his opponents have caused him to reconsider. As a purely statistical matter this is strange. It leads me to believe that he is not so much a scholar as he is a propagandist. Ironic, I know, because the very axe Pete is grinding is that evangelicals and "fundamentalists" are propagandists.

Collins and Smith fairly decisively put the lie to that meme.

With respect to his latest thesis, I'll simply say this.

1) If he is right, then the Bible says absolutely nothing about human origins and the origin of sin. Simply put: this is a ludicrous suggestion. It speaks of a certain laziness that Albrecht Ritschl, who held similar views (p.327ff), at least felt the need to explain at almost unbearable length the origins of sin and yet Pete doesn't even bother. It is much easier to have respect for the older liberalism than the new. At least they put some blood, sweat, and tears into it. For that matter, so did the evangelicals of an earlier era. You can see Bavinck's lengthy evaluation of Ritschl in his Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 3, p.44ff. If nothing else, you will see clearly that Enns is advocating nothing new.

2) If sin and dysfunction is inherent in the nature of existence, it cannot be overcome. There is no Christianity. This is an ancient Christian observation, going back to Augustine against Manichaenism and, even earlier, Irenaeus and Tertullian against the Valentinians. And, of course, Paul (e.g., sin "entered the world"). If evil is of the essence of things, then things cannot be separated from evil. Does Pete have some new insight as to why this is wrong? Once again, he just cannot be bothered.

And when it comes to whatever he dreams up next, I simply cannot be bothered.

Choosing Eight Years of Famine

Doug Wilson was kind enough to respond to my last post.

I will just attend to one point. He writes:

———

Brian then asks this . . .

"What's a little "creative destruction" of real people and real wealth to achieve a desired political end? Forgive me if this strikes me as extraordinarily glib and misanthropic. It is frankly immoral to wish catastrophe on people in pursuit of one's agenda."

But I am not deciding between catastrophe on the one hand and rainbows, fluffy clouds and unicorns on the other. I am deciding between rapid fire catastrophe and slow motion catastrophe. I am deciding between a fiery death in a plane crash or three years in a cancer ward. I am David trying to decide between 7 years of famine, 3 months of hotfooting it, or 3 days of pestilence (2 Sam. 24:12-13). David accepted the options in front of him, and did not ask Gad (sic) why "his best life now" was not on the list.

When David choose (sic) the pestilence, he was not wishing catastrophe on others in some immoral way.

———

A few (very) short responses:

1. Doug chooses to believe that Romney is slow-motion catastrophe. If that's the baseline, there's no helping him there. Even though I can see pretty clearly Romney's liabilities, I see no reason to just take that for granted.

2. Doug is not David, and I presume no prophet has appeared offering him this "choice."

4. David chose a three-day catastrophe instead of a seven-year catastrophe. And Doug wants to slip by me the notion that choosing an eight-year catastrophe is following David's example?

5. Doug's reasoning presupposes that catastrophe is historically inevitable. He does not know this. He cannot know this. And nowhere are we called to resign ourselves to a perceived historical judgment of God, much less attempt to hasten it. Which is what Doug is doing. I might have to add "masochistic" to my "misanthropic." The Psalmists everywhere recognize God's righteousness in judgment. That doesn't cause them to ask for it.

6. I hope Doug changes his mind.