There are others who have made
America into an idol and created a myth-narrative to go with it. Essentially
the United States has become the present manifestation of the Kingdom of God or
at the very least the leading vehicle for the Kingdom of God to work on this
earth. It's not that far of a leap if you incorporate culture (and thus
politics) into the definition of the Kingdom. Following Verduin, we have
labeled this extra-Biblical and very pervasive error...Sacralism.
If America or the West abandons
its supposed Christian heritage, then it's as if the Gates of Hell have
triumphed.
Whether one wishes to view the
present pagan surge as being an anti-Christian offensive or an anti-Sacralist/Constantinian backlash... regardless, the old order, the political and social consensus
that dominated America and all the West is being rapidly dismantled.
Their idol is being smashed
right before their eyes and they're in a panic. In that case they're not just
thinking wrongly about the Kingdom.... they've deified this Tower of Babel
they've created.
Perhaps the reader is already
seeing the dilemma of the anti-Sacralist. On the one hand we do not wish to
support the pagans, the secularists, nor endorse their worldview... but at the
same time, we rejoice in the destruction of the Sacralist order.[i]
Turning to politics, they've
embraced the game of power...power enforced by law...which is violence.
Remember law is about force and compulsion, and when people don't obey they
will ultimately face a consequence. Even if that consequence is a fine, it
carries the threat of violence if the authority of the state is ignored.
If you think that's a stretch,
then consider the following. If you're fined for something and you refuse to
pay as an issue of conscience, eventually the police will show up at your door.
It may take a long time and it may only come after progressing through several
bureaucratic stages. But ultimately it means a threat of violence. When you
refuse to comply, it can all end with the police taking you by force at
gunpoint. That's what law and government are all about. It's basically about
who wields the legitimate violence. Something to consider when we as Christians
are commanded to eschew violence. Can we lay aside the ethic in order to
fulfill an office? That's another discussion.
Aside from that point, can this
tool....politics...law...law enforcement...violence, be garnered by those who
would build the Kingdom? Culture can't function without law and authority, or
to put it differently law and authority flow from a cultural paradigm.
If the Kingdom of God includes culture and
thus law and politics...then the Kingdom and more pertinently Kingdom 'building'
must also include the police and military. That causes some to pause, but it's
consistent and many thinking Dominionists will admit that the Kingdom of God
can (at times) indeed be built with an M-16, by launching cruise missiles, or
by dropping bombs from a B-52.[ii]
Even if they were correct
regarding the Kingdom including the culture...is this how we would honour God?
Is this how we would build the Kingdom? Are the gates of Zion protected and
advanced by legislation and force? Apparently so if we accept their argument.
I'm afraid this is always the endgame to this type of apostasy...and instead of
the Kingdom of God....you will at best get a pseudo-version, a pseudo-Zion...a
counterfeit.
And this is far more dangerous
to the Church than something like homosexual marriage endorsed by a secular
state.
There are others who haven't
thought very deeply about it and yet they believe this country is in some sense
Christian. When pressed they can't tell me how the Bible ever uses the word
Christian in the way they are...but they want to live in a society they believe
to be Christian...that way they can support it and feel secure.
They want to be able to cheer
on the armed forces, feel good about America's special role (which they fail to
rightly see as dominance) of the world etc... If America isn't good anymore,
then they sure can't feel good about America being so powerful. It's really a
case of idolatry once again...or perhaps even just plain worldliness. Lust of
the flesh (which isn't just about physical gratification), lust of the eyes,
and the pride of life. To turn away from these enticements is to necessarily reject
patriotism which roots itself in pride and strength.
Sacralism won't allow any
distinction between the Church's theology of the Kingdom and the question of
politics.[iii]
They all go together. If they had any integrity they would drop their tax
exempt status.
They shouldn't incorporate in
the first place, but if the Church has basically become a political machine, if
being a Christian is equal to being a political activist, (I think the modern
Evangelical Church is really about little more than politics and
therapy)....then as a political partisan organization...they shouldn't be tax
exempt. And when they're called out on this, they wrongly cry persecution. When
you're being called deceptive and a thief, a breaker of the law, it takes no
little amount of cheek or chutzpah to cry 'persecution'.
If the Kingdom includes the
culture, then the Church must define the basic foundational elements of the
culture. The state lacks the ability to this. Anything that seeks to escape the
Church's dominion and definition is viewed as not just a political threat but a
spiritual one. This was certainly true in the Middle Ages when the Roman
Catholic Papacy controlled the social consensus and agenda. And frankly little
changed with the Reformation. This aspect, this foundation-stone of the Western
Middle Ages was not in any way abandoned by the Reformers or their heirs.[iv]
Dominionists who acknowledge
some form of Two Kingdoms would say, the Church and State are separate spheres
of the same Kingdom. The Church explains the doctrines of the Kingdom and is to
inform the state and hold it accountable. Of course under their construct, you
would have a religious test and all the magistrates would be members of the
Church and accountable to its leadership.
Let's say the magistrate
refuses to bow to the Church and the Church excommunicates him. Under this
model of Church and State, the excommunicated ruler has just been delegitimized
and has lost his authority. Being put out of the Church, or under Church
censure, he would become ineligible for office.
This is nothing new. One only
need to read a good history of the Middle Ages and some of the issues
surrounding The Investiture Controversy, the Salian Emperors, or even the Plantagenet's.
The controversies which embroiled them dealt with this very issue.
Dominionism's lip service to the Two Kingdoms doctrine is a semantic
fiction...a sham.
The Church would define
institutions like marriage. Sacralist Protestants are most pleased at the
prospect...as long as they're in control. They wouldn't be as happy if they had
lived in Franco's Spain or at any other time before the Reformation. Of course,
Reformation era Anabaptists and proto-Protestant dissenters did not like the
'Church' defining marriage, because the Sacralist Church was always against
them.
Actually some of the Waldensian
marriages were reckoned as 'fornication' by the authorities. Some of them
weren't 'formally' married, at least as the Church informed Magistrate reckoned
it. They refused to marry under the auspices of the Roman Catholic system....and
so they weren't 'legally' married.[v]
Regardless of what the state
did and how it defined marriage they went about their business, wedded (in
their own way)...raised their families etc..
The same is true of the early
Church. Rome was a pretty wicked place with perverse views of relationships and
sexuality. The Christian families, Christian Marriage, were not 'overthrown' as
some seem to threaten today. Society went on and functioned, the Church simply
had a different understanding of these things. The Church doesn't back down and
compromise, but the Church is hardly affected by what the lost or apostate
society is doing. It is only affected when the proper Biblical antithesis is
lost and the world invades the Church....which is exactly what happens when you
redefine the Church to include the larger society.
While ancient Greece and Rome
did not have an exact equivalent of our modern homosexual cultural
manifestation, they did have rampant homosexual activity, gender redefinition
and pederasty. While socially and perhaps psychologically pederasty is not the
same as pedophilia, in terms of conduct it's the same practice. These things
were widespread and socially tolerated. The Church of course completely
rejected these things but the historical reality somewhat defeats the Sacralist
argument that civilization will fall if homosexuals marry. Pagan civilization
continued, had its successes and failures and later transitioned into the model
known as Medieval Christendom.
In fact a study of post-Roman
history will indicate that not only did this perversity never really go away,
it revived in Europe around the time of the Renaissance. As I've indicated
elsewhere a lot of our modern ideas about 'olden times' concerning modesty and
morality really hearken back to the Victorian period which itself was something
of a reaction to the rather libertine period stretching from the 15th
to 18th century. There were interludes and variations depending on
where you look...the Puritan era for instance. I'm not suggesting for a moment
that we need to have a 'loose' attitude about these things, but historical
examination does help gain a broader perspective in terms of how we should
react.
Not only was Protestant hero and
joint Head of the Church of England, Queen Mary II (1689-94) frequently bare-breasted in public,
many other functional civilizations have promoted order and manners, security
and civil order and yet at the same time tolerated and approved of sin.
We can be happy that our
present day royals are covered and yet that doesn't make our society somehow
more 'Christian'...remember the reign of William and topless Mary is looked to
as a 'glorious' period in the history of Protestant Britain.
Again this doesn't suggest that
the current cultural surge of homosexuality is something we should ignore,
downplay, or be apathetic about. It's affecting all of us, yet... our reaction
should not be on par with the Sacralist.
[i] This
is nothing new. Non-Sacralists have faced this with the Turkish conquest of
Eastern Europe, the fall of the Stewarts, Bourbons, Habsburgs, the collapse of
the Papacy during the Dark Ages, the rise of the Nation-State and consequent degradation
of the Papacy with the Renaissance.
[ii] I
strongly argue this doctrine is fulfilled in the imagery of the Beast-Whore
relationship in the Apocalypse. This is the spirit of Antichrist at work in the
Church.
[iii] This
is all the more bizarre when you consider the majority of Evangelical Churches
hold to Dispensationalism which is a form of Pre-millennialism. For this camp,
which originated in the 19th century, the Kingdom is wholly 'future'
and this world is under the Dominion of Satan.
Traditionally, this school tracked the cultural apostasy and
viewed it in terms of the Second Coming, or more properly in their unique
two-stage Second Coming....the Rapture, the Tribulation, and then the actual
Second Coming.
This began to shift in the 1970's and employing a misguided
literalistic hermeneutic (to be distinguished from literal) they made a distinction
between Matthew's 'Kingdom of Heaven' versus the other Gospel's use of the term
Kingdom of God.
However a closer reading reveals that Matthew uses the term
in several parallel passages with the other Gospels. They're reporting the same
thing and yet using the different terms. The terms Kingdom of God and Kingdom
of Heaven refer to the same thing.
Why did Matthew use Heaven? Usually this is explained by
appealing to the fact that Matthew's gospel seems to be more specifically
directed to a Jewish audience, and 1st century Judaism was overly
sensitive to and frankly superstitious about naming the name of God. Sadly our
English translations have continued this practice by using 'LORD' and 'Lord' in
the Old Testament. Rather than titles, these are two expressions of God's
name...YHWH and Adonai. If you're unfamiliar with this, look at Psalm 110. It
casts the Psalm in a whole new light.
Regardless it makes little sense for Dispensationalists to
embrace Dominionism and yet it has become almost universal in those circles.
Progressively they have abandoned many key planks to their doctrinal system. At
this point, they still retain the unbiblical distinction between the Jews and
Gentiles and insist God has separate plans for Israel and the Church. Without
this the entire Pre-tribulational eschatological system would collapse.
Why have they embraced Dominionism when it contradicts their
theology? I think largely due to a wholesale embrace of Americanism. They
cannot bear to just let 'their country' go. They want it to dominate the earth.
For them, it's America and Israel singing 'You and me against the world,'....
and though they believe we're not in the Kingdom and that the Kingdom won't be
manifest until Christ physically reigns in Jerusalem...they continue to labour
to transform the culture.
[iv] The
first political attempt to abandon it was with the formation of the United
States of America. For this reason, I can rejoice in the secular foundations of
this nation. While that won't allow me to engage in hero-worship or mythology
concerning those men and events, I can rejoice that the United States was the
first non-Sacralist political entity formed in the West since the time of
Constantine.
It was a complete rejection of a tradition which spanned
from the time of the Caesars through Charlemagne and continued with both the
Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Contrary to the dreams of some
myth-makers, the North American state founded in the late 18th century
was a rejection of the political doctrines espoused by John Calvin and John
Knox.
[v] Perhaps
the Church needs to wrestle with the whole question of marriage and its
relationship to the Civil Authority. Some Christians have done this, but it has
resulted in divergent views.
PART 3
PART 3