NEHEMIAH 4:1-2, 6, 6:3

God places Adam in the Garden to work it and keep it, and then, in the fall, Adam is still doing that as it brings thorns and thistles. Without both of these formative events in mind, one will fall into one or the other extreme. One is to make creativity, profit motive, and hard work evils in themselves and the other is to deny the problems of scarcity and exploitation of people in labor. The Nehemiah text, incidentally, is a good example of the struggle between meaningful God-glorifying work and the natural, parasitical assault on this masculine motion against the sphere of nature. We will see this struggle between production and plunder throughout.

• THE GENESIS OF ECONOMICS
• WEALTH AND POVERTY
• FISCAL AND MONETARY POLICY
• THE CHRISTIAN VOCATION

The Big Idea is that man as a mover reflects the motion of God in the economy of his works.

The stuff of the house (oikos) is, first, the workmanship of God. Remember Ephesians 2:10—“We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” God makes the resources and ordains the reformulation of these resources for our good and his glory. Let us ask ourselves the “glory” question in both the unity and diversity of work. What does the motion of man in work say about God? And what does this particular calling, at this particular place of labor, say about God?

I. THE GENESIS OF ECONOMICS

A) Basic Elements: Efficient, Form, Material, Instrument, End

1. The efficient cause of an economy is God and all the world is its stage. The word ‘economics’ comes from the Greek word for house (oikos) and, moreover, the steward of that house (oikonomian) was left in its charge, to work it and keep it. An economy is a finite body of resources, allocated for the good of its members. Economics is the study of that body of resources and members. Any other definition of an economy and economics says something different about God—that He is not the sovereign Lord over material resources or, in the case of economic text books that define the study as the “allocating of scare resources for the good of society,” that the body of material goods are “the good of society” and that to the state belongs that chief end of man.

2. The form of an economy is referred to as its “circular flow,” pictured here:

We have already seen that the form of government is not theologically neutral. By extension of the same logic, if we inserted the state into this circular flow, that government, by definition, will have changed its form and in so doing polluted both spheres—government and labor—so that the conception we have of this circular flow is not theological neutral.

3. The material of the economy we will cover in our section of “Wealth and Poverty” shortly. One of the difficulties of this study is that material and instrument are so closely linked, particularly as one compares notes between rival concepts of economic theory. For instance, labor and machinery may both be viewed as a “means of production” (capital) in that both cost money to employ in production. Money is used as an instrument for attaining both. But does this mean that laborers are merely material, or that they are an instrument? Either way, it will appear to many that this dehumanizes the worker.

4. The end of the economy, again, is to speak about God. The relationship between dominion [1:28] and cultivation [2:15] is not that the one just is the other. It is that both are to be though about by the collective. The mistake of the collectivist is to think that they are therefore the same entity; the mistake of the individualist is to divorce them only by not thinking about either. This will ensure that the individualist does all the producing (but only in private); and the collectivist will do all the planning and doing for us all. It is a suicidal tradeoff. At any rate, Israel was told again, when they entered the land, to subdue it [cf. Num. 32:22, 29, Josh 18:1, 2 Sam. 8:11], so that dominion began with the people groups who were usurpers of the land (state) and then extended, once the rule of law was enforced, to the cultivation, or subduing, of the land’s resources (labor). Wayne Grudem answers the question of what this work says about God:

Just as God is sovereign over the whole universe, so he gives us opportunity to be sovereign over a small portion of land, or a car, or clothing and books, and so forth. In our stewardship of these possessions we have opportunities to imitate God’s wisdom, his creativity, his love for other people, his justice and fairness, his mercy, his knowledge, and many other attributes. Ownership of possessions also provides many opportunities to test what is in our hearts and gives us opportunities to give thanks to God for what he has provides to us (see Col. 3:15, 1 Tim. 6:17).[1]

Imagining, developing and voluntarily exchanging better goods from the earth that betters the life of others speaks of God’s creative goodness as well as the wisdom of his design—that this “invisible hand,” as Adam Smith called it, is actually not a failure.

B) The Biblical Teaching on Property, Force and Fraud

1. “You shall not steal” [Ex. 20:15] is the eighth commandment, and the tenth prohibits even thinking about it: “You shall not covet” [Ex. 20:17]. God is clear that this property is “your neighbor’s” seven times in the command, ending with the universal qualifier—“or anything that is your neighbors.” It does not belong to anyone else; and for that same reason it does not belong to everyone else. And similar to the hierarchical set logic involved in the case of Christ and Caesar, it is precisely because all property is sacred that fairly earned and given property is private. “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” [Ps. 24:1]. Of the summary of God’s things, each portion which is cultivated by the individual or corporation—not engaging in force or fraud—says something about God, and to that extent is justly private. In the two most famous instances of the state transferring private property to itself in Israel, it is treated as a great wickedness. In the case of Samuel’s warning of what Saul would do as king [cf. 1 Sam. 8:10-18] and in the case of Ahab seizing the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite [cf. 1 Kings 21:1-29].

2. Now the abolition of private property also eliminates liberty by extension, because as the law negates (whether by outright seizure or degrees of control) the flow of voluntary exchange, it controls what can be purchased, invested in, saved, passed on, and therefore where you will live and what you will do for a living. Indeed nothing, not even your home, would be exempt. If everything is reduced to the economic, and if the economic is subsumed by the state, then everything is subsumed into the state. It is a simple syllogism. But then the loss of liberty also demands the loss of life, as the entire life of man is owned by the state, the same state may, whenever it sees fit, dispense with any particular life form. Thus the loss of private property and the loss of the right to life are inseparable.

II. WEALTH AND POVERTY

A) Economics 101

1. Now how does an economy work, scientifically? No one has said more to describe what the “stuff of the economy” is than Adam Smith in his classic work The Wealth of Nations (1776). His thesis was essentially that the wealth of an economy was equal to the amount of natural resources it exploited and turned into real goods and services; and that the value of such resources was exactly what the market will pay for it. Money is not the wealth of a nation, though it is the objective standard for that wealth when it comes to the event of exchange. Reflecting on the true interpretation of 1 Timothy 6:10, that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil,” Grudem comments, “Money in fact is good in itself because it enables people to buy the goods they need and sell the goods they produce on the basis of a standard item…on which everybody agrees about the value.”[2] Likewise, poverty is not the excess of wealth concentrated in a class. Poverty is first and foremost the lack of wealth. Hence the solution to poverty is not to spread it evenly; rather the solution to poverty is the increase of wealth.

Smith also unpacked the relationship between the division of labor and the price system that emerged by self-interest. Each person acting upon only that information that is relevant to their special degree of labor and their particular wants will guide the entire structure of the economy more efficiently than any amount of planning. Thus it is sometimes called laissez faire, or “hands off,” economics. Even if a particular head of household was better at producing virtually everything better than his neighbor, it would not pay him to do so. There would be a law of diminishing returns.

Now the aggregate levels of supply and demand are a critical component of a nation Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the classical view. This brings us to perhaps the most fundamental principles in economic growth. Though versions of it were already floating around, Jean-Baptiste Say, in his Treatise on Political Economy (1803), formulated what we now know as Say’s Law—that supply creates its own demand. What this means is that each generation of goods and services were yesterday’s cultivation of the ground, to reassert the imagery from Genesis 2. The more we began to look at both Adam’s mandate and the study of economics, the more we will grasp that supply-side economics is merely the commercial expression of some of the most important spiritual realities in creation.

There was a “brief moment” when supply-side economics was the rule. That was in the early nineteenth century in England and America, yet died the death of half-hearted resistance to its nemesis in the early twentieth century. In other words, we are talking about a singular century—the 1800s—in the nations won over to the Protestant theological outlook. In the middle fifty years of the nineteenth century, real, median wages in Britain increased by 80%. That is because those wages were tied solely to productivity, and that productivity was in turn tied directly to the exponential advancement in wealth production.

2. Those who focus on the demand-side as the key to economic health do so for many reasons. One reason that economists do is the fear of overproduction—i. e. that supply will often not create its own demand and the ensuing deflation will force massive market corrections. Yet in a genuinely free market, such is not even possible.[3] Think about it. The moment a good is devalued, its producer will shift either means or material in order to continue to make as much money as possible. In the immediate, he will simply reduce prices until inventories are gone, and he will learn from the experience. The same is true with new innovations. They are expensive until they are so necessary for business to compete that this flood of demand will drive down the prices. Thus, yesterday’s luxury items are today’s necessities.

Nor is increasing societal complexity an irritant to this process. The more technologically advanced we become, the better information will be shared and thus the more efficiently the market will signal to producers to shift gears. At the end of the day, any suspicion that the logger or the steel mill or the silicon plant will make massive miscalculations only to be stuck with warehouses of unused goods assumes that a social planner—not in the industry—can do it better: that a centrally located group of elites can coordinate an economy very much like a chess board. The fact of the matter is that whenever there is a natural disaster, a war, or an instance of corporate fraud, either the price system will have to directly correct it (free market) or that same price system will have to indirectly correct (central planning). The only difference will be whether countless experts making the most careful decisions about what immediately affects their bottom line will make those decisions in units, or whether a handful of intellectuals will have to pull together the totality of all of those very same units to decide on things over which they bear no direct cost and have no immediate expertise. In other words, it assumes that everyone on the supply side, from producers of raw materials to wholesalers to shop owners, will fail to adjust once the market signals come to them—i.e. to stop producing or shipping or investing or stocking X, since the demand has gone down. But what makes the planner think he will have a greater incentive to adjust, much less receive the signal faster, than the one most intimately involved? It is an idea as arrogant as it is absurd! It violates common sense on a level so common that only an elitist could become intoxicated by it.

3. Moreover public ownership and public obtaining of resources cultivates stagnation in the individual and in the economy as a whole. Experience tells us that we treat things differently when we own something, personally, and if we have put our own effort into it. This is why the welfare program dehumanizes its recipients and this is why pollution and working conditions are always far worse in nations operating by command economy. Have you ever driven by public housing projects and compared them to the privately owned? Did you know that the per capita expenditure in our nation’s inner city schools exceed those of the suburbs and country sides by two-to-one and three-to-one amounts? And what is the crime like in an inner city area with the strictest gun laws as opposed to an area with nothing but private property and armed citizens? We can see an inverse relationship everywhere between what and how much government spends, on the one hand, and the exacerbation of the problem it is supposed to fix on the other.

4. To principles for the business cycle will show us how one-sided this question is.

Principle of Supply-Side Growth: To Invest in Exponential Production is to Grow an Economy.

Principle of Demand-Side Contraction: To Redistribute is to Stunt and Shrink an Economy.

Redistribution of wealth via taxation not only transfers potential capital to less productive sectors, but also reduces (and often squelches altogether) the incentive to produce for individuals and businesses seeking to invest at marginal rates of income. It is a bit like the “give-away/take-away” ratio in football. Every dollar transferred from private sector industry to public sector subsistence is both given and taken. It is not just one or the other, but both. There is a doubly negative trend toward contraction therefore.

Should someone reply: “But the individual on government subsistence will spend or invest it every bit as much as the person who exchanged labor for it—it goes back into the economy either way,” we reply: Yes and No. It is true that it is re-filtered into that same circular flow of the economy. But whether one’s income is distributed in productive exchange or redistributed by government will have massive impact on whether its receipts tend to flow more to the supply-side or the demand-side. It is a fact that we treat things differently when they are taken for granted, when they are not earned. But beyond that, as the concentration of income in an economy is distributed to those for whom there would be greater penalty to work, their own spending percentages shifts toward consumption-spending and away from saving or investing. Even the middle-class gets a lesson in that every time there is another “target tax cut” or “refund,” which is nothing but a welfare check to those who are working. How do we typically spend it? Exactly! We tend to spend it, not save or invest it. Of course, there are exceptions to this, but the rule is that income not derived from immediate, individually-planned, voluntary exchange will typically flow to the demand side of the economy and therefore typically contract the economy or at least leave it at a standstill.

B) The System of Voluntary Exchange and the Price System

1. Behind the idea that supply-side economics just is economics, there are the two phrases thrown around so often by the classical view and its critics, that it is worth pausing to define them. The free market (or free enterprise) system of voluntary exchange simply means that the members of the circular flow are free individuals (or corporations), that their motive/end remains their own, and that no force or fraud is permitted to violate these actions. Think of prices as the “DNA” of the life of an economy. It is the structure of the life: it’s what makes it work better than any other way of organizing goods and services. In this DNA there are “building-blocks” for economic life, just as there are proteins in the life that we study in biology. These will be easier to remember too, because, instead of G, C, A, T, there are only three and they all start with “I”—information, incentive, and income.

Those who supply goods and services and those who demand them both need information. The price tells everyone all that they need to know. When more people want more of a thing, then more money will be chasing that same amount of goods. Say people started eating cheeseburgers all three meals of the day, then instead of a hundred customers at lunchtime, you would have three hundred—additional groups of one-hundred at breakfast and dinner. If one cheeseburger cost $1, then the regular lunchtime money into the restaurant ($100) would turn into $300. If the restaurant usually ordered 700 meat patties every week, they would then have to multiply that by three to make it 2,100. This would mean more money from restaurants chasing more product (meat) from the meat market. Therefore, the price of meat from the market would go up. Soon—all other things being equal—the price of the burger would increase as well. Another way this would happen is if more people started preferring cheeseburgers over pizza and sandwiches for lunchtime. Say that the one-hundred people at the burger restaurant started to draw another hundred from each of those two other places. Now there would be $300 chasing the same amount of goods at one time. Therefore the price would immediately increase at the counter. When the price of goods and services goes up in an entire economy due to more dollars chasing the same amount of goods, this is called inflation. On the other hand, when the price of good and services goes down in an entire economy due to more goods being produced than people want to buy, this is called deflation. Excess stock of goods then need to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Yet with so much more to choose from, no bidding war need arise, as the flood of goods on the market would diffuse the frenzy of dollars chasing those goods into alternative choices.

Redistribution is seizure by increment; regulation is seizure by exhaustion.

Scarcity is real. The cursing of the ground says so [cf. Gen. 3:17-19]. One professing Evangelical economist, Paul Zane Pilzer, speaks as if scarcity is increasingly illusory as a technological gap is overcome; but that is overstatement. It would be better to say that there is an invisible frontier and interplay between the metaphysical economy and the physical economy and that what Jack Kemp once called “metaphysical capital,” that is intellectual potential productivity, creates a new supply, which in turn, creates its own demand. The bridging of the gap between the new creation and present scarcity is not necessarily an attempt to reverse the effects of the fall. God never said to Adam, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread…therefore don’t even bother!” The reconstitution of matter by metaphysical reason and physical energy is still called good because it speaks of the invisible to visible motion of God upon the world. In the history of Israel, God tells the people two basic things about the economy: 1) God is the efficient and end cause [cf. Deut. 6:10-12] and 2) the stuff of the economy and its excellent maintenance are God-glorifying things [cf. Deut. 8:7-10, 11:10-17, 28:1-14].

III. FISCAL AND MONETARY POLICY

A) Does Government Have a Role in Relation to the Economy?

1. Yes—the state is related to the economy negatively. It promotes economic growth and stability by preventing force and fraud: in other words, prosecuting theft and other infractions of the law, enforcing contracts and patent rights, and obviously prosecuting anything like a slave trade. What about regulations involving personal safety and environmental protection? This may rightly be viewed as a form of preventing force and fraud. But even here there is a discernible spectrum, where minimum wage laws and mindless OSHA requirements for buckets and ladders against the wall stands at one absurd end, and the local restrictions of unwanted resources or products at the other. The control of the informed local citizenry is important for balancing freedom and form once again.

2. Fiscal policy is the government’s adjustments to the levels of taxing and spending in the public budget of a nation. Contrary to the popular belief, every dollar that the government spends is transferred from the possession of the private sector to the public, so that a reduction of the tax rate in the next fiscal year is not a government expenditure but a reduction in receipts collected by the treasury. This myth stands in logical sequence between two others. Behind it is the assumption that the government produces wealth. But we have already seen that money is not wealth, but the accepted standard of its value in exchange. Flowing from this myth is the conclusion that, therefore, a public deficit is the equal result of either tax reductions or spending increases. Again, the tax cut is viewed as an increase in spending, which further assumes that it is the government’s money to begin with! As a fourth myth corresponding to these, it is concluded that with tax cuts comes deficit increases and vice-versa. In our section on empirical evidence we will refute this by the historical record.

Monetary policy is the government’s maintenance of a fair coin. We mentioned before that while money was not the stuff of wealth, it is nevertheless the agreed standard of it. So, much like the enforcement of contracts, the maintenance of a sound money standard has to be stable over the long haul for individuals and businesses to trust the current system of voluntary exchange. As Milton Friedman argued, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”[4] It is not the result of market forces operating on their own; those will correct via personal incentive.

By printing more an amount money that exceeds the real value of goods produced, the currency becomes inflated; and since these numbers have been recorded for centuries, those who study the rates of growth in the government know perfectly well the general trajectory. This has led many to the very reasonable conclusion that central banks inflate the currency on purpose since this applies a secret tax to purchasing power. When the price of essential goods and services increases, the demand for even more taxes / transfer payments corresponds to alleviate the cruel “market force.” In this way, central governments increase their power, incrementally, through a combination of secret taxation and economic ignorance. That this is evil is a biblical valuation: “Unequal weights and unequal measures are both alike an abomination to the LORD” [Prov. 20:10]. So while bad fiscal policy is an example of force—what Bastiat called “legal plunder”—fiat currency practiced by central banks is an example of fraud.

4. The simple fact of the matter is that government cannot control an economy without controlling its members, and so for the government to set out to invade this sphere is not the sort of thing that can be corrected easily. The principle of separation, as Friedman says, is that “competitive capitalism…promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.”[5]

As Reagan once said, the statist law of economics is simple: “If it moves tax it; if it keeps moving regulate it; if it stops moving subsidize it.”

B) The Clear Empirical Evidence in Favor of the Free Market

1. If we begin at a hundred years ago—1911—we can see from the basic economic indicators—GDP, unemployment, inflation rates, interest rates, deficits and debts—how the fiscal policies of the warring schools, classical and Keynesian, have fared. The results are clear. Keynesian, demand-side, economics has been a colossal failure and that because it does not accurately grasp what an economy is in the whole of reality. It is an appendage of a total irrational worldview.

Between the October 1929 crash and the end of the Hoover administration in early 1933, the economy was recovering and U.S. gold stock rose. The Keynesian vision, accepted by Roosevelt, in fact created the Great Depression, not the other way around. Unemployment actually rose from 6.4% to 17.2% from the first year of the decade of the New Deal. Another good barometer of this trend is how much of our national income is spent by the public sector and at what level. In 1928—the year before the stock market crash that forever altered the public’s conception of a free economy—around 10% of the national income was spent by the public sector, 3% of that at the federal level. Fifty years later, those numbers increased to over 40% and 25%—so that within the theme of governmental growth, there is also a theme of centralization of the ensuing power.

There were three times in the twentieth century that supply-side economics informed our nation’s fiscal policy, the fruits of the only three presidents that understood economics—Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan—in the form of tax reduction on marginal rates of income. All three times it worked to the fullest. The prosperity of the 1920s, 1960s and 1980s is not questioned. What is usually attacked are its “real causes” or harmful effects. In these cases, the rich got richer, true, and they paid more in taxes than they did at the higher rate. By 2006, the top 50% of income earners paid 97% of the taxes; the top 1% paid 40%.

Not only do people have the idea that the revenues collected in taxes somehow originate with the government; but this same public has gotten the idea that the economy is a static amount of money whose annual production has little to no bearing on those same revenues. This is called the static analysis of economics that sees a nation’s wealth as a zero-sum game. If Joe gets rich, he took it from Billy. If the government taxes 10% of $100, it gets $10. If it raises the rate to 50%, it gets $50. Again, this is a perfectly accurate infant snapshot. But in the real world, people do not hide their money under mattresses: families have children, businesses invest and hire, inventors invent their ideas, and there is a direct connection between the level of the rate and the incentive for production. Hence, there is a direct connection between the level of the rate and the actual production in the following year. A liberal hero such as John F. Kennedy understood this. In a 1962 press conference, he said that,

It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now…Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.

Now that first arena that these confusions manifest themselves is in the whole Robin Hood fantasy. What reason does the average person give for making the rich “pay their fair share”? Someone will chirp in that it is really jealousy. Wonderful, but we have a better argument than that, so leave that on the shelf for now. The assumption is that by government redistribution, we will move closer to leveling the playing field. But that does not bear out in the statistics. And all of this raises serious concerns for the supposedly humanitarian motives that people have for this failed vision of political-economy.

IV. THE CHRISTIAN VOCATION

A) Calling (efficient), Work (material), Art (form), Talents (instrument), and Motive (end)

1. The question is not simply “What am I good at?” We are all good at any number of things, but that doesn’t mean that God has called us to do that thing.

Remember Adam cultivating the ground? Aristotle drew a distinction between violence and nature that the Christian can retranslate in biblical terms. What brought form to matter was the violent motion which was so named because it violated the present static, passive, potentially meaningless void of things in themselves, and said, NO—this thing, this nature, is not an end in itself. It is a canvas and God is the artist and I am the brush. God made man and woman to cultivate; but He specifically made man to reshape the earth, to move it, to be a mover and shaper of stuff / ground (adamah) and to chart out the trajectories of that work in history; whereas He made woman to be a mover and shaper of persons / relationships (ishah / ish), which is why the two conceive of the main work the way they do when they’re healthy and why they avoid and undermine the work like the plague when they’re not.

2. What is the motive? The fear which hesitates to create makes God out to be an exacting owner, as the Parable of the Talents makes clear. There should be an inherent joy to the work, not simply in the act but in the finished product. Now we may still be tempted to separate self-interest as a necessary evil—a thing that “makes the economic world go round”—in the macroeconomic sphere, but totally inappropriate for the Christian worker as an individual. But this still misconstrues ‘self-interest’ for ‘interest-at-the-expense-of-others.’ That is an assumption that we must at least deconstruct. Piper’s Christian Hedonism gives us some valuable first steps in doing just that.[6]

Though one may reject the ultimate foundations of Rand’s ‘virtue of selfishness,’ yet some of her criticisms belong to the Western tradition and, in large measure, Christianity itself. A dictionary definition of selfishness only speaks of action directed toward one’s own benefit. Any moral valuation implied is derived from the outflow of ethical theories and so it begs the question. The culture of altruism, in other words, has cheated. We have skipped the hard work of philosophy and have simply assumed the altruist conclusion, as Rand says, that, “the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value—and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.”[7] When altruism wins out, it slices society into two basic opinions, each placing its morality on the foundation of felt needs and not reason. One side is the respectable majority which sides with Kant. They say that we should never do anything but what benefits others and that is the only reason why we act, why we sacrifice. On the other hand is Nietzsche—whose egoist ethic was often confused with Rand—and he says that we ought to do as we please, or specifically because it is I who choose. But Rand claimed that she avoided both by appealing to rational self-interest. And rational self-interest does not mean “what my reason” happens to think benefits me, but what is discovered to be the real interest of my-self. It is therefore not a whim.

Now whether Rand could justify it or not, given her foundational commitments, can we call God’s commission to man for work a ‘rational self-interest’? Certainly: if by “rational” we mean the mind’s conformity to the reality of the world as it is, and if by “self-interest” we mean that the individual is moved to action x for the chief end of his or her own happiness, then in that case the answer to the first question of the Catechism and the ethic of Rand are at one. If it is true that ‘God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him,’ then it must follow that the heights of the individual’s happiness and the heights of God’s glory are mutually interdependent[8] in every action of the individual out into the world.

The Eighteenth Century Christian apologist Joseph Butler argued for a distinction between self-contained self-love and the kind of self-interest to which the Bible so often appeals. This self-love is always coupled with love of others. But is that the most accurate way to think of it? Are they merely “coupled,” as if the one is a parallel reality to the other? Or are they not—like the glory of God and happiness of the creature—mutually interdependent? The great apologist of the following century, William Paley, seemed to take one more step in the same direction by defining virtue as, “doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.”[9]

Here I think is where Rand’s weakness lies. In order for the “interest” to be rational, it must be true to the reality of the individual (as man), the world and the whole moral realm. All three are real and therefore the soul’s conformity to the whole of reality alone can be called rational. We cannot call “rational” that which conforms only to that part of reality that one wants to be the most pressing motivation. And thus one cannot be a thoroughgoing adherent to rational self-interest unless they are a Christian because all other views will present something less than the whole of reality as it relates to the self and even its most selfish ends. In claiming to have an objective ethic, Rand makes “What is good and right?” into “Why does man need ethics?” as if the “need” escapes the possibility of subjectivism and whim! The reason man makes value is that only ‘Life’ is capable of valuation, and in that card trick, the Randians equate “Life-to-existence” out of one side of their mouths, while arbitrarily denying an ever existent Life (which would seem to be infinitely more objective) out of the other. By making value start in the finite life of volition and reason, the Randian ethic is hopelessly subjective and emotional.

B) The Relationship Between Work and the Other Spheres

1. The first and most obvious relationship is between our place of work and our place of living. Here a Christian forms an economy within an economy, in that his or her income becomes a material capital for the formation of the image-bearing industry at home. This is where a command economy is appropriate! The allocation of these few precious resources says something about God and therefore a budget, and a theological vision for that budget, is crucial. What is also crucial is that husbands and wives are counseled (preferably beforehand!) to form this gender-specific division of labor so that the specifically called work can be done with excellence and enjoyment. A freeing wife is like a hand in the glove that the man is, as he handles the ground. A contentious, relationally immovable wife is like a hand trying to fit on different gloves, forcing the man to conform to a suburban cell when God has called him to move something very specific.

2. Since morality is a function of religious truth, the system of voluntary exchange protects the collectivization of morality that naturally occurs when a state decides what people should do with their property. Thus the free market is necessary to the integrity of religious freedom.

The Christian doctrine of calling demands that though the church informs the other spheres, the individual is called by God ethically and so bears the weight of responsibility to initiate in his or her particular sphere. It is not the church’s responsibility to employ, invest capital, or appoint people to what they should be doing. This is usually obvious. But in a time and place in which there is a revival in the church, and a recovering of the biblical worldview with it, directionless young men especially may become disenchanted with the church that is not “making it happen” with their particular gifts. The church needs to inform these members of the body that avoiding atrophy is their responsibility. They are as much a missionary in culture as the living local church itself was when it first broke ranks with the cultural church of death. The church that tries to animate everything will come to nothing.

GENESIS 9:5-9

Do we catch those operative words that carry over the dominion mandate from the original creation to the other side of the flood? This mandate is to be carried out by man; for God; with you and your offspring after you. The Bible is clear, whether we cover our ears or not.

So I am not going to spend any of our time here justifying the Christian’s involvement in the public square as I have already done so in the third talk of our City of God series entitled “Sojourners of the City.” I will assume up front the biblical truth that God made the city and the state to speak about Himself and therefore He made the citizen and statesman as the ethical actors on that very public stage for the same reason. Consequently there just is a God-glorifying state such that we presume to rob Him of his glory in that sphere to the degree that we opt out. What we will do is to unpack the doctrine in four parts.

• THE DESIGN OF THE CITY-STATE
• THE DISTORTION OF THE CITY-STATE
• GOVERNMENT AND LAW
• GOVERNMENT AND POWER

The Big Idea is that the city is the concentrated collective expression of the image of God; and the state is the collective expression of the physical defense of the image of God.

Ultimate worldview assumptions demand very specific, consequent ethical commitments. Because of what God made a man to be, there is a collective response to evil that is right and another that is wrong. The Christian starting point issues forth into a man with a sword rightly dividing between good and evil, just as he does with the word and just as the Word does when He returns to set up the only truly just state. We are not the Word. But a copy is still a copy, or else it is a lie. By contrast, the Buddha is, more often than not, seated with his eyes closed; and, as Chesterton said, that is appropriate, because there is nothing worth seeing down here. But then to see no evil is to stop none, and this is precisely what Eastern man has been able to do with mass violence—nothing.

I. THE DESIGN OF THE CITY-STATE

A) The Origins of the City and the State

Right from the start of the Bible, the call to dominion was a call from the social wild to the social order. The city is never viewed as evil in itself. To the contrary, the social order of God to be replicated on earth is called The City of God [cf. Ps. 46:4], and his temple was intended to reside in his city, Jerusalem. The final eternal state will center on God’s presence in the city of New Jerusalem. The Greek word for city (polis) is where we derive the word “politics.” To speak of a city-state is what the modern world means by a nation-state. The English word “city” just comes from the Latin version of the same (civitas), from which we also derive the words “civics,” “civil,” “civility,” “civilization,” and so forth. Hence what we call politics or civics was first and foremost meant to be a science before it is an art; and to be a good citizen is to make a good study of this political entity that God designed.

Within this city-state resides the densest concentration of the divine image. And therefore life was to be defended because it was the image itself; liberty was to be defended because it was the life of worship always commanded into idolatry by other masters; property was to be defended because it was the product of man, and either spoke of God accurately or inaccurately. In other words, wherever idols command the soul away from God, it comes in the form of the will or its produce being used for idolatry. One cannot worship God in purity unless not only his life in general—life is not a generality but a real thing in each specific case—but his invisible life (liberty) and visible life (property) were compromised at the directives of other masters.

The most concise statement of the elements of just civil power, outside of Scripture, may be found in a little book by the French statesman Frederic Bastiat called The Law (1850). Of life, liberty and property he says,

—this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense…If every person has the right to defend—even by force—his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right—its reason for existing, its lawfulness—is based on individual right.[1]

So when we move from Genesis 1 to 9 and see the creational covenant maintained. We then see God reconstitute the purpose of humanity in one special people called Israel. Leaving aside the debate between hard Theonomists and the rest of us, let us at least agree that the law of God is a reflection of his character and that therefore the civil law given to Israel is no exception. Consequently, even if we argue that the theocratic law given to the nation is dissolved with their ancient exile (or that it is fulfilled in Christ’s work), it would still be the case that the spirit of the law is the perfect reflection of who God is in the civil sphere. We will be revisiting three facets of the law throughout: 1) natural rights, 2) governmental form, and 3) the accumulation of power. At first we should take notice that Israel’s government went from the exegesis of the priests—fulfilled by the judges prior to the era of the kings—to the monarchy. In Deuteronomy 17 we see the application of law divided into “right” and “assault” (v. 8), covering the realm of the divine image and its defense.

This reminds us that civil law is concerned, materially, with rights and their defense. But we also see that the basic function of the priest-judge was as an exegete of the law; so that, even though finite sinners would always preside in the office, the officer was under the same law, not the officer the originator of the law. All that changes with the demand for a monarch in 1 Samuel 8; though God anticipates this and guides the people through even their national sin way back in Deuteronomy 17:14-20. In the biblical worldview, the state as an institution and the law as its information originate in God’s expression to man—his image—so that the civil sphere is a function of the divinely revealed covenant.

Now, the secular thinker has to rest all of its ideas of social justice on the notion the social contract. This was a very popular idea within Enlightenment philosophy. The most famous examples can be found in Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1689) and Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762). For Hobbes, the power of the state is a necessary evil which is preferable to the state of war which inevitably arises from the self-interest of each individual and group. Man is bad in the state of nature, but a strong central state, rooted in the monarchy, is a sufficient ordering principle. For Locke, the social contract comes closest to the Christian view. The natural rights inherent to the law are the reason for the government’s existence. “State of nature, for Locke, meant the state in which God creates man and in which man still consists. The notion did not depend on some deliberate, pre-civilized progression. Rather,

That is a state of perfect freedom of acting and disposing of their own possessions and persons as they think fit within the bounds of the law of nature. People in this state do not have to ask permission to act or depend on the will of others to arrange matters on their behalf. The natural state is also one of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal and no one has more than another…They have no relationship of subordination or subjection unless God (the lord and master of them all) had clearly set one person above another and conferred on him an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.[2]

For Rousseau, man is born free and equal. What enslaves him and creates inequality are the rise of competition inherent to civilization and the growth of reason. Why then the state if the problem is irreversible? It is that the collective expression of the people can force people to be free. Legitimate power resides only in the people and a just law is one in which the people are present to ratify. In the French Revolution we see the shift come full circle from the law as the objective reference point to the people.

B)  The Assumption of Sin and Priority of Law

The biblical doctrine of sin informs our doctrine of the state. How so? Well, if the design encompasses the distortion—as God designed man’s life in the fall to speak about Him as well—then it follows that this dominion will be designed to prevent the distortion, to resist it: “the law is not laid down for the just, but for the unjust” [1 Tim. 1:9]. Dominion is over the earth, to subdue its corruption. Thus the illegitimate use of force requires a legitimate use of force in response. But legitimate force is not simply a preventative measure but an expression of justice.

For the founder of the Utilitarian philosophy, Jeremy Bentham, all punishment is evil because of its effects on the spectrum of pleasure and pain. On the other hand it seems to be a necessary evil.  The traditional Western answer to this question was simply that justice demands it—i.e. retribution—whereas the Utilitarian needs a motive that is aimed toward the positive increase of society’s happiness. Therefore there are two utilitarian justifications for punishment: the first is deterrence from future crime and the second is the rehabilitation of the criminal.

C)  The Decree and Design of the Sword

The definitive New Testament passage on the state is Romans 13:1-7. We live in a time and place of church history where the extreme Pietism is eclipsing the extreme of Triumphalism and in so doing exegeting texts like Romans 13:1-7 with a heavy Pietistic leaning. Consequently we tend to see the decree language of Paul’s teaching and tend to ignore the design language. Both are taught. God decrees the man in the office and God designs the office that the man holds. The decree teaches us to bear up in humiliation, as unto the Lord, to accurately speak of Christ’s humiliation under Caesar and his Roman cross—and so we obey the man—the designs teaches us that a state is to punish injustice, not create justice, and that when the lustful sword of the criminal or the mob rises up that God has given a just sword to the state to prevent the lust for power—and so we disobey the mob and its illegitimate sword in order to uphold the legitimate sword of the state. Understanding both of these dimensions of the text is crucial to applying the doctrine of just powers our specific contexts.

And that is another often overlooked truth: different Christians live under different forms of government and must therefore apply the universal truth diversely. Similar to the translation of the slave-master relations to employee-employer relations, if we do not live under a monarchy, do we really believe that Paul’s teaching doesn’t apply to us! We are called to submit to the governing officials given the form of the constitution (written or unwritten) of the particular political entity.

II. THE DISTORTION OF THE CITY-STATE

A) The Totalizing Tendency of the State

We also see a profound analysis of the disintegration of the state in Scripture. From Cain’s flight further east we see the building of cities for the purpose of hiding from God and perpetuating corrupt human power. We see the Tower of Babel utilized to consolidate all of the spheres of society under one head. But the definitive passage can be found in 1 Samuel 8 where the people of Israel changed forms of government. Here three things of the distortion are evident. The first is that the object of revelation shifts, the second is that, therefore, the form of government is not theologically neutral, and the third is what the centralization of power in a sinful man will cause as a result. Samuel is told by God, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (v. 8). Both of the first two elements are perceived in this verse. In moving from the rule of law (corresponding to the exegesis of the office-holder) to the rule of man, the voice of the people takes precedence over the voice of God. And that further implies that man is ethically sovereign and not God. True, a finite-sinner will hold the office in either case; but the center of civil truth shifts from the objective word of God to the subjective will of the majority. As to the third element, there are the unintended consequences of this shift of which Samuel warns them [vv. 11-18]. This is not the prediction of the exclusive sins of one particular tyrant named Saul. This is the natural way of the kings, of the rule of man. Thus we have a comprehensive biblical warning against the shift from the rule of law to the rule of man in governmental form, and the description of the unintended consequences of that concentration of power which ensues from the initial shift. This is a doctrine of Scripture.

B)  The Deifying Tendency of the Statesman

Certainly Cain, Lamech, Nimrod, Pharaoh and Saul exemplified this tendency. Yet it is Nebuchadnezzar who seems to most explicitly state this attitude. Of his rule he boasts, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” [Dan. 4:30] Therefore God removed the secular kingdom from him. Thus were Nero, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin all raised up and torn down by the sovereign ruler of history. One part of general revelation that we might tend to miss is what the old thinkers called the jus gentium, the laws of nations. In the Christian tradition these are a legitimate field of study as a guide in this restricted manner: to learn from the mistakes of those who have aimed the nearest to, or fell the farthest from, the eternal pattern.

The civil sphere which restricts freedom commands obedience. You cannot have one without the other. Thus the “enslaver” [1 Tim. 1:10] is included in the New Testament lists of grievous sins; and for this reason Paul says “if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity” [1 Cor. 7:21]. It was with this vision of the soul in relation to God that Paul appeals to the slave owner Philemon to “receive (Onesimus) back forever, no longer as a slave” [Phm. 15-16] on the ground that, before God, they were equals. To choose against liberty, where it can be maintained, is a choice against obedience to God.

C)  From Athens to Rome to London to Independence Hall

Russell Kirk, in his book The Roots of American Order (1974), traces those elements that resembled the eternal order of justice in the centers of power that comprised Western history. The center of world power has passed in concert with the movement of what Kirk called the “moral imagination” of each civilization. As a people group ascended to the objectivity of the rule of law, that people group solidified the legitimate powers of their polis and their political integration stepped into the void of the existing power’s increasing political disintegration, marked by a subjective turn from the law (nomos) to the people (demos).

It is interesting that in the vision of the king which Daniel interpreted, four world orders are passed through, each composed of material which corresponds to their form of government. The Asiatic Empires—the Babylonian and the Medo-Persian—are solid, gold and silver, but suffocating of human freedom and dignity; the conquests of Alexander would expand the Greek, which is the third of bronze, to a grander scale than the city-states would have in their Golden Age; then the iron represents the Roman Empire which was the strongest in terms of military prowess and scope. Finally its boundaries would divide into what would become the modern West, composed of more easily breakable clay. If we study out the political forms of these world powers, we will see clearly that there is a spectrum of what Schaeffer once called ‘form and freedom,’ such that, as form is maximized, power is retained but freedom is annihilated; as form is minimized, freedom is trumpeted, but order does not last. What began to develop in the Western political tradition is a classical liberal theory, rarely lived up to, where liberty consistent with law, or freedom consistent with form, became the ideal. This notion of self-government, rooted in objective law, reached its peak expression (as a notion) in seventeenth and eighteenth century British though, informed by Puritanism as it was. And yet the English people were more informed by an Anglicanism where the church and its truth rested upon the dictates of the crown, so it could never really take in the old world. New England was to be the shining city on the hill where the Puritan vision of Christian thought and action would have a blank slate to work upon.

III. GOVERNMENT AND LAW

A) The Forms of Government

Anarchy is the state of social disorder in lieu of the order of the state. The word ‘anarchy’ is derived from the Greek anarchia which means lack of a leader, descending in turn from the roots for “without” (an) and “first thing” (arche). There are basically four ways to constitute the civil government: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy and republic. Any other supposed forms are really a species or modification of one of these forms.

Monarchy is the rule of one, from the Greek for “one” (mono) and “first thing” (arche). No mere mortal has the capacity to rule those around him by the sheer force of his own will, as by some hypnosis or charm or threat, but is always a titular head at the behest of a small number of powerful groups, wielding the forces of expertise, money and priest-craft. Consequently no pure monarchy has really ever existed.

Oligarchy is the rule of a few, from the Greek for “few” or “small number” (oligoi) and “first thing” (arche). Since there is really no such thing as a monarchy except in name, the rule of the elite few has been the universal norm of history.

Democracy is the rule of the people, from the Greek for “people” (demos) and “rule” (kratein). The vast majority of the philosophers and theologians of Western Civilization have vehemently opposed democracy. The basic reason has always been that one cannot place “the people” as the ultimate reference point of law without assuming the same ultimate reference point of truth. By reducing truth and morality to democratic origins, nothing of humanity is safe from the dictates of this majority; nor is there any corrective, above the majority, unless democracy is modified or abandoned altogether.

Because the nature of democracy is to tend toward the annihilation of the law inherent to the people, it has in fact done so in history without exception, as James Madison observed in Federalist, No. 10 (1787):

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

Consequently democracy is nothing but a stage and step back to oligarchy. It is therefore the promised form of the tyrant, in which goods are offered from the public trough in the willing exchange of the rights of true law.

Republic is not the rule of man at all, but the rule of law. It comes from the Latin for “public” (publica) and “thing” (res). In other words, a republic is “the public thing,” or “the objective thing.” When it is objection that men rule no matter what the form, so that the form is irrelevant, we need to look deeper into the nature of law as to its objectivity. A republic is not a panacea; rather a republic is the only form that shouts to its members that you have not been given a panacea, but a trust.

As Milton Friedman said, “The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority.”[3] The point is that this collective force defeats the point of collective right and it is not the sort of thing you can have buyer’s remorse about. If you lose freedom it is not the same thing as purchasing a defective product. The man behind the counter this time has tazers and tanks behind him.

B)  The Forms of Law

First and foremost, there is the divine law (nomon theou). We have already established that all that God desires and does and decrees is inherently righteous. Now God made the earthly sphere of dominion to give honor to, to speak accurately of, his heavenly dominion. Those who hate the essence of the state hate the one true God; those who hate the corruption of the state ought to hate, in the corruption, that which lies about God.

How the design is discerned in the Word and in the world comes together to what we mean by the next form of law. As a species of general revelation, there is natural law, which, contrary to the building myth, does not mean “autonomous” or “secular” verdicts. It simply means the legal truth as reflected in the nature of the states that are, and, more importantly, in our reasoning about this sphere. If our right reasoning, in general, is a part of natural theology, then our reasoning about the civil sphere is what we mean by natural law. Notice at that point that any argument against the objectivity of natural law will be made by reasoning about is object—the civil sphere and our reasoning about it—and thus is self-contradictory. The doctrine of natural law, that it is objective, is logically irrefutable.

Within civil law we may distinguish between common and statutory law.  This difference is reflected in the constitution of England as opposed to the new Constitution of the United States as those two nations became separate entities.

So there is this order—the divine law is manifest in the natural law, as well as the Mosaic law to Israel (following from the breakdown of general and special revelation), which second genus of law then issues forth into civil law—from the divine to the natural to the civil. It follows that a civil law is just to the degree that it conforms to the divine law, which conformity is discerned through the lens of natural law, inside of which, is the finer lens of the moral law revealed in Scripture.

C)  The American Experiment in Constitutional Federalism

1. The basic concerns of the Founding Fathers revolved around the competing claims of law and liberty, power and its abuse. They knew that the form and freedom of the just state were set against each other to the degree that sin reigned and ignorance did its bidding. The people (demos) and the law (nomos) were magnetically repulsive in their relationship short of a republic upheld by a moral and educated population. The doctrine of ‘checks and balances’ is not simply a historical reaction, but a theological reaction to the reality of sin in the public official. Since it is precisely persons who are corrupted by sin, the concentration of power is barred from persons, as one sector of the state checks, or balances out, the accumulation of power in another. So the American system is balanced on two levels: three branches within each level—and two houses (bicameral) within the legislative branch—and a decentralized system where legitimacy flows from the locales and counties to the state to the national government.

The American Revolution was biblically justified because the British state, at least in its motion toward the Colonies, had dissolved the bonds of the covenant. The law which stood over both the crown and its subjects had been disobeyed by the state officials; and thus the lower magistrate in the colonies upheld the law and the lawbreakers were prosecuted via military campaign. The tyranny of unlawful governments may be opposed by competing magistrates whose office is also lawful. This may be done by one sovereign power protecting its borders from the unlawful force of another sovereign power, or, it may be done by a lower magistrate or officer fulfilling those duties that are within his lawful jurisdiction.

2. In our day, it is still the highest source of federal law that, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people” [Amendment 9] and “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” [Amendment 10]. Consequently, the governments of the states may lawfully resist, even by armed force, the unlawful force brought against their jurisdiction. It is illegal for the central government to be doing anything that the people have not expressly delegated to them from that higher form of government—in the federal system—called “the states.” What is unique about our system of government is simply that the “lower” magistrates—the constituents of the federal system—are actually “higher” magistrates in terms of authority. Again, this is not “theoretical,” it is the law. The states are responsible to bring the lawbreakers to justice, by peaceable, judicial means if at all possible, until a full state of war ensues.

Where the mediating magistrates act as cowards, or ignoramuses, the populace may inform them that the powers of all such magistrates are derived by the consent of the governed. Indeed this consent is an expression of each individual’s life, liberty and property and it is this natural right, and nothing else, that has instituted each level of government as expressed in the laws themselves:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Hence the right of armed police action belongs to the people, in the formation of a state, where the former civil government has broken down. This is the fundamental reason why the American Revolution was justified under biblical principles. The citizens of the colonies did not revolt against a legitimate state, but the lower magistrates and people performed a defensive police action against a rouge state that had broken down into a state of war. Thus, in Romans 13 terminology, the crown had abdicated its sword and played the rebel, at which point the lawbreakers of London were brought to justice for their barbarous activity.

It is important to note, first, that the representatives of the American colonies sought remedies peacefully, according to English law, for over a decade of the Intolerable Acts, and second, that the British anarchists invaded a portion of the citizens from which they derived their authority. Thus the Patriots’ resistance was a defensive police action meeting all of the standards of the just use of force. Their life, liberty and property were assaulted without just cause.

IV. GOVERNMENT AND POWER

A) Three Branches as a Reflection of Christ

1. The prophet Isaiah tells us that, “The LORD is our judge; the LORD is our lawgiver; the LORD is our king; he will save us” [33:22]. The offices of Israel were triune and the government of Israel was triune. But alas, an analogy submerged in sin is in need of a fulfillment. Therefore human government is not an end in itself and the prophet finishes that this Christ will save us, not any work of human government. Yet the government not ordained to save is ordained to speak of the Savior-King, and it will speak accurately to the degree that it exemplifies this Trinitarian stamp: the executive, the legislative and the judicial, as the Father decrees, the Son is this logos and the Spirit glorifies, or interprets, the Word.

Henry de Bracton wrote De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (On the Laws and Customs of England). Arguing from a stream of Roman canon law and English common law, he began to argue that the king ceases to be the king when he acts against the law. This he wrote during the drawing up of the Magna Charta in 1215. The document was forced onto King John by his barons. It at least guaranteed the rights of “non-serfs,” which at least placed the King under the law. A century earlier, Henry I had granted rights, restricting his own sphere of power; but the significance of the subjects demanding rights and being the agents of checking it was that if the only rights ever restricting the king came from the king, then, in principal, the rule of man still held sway.

The elements of this civil sphere, as summarized by John Calvin in the Institutes of Christian Religion (1536), “are three,”

the magistrate, who is president and guardian of the laws; the laws, according to which he governs; and the people, who are governed by the laws, and obey the magistrate.[4]

The Puritan, Samuel Rutherford, wrote Lex Rex (1644), which means “the law is king.” Of course Rutherford, being a Scottish Puritan, was not against every form of divine right! He believed that the Presbyterian form of government was so clear in Scripture that it ought to apply both to church and to state. The two are distinct, but it is still for the state, he thought, to at least promote the true religion by repressing alternative religious speech.

2. Of course we have to know that these three functions of the state are to maintain them. The legislative branch crafts the laws, the judicial branch interprets them, and the executive branch enforces them. The abiding legal philosophy that makes the judicial branch what it is has recently been called “Originalism,” though it is sometimes still called strict “Constructionism.” Truthfully there is no other philosophy of law that makes sense of having written law to begin with. The principle of “let the decision stand” (stare decisis) assumes that there is more wisdom in the people and the ages than there is in the imaginations of one or a few elites. Applied to Constitutional Law this principle assumes that those who wrote a law, particularly a law foundational to entire civil order, must be taken seriously as to their intent, not sifted according to the supposed progress of a whole society that it takes nine judges behind closed doors to tell them how much they’ve progressed!

B)  Just War as an Extension of the State Principle

What constitutes a just war? The answer is that, since a war is a prosecuting use of force turned outward to an alien illegitimate force, the very same thing that justifies the use of force within the nation-state justifies its extension to alien prosecution.

The three tradition questions that are asked are these: 1) Is the cause just in general? 2) Is it in our national interest? 3) Are we likely to win? Now questions 2 and 3 are certainly relevant to strategy at the war college. However, if the answer to the first question is ‘Yes,’ then 2 and 3 becomes ancillary details; and if the answer to the first question is ‘No,’ then 2 and 3 become polemical pretexts for an unjust war. In summary, the questions of national interest and probably victory belong to strategy and not to the first principles of just war.

Is an unmanned attack plane more immoral because it “de-personalizes” killing? This seems to be a revealing question. I don’t disagree that depersonalizing the killing of people will be the tendency of this as much as the invention of the atom bomb was. On the other hand, the two cities in Japan destroyed by the bomb represented far less lives on both sides lost than would have been lost in an invasion of the whole island. At any rate, what is revealed in this objection? The notion of the “gentlemanly war” or a “war between brothers,” which reached its peak expression in the Genevan Convention, is perhaps the most underrated hypocrisy in the long history of hypocritical notions. Feeling as though you’re playing a video game when you’re really killing people “depersonalizes” warfare, but the desire to fight wars free from mass extinction or ‘easy kills’ to recapture the “honor” of it all doesn’t? Excuse me! Are we not thinking of the words “depersonalizing war,” as if it were the same thing as putting Astroturf in at Wrigley Field?

The whole premise of a just war is that an aggressor has stepped out of the social covenants and must be stopped for the same reason that the police stop a bank robber or hostage holder. The heightened means of violence on the part of the police action is only in proportion to the means utilized by the aggressor. What is especially hypocritical of the selective pacifist here is that his outrage is directed not at the potentially evil motives for war but at the excellence with which it is executed. From a biblical perspective, if the Image of God in one’s crosshairs does not need to die, then you have no business fighting a war even with cap guns or toy swords. The moral issue is not the availability of force but the legitimacy of its use (in any amount).

C)  International Relations and Global Consolidation

On the principle held by everyone from Aristotle to Montesquieu, the government that governs least governs best. This did not simply refer to the size of the state’s bureaucratic largess, but to its per capita constituency. We know in our everyday lives that when everyone owns something, no one really owns it; and therefore no one takes the initiative or responsibility in its maintenance. As the state expands its powers and as the local becomes more remote, the ownership in the franchise is diminished and the state officials become more unaccountable. Thus there is a kind of tyranny of the critical mass.

How much more would this be the case beyond the current boundaries of nations? The fear of a one world government is not simply about conspiracy theories. It is, scientifically, a bad idea and, at the same time, an inevitable tendency of an ever shrinking and ever secularized world. It also happens to be the stated goal of Western intellectuals for over a century now.

If nothing else, the Christian should have a working understanding of where the flow of political history is going, so that we can pray for the strategy of missions that we ought to. Think of the current surge of Christian ideas in China and Africa.

D) The Strategy of Christianizing Mission in the Rising Powers

At one extreme the modern Christian mission attempted to ‘Westernize’ the mission field and at the other extreme the postmodern Christian mission is attempting to ‘relativize’ the mission field. Beyond these wrongheaded views, the biblical mission is to bring the gospel to the nations within the context of a worldview that stands over the cultural norms all nations.

The basic reason that hard Theonomy is unbiblical is that Christ the King fulfills the form of government for which Old Testament Israel’s civil law was the shadow. It is true that the monarchy in David was not God’s original design, chronologically or essentially; but we must understand that even in the original law, Moses and then the priestly class functioned as the representative of the true King, Yahweh, so that when Christ reigns over the church and the nations now, the secular monarchy of Christ is only announced by the church and not enforced by the church. This follows from our doctrine of Christ. Christology informs Theonomy at this point: not the other way around (as hard Theonomists would have it), not side-by-side (as Two Kingdom Pietists would have it). So the City of God informs the city of man in the church age, in the form of the prophetic office and not the kingly office, while the office of secular statesman remains until Christ returns. We influence/invade the secular with the sacred via information rather than force.

PSALM 127:3-5

In review of what we saw from the opening chapters of the Bible, the triune God made human beings to speak about himself—that was what Image meant—and we do not restrict this God-glorifying function of the Image to the Image existing in isolation. God did not make man to be in isolation. And that social dimension to the image is most clearly seen is how He brings together this first social that we’re going to look at: the family. The basic thing that God does in response to it not being good for man to be alone is to “make him a helper fit for him.” We saw that woman was an ezer, or picture of the Spirit of God reflecting all of the life-giving and comforter aspects of life. At this point we have to avoid two extremes about this doctrine of Complementarian gender designs. The difference between the sexes has marriage as a central material end, but it does not have the act or reality of a particular marriage as its origin or basic meaning. In other words, marriage can be an end cause of gender difference without depending on a particular marriage in this lifetime ever occurring or even going well.

• WHAT IS A MARRIAGE?
• WHAT IS A FAMILY?
• WHAT IS A HOME?
• WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THIS AND OTHER SPHERES?

The Big Idea is that the family is the multiplication of the Image and therefore the home is a fortress for the preservation/perseverance of this Image.

A word of warning: The biblical doctrine of the family is a divisive doctrine. It divides the church between the younger and the older. Those who have been there and done that have been young idealists. They were once excited about putting into practice the biblical mandate; and they have seen the biblical truth of Job—that God does with homes something bigger than He commands of family members. But cynicism lurks in that lesson. Those who are just getting started see in the Bible a world-changing ethic that flows from the home to the whole world; and naturally anyone that sees this is going to immediately see childbearing and homeschooling in a different light than they otherwise would have. Their immediate thought it: Wow, I’ve got to do this! “Got” becomes a slippery words that begins to rise above everything else in the Christian worldview. And legalism lurks on that slippery slope. Both sides forget the fundamental principle of biblical ethics—that we do what we do because of what it says about God, not because of what it says about us—and therefore both sides tend to pit one side of the biblical teaching against the other: old creation and kingdom against gospel and new creation; or vice-versa.

I. WHAT IS A MARRIAGE?

A) The Unity and Diversity of the Image in Men and Women

1. As to unity, both man and woman are created as mankind (adam) and are therefore equal in dignity. In being placed in eden they are both given the same basic, ultimate vocation: namely, worship. On the other hand, they are also created “male and female,” and thus man is formed from the ground (adamah), whereas the woman (ishah) is formed from the side of man (ish). They are given a unified set of names (Adam and Eve) and they are given a diverse met of names (Man and Woman) in order to reflect that they have the same ultimate purpose, but diverse specific tasks. And the God of perfect wisdom built them specifically for their specific tasks. John Piper has labeled this well and so we will defer to his breakdown here[1], though I will combine it with the linguistic dynamics of Genesis 1-2:

Men                               Women

Gender-Specific Dispositions                       lead, provide, protect                affirm, nurture, receive

Location of Glory-Seeking                            ground / impersonal                 side / interpersonal

Basic Complementary Need                         ground / respect                       side / love

2. Marriage is the “material unity” of the two image-bearers. It is not the only unity of their design; but it is the clearest display of it and therefore very much on purpose. Marriage is neither a social contract (secularism) nor a sacrament (Romanism), but a divinely ordained covenant [cf. Mat. 19:4-6]. This means that every single marriage—whether of believers or unbelievers—is made by God.

B) Complementary Differences Complement In and Out of Marriage

1. There are more cans of worms crawling around at this point than we could possibly clean up, so let’s confine our study to the two most obvious difficulties: First, how do we understand gender distinctions apart from this one flesh union? Second, where do we draw the lines between God’s design and man’s distortion? These differences are creational-not-conventional. Gender as convention represents a materialistic worldview and a program of social engineering, the immediate goal being to change conventions. And these differences are also psychological-not-simply-biological. Gender as strictly biological is also coming from a materialistic worldview. Such distinction will help the church understand when their values about gender are coming from Scripture or culture, and whether or not we are trying to perform our own social engineering within the church.

2. Notice that when Jesus reaffirms the original design of marriage in the New Testament He parallels this with the continued design of gender uniqueness: “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female’” [Mk. 10:4]. Man is not at liberty to undo male and female anymore than he is at liberty to undo any particular marriage union.

C) The Genesis of Gender Psychology

1. As we turn to Genesis 3 we can see that in the Fall we do not simply have a fallen race, but also the fallen sexes. The curses specific to the man and woman directly mirror their design. The gender-specific Image cracks. So, the man who sought God’s glory in the cultivation of the earth now seeks his own glory in the cultivation of the earth; so, the woman who sought God’s glory in the cultivation of relationships now seeks her own glory in the cultivation of relationships. That which at first yielded a harvest of worship now yields thorns and thistles and coldness and neglect. The abuse is in the use because the distortion is of the design.

II. WHAT IS A FAMILY?

A) To Multiply the Image is a ‘General Imperative Blessing’

1. Again misunderstanding abounds. But each of these three words will be important and avoid all of the extremes. God’s words in 1:28 reflect all three of these essential elements: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” It’s general because it is to man-kind (adam), as the anthropological account that treats man and woman distinctly as individuals waits for Chapter 2. It’s an imperative because God says to mankind to “Be fruitful.” Some may be concerned that this is Law-therefore-not-Grace. But that assumes that God would ever command of you something that is either not good or at least neutral. All of God’s commands are blessings!

2. Notice also from 1:28 that the family precedes the state as the cause to an effect. Fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion. Who has dominion over the whole earth? Obviously only more image bearers. So, the family is the most basic institution of the original creation. When it goes, all of society goes; for the family is the social DNA—the base informing society that issues forth into the traits of society at large—from the bond of a man and woman comes all of the rational creatures that comprise total society. We might say about the family that it is the microcosm society where the other three spheres we will speak of after are the macrocosm of society. For society to intrude upon the specific prerogatives of the family would be like a mad scientist fiddling with the embryos of all of the members of the next generation.

B) To Multiply the Image is a Communal Gift in the New Creation

1. What if we have a basically positive vision of the family against the secularizing tendencies of modern culture, but we are equally suspicious of a legalistic interpretation of this domestic imperative? The three-fold doctrine above should have already helped. The command spells out a general vocation and never mandates amounts of children, nor excludes vocations that do not include childrearing. But let us say we need more to assure us. Jesus helps us here. When Peter asked him about leaving everything behind for the sake of the kingdom, Jesus replied that these (including children) would be made up for “a hundredfold…[with] children” in the kingdom [cf. Mk. 10:29-30]. In other words, when Jesus redeems you He also makes true the prophecy about Him redeeming all that you’ve lost [cf. Joel 2], and that includes any loss of reputation, favor, status or sense of worth within the domestic sphere. No matter how God has shaken the home you came from or the home you tried to build, you are an equal member of the household of God and all things really are in common, which doesn’t mandate a communist cell. What it does mandate is more of a war-time lifestyle that sees everyone on the same side in the greatest war conceivable. But this camaraderie goes together with this charity. No widow, no orphan, no single mother has to come crawling back to the suburban heroes of the church to carve out a measly existence in the church penalty box. The Holy Spirit is doing something new with every broken person and it does not, and cannot wait, till you get your suburban ducks in a row.

2. We do not want to commit a fallacy by arguing from someone else’s false good to the negation of a true good. For instance, in the Bible barrenness was always dreaded by wives and used as a symbol of spiritual destitution. So if we hear a triumphalist view of childbearing equating barrenness to disobedience, we can commit this fallacy by arguing not against them, but against God’s value of multiplying the image. Likewise, the Roman Catholic doctrine that marriage, and therefore sexuality, is exclusively for reproduction leads to everything from identity crises, priestly celibacy (and potentially abuse) and the forbiddance of contraceptives. We can commit the same fallacy by arguing, not against their fallacy, but against God’s primary design of marriage for procreation.

C) The Largest Context Even for the Old Design is the Gospel Declared

1. This may be hard to get our minds around, but the New Testament seems to be consistent that at the highest point in the ethical hierarchy of the old institutions is the purity of the gospel witness. Thus leadership, submission, covenant-keeping faithfulness and forgiveness, all take precedence over any other ethical inference which we might otherwise rightly draw from Scripture. In commenting on all the “for the Lord’s sake” calls to submission in 1 Peter 2 and 3, Andreas Kostenberger concludes that “leading unbelievers to Christ is a greater cause than insisting on justice in human relationships.”[2] And it is precisely the display of the gospel in these submissive acts which so powerfully leads sinners to Christ.

III. WHAT IS A HOME?

A) The Home as a New Image Fortress / Incubator

1. If a child is nothing but a new human, and every human is made in the image of God, then the home is meant for the preservation and perseverance of this image so that the family can propagate this image: preservation, perseverance, propagation. ‘Image-Mutations’ are the results of nature and nurture. In his book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart, Ted Tripp gives us a good biblical counterpart to the psychologist’s nature and nurture breakdown. He calls these the basic “God-ward orientation” of the child’s soul and the “shaping influences” upon the child’s soul. The God-ward orientation is basic to everything else, but the influences are still shaping. And this follows from our doctrines of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. But this breakdown is just one more safeguard against flying to the extremes of pietistic cynicism or else “blood and soil” legalism.

B) The Home as a Covenantal ‘Circle of Blessing’

1. Fathers were given the role they were to speak of God, which is why Paul retains the patriarchal stamp on familial reality in Ephesians 3:  and 6:  . Once again there are two extremes. One is to make patriarchy foundational to theology and the other is to see it as essentially corruptive. Instead patriarchy exists because of what it says about God; that there is patriarchal abuse simply means that there is a distortion of the design. Kostenberger points out that “it was not primarily the power and privileges associated with the father’s position but rather the responsibilities associated with his headship that were emphasized.”[3] God binds all the members of the family to speak about himself in general, but He bind each member of the family to speak about himself in particular. So, again, there is unity and diversity in the covenant relationship.

Mothers were not directly addressed in Ephesians 6, not because Paul forgot them, nor because there were no Ephesian mothers! It was because the Deuteronomic mandate to the patriarchy was retained in the New Covenant. And that also does not mean that mothers do not have similar responsibilities; rather that mothers do not suddenly become fathers! Now to the unity of the parents’ calling, notice that the man and woman are both called to accomplish the four vocations in general, but that the man is pictured specifically heading the cultivation and scientific aspects in the temporary absence of the woman (and it’s not a good thing!)—and so does not mean that women may not work outside of the home, but—which draws attention to the man’s physical capacity and spiritual aggression to do those things in a way that women, in a normal context, have no desire to do. Their help comes in a different form. But a wife is still related to these. The initial two commands explain how this is. The imperatives of multiplication and dominion center on the home and the reproduction of Image bearers, which means the cultivation of a new generation of spiritual giants [cf. Ps. 127:3-5]. It is viewed as the most powerful thing: the location of the most motion of earth, since here is the image. The image is not what the man is “working on” at work, nor what the electorate is “voting on” in the public square. The Image is most nearly the ones who are grown in the home.

2. Within the covenant relationship there is blessing; with disobedience and separation comes a curse. The immediate task of the parents’ communication to the children is of this covenant dynamic. This is the way Paul interprets the fifth commandment:

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother (this is the first commandment with a promise), that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land [Eph. 6:1-3].

3. Formative discipline refers to the formation of the whole person. All of life is this kind of discipline. It may be helpful to remember that “disciple” literally means “disciplined one.” So in the Great Commission what are we told to do in making disciples? The formative process is described as “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” [Mat. 28:20]. Corrective discipline refers to the changing of external elements, whether environmental changes or punishments imposed, in order to prevent the irrational soul from moving outside of the circle of blessing because they are manifesting a state of mind that is incapacitated to the point of immediate danger. Naturally it is a last resort. However that does not mean that it may not be frequent, as the Proverbs make clear: “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him” [13:4]; “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him” [22:15]; “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die” [23:13]; “If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol” [23:14]; “The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother” [29:15].

The interplay of formative and corrective discipline flows from the understanding of a Christian parent of when the rational soul or irrational sin is the immediate target. The rational soul is the norm; but there is a time and place for snatching someone from the edge of a cliff. Tripp says about the norm: “Changing behavior without changing the heart trains the heart toward whatever you use as your means…[God] produces change from the inside out.”[4] So in having a total vision of God’s role and your role, where should your role be aimed as a parent? It should be cultivating the thing that God is already doing: aiming at the inside-out function of the intellect in the soul.

C) The Home as a School-House and Seminary

1. Since the discipling of the human soul is primarily formative (intellectual), not corrective (physical), it follows that there is a total relationship between the information of the biblical worldview and the formation of the godly soul. The form of discipline is essentially intellectual: a subject we will return to in great detail in our final session.

2. A school-house must be geared toward the generations. The language of the commands in Deuteronomy is aimed at the generations because the whole point of the family is the propagation of the Image. And if the image is formed essentially through the intellect, then naturally it follows that one can only aim godliness at the generations through multigenerational education. Paul gives us a hint what this means in the Pastoral Letters where the charge to Timothy and Titus for the maintenance of the churches they were founding was essentially doctrinal. In the second letter to Timothy, Paul tells Timothy to “Guard the deposit” [2 Tim. 1:14].

IV. WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THIS AND OTHER SPHERES?

A) The Doctrine of the New Creation Informs the Doctrine of the Spheres

1. In the original creation there was unity and diversity in the spheres because of what it said of the unity and diversity in God. So, as Christ creates the new creation, there is a unity and diversity of the City of God (New) over/in the city of man (Old). And the new unity and diversity trumps the old because it is the real reality. As John Owen argues in The Glory of Christ, the new creation is founded on God the Son (the infinite, ontological Word) whereas the old creation was founded on only secondarily on God (the spoken, creational word). In the first, Owen says, “he hangs the world upon nothing,” whereas the new world springs forth from the Rock who is Christ. It is forever and eternally real, stretching both time past, space present and off beyond the end of this age; the world of history in Adam was a vapor, a shadow, a sketch, only eschatologically real. All of its directives, all of God’s commands in it, are to be interpreted in light of the new divine directives.

2. And the individual Christian is the focal point of the new creation. The church is nothing but the communion of saints—yes the body of Christ—but the traffic from eternity flows from God’s word to the conscience of the individual Christian before it flows anywhere else! This is why the church can be “over” the whole of the family and the husband/father, wife/mother, or child can decide “over-against” the dictates of either family or church at the same time (in a different relation). The sense in which the church stands over the other orders is entirely with the word of God. The sense in which the individual Christian stands over the orders (including, if need be, the local church) is entirely with the word of God. In other words—in this hierarchy—it is the word of God that gives unity to the diversity of the individual conscience (NC), the supreme sphere of the church (NC), and the lesser sphere of the family (OC).

B) The Church as the Actual Kingdom, the Family Members as the Potential Kingdom

1. In the oldest concepts of physics we would draw a distinction in motion between potency and act. This is Aristotle’s notion, but I have made use of it many times before and it is useful in the same way as the alphabet it, if anyone is wiggling. Now if the church, or city of God, is the form of the new creation, which is the greater reality, then the matter of our biological (or adopted) will only be acted upon in a gracious way to the degree that we see the church as the superior reality. Only this will be good for them and break their idols. What moves upon, and actuates this potential spiritual life, are the Word and the Spirit. And these two elements are given principally to the church. Our biological children are potential members of the kingdom, but they are not actual members until or unless the Holy Spirit ministers the content of the gospel to their hearts.

2. The church is not the collective family and the old family is not the church. Here the Family Integrated movement commits a doctrinal error. Voddie Baucham’s Family-Driven Faith (2007) offers many good correctives and many good directives for the home, but its view of the relationship between the family unit and church methodology goes wrong right from the title. Our faith should not be driven by our family, but our family (as everything else) driven by our faith. This difference is not merely cosmetic. The impression is given within this movement that the biological family forms the solution to the disintegration to both the body of Christ and its mission.

3. Neither Kostenberger nor the CBMW ever sufficiently show how the church, as the new creation, stands over institutions such as the family in a way that wars against the extremes of pietism and triumphalism, of cynicism and legalism. The Complementarian doctrine has spent its first twenty years of expression pitting the biblical view of gender and family against the culture rather than answering the more delicate and intricate issues of extremes within the church. We should extend patience and show maturity in our own thinking by keeping our criticism of Complementarianism at a constructive level. There should be no doubt that it is the biblical position in general, but that it needs to be refined as to particulars. But I would also insist that it needs a deeper theological foundation in Genesis 1 and 2 as we are attempting to do.

REVELATION 18:2, 4, 21:2

Babylon is first described in Genesis 10 and 11. Of course it is called bab-el, the Sumerian word for “the gate of the gods.” The Jews derived the play on words for “babble” which Moses picked up to explain that the origin of the diverse languages and cultures was actually a divine curse. At any rate, virtually everything about the building project was religious in overtones. Nimrod exalted himself as the incarnation of the highest spiritual life form.

How do Christ and the Christian relate to the culture? This relationship was most famously articulated by Augustine when he wrote The City of God (410) at the beginning of the Christian era and, perhaps less famously, H. Richard Niebuhr when he wrote Christ and Culture (1951) at the end of the era. They were the perfect bookends of this era since to speak of a Christian “era” is to speak of a time and place in which the Christian worldview informed society precisely as a worldview that covered society.

• THE ESSENTIALLY CHRISTIAN MODEL (AUGUSTINE’S CITIES)
• THE POSTMODERN TURN AGAINST A MODEL (NIEBUHR’S TYPOLOGY)

The Big Idea is that there are two cities over which Christ is Lord, two cities in which the Christian is the Lord’s subject, and therefore the order matters.

I. THE ESSENTIALLY CHRISTIAN MODEL

A) Two Worlds

1. Out of one fallen human race God ordains two seeds, and therefore two humanities: two worlds which collide [cf. Gen. 3:15]. Augustine traces out the history of the two rival cities which he simply calls the earthly and the heavenly cities. It was important to establish a few key concepts in the biblical view of history: creation, providence, sin and judgment being foremost. Also the great war raging in the heavenlies issues forth into everything that goes on here. Augustine makes it clear that the false gods of the world are nothing but the demons moving in and out of global power structures and that the Greco-Roman gods, in particular, told such fanciful tales through the poets in order to give a false impression of how this war was going. The myths were right that the spiritual realm determined the natural playing field; they were wrong that these were gods with independent spheres of control. All of this belonged to God alone.

2. To use the terms of classical philosophy, this heavenly city has a form, a matter and an end. Plato had talked about a realm of invisible, immutable essences that he called the Forms. There had to be a universal idea in eternity of beauty, goodness, justice and truth in order for these adjectives of things down here to correspond to any objective reality. But there were three basic problems with Plato’s view. The first is that he had no explanation for why form ever became matter, or how these ideas caused the world of their instances; the second is that there was no unity to the forms themselves—the Good was his candidate for the most basic, central form; the third is that there was no certain expectation that the soul would reach its chief end of this Good. Augustine took Plato seriously philosophically; but he knew that the biblical view had the answers to these questions. The view of history that takes up the majority of the City of God gives the matter of this city unfolding in the midst of the earthly city. The form refers to its being. That is what is so important to Christian ethics. While the way things are here and now are the “way things are,” the way things are in the mind and dwelling place of God is the “way things ought to be.”

B) Two Ethos

1. Before Augustine gives you the “stuff” of the heavenly city, he has to do some demolition work. Pagan religion was a failure on three counts: its gods were a) philosophically incoherent, b) morally repugnant, and c) practically useless. What he meant by this is that a diversity of ultimate beings give no ultimate unity to the diversity of things in a worldview, and only a worldview can sustain an ethic.

And the Romans blew a lot of smoke about virtue, but characters driven by human praise is no virtue at all. Only someone who seeks a glory that is infinite has enough left over to relate to other human beings without abusing them. There is a close connection in the Christian vision between glory and virtue. The Romans sought glory above all, but it never rose beyond the level of applause and domination: “it is not true virtue which is the slave of human praise.”[1]

2. By two “ethos” we really mean two different ends (telos) or organizing principles of ultimate motive.

The two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God.[2]

What separates the two cities, in other words, is not that one seeks for glory and the other does not. Rather, one seeks for an infinite happiness and the other is satisfied with that which is passing away.

C) Two Destinies

1. We said that the city above represents the way things ought to be, standing over and judging the way things are down here. Yet there are two senses in which the heavenly city functions as a “blueprint” that gradually makes the “is” and the “ought” one and the same. The word “kingdom” is a more frequent New Testament words that is used for this city; and the “already/not yet” dimension of this kingdom shows how the heavenly blueprint is both the informing agent of the church in this age and the expectation of the church in the age to come.

2. The last we can say about the manifestation of these cities is that, one way or another, the heavenly city will change the earthly city into its norms. Now that does not mean that the old city becomes the new city. Rather it is replaced. Some of that happens as a sign in this age and the consummation of it comes when the King returns. But the important thing is that, for the Christian, the prayer “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” [Mat. 6:10] is not made with our fingers crossed behind our back. Jesus told us to pray this way; not to calculate whether we should pray it by which way the winds seem to be blowing. The City of God is both a future hope that compels our motion now and it is an abiding blueprint that patterns what we implement now.

II. THE POSTMODERN TURN AGAINST A MODEL

A) The End of Christendom

Now let’s look at the Neo-Orthodox thinker H. Richard Niebuhr in his Christ and Culture (1951). Niebuhr was famous for saying about the false gospel of liberalism: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”[3] In his more famous book, he set up a typology comprised of five basic ways that the church has conceived of the relationship between Christ and the culture:

1. Christ against Culture. This is the exclusivist Christian. For him history is all about the rising Christian culture against the backdrop of the declining pagan culture. He sees the new creation as a new law to the old law, eclipsing it, and demanding of the church a life of utter separation from the world. In this tradition we find Tertullian, the Benedictine monks and Tolstoy’s followers, the radical Lutheran Pietist, the radical Dispensationalist and the Fundamentalist. The high note of the exclusivist ethic is personal holiness in the individual and in the small group, and the principal danger to this goal is the corruption of external cultural norms.

2. Christ of Culture. This is the accomodationist Christian. For him the nature of culture is already set up to be visited by Christ and discovered as Christ-friendly by his church. The manifestations of culture are thought to be entirely neutral and may be treated independently from the foundation of competing worldviews. At its extreme there is a denial that worldviews ever really “compete” at the most basic level at all. This is the liberal, old and new. The difference between the old liberal of the nineteenth century and the new liberal of the Emergent Church is that the former based his accommodation to culture on a positive Enlightenment reading of Western culture; the latter bases his accommodation to culture on the negative deconstruction of Western culture which postmodernism demands. The culture which he accommodates within is post-Western and post-superior-culture. Niebuhr also places the Platonic church fathers and Peter Abelard in this group due to their starting points in natural law.

3. Christ above Culture. This is the synthesist Christian. He takes the best of the first two positions and sees history as a preparation under religion and reason for a higher experience of God. Thomas Aquinas was really the first great proponent of this view, since the ethical claims of Christ over all actions and institutions follows logically from the unity of nature and grace. God is both the source and end of both forms of truth; thus his word and his world never really contradict each other. However, Niebhur sees this unity as “architectonic” and therefore as a defense of the status quo.

4. Christ and Culture in Paradox. This is the dualist Christian. His view of history is one of a struggle between belief and unbelief, in which we simply announce the future judgment and restoration while we wait in between these two worlds.  He may accept the claims of natural law, but his main business is to protect the claims of the gospel and the ethics of the kingdom from its secular temptations. The two kingdoms, or cities, are not the same thing: therefore there is no overlap between them. One may be a citizen of both, but one law does not apply to both at any point. The early Martin Luther can safely be placed in this camp, though his increasing interaction with the German nobility was more than just out of convenience. He saw that the church had a prophetic role in relation to the state. The Neo-Orthodox school was the same. Niebuhr places them here, yet it was they who crafted and signed the Barmen Declaration against the Third Reich.

5. Christ Transforming Culture. This is the conversionist Christian. He is as aggressive in cultural involvement as the second view is, but he is not as optimistic about the orders of creation that the gospel and kingdom are interacting with. He begins in the “new law” like the first view, but he is not as pessimistic about the old orders. This fifth view differs from the third beginning in its pessimism regarding the existing culture’s grasp of natural law. In the fall, the imperatives of God were sinfully translated and thus the final revelation in Christ demands a re-translation of these imperatives by the church into the culture. There is therefore the redemption and restoration of natural theology and natural law. Augustine, Calvin, Edwards and even possibly Barth were all placed here. Clearly the Neo-Evangelical movement from the 1950s to 1990s would have likewise been placed here by Niebuhr had he lived to see it.

Where must Christ be in each of these views and in what ways are honor given to Him or detracted from Him? That is the basic Christological way to view this typology. And where do we see these five views today and is there any overlap? Niebuhr drew a circle around (1) and (2) saying that, though they seem so extremely different (one is hyper-exclusive, the other hyper-inclusive), what they have in common is that they read God’s law as one single unity: whether “new law” or “natural law.” They lack the complexity of the biblical view of truth. Views (3) (4) (5) are two-worldly and never wind up absorbing the revelation of nature into the revelation of Scripture, or vice-versa. Needless to say, Niebuhr assumed a few things about the relationship between general and specific revelation that are unwarranted here. It is impossible to not see Christ and Culture as a typological form of the blind men and the elephant parable. The moment that it becomes prescriptive rather than descriptive, Niebuhr puts himself in the position of the seventh observer of the elephant, not blindfolded. What is especially important here is that this work marks a turn in the study of Christian ethics from an imperative extension of doctrine to either pure description or else the communal starting point in its own right.

B) The Basic Characteristics of the Emerging Ethics

1. The emerging ethic is clearly at home in the second view, which is the view of liberalism. The common threads of this program are, first, deconstruction of all things Triumphalistic; second, the reconstruction of church into what are called “gospel communities” for the sake of what they call “kingdom justice.” Naturally all four of those words have already been retranslated at a rate that would have made Orwell’s head spin. The “justice of God” now means God’s plan to bring social leveling to the nations in this age; the “kingdom of God” is that state of affairs in which social leveling is taking (or has taken) place; the “community” is no longer the church, so defined by its members having been forgiven of their sins and separated from the world, but rather the community or people group into which the gospel is contextualized; and the “gospel” is the good news of all of the above. It is all very much like the old Soviet dictionary that would redefine virtually every virtue as “the state of things as they exist under socialism.”

Within any of these spheres, the Christian is to relate to the old orders from the vantage point of the new order of things. We speak from the new creation—with the spiritual disciplines—and we speak toward the new creation—with the restoration of these orders as our pattern. Thus no matter which of these spheres we are talking about, we are given prayer, proclamation, persuasion and participation. The first two are more directly seeking the city that is to come in that appealing to God for power to change things, entrusting to Him the means and the timing, preaching the gospel and watching its life-changing effects extend outward to culture all relate to this age only secondarily. The latter two work more immediately upon the secular city, though no less from an eternal perspective, in that ministering truth to our neighbors and serving in the legitimate vocations into which God has called us, are precisely the reasons that God has left us here in a cursed world. It is not simply to “save the lost,” as if ministering the gospel to the lost happened in a formless void. No, the gospel in our lives happens precisely in our lives, in persuasion and participation with culture.

Prayer

Proclamation

Persuasion

Participation

(Notes Incomplete)

As Brunner said, the Christian individual is a “free lord over all things.” But I would bring in the paradox of Luther at this point to situate the Christian in both cities. The Christian is perfectly free in Christ, appraising all things in Adam, because of the exaltation of Christ; the Christian is perfectly bound, serving all people in Adam, because of the humiliation of Christ. It is a paradox within a paradox! Because of Christ, we are free in Christ, where we were slaves in Adam. For this same reason, in ethics, we are servants after our head Christ and lords after our head Adam! But we are not lords in Adam, or else we are condemned lords.

There is a foundation and a fuel of the gospel. When we come to Reformed theology, depending on where we’re coming from, we might tend to see the foundation very well. The foundation is what we typically mean by the “doctrines of grace” or “Calvinism” and so on. It’s a foundation because, here, grace is a principle by which we “get in” and even “stay in.” It’s a front door. It’s our invitation. It’s all-important. Another way to say the same thing is that we see the principle (foundation) of the gospel, but not its power (fuel).

But the gospel also has a fuel, not just a foundation. Grace is not simply a principle by which God saves sinners, because salvation is not simply a “get out of hell free” card, but is an entire salvation of our whole lives. God is redeeming the whole show, the whole man. And so the good news is not simply that we are innocent “up there” or “one day,” but that we are also innocent, and good to go, “down here” and “right now” and “before man.” This state of innocence and fatherly pleasure in us is pictured in Scripture as a fuel. It is a power. It is a way of life that sets us free and sets others free to move.

But here’s the basic problem. We don’t really believe it. We don’t trust in the power of grace. We have two categories. Grace is how we got saved one day in the past and how we will stand before God one day in the future (so by being past-and-future oriented, its “out-there” or objective or principle oriented). Law or effort or will is how we live in between those two days (so for how to handle the present and the practical and the powerful, we turn inward). Grace is for salvation, will is for life. That’s how we think. Grace is amazing, but will is what works. But this is the world’s most dangerous false dilemma! It is dangerous because it disables the church, and sidelines Christians.

The Text

In Paul’s letter to the Galatians he asks those churches who were being seduced by the Judaizer error a double-barreled question in the third chapter:

Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? (vv. 2 – 3)

At first it may look like all Paul is doing is defending the foundation of the gospel. Only the foundation is under attack when justification by faith alone is under at attack. That’s the surface way that Galatians is usually read. But anyone who reads Paul’s exact arguments carefully will realize that he is arguing against people who know very well that you “begin by the Spirit” [3:3]. He is appealing to knowledge they already had. The issue was not how they were justified at the front door, or at the foundation, but rather how they were justified continually, in everyday life, as a motive for action. So lest we get the idea that only the foundation is under attack, Paul drives at the same thing by shifting his question from the beginning of the Spirit’s work (at the foundation) to the whole of the Spirit’s work (the whole fuel of life):

Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith…? (v. 5)

Notice that the two things that Paul pits against each other in these two rhetorical questions is actually more specific than “law” and “grace,” but he wants them to adjust the microscope of law versus grace even further in, to pit “works of the law” against “hearing with faith.” The power of grace, or the fuel of the gospel, in other words, comes through the “gas nozzle” of the intellect. Obviously “hearing with faith” doesn’t just mean an audible experience alone. It means the power of the word of God operating upon the mind. If you’re wondering what the content is, or the material, of the word that Paul focuses on, move back to verse 1: “It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publically portrayed as crucified.” So where does all spiritual life after the initial spiritual birth come from? By the Spirit, through the word, to the intellect, about Christ crucified—that’s the formula for the Christian life! The power of the Christian life is no different than the principle of the Christian life: the fuel comes from the same foundation—the gospel of grace!

Correcting Our False Doctrine with this True Doctrine

It’s too easy to apply this doctrine to the acts of preaching, teaching, or evangelizing. Those are the “glamour positions” of Christian communication, so let’s leave that for another day. Instead let’s talk about the concept of extending grace in everyday acts of communication. Remember the claim of Paul in Galatians. Paul’s claim is not that grace is opposed to law or that law is opposed to grace: that was part of what the Judaizers misunderstood. Paul’s claim was that legalism doesn’t work, grace does. Extending grace is the power of the Christian life rather than commending will power, comparisons to others or unintelligible imperatives from the Law. The Law is good and it works for what it works for—namely, informing and convicting to bring the hardened heart back to the cross. But when it comes to motive, “works of the law” move nothing but sinking the heart straight to hell.

Now of course no one’s “against” extending grace. It’s just that we’re not desperate enough to extend the concept, to see all that it really means.

Extending grace is usually left to mean “being gracious” as in a tone of voice or a tolerance level. But to extend grace is literally to extend the power of grace, to remove every obstacle and ignore every pretense that this person has to answer to me. God, who alone is their judge, has declared Himself no longer their judge. And so my only job is to get my “less-than-God” expectations out of their way, and “in humility count others more significant than yourselves” [Phi. 2:3]. So extending grace is not just a matter of cooling your jets on the outside toward someone else; it’s about removing anything in you that needs anything from them! It is unconditional acceptance of God’s unconditional, ever-present clean start for the other person.

Extending grace actually means communicating the power of grace as the next step at every point of every situation in life. Law and grace both work to move people. But law moves people like guards move prisoners, from one solitary confinement cell to another. It moves from the outside in, which is why it can only move for a moment—usually a movement of fear or hypocrisy. But grace moves in the heart by surprising it, which awakens the mind to make the most of the new life it didn’t deserve. It grows them as a person; it doesn’t bend them as a plant or beat them as a beast.

Those who pit law against grace in the gospel-centered church still have the notion from their old worldview that law works—in other words, that one of the purposes of the law is as a fuel to Christian living—which comes from a misreading of the “third use of the law” in the Reformed tradition. But here’s the thing: this is fundamentally a worldview difference. It is sub-theistic to believe that a part of nature can contribute to the power of grace. That is fundamentally a shift toward atheism and death in the church, however subtle. And this naturalistic shift is at work anytime we withhold forgiveness, anytime we operate in any area of life by reaction and prevention, rather than by taking the risk of setting people completely free.

In his book The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges comments that,

We are performance-oriented by nature, and our culture, and sometimes our upbringing, reinforces this legalistic mind-set. All too often a child’s acceptance by his or her parents is based on the child’s performance, and this certainly tends to be true in our society. We carry this same type of thinking into our relationship with God. So whether it is our response to God’s discipline of us or our practice of those spiritual disciplines that are so good and helpful, we tend to think it is the “law” of God rather than the grace of God that disciplines us.[1]

Application of this Doctrine

If we’re honest, we really don’t buy this. It’s one of those things that we say we believe but it’s not our natural instinct, especially if we’re doers. We want to be in control and the idea of really extending grace looks an awful lot more like a principle of excuse. In other words, if we were to pop off the “hood” of our minds and examine our deepest assumptions, we would see that we really think that the principle of grace is a counter-balance to the power of duty or will. Everything we say about “extending grace” betrays that faulty superficial idea. When we talk about extending grace our only category is that it is the “right” or “nice” thing to do against what would otherwise be more efficient or faithful. In other words, it’s an excuse (A holy, Christ-like excuse of course! But it’s an excuse nevertheless). We are excusing the other person from getting serious or admitting their fault or doing the right thing. We are, in short, extending a pass, enabling them, but for a good cause, we tell ourselves.

It doesn’t occur to us that grace acts immediately, even if secretly. And the information that grace communicates is infinitely more effective than our best attempts to affect other people on the spot.  Our minds can’t even hear that it’s not just a principle: hearing the gospel is the only thing that moves the real thing that a man is—an invisible, intellectual soul. That’s what Paul means by pitting “hearing with faith” against “works of the law.” He’s not against works of the law. He’s saying, if you ever want to see works of the law out of that person, the Holy Spirit only ever moves the heart by hearing with faith. And that person can’t hear God through your trying to get him to hear you. Your wife and kids (and my wife and kids) can’t hear God through our obsession with them hearing us. Extending grace to others equals annihilating expectations in myself! If I expect from them (and they see my sweat or my indignation) they cannot hear the gospel in my pleas.

Let’s look at a few verses that speak of the supernatural, every-day, activity of grace. What Paul says comes by “hearing with faith” is a message from outside of us. It is a message of unapologetic, unadulterated, unqualified, undeserved (but unstoppable) favor from God. God is saying—in the death and resurrection of his Son—You are forgiven, and if forgiven, then free, and if free, then get back in the game right now! No excuses—which, of course, gives us a clue that legalism is actually the fountain of excuses (but you’ll have to come to my Lectures on Galatians to see that). Grace is this infinite, effective power in every different area of life! But I will just close by mentioning three areas.

1)      Grace is the power of self-denial!

“For the grace of God has appeared…training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age” [Ti. 2:11-12].

“Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, which have not benefited those devoted to them” [Heb. 13:9].

2)     Grace is the power of shepherding your spouse!

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word” [Eph. 5:25-26].

“Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct” [1 Pet. 3:1-2].

3)     Grace is the power of the mission of the local church!

“and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” [1 Cor. 2:4-5].

“(the gospel) is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes {to the believing ones}” [Rom. 1:16].

There is more good news in the gospel! The good news today is that the grace of God in the gospel is not just a principle, but a power; not just the foundation, but the fuel to all of our motion. Extend it to everything and watch everyone start to move.

In Paul’s letter to the Colossians he argues for the cosmic Christ over the alternative pagan philosophies that claimed to be bigger. The Christian faith was superior on two counts, said Paul: we have one supreme God as a reference point and the fullness of this God dwells bodily as a man, providing us with a real foundation for ethics. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a disengagement from the world. Though the old world is cursed, the new world does not retreat from it. It stands on top of it, speaks to it, serves those in it, and in every other way, eclipses it. Note Paul’s constant repetition in Colossians of “all things”—all the fullness of God in this new Man over the whole of the world.

And the Bible confronts us with another kind of superiority that is often forgotten by the Christian. Since the second Adam (Christ) is superior to the first Adam, so to that same degree—which is infinity—everything in the new creation is superior to the old creation. And not surprisingly the Bible at certain points begins to talk about even those elements of the old creation that were commanded by God in and as special revelation as if they were of the same passing “stuff” as the pagan systems of thought. Paul, for example, compares the Law to “the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world” [Gal. 4:9].

• THE RESTORATION OF THE GREATER IMAGE
• THE SUBSTANCE OF THE NEW CREATION
• THE SOJOURNERS OF THE NEW CREATION
• THE ETERNAL ORDER OF THE NEW CREATION

The Big Idea is that Christ and the Christian stand over Adam and the world in full freedom and with full authority.

I. THE RESTORATION OF THE GREATER IMAGE

A) History is Driven Toward the Unveiling of the New Race

1. Later on in Colossians, the Apostle Paul instructs us: “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” [3:9-10]. The word for “image” here is eikon from which we derive the English word sounding exactly the same, “icon.” There is a revelatory aspect to ethics. This is an ethical statement by Paul—DO NOT do such and such in relation to each other—and he roots it in this fact that the new creation is working in us as naturally as a new butterfly is shedding the cocoon of the old caterpillar.

2. The Second Adam isn’t really a “second Adam” in the sense of a Plan B or even a 2.0 of the original. Adam was the shadow, just as Eden was the shadowlands. Paul says this about what God is doing inside us now and in full view in the future:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies [Rom. 8:19-23].

Note that when God makes a spectacle of the new Nature the thing that even nature features on center stage is the individual human being—the sons of God—and this is no surprise, given the doctrine of the imago Dei. And the whole of creation has been “groaning together” so that everything from a good longing to a bad war is this striving madly, blindly toward God. The doctrine of total depravity, incidentally, does not teach that man is not lashing out toward God with an approach that (if you stripped away all the sin) is not essentially good. Man’s desire for intimacy, security, even fame—these are not evil: they are corrupted in the fall and that corruption of those desires is evil.

B) The Christian Life is Driven Toward This Unveiling

1. If history and nature is moving toward a God-glorifying end, then so is the informed Christian. In a very real sense, the Christian doctrine of sanctification is a violent statement against the fall (not a denial of the reality of the Fall mind you!): “you are the salt of the earth” [Mat. 5:13]. In the Protestant tradition, as pietism has inflated the role of private experience with God, we have turned the doctrine of salvation into a rejection of the new life. Some theologians see this and they blame the doctrine of salvation! But sanctification is the believer’s becoming more and more like God—which means more and more like that image—every day. There’s a sense in which life as it was meant to be has to wait for final glory; but there’s another sense in which life as it was meant to be is to be acted out right now and gradually with more and more excellence.

“But the fall!” we will object. Here we have to apply our fundamental principle of biblical ethics: If the individual Christian rows against the current of the fall, it is not because he thinks he is going to reverse the basic direction, like the march of Aslan melting away the whole spell of winter in Narnia. It is because the image will manifest God more clearly in that one time and place. If a good chunk of winter gives way to a good chunk of spring, then glory to God and let the gospel go forth from a sturdier, momentary platform! But the control of the weather of the old age isn’t our motive. Why? Because we don’t do what we do because of what it says about us, but because of what it says about God.

Christ and the Christian stand over Adam and the world.

2. But the order matters—from God to the individual to others whom I am called to serve. This is what the New Testament calls the “kingdom of God,” and it is another way to speak about the gospel. So much is this the case that often times it says that Jesus came “preaching the gospel of the kingdom.”

One of the biggest obstacles to a total biblical ethic in our day is the rapid pendulum swings in a post-theological age. When those leading the church do not study doctrine very deeply, it is inevitable that a lot of very influential voices will be blaming a lot of the wrong things for all that ails us.

To cite a most famous instance, look at all the times that professing Christians have charged headlong into some sphere of action, sure they were doing the will of God, only to find either a) that they were wrong, to the detriment of real people and smearing of the gospel (i.e. Inquisitions), and b) that they were not even in fact a child of God, as revealed through their growing idolatry in the sphere in question (i.e. Judas). But how do we balance out our fear of the Lord and an irrational hesitation?

Surely one way is to cultivate the virtues rather than obsesses over the potential dangers. Move forward with humility, charity and unity; but if these keep us in either indecision or skepticism, we can know the spirit of hesitation is not from God: “for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” [2 Tim. 1:7].

II. THE SUBSTANCE OF THE NEW CREATION

A) The King Who Makes the Kingdom

1. The relationship between the person of Christ and the work of Christ is crucial in having a working understanding of the kingdom of God and therefore ethics. Every kingdom in this world works from the ground up. No matter how the ancients claimed that their kings descended from the gods, it was all revealed to be a power play, like the little imposter behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. And that being the case, in every earthly kingdom, the king arises from the kingdom, from the same blood and soil as everyone else. But in the City of God, there is nothing about the kingdom that is not issuing forth from the DNA of the Person and Work of the King.

2. And here is where the gospel (the center of our worldview) informs our whole worldview. In this kingdom, the King unites his subjects to himself, in his work. He knows they are traitors and He is willing to die for them, so that when they are united to Him, their old person in Adam is tried, found guilty and executed in his body on the cross. And in his resurrection, the new man is no longer a foreign invader and traitor, but a royal subject and citizen with full rights in the heavenly city.

B) The Kingdom Comes in Two Stages

1. Theologians have two words for this—humiliation and exaltation—and the Scriptures constantly use the words “suffering” and “glory” for the same. Eschatology matters. But what matters about it is to stay simple—simply Christological! Unlike our prophecy charts, there are two things that the New Testament actually is quite clear about—1) the kingdom of God, and 2) the second coming of Christ. The kingdom was inaugurated in the first coming, but it will not be consummated until Jesus returns at the end of the age.

There is a “kingdom tension” in biblical eschatology. It is already here in one sense, but it is not yet here in another. Sometimes this is called inaugurated eschatology, and it has blessedly become the dominant position again in our generation. What matters for us to see is that when Jesus came the first time, it was as the Servant King, announcing judgment and mercy in lowliness; but when Jesus comes the second time, it will be as the Exalted King, executing judgment on his enemies and showing mercy on his own. When the trumpet sounds, there will be no more chance to heed the announcement.

Now how does this Christ-centered eschatology make ethics? Well the Christian that stands in this already/not yet tension of the kingdom is a citizen of both cities—the city of God above where Christ is already exalted King and the city of man below where the Christian must do what Jesus did in his first coming—announce as servants to all. There is exaltation and humiliation in our King, and because of this (Christology) there is triumph and suffering in our kingdom expanse (eschatology-to-ethics). Christology makes eschatology, then eschatology makes ethics. Therefore the doctrine of Christ makes Christian ethics what it is. If A = B and B = C, then A = C.

2. The basic problem with triumphalism—whether it takes the form of a particular view of the millennium or whether it simply ignores the reality of Christ’s coming altogether—is that it attempts to consolidate the kingdom apart from its King. Here is where a liberal and conservative can agree on their heresy! Arthur Custance remarked about how the Enlightenment revolutionized the way Christians conceived on the kingdom on earth:

The Christian view of the world getting worse and worse until Christ returns in judgment in a dramatic way to set things right was replaced by the concept of the progressive righting of wrongs by man himself until the millennium was to be achieved by a kind of cultural evolution inspired by Christian ethics and to be capped only, as it were, by calling upon the Lord to come back and take over the kingdom made ready for Him. He was not coming to judge the world, but to dignify it by occupying the throne as a kind of constitutional monarch.[1]

If a notion of “Christian ethics” has been used as, or in, a false view of the kingdom—and if this has been a dominant idea in the modern church—how do we understand the cause of this and how do we avoid the same error? One way we cannot diagnose the extremes is by gravitating to one extreme eschatology or another. The problem begins with a failure to recognize the fullness of the two natures of Christ and it attempts to protect the integrity of the gospel by pitting one against the other. All other ethical problems find their root here.

3. The most important thing we can say about the new creation is how much greater it is than the old. It is founded upon Christ, expands now through the full gospel and is lived out through the church. The worldview shift has to happen at this point or there will be no sustained Christian action. Our doctrine of what lasts informs our understanding of what works. At this point—in his doctrine of the new creation—Christianity is violently opposed to pragmatism, which says that if it works do it. Its ultimate standard is “success” and therefore it has a powerful apologetic: it’s working, isn’t it?

Success is a counterfeit glory. It calls what has happened “what is,” and the mob applauds. But the humiliation of Christ triumphs over mere success. The crowds cried for Barabbas, not Jesus, after Pilate said ecce homo. Therefore when the cross trumped the “wisdom of the world” one of the main powers that the cross crushed was the false god of success. The Corinthians were a people obsessed with things like worldly words of wisdom and standards of success; and Paul had some words for them that run totally against the grain of this world:

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? [1 Cor. 1:18-20].

Christ is for the Christian an infinitely superior wisdom and an infinitely superior power, so notice that Christ crucified and risen is not simply a superior ideal: it is an active superior power designed by God to be always defeating the earthly powers, and that includes the crucifixion of success.

Christ and the Christian stand over Adam and the world.

III. THE SOJOURNERS OF THE NEW CREATION

A) We Only Sojourn Toward a City

1. Only motive ever makes motion. Jesus is constantly giving the disciples motive as He tells them that He must go to Jerusalem to lose his earthly life in order to gain ultimate glory. The author of Hebrews says of the pilgrimage of Abraham: “For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” [11:20]. All the great saints of the past were sojourners first. They endured scorn, slander and the martyr’s stake because they remembered that “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” [Mat. 8:20], and they loved Him for it. This was not their home, so its demolition was no threat.

2. Now here is the tricky part about understanding how the Suffering Servant King went “up to” Jerusalem to be condemned and crucified “outside of” the City, so that He could assume his throne at the head of the City. We have to remember that it was in the earthly copy that this was acted out within. So when the King calls his subjects to come die with Him so that they can rise with Him, He says,

So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come [Heb. 13:12-14].

Here is a death not only to our old lives as sinner, but also to our old treasuries in the earthly city. This does not imply inaction in the earthly city; it implies independence from the earthly city. We no longer need the applause and approval of the earthly city in order to do with it and in it what we are called to do. But this takes a death. This is the meaning of Paul’s words at the end of Galatians: “far be it for me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world” [Gal. 6:18]. This is a paradox; there is no doubt about it. Christ’s cross takes the Christian out of the world legally so that He could leave us in the world ethically. Here is the connection between the gospel and ethics that the liberal of the nineteenth century and the new emerging liberal cannot comprehend. It takes a dead man to move. Or as Bonhoeffer said it, “Only the crucified man is at peace with God.”[2] We will be no good if we are either guilty or self-righteous. We will be no good if we think that the kingdom is out there in the world’s actions and institutions and intentions. It takes someone who knows their dead to the old fantasy to really live in the new reality.

Christ and the Christian stand over Adam and the world.

B) We Live (in a Sense) in Both Cities

1. Our lifestyles in the earthly city say that we are seeking the heavenly city—which immediately highlights the importance of both citizenships. The author of Hebrews said that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” [13:14]. There is a “(city) here” and there is a “city that is to come.” We live in both now. The one fades and the other lasts forever. Yet the one that fades is real and is the seedbed and stage for the present glory of the everlasting. Western man has always seen the soul and the body as the ultimate picture of this, whether it was in a pagan like Plato or a Christian like Augustine. We are that stage, we are that city, we are that spark of the kingdom—beginning with the very invisible information that turns the lights on in our own minds.

2. We are God’s workmanship (poiema) [cf. Eph. 2:10]. We are his poem, his song, his specially attended to work of art. “Be imitators of God as beloved children” [Eph. 5:1]. Do you see why we do these things? It says something about God. An artist’s work says something about him. As the colors of God run from the brush onto canvas, those colors run and pick up their own brushes and start painting inside his paint. We are an expression of his mind and heart on the canvas of creation. We are simply told to be imitators of God, not to be calculators of how people will respond or barometers for how they are presently responding. The triumphalist sees himself and a few friends grabbing the brush out of the Artist’s hands and filling up the canvas all at once himself; the pietist sees people doing that and throws up any hands that are not the Artist’s hands—“why polish the brass on a sinking ship!”

James Boice looks at the case of Daniel in Babylon and drew out four features that parallel ours in a post-Christian postmodern West: 1) Daniel was in a secular environment; 2) Daniel was God’s man in a kingdom that typified the opposition; 3) Daniel and his three friends were greatly pressured to conform; and 4) the world seemed to be winning.[3] Why bother?

3. But that response is an expression of exhausted idolatry. The objection assumes that we do what Adam was called to do only if and when we can see how and in what sense it’ll pay dividends here and now. But that’s not why we do things. Incidentally this same error in logic is the basic stumbling block for those who see a “tension” between divine sovereignty and human responsibility. We are at every point his poiema—especially when the odds are against us and we’re in a concentration camp, or, say, on a Roman cross. This is true when we have to submit and when we have to rebel. “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution” [1 Pet. 2:13]; but to the imposters in the temple, say gently but firmly, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” [Acts 4:19-20].

Christ and the Christian stand over Adam and the world.

IV. THE ETERNAL ORDER OF THE NEW CREATION

A)   The Lone Institution of the New Creation

1. A new covenant was made for a new creation. And this created a new institution called the church. The church is not on the same ethical footing with the family, state, labor or education. It stands above them, explaining them and, where God has ordained in the lives of individual believers, infiltrating them so as to display his glory in them.

B) The Relationship of the New Institution to the Old Institutions

1. The church relates to the state as a prophet in two ways. First, within the new creation, individuals in the church naturally preach the gospel to individuals who happen to be state employees for the same reasons, and with the same methods, as we would anyone else. Second, in relation to the old creation, the church informs the state officials of their duty. We do not assume that the state official knows their duties—as their duties come from God—and the church alone is given the wisdom, in Scripture, to articulate this duty.

2. The church and the family are two different institutions. Neither one has the prerogatives of the other and neither one constitutes the other. Of course this does not mean that they do not overlap entirely in our own experience of time. If there was ever a moment when a Christian had to be in one at the expense of the other, then, at that point, he would cease to be a member of his family or cease to be a member of the body of Christ. Since that is impossible, it follows that the separation of the two spheres is a distinction that never divorces. The separation is helpful for avoiding confusions of many kinds.

There are at least two things that place the church as the ultimate ordering institution in the world. First, it alone holds the power that created all of the other institutions—even though its members do not do that creating—namely, the word of God. Second, it alone will outlast the present age. So there is an invisible-to-visible order to all created things; and all of the other institutions are temporal and therefore to be practiced in subordination to the advancing kingdom of God.

If anyone is concerned that this places church “officials” and “statements” over the prerogatives of the other spheres, that person is not yet thinking on a very deep level. The reason, for example, that the church can speak authoritatively to the state without encroaching on its duties is that the church is ultimately comprised of the same individuals who are also dutiful members of the other spheres (i.e. civil society). In the case of the family, the reason why the supremacy of the kingdom need not eradicate the headship of a man in his home is that the same man who is a subject to Christ’s kingdom is made lord over his family. They do not cease to be two separate spheres just because the man finds his ultimate citizenship in the City of God.

What this does do is to provide the man with a compass in eternity for his action in history. Since the word of God creates the invisible church, his “north star” that shapes his program in all of the other institutions is derived from the word proclaimed within the church. He will think through issues, fight against his own pride, and love his wife to the degree that he is pursuing “the washing of water with the word” [Eph. 5:26].

The truth of the matter is that those who tell us to preach the gospel instead of live in an objective Christian way in the culture would put the gospel exactly where the culture wants it—in a dark and quiet closet.

A handful of premises shape the beginning of biblical ethics:

1) Ethics begins with God’s revealed character.

2) God’s revelation begins in the initial creation and covenant.

3) All human beings are bound in and by this covenant.

We should feel no hesitation moving on to and from these three premises. We should not hesitate to move on to these premises because we have already shown the bankruptcy of secular ethics as well as the failure of the ethics of other world religions. So we don’t have to keep revisiting that question, at least in our own conscience. And if our conscience is “held captive to the word of God” then we should also feel no hesitation in moving from these premises. Obviously an unbeliever is going to reject all three premises, but we have to draw a distinction between “knowing” and “showing” here. Our conscience—in terms of our own action—is not bound to the intellectual deficiencies and disobedience of the unbeliever. We can revisit demonstrating these three premises for the sake of the unbeliever, but we are not bound to that in order to act. These are two different spheres of responsibility: knowing and showing. We can act on what we know without confusing that with the need to show.

Having said that, let’s go back to the beginning of the biblical worldview to see God making man an ethical being inside of making man a God-glorifying man.

• THE IMAGE OF GOD IS A NOUN (OBJECTIVE) AND VERB (SUBJECTIVE)
• THE ORDERS (OR SPHERES) OF CREATION
• THE SHADOWS AND SUBJUGATION OF THE OLD CREATION

Having given the fundamental definition of biblical ethics, we are ready to receive the fundamental principle of biblical ethics:

The Big Idea is that we do what we do because of what it says about God—not because of what it says about us.

This follows from 1 Corinthians 10:31, which reaffirms the divine image in the form of a command: “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” To do something to the glory of God simply means to act in a way that speaks accurately and passionately about, and therefore draws attention to, God.

This is another reason why right and wrong are absolute and situational. They are absolute in God; they are situational in the situation. In other words, courage is right because of what it says about God; yet the suburban American mother who stays home to educate her children in obedience to Deuteronomy 6 and the mother who works in a factory in China, subjecting her children to the state school, do not necessarily differ either in courage or in obedience to Deuteronomy 6. The moment that we say, “Courage is what I am doing right now,” we speak the words of Euthyphro and in the name of combating relativism, we embrace relativism! But either ‘righteousness’ is what is true about God, or else righteousness is relative. There is no third option. But the moment we see that, we begin to see something which is a paradox to the mere conservative—if right-and-wrong is not to be relativized with respect to its essence, then it is going to have to be relativized with respect to its instances. The two not only go together—the absolute and the situational—but they have to go together!

I. THE IMAGE OF GOD IS A NOUN (OBJECTIVE) AND VERB (SUBJECTIVE)

A) The Image of God as an Objective Reference Point

1. The doctrine of the imago Dei has several important implications. Some have to do with human dignity and rights, others have to do with gender differences, but all of these implications are really worthless if they are not true to the real, objective way that God made man and woman his image—in other words, what did God himself have in mind, since He is a purposeful Designer? Take that first issue of human dignity. Human worth is greater than human beings have thought; but this worth is extrinsic, not intrinsic. That is, human worth is a reflective worth; but what we are reflecting is infinite in worth! So Jesus calls himself “the light of the world” [Jn. 8:12]. But then Jesus says to the church, “You are the light of the world” [Mat. 5:14]. How can both Jesus and his church be the light of the world? So human worth is exactly what human beings say about God; but since God is of infinite value, then there can be no higher worth for the creature than this.

B) The Image of God as a Subjective Responsive Lens

1. What does it mean to “say something” about God by what we do? If that is our fundamental principle of biblical ethics, we need to know exactly what we mean by it. Remember the three elements of communication—logos, pathos, ethos—and think of the biblical passages which talk about human beings bringing glory to God. How does this show that man and woman (the image) is a “moving picture of God on earth”? Do all to the glory of God. Glorify God in your body. To the degree that your thinking, feeling and doing says the most accurate thing about God, in that context, you glorify God more than if you simply sat there and did nothing or did something contrary.

2. Now God placed the man and woman in a garden called eden, which is the Hebrew word for delight. In other words, in the broadest definition of the term, “worship” is this subjective movement of the soul that we call “delight” or “enjoyment” of an object. The thing that we perceive to be of ultimate worth receives our “worth-ship.” Interestingly, the social science each attempt to explain what worship is from their various perspectives; yet worship is actually foundation for the social sciences. The Garden of Eden is the stage that sets forth this doctrine of vocation; it does not draw out the doctrine itself. So, it is important to understand what we are saying and not saying here.

II. THE ORDERS (OR SPHERES) OF CREATION

There is a unity and diversity in the essence of man. All of these spheres in which people’s unique gifts are called make up a single stage of worship. Therefore there are two questions that are insufficient to ask: 1) What am I good at? 2) What do I enjoy doing? 3) How can I glorify God in this sphere independently? All are good questions and right questions as a part of the doctrine of vocation.

A) Dominion [1:26, 28-30]

1. And let them have dominion…over all the earth…fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth (26, 28). Dominion comes from the same Latin word for “lord” (domini), so that to have dominion means to be and act as ‘lord’ or ‘master’ over a particular sphere. The key implication to this is protection of a domain, the keeping of boundaries, and that means law and order. The biblical doctrine of the secular dominion can be traced from the Garden to the covenant with Noah and his sons to the Tower of Babel incident, through the whole history of Israel’s law and offices. The crucial passages are Genesis 9:6, Matthew 22:20-21   and Romans 13:1-7. In these texts we can see that God covenants with all mankind to defend the image of God by a collective force, to respect the secular realm inside of the sacred realm and then to honor its officers accordingly.

B) Multiplication [1:28]

1. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…” (28). What is being multiplied in human reproduction? The biblical answer is more images of God: “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” [Hab. 2:14]. As God is jealous to propagating his image, so must his image bearers be. “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!” [Ps. 127:3-5]

C) Cultivation [2:15]

1. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it (15). The word culture comes from this farming word in the Latin (cultus): hence the sphere of agriculture. The idea was that through the application of reason, man could both reshape and restrain the earth, which brought order out of the inevitable bent of nature toward chaos. Thus our culture is really the result of our work, and our work is really the result of our reason. The word art also gives us a clue, since the “artificial” is that which transcends the natural and an “artifact” is the relic of cultures of the past, not simply the natural process of the past.

D) Knowledge [2:19]

1. Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name (19). If we want to be specific, this activity of Adam would go under the name ‘taxonomy,’ or, the science of classification of biological forms. Broadly speaking, science comes from the Latin word for knowledge (scientia). God has given reason to man not only to bring order and creativity and communication, but also to know and to name. To name something in Scripture is to colonize it—not to devalue it, but—to apply the mind to tell the truth about what it really is and, in doing so, to give it a place and a use. Modern man tried to do this on his own, without waiting for God to bring the animal to him; postmodern man doesn’t think anybody should be naming things at all (and he has a name for that).

E) Companionship

1. Notice that twice the words “helper” and “fit” are used: “I will make him a helper fit for him…But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him” [2:18, 2:20]. Man, woman and their children represent the triune God in community and creation. As Adam was taken from the ground, woman (ishah) was taken from the man (ish). Note that as woman is called a helper (ezer), so is God the Holy Spirit (paraklete). She was created for him, for their maximum efficiency together in these four elements of the task of glory. Genesis 1 and 2 is the context for Proverbs 31, which is the context for Titus 2. Note that it was the admonition of King Lemuel’s mother to her son that frames the Proverbs 31 woman.

Do not give your strength to women, your ways to those who destroy kings. It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine, or for rulers to take strong drink, lest they drink and forget what has been decreed and pervert the rights of all the afflicted… Her husband is known in the gates when he sits among the elders of the land [Prov. 31:3-5, 23].

Marriage, in addition to being a demonstration of the gospel, is also a unit built to multiply God’s image and expand the territory of the kingdom in a more efficient manner.

III. THE SHADOWS AND SUBJUGATION OF THE OLD CREATION

A) The Distortion is of the Design (or the “Metaphysics of the Fall”)

1. Naturally the secular philosophies will fail to tell us what is wrong with man for the same reason that they will fail to tell us what is right. We cannot call a line crooked if we do not have access to the straight line. So the evolutionist demands more time to evolve; the behaviorist may suggest either psychoanalysis or an alteration in the gene pool; the sociologist will point to society and exalt the policies of the centralized state. Everyone agrees that there is something wrong with the world, and to that same extent, this usually comes to mean that there is something wrong with man. Of course on the secular assumption, “something wrong with man” comes to mean something wrong with “that man over there” or with men in general; and the innovator is naturally exempt from his own diagnosis in order to conduct the innovation in his own image. This is the logical consequence of ethics outside of the doctrine of the image of God and the fall. They all have in common the necessity of reforming society in the image of the reformer, for he is the only reference point left. The secularist and the Christian alike need to be reminded that if there is a distortion, then there is a design. If there is a counterfeit, then there is an authentic. If there is a fall, then there was a height. We cannot have it both ways, and the Christian often has this inconsistency in common with the unbeliever: that there is a lashing out against “the way things are” on earth without reference to “the way things are” not merely originally, but essentially.

2. Do a test of word association on yourself—Domination. Submission. Exploitation. Pleasure-Seeking. Profit-Motive. Intellectual. Critical. Argument. Cities. Bodies. Population—What images tend to come into our mind at the first sound of these words? Do not most of them, if not all, tend to conjure up negative ideas?

B) The Design is Still Discernible through the Distortion (or the “Epistemology of the Fall”)

1. John Wyclife developed a doctrine of dominion in which Adam lost the right and that only those in the second Adam retain this right of secular rule. The modern Presuppositionalist school has argued that the knowledge of God in the creation is obliterated unless or until the Spirit recreates the Christian circle in the regenerate mind.

2. There are three moral philosophies that we did not cover in the first week, which we would do well to consider here. Those are the Utilitarian model of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the Categorical Imperative of Immanuel Kant and the Objective Egoist position of Ayn Rand. These have become the three dominant systems of ethics in the modern West and each is founded upon a single principle. They are relevant here because they stand as options around the original ethic given to Adam. For many people, they seem at points to be saying the same thing as God had commissioned to the first man. But the similarities are only superficial—distortions of the original design. Since this is a class on biblical ethics (and not general ethical philosophy per se), we will not spend too much time refuting these schools. We mention these only in order to show that they are not the same thing as biblical ethics. Let’s add Brunner’s Divine Imperative as a fourth option.

If we picture man (adam) at the center, on the ground and facing the future, we will see at “9:00” Kant’s Categorical Imperative situated behind Adam, calling him back to duty, in spite of his natural motion forward; directly under Adam at “6:00” we see Rand’s Objective Egoism, where the ground is waiting to be moved by the heroic producer; then up in front of Adam at “3:00” the Bentham-Mill model of Utilitarianism promises to be progressive and benefit the most amount of people; and then directly above Adam at “12:00” is Brunner’s Divine Imperative which insists on no principle at all but the free directives of God to the individual’s conscience.

Now we could ask the question of whether Adam was made a man of duty, self-interest, utility or transcendence. The biblical ethic will encompass all the above and we will disagree with Brunner that the Bible does not present to us a singular ethical principle which cannot be transcended.[1] The trouble with these four models is that they take an aspect of the ethical reality and set it against others. Usually when people criticize them, they throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And individuality and real life both imply a situational dimension to ethics. Please note that this is not the same thing as Situational Ethics as propounded by Joseph Fletcher. But please note the opposite error of defining biblical ethics solely as a reaction to a secular school! Of course right and wrong are situational, since right and wrong press only upon individuals; and individuals, by definition, are always in sufficiently different circumstances from all other individuals to require a more specific sense and application of the law than others. Note this does not change the meaning of the law! This specificity of the situation only changes which angle at the hierarchy of ethics that individual will be looking at. In a biblical view there is never a tension between the absolute and the situational with respect to right and wrong. Right and wrong are always absolutely what they are in every situation and every individual is always situated at a different point in relation to God than any other individual has ever been in at any point. Both of these truths are true and there can be no mature apprehension of biblical ethics if this truth is not first chewed on and digested.

John 5:19-29

There is a real objectivity of the covenant that both extreme strands of the Reformation have obscured. By a collectivizing, horizontalizing tendency, the Presbyterian-Reformed tradition has given us a covenant theology that tends to pit the communal, the visible, the ecclesiological, and often the purely natural, against the individual, the invisible, the soteriological, and often the surprisingly supernatural. By an individuating, privatizing tendency, the Congregational-Baptist tradition has given us a covenant theology that tends to protect the immediate, the conscious, the internal, the divisible, against anything overarching. The extremes of these, as we saw, were Dispensationalism and Covenant Nomism. Now the chief foundational doctrine to the Federal Vision was what they call the “objectivity of the covenant.” This objectivity is “objective” (is an object) to the degree that it is visible, such that the identity of the church and the believer becomes sucked up into the visibility of our faithfulness to the covenant. But in the name of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater it is important to see that there is such a thing as covenantal objectivity. We would just begin our vision of these objects where the biblical worldview begins—God, then outward. We begin our panacea of the covenant with the God who covenants.

• THE OBJECTS OF THE COVENANT OF GRACE
• THE ILLUMINATION OF THE COVENANT OF GRACE
• THE PRESENT-FUTURE KINGDOM OF THE COVENANT OF GRACE
• THE KINGDOM ACTION OF THE COVENANT OF GRACE

The Big Idea is that the covenant of grace is to King Jesus and his subjects, through the Spirit’s present awakening of the King’s work and the future consummation of the King’s world.

THE OBJECTS OF THE COVENANT OF GRACE

If we read Robertson charitably we conclude that he was so emphasizing the singularity of the covenant that his weakness was a de-emphasis on the unconditional relationship of God to the true recipients of the covenant of grace. But there is another possibility. It is possible that there simply isn’t any room in this hyper-horizontal system to differentiate between the unconditionally elect and the conditionally covenanted in the same visible body. So Robertson opens off his last chapter by unpacking what he means by the “fatal deficiency in covenantal administration,” which cannot be chalked up to the Mosaic arrangement, but is rather, “a reversal of the beneficence expressed in the covenant with Abraham.” How so? Drawing from the dual language—I will do this / you do this, so that I can do this—of Genesis 17, he concludes that, “The false idea of a wholly unconditional covenant relationship was proven to rest on an improper assumption.”[1] Now let us agree with Robertson on three things which he most certainly implies, or assumes: 1) No relationship with God is ‘unconditional’ in the sense that it doesn’t matter how you live before him; 2) that necessary conditionality applies even to those with whom God promises something unconditionally; 3) the Jews gradually began to presume upon the unconditional concept and thereby excused themselves from the conditional end. Put all three of these together and you still haven’t addressed the question: What makes the difference between belief and disbelief, perseverance and apostasy, inclusion versus exclusion? Robertson will answer “Christ!” And, in general, that is true. But why should one person be grafted into mystical union with Christ and another person merely be temporarily connected to his local body?

Robertson sees the new covenant prophecy of Jeremiah as a “complete reversal of God’s sovereign election procedures,” [2]but how is this the case? Decretal election was always occurring within, or in the midst of, genealogical election, and so when God brought in the Gentiles, even as fewer and fewer ethnic Jews were holding on to the real promises, this moved in the same direction it always had. Ironically, to protect the unity and singularity of God’s plan, Robertson has to appeal to an aberration! When he conceives of the “everlasting” nature of the original Abrahamic covenant he has to make the return to the land of promise, in the new covenant, the focal point. In fact the down payment of the land becomes a central object of the covenant of grace for Robertson, so that in his rebuttal to Dispensationalism he is more affected by Dispensationalism than he may have thought. He is forming his covenant theology in reaction. Now if there a sense in which “the land” is a chief object of the covenant? Yes—but, as we will see, that is as an eschatological object of the covenant, or, we might say, an end cause of our definition of the covenant. It should not be conceived as an object that functions as an efficient, material, instrumental or formal cause of the covenant of grace.

There is a hierarchy of objects in the covenant of grace: the triune God—Father, Son and Spirit, as to their divine nature—being the efficient (or ultimate) object; the Son of God, as to his human nature, being the material object; the covenantal promissory structure—promises made, promises kept—of the Bible being the formal object; the work of Christ—crucified, risen, ascended, returning—being the instrumental object, which alone fulfills the conditions of the promises; the consummation of all things flowing from that work being the end object. This is so obvious when stated in this way that it is difficult to imagine many Reformed theologians taking issue with this hierarchy.

But we will notice right away that there is no mention of the beneficiaries of the covenant of grace here. That is correct. That is because this is a causal structure. It explains what the covenant is, how it “got there” and where it is going. So consider the obvious fact that the covenant of grace is an unconditional promise made by God to his elect children. If they were any part of the cause, well then grace would no longer be grace [cf. Rom. 11:6]. By “object” we mean an essence, a real thing, outside of our own minds. Sometimes we will refer to anything receiving an action as an object—as in a “direct object” and an “indirect object” in basic grammar—and that is all fine, so long as we remember that we are speaking loosely. We have to first use the word “object” philosophically to see the “stuff” of the promise, which is not us, thank God!

Now if by “object” we want to mean the recipients, or, the members, then that is a separate question and one on which I would hope we already have a strong grasp. The objective-members of the covenant of grace we treat objectively. And we mean what all the old thinkers used to mean by objective. We do not mean what the Federal Vision means by “objective,” namely visibly. We mean by objective, essentially, the way things really are beyond mere appearances, for “man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” [1 Sam. 16:7]. The moment someone objects, “But you are but a man: you cannot see things the way God does!” at that point we are changing the subject. The question about “the way things are,” is just that and not a provisional, “best we can do,” definition of objective. For one thing, the Scriptures give us plenty of definitions and descriptions of who gets saved, how they get saved, and what it tends to look like, without ever forcing us to choose between the objective and the hypothetical. To say that “I don’t know who the elect are,” is most certainly not the same thing as saying, “We cannot know that the elect are the same as the glorified.” This is an example of how we rise above this confusion. Here is one thing (there are many others) that the Scriptures attribute to the personal identity of the members of the covenant of grace—i.e. their election unconditionally guarantees their glorification. The unconditional guarantee of the glorification refers to God’s intent; it does not imply that there were no conditions for the elect to be glorified. Those are two separate questions. God’s unconditional intent will guarantee that the conditions will be met. The unconditional does not eradicate, much less contradict, the condition; rather it establishes it! So in an objective sense there are plenty of things we can tell about who the members of the Covenant of Grace are: they are those who are spoken of in Ephesians 1:3-14. They are “blessed…with every spiritual blessing” (v. 3), “predestined…for adoption” (v. 5), redeemed “through his blood,” their sins completely paid for (v. 7), obtaining “an inheritance” (v. 11).

THE ILLUMINATION OF THE COVENANT OF GRACE

Now when Paul moves from the work of the Son to the work of the Spirit, he says, “you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it” (vv. 13-14). Note that the ministry of the Spirit is, first and foremost, to illuminate the work of the Son—note, “when you heard…and believed in him”—and this illumination of the content of the gospel is the moment when the believer is sealed into the obtaining of this inheritance. The illumination of the Son is treated as the same as the illuminating the inheritance, in other words, the covenant of grace, the promises.

When the new covenant promises a new heart, it is not that participants in the covenant of grace also get a spiritual transformation thrown into the deal; it is that this spiritual transformation which the New Testament calls the new birth is precisely what includes someone into Christ, the Head of the Covenant of Grace. In other words, the circle that we draw around members of this new covenant is a thick circle called “the new birth.” Baptism doesn’t draw that circle. Presbyterians draw that circle with infant baptism and Baptists draw that circle with believer’s baptism. But the Bible draws that circle with the new birth—something we cannot control by genealogy or by introspection.

So as we come full circle to the end of our study on covenant theology, we can see that when Christ is truly presented to our minds and hearts and believed on, the Holy Spirit illuminates to us a kingdom, a future, a whole new world that changes our perspective of our lives that we still live in the old world. When we are born again, the actual things promised become the end cause of the covenant of grace. Those who see it are covenant members; those who do not are not. Now there is such a thing as blurry vision and weary saints and other such things, so we should not live up to the caricature so dreaded by the FV.

But as a basic principle, when we are born again, what the Holy Spirit is doing is awakening us to our King and his kingdom. The new birth is our vision of both. If Christ is seen as the King of all, then that recognition will immediately imply you weren’t seeing the “all” rightly prior to the new birth. To say this another way, it is psychologically impossible to see the kingdom of God without seeing Jesus as its King; and, just as much, it is psychologically impossible to see Jesus as King without seeing that his kingdom covers everything. How we fill in the blanks of that realm and its timeline may vary, but to fail to see it at all is a sign that the new birth has not really happened. So as we turn to this end cause of the covenant being illuminated in the member, we turn to covenant eschatology and covenant ethics; but it can only make sense if those who are driven by this eschatology and live by this ethic are actually members of the covenant of grace.

THE PRESENT-FUTURE KINGDOM OF THE COVENANT OF GRACE

We should not forget that the covenant was of a kingdom. It is true that the specific kingdom covenant was made to David, but broadly speaking, a kingdom (basileia) is nothing but a domain, a territory, a realm, a place. Herman Ridderbos in his Coming of the Kingdom (1962) argued that its dominant usage is of “a higher, spiritual and imperishable reality.”[3] Such a definition will be accused of being ethereal today, but this is consistent with the whole Christian understanding going back to and behind Augustine. The kingdom is the reign and rule of God, through Christ, his decreed King in the world, which then includes the church as its subjects. The reason that “the kingdom of God is preached” [Lk. 16:16] is because it is announced. It is here; it came when its King came. Now it is true that Jesus refers to what God was already doing with Israel as his kingdom—“the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruit” [Mat. 21:43]—but if we keep in mind that the kingdom is not identical to “the church,” but includes the church, in other words that it begins in God’s reign and rule, then we can see that the object of the kingdom begins in God, what God is doing (which included ethnic Israel), what we have here is a moment of progressive revelation. God was moving the manifestation of what He was doing from physical Israel out to the Gentiles, but that is not because the essence of membership in the Covenant of Grace had changed.

Christ is the focal point of the consummation of the covenant. This is the case because all prophecy is about Him. All prophecy points to the Person and Work of Christ—some of it just refers to his first coming, others to his second coming—but the whole of the consummation of all things is found in Him. If we are weak on Christology, we will be weak on eschatology as well. Since Christ is the end of all things, eschatology does not merely come after Christology; eschatology is a subsection of Christology. With this in mind, we can see that the problems of under-realized and over-realized eschatologies are the result of Christological minimization. In other words, if our doctrine of last things has the kingdom entirely fulfilled (over-realized), yet frustrated, then we have minimized the historic totality of the work of Christ; if, on the other hand, our doctrine of last things has the kingdom entirely postponed (under-realized), even if inevitable, then we have minimized the eternal totality of the work of Christ.

Virtually all theologians, regardless of their views on the millennium, have coalesced around what they call an inaugurated eschatology. At its core is the notion that the kingdom of God is already inaugurated, but not yet consummated, so that we, the church, live in an “already / not yet” tension. But it is a tension between these two ages because if one is a member of the Covenant of Grace, then he is a citizen of two cities, the heavenly and the eternal. To say the same thing another way, the member of the Covenant of Grace is a subject of the kingdom of Christ and a sojourner within the secular kingdoms.

Let us begin with how the Covenant of Grace relates to the “already” or “present” dimension of this kingdom. First, the Bible teaches that every Christian, precisely in being included into Christ’s mystical body—the invisible church—is at the same time and in the same way made a citizen or subject of this kingdom: “   …He has “made us a kingdom” [Rev. 1:6]. Second, the means of grace given to the church are signs of new covenant realities which find an ultimate fulfillment in the consummation: think of prayer, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, corporate singing, teaching, confession, witnessing, etc. Third, there is the order of how God moves upon this world through his people. The invisible to visible order utilizes image bearers in a way closer to the state that Adam and Eve were in. That makes sense, since the faculties of our soul are being renewed in the here and now. There are other things, as well, such as miraculous healing of various diseases and injuries; the saints who were raised as first fruits of the general resurrection to come [cf. Mat. 27], the understanding of the Pentecost message in their own tongues as a first fruit of the reverse of Babel [cf. Acts 2].

Robertson balks at R. K. Harrison’s commentary on Jeremiah 31, where the latter claims that, “it changed the older concept of a corporate relationship completely by substituting the individual for the nation as a whole.”[4] The trouble is that Harrison overstates here. This was not a complete substitution of the importance of the corporate, but rather a heightening in how God would move among his people, as his kingdom would become inaugurated. But we can see here our two covenantal extremes at work in how church and kingdom relate. The horizontalizing tendency insists that God still works first through the corporate; the individuating tendency insists that God now works first through the individual. But a full covenant theology would say unify these concerns by insisting that God works, immediately, through the individuals that comprise the church—but in the order of the means of grace He gives to the church corporately—so mediately through the assembled body.

To preach “the gospel of the kingdom” [Mat. 4:23] is to announce and offer the good news of the promises of the Covenant of Grace; and to say the “kingdom of heaven is at hand” [Mat. 4:17] is to warn that this offer will not last forever. It is immediate, it is moving, and it is closing like the door of the ark. But to those who are already born again, the inheritance is precisely of this kingdom. Jesus says, “It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” [Lk. 12:32]. He has given it to us and we live in it now.

THE KINGDOM ACTION OF THE COVENANT OF GRACE

There is a parallel between the prophecy of the dry bones coming to life in Ezekiel 37 and the two resurrections of John 5:25, 28-29 and Revelation 20. All in Israel who put their faith in the promises of God will come to life in the land of promise. The everlasting covenant that includes the land will be literally fulfilled, personally, in the age to come. The Holy Spirit will make alive all of faith, in the kingdom, in this age; and on the final Day of the Lord, all who are in the graves will hear the voice of Christ directly and immediate rise, body and soul together.

How does thinking about things like the Covenant of Grace and the coming of the Kingdom relate to Christian ethics in everyday life? Let us begin with examining what the way that the Bible describes the largest object in the covenant members’ life in between the inauguration and consummation. Once Christ has been inaugurated on the throne [cf. Acts 2:34-36], the Spirit is given to hear the voice of Christ so that the spiritually dead may come to life through gospel preaching [cf. Jn. 5:25, 2 Cor. 4:4-6]. So in Revelation 20, it says of the persecuted saints in the millennium,

They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years (vv. 4-6).

Notice three things about the expansion of this inaugurated kingdom in this age: 1) the kingdom expands through and in the pressure of persecution; 2) the kingdom expands by the message of the gospel believed; 3) the kingdom expands one individual at a time, such that the individual is included by rising from spiritual death. The link between Revelation 20 and John 5 is not difficult to make if we understand the clearer biblical teaching on how the gospel works upon the soul. Those who find this link “forced” demonstrate a shallow view of what the Bible says concerning the power of the gospel.

Notice also what follows from this, about the link between gospel preaching and kingdom expansion. If the kingdom expands in this age, one gospel convert at a time, then consider how this changes our vision of supporting gospel ministry and being about gospel ministry. Right covenant eschatology issues forth into right covenant ethics. Everything in our life’s decisions and strengthening instincts are built entirely around gospel ministry. Nothing else that is worth working on will work in any other way but by speaking the words of the Covenant of Grace to the intellectual soul. Ridderbos saw the link between the battle of ideas—particularly in gospel preaching—and the driving back of demons and their front lines, saying, “That is why at bottom there is no difference between the word with which Jesus casts out devils and his preaching of the gospel.”[5]

Amos 9:9-12

What does a covenant theologian think about Israel today? The answer is we think exactly what the Bible says. God’s promises to Israel have not failed and will not fail. The full answer is a paradox, but it is a biblical paradox. The Lord says through Amos that He will “shake the house of Israel…as one shakes with a sieve, but no pebble shall fall to the earth” (v. 9), which means there will be no one left. Now this is somewhat hyperbolic because there is a remnant throughout the era of the captivity. But then, in a Day of the Lord, He “will raise up the booth of David that is fallen” (v. 11). A booth is contrasted to the Temple. In the Feast of Booths, the Israelites would spend the time outside of their homes in makeshift mini-tabernacles to remind them of their humble beginnings in the wilderness. God would start over in “single-man-temples.”

• THE JUDICIAL END OF ISRAEL ACCORDING TO HER WORKS
• THE DECREED END OF ISRAEL ACCORDING TO GOD’S PLAN
• THE PARADOXICAL GOD-GLORIFYING RESTORATION OF ISRAEL
• ROMANS 11 IN A NEW LIGHT

The Big Idea is that the death, burial and resurrection of Israel forms a shadow of Christ, moving from cover to cover.

Judgment and renewal is the constant pattern of the prophetic books.

THE JUDICIAL END OF ISRAEL ACCORDING TO HER WORKS

We have seen that the covenants had a legal character because the essence of the law—just as the essence of the covenant—is the character of God. It is not primarily that man first stands in a courtroom relation to God, as a defendant to a judge, nor because man can merit this relationship. Rather, it is because the righteous requirement to live in the presence of God is the very eternal righteousness of God. Again, He says, “be holy, for I am holy” [Lev. 11:44], and Isaiah says, “The LORD was pleased, for his righteousness’ sake, to magnify his law and make it glorious” [42:21].

As Robertson notes in a subsequent book, The Christ of the Prophets (2004), “law and covenant undergirded the whole perspective of the prophets in analyzing the past, present, and future of the people to whom they spoke.”[1] So, we have seen that, theologically, we move from the righteousness of God, legally, into the covenants made with those already in unrighteousness. And we have seen that, exegetically (or, in the narrative flow), we move from the gracious covenant of God, normatively, to the legal requirements. The order of the relationship between covenant and law depends on whether we are speaking theologically, from the top down, or exegetically, from left to right in the Bible. In any case, covenant and law are the prophets’ reference point when their form is judgment and restoration.

We have also seen, more specifically, that the covenant made to the ancient people was conditional, demanding a relative obedience within a typological relationship. This relationship and this obedience did not make Israel’s disobedience to God less serious. On the contrary, by “typological relationship” we saw that Israel was a sign, a story of the people of God. Because there was so much at stake, therefore God would jealously enter into a covenant lawsuit against the people. And that brings us to our last point of review. We will remember that the Old Covenant genres are covenantal, and that the prophets would function as the Lord’s prosecuting attorneys. They were prosecuting nothing other than a case of covenant unfaithfulness.

The heaviest weight of guilt collects against the sins of the leaders of the people—the priests and kings especially. The most monumental act of judgment, to begin with, is against the monarchy. God punishes the house of David due to Solomon’s sin: “I will surely tear the kingdom from you and give it to your servant” [1 Kings 11:11]. He punishes Judah eventually as a result of the sins of Manasseh [cf. 2 Kings 21:4, 7]. The various movements of Israel’s kings away from God were quite deliberate. An intentional secularization of the northern tribes is noted by Robertson in that, “Worship centers never were coordinate with royal residences in the north.”[2] This secularization is the exact result of being and doing what God had warned them against from the beginning of Deuteronomy, the sin of forgetting God as their Lord and Savior and Treasure. Robertson continues,

Now God’s people were no longer tent-dwellers, always on the move, pilgrims without a permanent dwelling place. Instead, they were inhabitants of a kingdom, settled and secure. No longer was Israel exclusively looking forward to the coming of the kingdom; in a very real sense, God’s kingdom had come.[3]

To specifics, Israel was commanded to smash every last altar of the Canaanites [cf. Deut. 12:2-3]. Every generation seemed to want to make exceptions to this, until someone more wicked would deliberately commit Israel to syncretistic practices. Deuteronomy also set forth an ideal pattern of worship at a centralized location, what would eventually be located in Jerusalem [cf. Deut. 12:4-7]. If we were to compare the commands given to the people and God’s later dealings with those who disobeyed, it becomes clear that the basic concern is idolatry and the chief culprits are the religious class.

Idolatry, in turn, is rooted in a theological covetousness, which is really just ordinary covetousness. Paul commands us to put to death “covetousness, which is idolatry” [Col. 3:5]. What made Israel’s worship unique was that their God was infinite spirit and therefore the only Being really worth being the ultimate object of the soul. But since He is invisible, He is the only truly ultimate object of the mind. Idolatry begins is the lust for a plurality of things, something tangible to control, which is at the root of our hatred of thinking, and particularly theological thinking. What masks itself in humble simplicity and practical earthiness is actually the root of all of history’s great sins. Our impatience and exhaustion with the invisible is really nothing other than our resentment of the God-ness of God. Observe Israel’s motives for seeking out other objects of worship. Observe God’s rationale for why it is so wrong. If only Israel would have fixed its gaze upon the invisible, they would have remained transparent, an image, and through their relative invisibility, God would have been on display, made known, made “visible” so to speak. But impurity is a defilement of that clear lens, so the Lord says through Hosea, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” [4:6], and on the flip side of that theological coin, “[they] became detestable like the thing they loved” [9:10]. The fact of this hatred for thinking about God becomes clear throughout the prophets, also in Hosea, “Were I to write for him my laws by the ten thousands, they would be regarded as a strange thing” [8:12].

And God disables the prophetic office, since they despised his word: “has closed your eyes (the prophets), and covered your heads (the seers)” [Is. 29:10].

THE DECREED END OF ISRAEL ACCORDING TO GOD’S PLAN

Way back in the Pentateuch, God foretold of national Israel’s demise.

As the Lord raised up the enemy of David’s house, Jeroboam, he sent his prophet to inform him, “I am about to tear the kingdom from the hand of Solomon and will give you ten tribes (but he shall have one tribe, for the sake of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city that I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel)…that David my servant may always have a lamp before me in Jerusalem” [1 Kings 11:31-32, 36].

Of course God begins with the ten tribes of the north: “In that day the LORD will shave with a razor that is hired beyond the River—with the king of Assyria” [Is. 7:18]. God Himself says, “Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger; the staff in their hands is my fury!” [Is. 10:5].

Outside of the doctrines of the sovereignty and providence of God, what can the student of Scripture do with God’s intentions with Judah and Jerusalem? Now He says, “I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed Israel, and I will cast off this city that I have chosen, Jerusalem, and the house of which I said, My name shall be there” [2 Kings 23:27].

In the prophets the basis on which each messenger convicted Israel for sin and the basis on which they promised future blessing was the covenant the God made with them. The former referred back to Moses; the latter referred back even further to Abraham. While the holy character of God was the eternal reference point, the covenant of the Lord was the material reference point. Calvin broke the essence of the prophets down into three heads: 1) restatement of what Moses commanded, 2) reminder of what Moses said would happen, whether following obedience or disobedience, and 3) a clearer exposition of the coming grace of Christ than was given by Moses.[4]

And yet the decree for the cutting off of Israel did not precede the decree to preserve an Israel within Israel—“And he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem” [Is. 4:3]. And in response to the Prophet’s cry, “How long, O Lord?” the decree of the ever-decreasing remnant, “And though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump” [Is. 6:11, 13]. So Judah will be a remnant to Israel, but Judah also will be carted off—Christ alone will be the true Israel and into Him alone will the ultimate remnant be grafted in. God tells Judah, long before their captivity: “For your sake I send to Babylon” [Is. 43:14].

THE PARADOXICAL GOD-GLORIFYING RESTORATION OF ISRAEL

We have seen that Robertson shares the same concern to stress the covenant’s priority over law that we see in N. T. Wright or Doug Wilson, and the basic reason that he does so is to let the personal God remain sovereign over its end. God’s personhood, his relationship, triumphs over the stipulations and curses precisely because covenant precedes law. Now if we move from left to right, that is an important point; but we have to be careful when we hear personal relationship pit against “abstract notions” of law, as if the words on paper are abstract in the same way as their essence, namely divine righteousness, is an abstraction. The problem, in other words, is not in their exegesis, but in their philosophy that they are unwittingly smuggling in. At any rate, for Robertson, “This restoration is possible only because covenant supersedes law.”[5] And if all we mean is that God’s person and God’s promise supersede the legal demands and their consequences, then we all agree.

For God’s “true Israel,” the blessings cannot be earned by their obedience, and the blessings cannot be forfeited by their disobedience. This is the ultimate relationship of the individual soul to God—that which the emerging movements minimize and that which cannot be accounted for by simply asserting that covenant precedes and supersedes law. Israel was judged. Real people died horrible deaths. And many ethnic Jews were reprobate. The mere singularity of the covenant and subordination of law does not even begin to explain this.

So what does start to explain it all?

Within God’s visible election of Israel, there is an invisible reprobate and an invisible remnant. This reprobation and remnant will come to the surface—will become visible—as the story unfolds. Robertson criticizes thinkers who see a duality of covenants in the prophets, but does so by a strawman, namely, that duality explains a contrast between “covenant and covenant, prophet and prophet,”[6] when this duality is exemplified within each prophet anytime there is total judgment followed by unconditional loving renewal. That begs explanation within singular prophetic messages. The explanation is simply that there is an invisible election that creates an invisible church, which church resides within a visible body, which merely visible body eventually falls away from the invisible substance that formed the whole. The reprobate is that which falls away from the invisible Word—apostasy being the word for the action of that falling away—the remnant is that which is invisible, made to lay hold of the invisible Word and persevere in it, which ultimately means, in Him. To be fair, Robertson, at this point, is reacting to the higher critic who is arguing from duality of substance to a duality of sources. This was a worthy project and still is, to the degree that mindless theories of form criticism still linger; but a new covenant theology is needed that accounts more fully for both the invisible and visible, both the vertical and horizontal, as complementary formative elements.

A remnant is prepared the moment that God curses the house of the king. In the next breath of the curse to Solomon, the Lord adds, “However, I will not tear away all the kingdom, but I will give one tribe to your son” [1 Kings 11:13].

On the one hand, “you have rejected your people” [Is. 2:6], which comes to include both northern and southern kingdom.

On the other hand, to the remnant He says, “I have chosen you and not cast you off” [Is. 41:9], “and I will raise up their ruins” [Is. 44:26], and “in the LORD all the offspring of Israel shall be justified and shall glory” [Is. 45:25].

The turning point is seen most definitively in Isaiah 40. It has been said that, just as the Bible contains sixty-six books—thirty-nine in the Old Testament, twenty-seven in the New Testament—so Isaiah, that magnum opus of the prophets contains the same breakdown, so that as chapter forty begins, the mood shifts from darkness to light, from condemnation to salvation: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins” [40:1-2].

Such a hope included even the resurrection: “Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy!” [Is. 26:19].

The prophetic language about the future state of God’s people has to be read with caution. The prophets do share some literary features with the poets. Much is either metaphorical or hyperbolic imagery to point to a particular essence which, in the old age, is exemplified in something that the Scriptures suggest elsewhere will not be there. For example, human governments and death will have no place in the new age and yet the prophets speak of the blessedness of this state by including these elements. It is a restoration of the social order of the city of God: “And I will restore your judges as at the first, and your counselors as at the beginning. Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city” [Is. 1:26]. The new heavens and the new earth are pictures as Israel-centric, so that “out of Zion shall go the law” [Is. 2:3].

What does this say about God? It magnified the Lord as Savior, when He can say of his people, “they have become a plunder with none to rescue, spoil with none to say, ‘Restore!’” [Is. 42:22]. It magnifies his mercy, since Israel did nothing to deserve restoration: “I am he, who blots out your transgression for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins” [Is. 43:25].

And God explicitly says that He does this to speak about Himself:

For my name’s sake I defer my anger, for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, that I may not cut you off. Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another [Is. 48:9-11].

And specifically Israel, in their stubborn, unknowing sin, dramatizes what Christ does in all purity: “Out of Egypt I called my son” [Hos. 11:1]. This is what I mean by the fact that the death, burial and resurrection of Israel forms a shadow of Christ, moving from cover to cover. Christ hears what Israel heard in their calling: “The LORD called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. He made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow; in his quiver he hid me away. And he said to me, ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified’” [Is. 49:1-3]. The shadow Israel, God’s ethnic, adopted son; Jesus Christ, the end of Israel, God’s eternal, divine Son. As this polished arrow, Israel fell short of the glory of God, Christ hit the target, fulfilling all the law and atoning for the sins of his people [cf. Gal. 4:4-5, Mat. 1:21]. They can rise after dying because He rose after dying. They were sold into the hands of the Gentiles, taken outside the city in shame, and then their dry bones were given life by the Spirit and gathered back into the land.

ROMANS 11 IN A NEW LIGHT

So how do we understand the destiny of Israel in Romans 11? There are several views, most of which are surprisingly compatible with each other. The debate is over the exact meaning of the phrase “all of Israel” (v. 26). Various people have suggested three interpretations:

1) ‘All of Israel’ means the total number of the elect, spiritual Israel—Jews and Gentiles.

2) ‘All of Israel’ means the total remnant of ethnic Israel being gathered throughout history.

3) ‘All of Israel’ means a massive (or total) ingathering of ethnic Israel in the last days.

The idea that Paul does not have ethnic Israel in mind is a stretch because of the contrast already set throughout chapters 9 through 11. Since “Israel failed to obtain” (v. 7) and a “partial hardening has come upon Israel” (v. 25), it seems unnatural to see Paul switching connotations when it is precisely the contrast between Jews and Gentiles being discussed. And between the second and third option, the third seems more specific to Paul’s focus on times: “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” (v. 25).

The notion that Covenant Theology is incompatible with this ingathering of ethnic Jews at the end is nothing but ignorant slander, usually tacked to the pejorative smear “Replacement Theology.” But no blood-bought believing Jew will ever be “replaced.” The question is how any of us are saved—Jew or Gentile? If by Christ alone, then any Jew who puts their faith in their true Messiah will certainly be saved. However, if they are saved they will be gathered together with Gentiles into the same “commonwealth of Israel” [Eph. 2:13]. It is instructive that Paul uses the imagery of a tree, a Jewish tree even, but it is only one tree that we are all grafted into, after all!

Romans 5:12-21

If Dispensationalism is one modern extreme that fractures the biblical drama, a new school known as the Federal Vision (FV) flies to the other. It accuses the modern Presbyterian and Reformed strands of American Evangelicalism of being critically infected by Dispensational (and even Lutheran) thinking. But it goes farther. In a wholesale criticism that sounds almost identical to the New Perspectives and Emergent foundations, the FV charges that the mainstream Reformed community is guilty of all things Western.

When it comes to practical religion, the modern Reformed have exalted two things that are beyond our comprehension: the secret counsel of God (systematic soteriology) and the genuineness of the new birth (pietistic conversionism).  Both “peerings” move us away from the big hearted, big tent, big world Christianity inherited from the Middle Ages.

Douglas Wilson, Peter Leithart, James Jordan, Steve Schlissel and Steve Wilkins make up the names of those who have most notably pressed this thinking. And just as in our dealings with the New Perspectives if we treat the Federal Vision as a monolith, we will be snapped at. There are many finer points on which their recognized thinkers are at odds. Consequently I will only deal with the main points where either there is a consensus, or, where there is enough of a danger in a particular idea that it is worth mentioning.

• THE DOCTRINE OF COVENANTAL OBJECTIVITY
• THE ECUMENICAL AND SACRAMENTAL INFERENCE
• ORDO SALUTIS MATRIX RELOADED
• RED STATE RELIGION FINDS ITS SYSTEM

The Big Idea is that Covenant Nomism reduces the divine to the historical, the gospel to natural and all of life to our performance. 

This session may be open to the charge of being unfair. I do not deal with the FV in the conventional sense of taking the bulk of their claims serious. One reason is that we do not have that kind of time. Much like in the case of the New Perspectives, the FV puts its finger on several things that are excesses of modern Evangelicals. I personally agree with the Presbyterian and Reformed apologists who argue that they’re blaming a lot of the wrong things. Our purpose here is much narrower, but for my money much more important to protecting dangerous inroads that FV could make into the New Calvinism. So I will freely admit and put out this disclaimer that if you want a primer of the FV per se, in isolation, there are other resources that will be more helpful than what I will be saying.

I. THE DOCTRINE OF COVENANTAL OBJECTIVITY

            A) The Federal Vision’s View of the Biblical Covenants

1. The first question may be the same as it was for us: What is a covenant? FV proponents are quick to define covenant as a “personal relationship,” as opposed to the modern Reformed tradition, which has made it into a systematic abstraction.[1] The Scriptures, they say, do not divide the human race into relationships of performance versus promise, but rather belief versus unbelief, faithfulness versus faithlessness. At this point, our false dichotomy detectors should be seeing red! But the question for them is not how to “get in,” since all are already in the most general relation to God in Adam, others born into the covenant community; the question is “staying in” and “living in”. The general language of covenant is equated to the kind of covenant that marriage is. To be sure, the Scriptures do speak of marriage as being a picture of the covenant of grace; but to equate the two is dubious. We may want to ask what motivates this equation.

2. How does the FV understand the unity and diversity of the covenants? Two words are important—singular and horizontal. What we see in the Old Covenant is what we get in the New Covenant. Paul said that all those baptized into Israel with Moses ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink, as we have seen, and therefore there is no such thing as an invisible church so much as there is an invisible and visible version of God’s saving acts. Yet the invisible version of election, calling, justification, sanctification and glorification is not worth dwelling upon, since it leads to pride and morbidity. If we look to the invisible heights we are presuming to peer into God’s secret counsels and if we look into the invisible depths we are obsessing over our innermost “selves,” which is as counterproductive as it is impossible anyway.

3. Here the “genealogical principle” runs like a single thread where the visible people of God and those placed in Christ are one and the same. There is a minimization, and, at times, denial of the concept of the invisible church. Membership into the church is entirely a visible thing; certainly regeneration and conversion are not to be seen as where the lines are drawn. But here, it seems, the FV has confused the distinction between whether the work of the Spirit in fact makes the difference (objective) and whether or not I can tell whether the difference has been made (subjective). If one cannot tell, then it seems to them that the difference is superfluous—which judgment is then read into Scripture as evidence that Scripture has no reason to speak of these invisible differences (election-to-regeneration). It rings to them of the subjective, privatized individualism of the modern West. And against this they assert what is perhaps their most unique and telling doctrine—the objectivity of the covenant. 

B) What is Meant by the “Objectivity of the Covenant”?

1. This objectivity begins as an objection. To repeat, they claim that confessional Evangelicalism is guilty of the modern individualism of our culture. It defines faith in exactly the way anyone wants their faith to be defined. Thus the Baptist extreme is “hands off” of children in the covenant community when, in fact, if someone grows up in a Christian home they bear a double guilt. To put this in the marriage context, “If you were to stop believing that you were married, you would still be married.”[2] Likewise, if you were to believe or behave in a way that denies your profession and your identity in the covenant community, you can no more erase that inclusion into Christ than a pagan can erase his status in the race of Adam.

2. At first glance it may appear that the objective is pit against the subjective in that one’s status in Christ rests entirely in the object of faith—what God has done—and not at all in the internal performance (i.e. critical adherence to abstract propositions, sufficient introspection over one’s sinfulness). Thus the object of the covenant is precisely itself, the relationship wrought by God, so that the FV is guilty of nothing more than being the most thoroughgoing defenders of sola gratia yet. That is certainly the way it may appear. But, no matter how much FV proponents sincerely believe this is the crux of the matter, some deeper probing will show that there is another “objective” shift at work. And that is the shift away from the way the Western mind used to mean the metaphysical essence of objects—i.e. the way things are in themselves—and toward the a more horizontal definition of objects as they appear in time and space. In other words, the FV conceives of objectivity as having less to do with “the essence of things” and more to do with “the visibility of things” or “the tangibility of things.”

As Waters summarizes, “The chief consequence of covenantal objectivity is that a premium is placed on that which is visible, external, and tangible.”[3] This naturalistic shift is not simply a convenient wedge for the FV’s opponents to make a particular point; it will be important for understanding how everything flowing from this view of the covenant tends toward a legalistic mindset. Similar to Wright’s use of the word “abstract” to refer to the Reformed view of the righteousness of God, so here “objectivity” is moved below Kant’s line to explicitly refer to the phenomenological. To the degree that the covenantal act is legal and vertical it is “abstract.” To the degree that the covenantal act is moral and communal it is “objective.” Wilson equates the traditional understanding of the invisible church as a “Hellenistic” strand of thought, rationalistic and ethereal.[4]

3. Covenant objectivity is covenant faithfulness—living like what is in fact true—and covenant faithfulness is visible faithfulness. It all sounds very biblical as far as words go. Yet, as the syllogism ends, we can see that the doctrine of the objectivity of the covenant issues forth, irresistibly, to the ethic of visible faithfulness. And visible faithfulness in red state America usually means whatever Job’s three friends in the suburbs needs it to mean.

II. THE ECUMENICAL AND SACRAMENTAL INFERENCE

A) Covenant Baptism and Lord’s Supper

1. Christ was the Word made flesh. He was visible. Hence initiation into the visible house is inclusion into Christ’s body. It is not belief, but baptism, into Christ that is the most immediate vehicle of reconciliation with God. Baptism marks the translation from death to life. The Moscow school, especially, has remarked on the Gnostic disbelief in the efficacy of the waters. But God made the waters efficacious so that what we act out really does share the grace of Christ to which the symbols point. In their mind, to disbelieve in the sacraments is to disbelieve in the gospel. We do not disbelieve in preaching, and its gospel told, on the ground that there are pages, ink and sound waves involved. Evangelicals typically do not complain that there is a danger of sermonic regeneration. But there is a difference, which Paul addresses where he says that, “faith comes through hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” [Rom. 10:17].

            B) If Grace Comes through One Baptism, Then…

1. Well, then all assembled Christians, baptized in the Trinitarian formula, are baptized into one body. If Rome preaches a false gospel—as Wilson seems to agree that they do—then they will be under the stricter judgment; but their judgment is so strict precisely because they are part of the same house. This explains his position in the debate with James White a few years ago over whether Roman Catholics are our brothers.

At any rate, our vision needs to start with the visible. One of their authors put it this way,

To have a Federal Vision is to have an objective view of Christians; you view the word Christian in terms of the covenant relationship a person has with the church. Once again, there are two kinds of Christians: A) the faithful, who are baptized people who keep God’s laws and live a life of obedience ending in eternal life, and B) the unfaithful, who were once enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, but who fall away and crucify again the Son of God and put Him to shame (Hebrews 6).[5]

III. ORDO SALUTIS MATRIX RELOADED

            A) The Visible Versions of the Whole Order

1. Much like N. T. Wright charges the Reformed with a Gnostic abstraction of divine righteousness, so Peter Leithart charges them with doing the same to divine grace. The systematic character of the doctrines of grace quickly became ethereal, impersonal, impractical, and in all other respects, less like the covenantal actions of the God of the Scriptures. He says, “grace is not the kind of thing that can be infused (since it is not a ‘thing’).”[6] In its place, Wright roots the righteousness of God in the personal act of making a promise to Abraham; and Leithart roots the grace of God in the same. There is a “de-ontologization,” in Wright and Leithart, of these attributes of God. In other words there is a systematic program of sinking the roots of these attributes into the soil of history and thereby reducing their essence to something other than eternal being. Ontology equals the opposite of relationship, the opposite of real reality! The other similarity between the NPP and FV here is the eschewing of the roots of soteriology. The concept of “being in covenant” (FV) and “being in Christ” (NPP) are synonymous. Whichever words you use, soteriology is subsumed under ecclesiology, or else missiology. And while Wilson is, on exegetical points, more critical of Wright, Leithart and others go as far as to affirm Wright’s total gospel emphasis as being about making Christ known, rather than “how we get saved.”

2. There is, according to the FV advocates, a “corporate justification,” which, in Wilson’s words, “does not contradict the realities of individual justification,” and which, “begins with the justification of Jesus, our Head, which cannot be thought of as justification in the tradition of crisis conversions.”[7] Here is a potential straw man. That Jesus may be justified, or vindicated, is no doubt related to the justification of the believer [cf. Rom. 4:25]; but whether this translates as well into a corporate justification needs to be treated as a separate matter. What this comes to mean is that someone may be a member of the justified body, yet come to find out that they themselves are unjustified in the Last Judgment.

3. Is there an adoption into the visible people of God? Romans 9:4 says at much about the ethnic people at least—“to them belong the adoption”—but does it follow that we carry this over into the visible church of the New Covenant age?

Reconciliation is between God and man, and between man and man—i.e. Jew and Gentile—and so the act of reconciliation is seen first in the church. We can see the same blurring of soteriology and ecclesiology as in the New Perspectives. To be saved is to be brought into the church; and to be brought into the church is to be baptized.

            B) Covenantal Election and Reprobation

1. If you haven’t asked by now, it will now be asked: How do FV advocates hold to the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints? There is one way they can and that is to make the distinction not between invisible and visible church, but between the invisible decree and the visible apostasy. Apostasy, within the FV, essentially means the same thing as it does within the mainstream Reformed tradition except with special emphasis on their definition of covenant unfaithfulness. To be in a state of apostasy is to be in a state of lying about the One to whom you have been covenanted, just as an unfaithful spouse does lie about Christ and the church in their act of infidelity. The crucial difference is that for the traditionally Reformed, to apostatize is to fall away from the visible church, revealing that one was not truly a member of the covenant of grace; whereas for the FV, to apostatize is to fall away precisely from the covenant of grace, which is made to the whole visible church without remainder. 

2. And this in turn rests on how the FV understands the concept of election within the covenant. Norman Shepherd—professor of systematic theology at Westminster East from 1961 to 1982—did more to spread this view that anyone else. For Shepherd, the doctrine of election must be understood within the more prevalent biblical data on covenant, not the other way around. Thus there are elect members of the covenant who will nevertheless be judged and reprobates called into covenant, and thus election. This is ironic since others, like Barach and Lusk, who call their “covenantal election” the ultimate assurance. Why wrestle with the question “Am I elect?” when, if you were baptized, there is no need to doubt God’s love for you. But two questions may be asked. What becomes of the crystal clear admonition of 2 Peter 1:10, an imperative presumably addressed to those who had already been baptized? And how does this square with the FV’s doctrine of apostasy? If apostasy is a possibility precisely for the elect, then how is it irrelevant to ask whether or not one is elect in the invisible sense? To ask it is the same as to ask whether or not one will become apostate. Waters summarizes it by saying that, “We may then speak of election in terms of a process: the fact that one is elect is no guarantee that he shall remain elect. Reprobation, to use Barach’s term, is a genuine possibility for the elect.”[8] And that is not the only problem. Waters lists two glaring exegetical difficulties:

1) By what criteria do we determine that a given passage is speaking to us of covenantal or decretal election?

2) How, in fact, do we know of the existence of decretal election at all?[9]

IV. RED STATE RELIGION FINDS ITS SYSTEM

            A) What is at Stake in the Covenant of Works?

1. The FV makes no secret that they resist the language of a “covenant of works” in which Adam was constrained merely to a probationary period in which he sought merit from God.[10] Even if we speak of “possible merit,” we are no longer speaking of grace. But here it would seem that Paul is against Paul again, as Romans 11:6 would seem to make the FV point, but only against Galatians 3:  where is it says “hypothetically” that “…live by the law” If the law cannot give life, then, whether Adam was thinking about it or not, the fact remains that the law is not the source of life. The question is whether or not these imperatives of God to Adam were in fact law. We have seen that they were. But it should also be pointed out that the descendents of the Westminster tradition have never argued from the fact of this legal obligation that such performance actually does lead to life in the most absolute sense.

At any rate, in its place they prefer the language of a “covenant of life” or a “covenant of blessing,” and naturally this does sound kinder and gentler. Wilson prefers to divide history into two covenants, the one prior to the fall being “creational grace” and the one after the fall being “redemptive grace.” Again the emphasis seems to be to rid the Garden of Eden of any merit. Another of their advocates, Richard Lusk, adds that, “Perfect obedience is not required of us in order to be regarded as law keepers and covenant keepers.”[11] And, of course, if what he means is what Horton already described as “relative obedience” within the “typological relationship,” very well. But if you begin by denying the distinction between the invisible and visible, as a worthwhile thing to talk about, then your system is not sophisticated enough to prevent the legalistic inference that “If blessed by God in this life, then faithful,” or “If in trouble in this life, then faithless.” The words “in this life” (i.e. in this covenant—especially if the covenants are not essentially different!) are not sufficient qualifiers.

2. But what if the FV gives back with the right hand what they take away with the left? What if, after all their talk of de-meriting Adam and Eve’s blessed task, their movement talks to no end about those very things as the source of life? Ralph Smith, for example, compares the Covenant of Works to Covenant of Grace in the area of conditions,[12] and Schlissel flatly rejects the three-fold use of the law as being subjective. Rather the law is to be “our life” in an undifferentiated sense.[13] The only question is whether external disobedience is the most basic cause of apostasy. Now this shift reaches its climax in the FV’s parallel insistence that the work of Christ should likewise not be understood in terms of merit. So, Adam was not after merit in the Garden, nor is anyone in his race under such because of that covenant; and Christ did not earn merit for those placed in Him. From this assumption it becomes difficult for them to locate the notion of Christ’s active obedience anywhere in the Scriptures. At least, they say, Jesus did not merit for us, by his life, our righteous standing before God.

3. In summary, we can see that the FV moves in its thinking from (1) a denial of the concept of the covenant of works, implying merit, to (2) the uselessness of Christ meriting this merit for us through the law, to, (3) the absence in the text of the imputation of Christ’s own righteousness to the believer through faith in that active obedience. 

            B) The Pre-Existent Formula, with the FV’s Blessing

1. We have all heard the maxim of the Word of Faith movement—i.e. Faith is a force, and words are the containers of that force. I have argued elsewhere, that the suburban superstition that goes by the name “Christianity” today has a parallel maxim—i.e. Faithfulness is a force, and external appearances are the containers of that force. So as we come full circle, we can see how the Federal Vision gives a whole theological foundation to this already dominant will-power, American religion. Remember that for the FV, faith, in justification, is not entirely receptive. The faith which justifies is a faithful life. Note that in the covenant of life, all those in Adam and all those in Christ are called by God to marry, bear children, raise them and educate them in a way that either tells the truth or lies about the covenant Lord. But notice that what looked like a “kinder and gentler” Covenant Theology, by replacing the language of “works” with “life” now leaves us with the only covenant head being the head of each home. We are not subject to Adam’s particular task and we are not helped by Christ’s particular life. We are federal heads of those in us. The suggestion is always subtle, but it is always there.

2. Remember also that for the FV “covenant objectivity” means precisely visible manifestations of faithfulness. So if we combined their theological definition of “faith-fulness” with their philosophical definition of “objectivity,” what we have is nothing less than a very gender-specific inquisition of Job’s friends. That is one great irony to all of this: that this vision of Federal Headship is billed as chauvinism, but actually it is quite anti-male. The man who is not moving quite like the lead male, the federal head among heads, which is why I have called this elsewhere “Yuppie Hero Worship Religion,” those lesser movements are less masculine, less mature, less qualified, less faithful and therefore are suspect and in need of control. While this certainly lets one or two men have the power trip of their life, the vast majority of males in such churches will be enslaved. Some may like it and follow in lock step; others will remain outcasts and be branded faithless, either because they are single, or haven’t produced as many children, or are not educating or disciplining their children along the party line. In other words, when it comes to everything given to Adam and Eve to do before the fall, merit is removed, so Christ’s merit is unavailable. Each head is on his own.

3. This study of the FV is just one more helpful exercise to get us to see that naturalism and legalism are not simply closely associated, but are logically related as an antecedent to a consequent. To the degree that we bring the divine attributes down to the spatio-temporal realm, the law is read phenomenologically, or, as a prism for the external motions of society’s “doers.” Schlissel’s complaint that any talk of “uses of the law” is subjective is exactly the reverse of the truth. The whole reason that Paul used the word “uses” in 1 Timothy 1:9 is apparently because there are at least two uses of the law—a right one and a wrong one! It is also ironic that Schlissel blames folks’ morbid introspection and uncharitable judgments of other’s testimony on this invisible peering, but it is precisely in what a man knows he is before God that protects him from a lack of charity, as Paul said, “But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is know also to your conscience…so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart” [2 Cor. 5:11, 12]. Let me be clear that I am not accusing the FV of attempting to bolster this “red state / will power” religion by their system, only that they in fact do so by the law of unintended consequences. It seems that they are concerned that modern Evangelicalism has corrected Rome’s system of external works-righteousness only by creating a system of internal works-righteousness—hence our Calvinistic, or even Arminian, venom over getting election right and getting our personal “closing the deal with Jesus” settled. I will not question the FV’s sincerity about wanting to correct this. I am questioning whether or not they understand that they correct it only by giving us one more form of external slavery. They propose to give us a kinder, gentler God who is eager to save, but only by giving our suburban overlords the keys to a kingdom that is run, until Judgment Day, by “objective,” or natural, immediate, familial, performance.

4. In closing it is important to note that there is a close connection between this “objectivity of covenant faithfulness” coming to mean natural, near, easy-to-detect movements of the man on the one hand, and the invisible essence of the law on the other. The Federal Vision is not only out of step with the Reformation, but with the Medieval thought that Wilson, at least, is so keen on recovering in his vision of classical education. There is virtually no material on the FV that draws this connection between their theology and the popular will power religion already at large. That is undoubtedly because those who are granted access to speak and write within Presbyterian circles minister in the larger metropolitan areas of our nation where more Christians have better things to do than to watch every last un-shepherded muscle spasm of our wives and kids. It doesn’t hit them where it hurts. Water’s book is excellent, but it remains a matter of intramural debate over abstract notions. When small churches in the suburbs of the red states begin to pattern themselves after these thinkers or their parachurch contacts who pedal homeschooling, family or other life resources, the yeast can find its way into the dough.