Calling for a Return to the Doctrinal Ideals and Kingdom Ethics of the First Reformation
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While there are certainly some advantages to understanding
the context of the Ancient Near East and while this knowledge can sometimes
elucidate certain episodes in Scripture, Bailey provides a sterling and
noteworthy example of how this should not be done.
Through the efforts of my son I was able to read Peter Brock's The Political and Social Doctrines of the Unity of Czech Brethren in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries (The Hague, Mouton & Co., 1957).
Copies can be found but it's a somewhat rare
and expensive book. This is one of Brock's early works and probably not his
best known. Recognized as an authority on pacifism, he specialised by focusing
on many of the groups in Eastern Europe such as the Unity of the Brethren or
Unitas Fratrum.
In light of these struggles and the fact that money is not the goal – but to honour God and hopefully (if possible) find something you enjoy doing, we have wrestled with whether to encourage our children in terms of college and career, or simply to wait and let them live awhile, gain life experience, save some money, and so forth. For the most part I think we've opted for the latter.
This question of daughters seems especially difficult in today's context, all the more when you make something of a stand and yet no one else is doing so in your local congregation. In fact, not only will your daughters grow frustrated by all the 'exciting' things the other young women are doing, the other parents are likely to start raising eyebrows at you when your daughters (and perhaps your sons) aren't attending college and moving out. Once again, these assumptions are more about status and middle class respectability than anything else. For them, it's embarrassing to have kids not going to college – there's almost an unspoken assumption that you've failed and they're too undisciplined, dumb, or otherwise incapable of getting through a university programme.
As my children are all now in early adulthood and yet living at home, we have been forced to wrestle with some of the assumptions in the culture about kids leaving. These questions are coming from both within and without the Church.
The New Testament teaches that the Mosaic order has been disannulled – hence the harsh words in the epistles of Galatians and Hebrews, the errors of these groups being close cousin to what contemporary Theonomy advocates. Exodus 20 cannot be appealed to in the way DiGiacomo would use it. There is no Theocratic order in the New Testament apart from the Church, the earthly manifestation of Christ's Kingdom which is not located on Earth in terms of a political, cultural, or geographic order, but in Heaven itself. Exodus 20 is Scripture, but fulfilled Scripture and must be read through the Christocentric lens of the New Testament. To do otherwise is to invert the Scriptures and read them unfaithfully in a Judaized manner.
The various Babylons of the world will to greater or lesser degrees build law codes and ethical systems and they will all be flawed and tainted by idolatry. They will contain grains of truth – some more and some less. This all brings judgment on them. Evil laws condone sin and thus condemn them. Good laws which reflect something of the will and character of God condemn them too in the fashion of Romans 1. They are without excuse. This does not make their society better or help the believer and if anything such legislation can sow seeds of confusion and represent a danger as believers might be tempted to think such a state to be godly, when in fact it cannot be. This is a point Paul emphasizes when he contrasts Christian conduct and imperatives with the Providentially ordered and temporal nature of the state and the sword it bears (Romans 12-13). In terms of Providence, the state rewards 'good' in a highly generalized sense, just as it is a minister or servant in the same way Babylon, Assyria, and other Beastly powers were servants or ministers under the old epoch. This does not mean the state has a positive role in terms of enforcing God's law and the dichotomy established by Paul suggests that Christians should have no part in this. The good of the state is clearly something very different from the kind of 'good' a Christian would define by means of the eschatological ethics of Romans 12.
The Theonomist in question argues that Irons holds to an
esoteric position on the Sabbath that has no confessional status or Biblical
precedent. This begs the question as to whether or not confessional status has
any bearing or authority for those concerned with following the teaching of the
New Testament. And in terms of Biblical precedent, he's simply mistaken.