Protestantism continues to pursue the transformation of the world and yet continues to be transformed by it. The overwhelming support for someone like Donald Trump simply testifies to this. The fact that many will respond by saying that such sentiments indicate a political liberal or Clinton supporter only further the point demonstrating just how trapped many Christians are by the world and its paradigms.
The Third Way which wholly rejects Rome and largely rejects
the Magisterial Reformation and which finds some resonance with historic
proto-Protestantism represents a key difference, a way of re-framing these
questions. Sadly as much as the Magisterial Reformation might have helped the
cause of the Gospel it at the same time sowed some terrible seeds which have
and continue to produce a rotten harvest.
But as mentioned previously despite the efforts of those who
would eliminate it, the Nature-Grace duality endured even into the twentieth
century. In fact it was buttressed by the rise of Theological Liberalism and
the blatant decline of Western Civilisation. In the century or so before WWII
there were some very encouraging signs and a real hope of recapturing something
of the Non-Sacralist and Separatist spirit once possessed by segments of
British Nonconformity and certainly some of the better pre-Reformation
movements. The illusion and lie of Christendom was becoming difficult to
sustain but new threats emerged which would sweep up even the most recalcitrant
separatists into the warp and woof of politicised Christianity.
The world wars shattered the perception of a Christian
culture and even while Western Civilisation continued to fragment and
Christendom (so-called) continued to crumble and decompose, through the efforts
of some very determined (and generously financed) teachers the twentieth
century gave birth to a new and more robust form of Sacralism in the form of
Dominion Theology. A collaboration with Right-wing politics and a more or less
ecumenical coalescence of theologies were posited in order to combat the threat
of Communism and within a few decades this new movement all but swept away the
faithful testimony and the good (if sometimes misguided) impulses that
dominated anti-modernist Fundamentalism and its separatist mindset. Similar
testimonies found in groups ranging from the Stone-Campbell Churches of Christ
to the Plymouth Brethren were similarly waylaid and all but disappeared... and
today are mostly forgotten.
By the 1940's the new Evangelicalism had arrived and over the
next several decades the separatist and pilgrim-dissident mindset would be all
but eradicated and actually relegated to the status of heresy.
Transformationalism as one Reformed teacher put it became the new orthodoxy.
This movement while often accused by the secular world of being anti-modern in
its approaches to science is in reality supremely humanistic in terms of its
understanding of man vis-à-vis the creation and certainly in terms of
nature-grace dualism. The New Dominionist Evangelicalism effectively rejects
all duality and all tensions and has sought to sacralise the world through its
monistic epistemology and quest for a unified metaphysical coherence. This
monism has at times even strayed far beyond the boundaries of New Testament
cosmology – touching on the fringes at what must be described as a form of
pantheism, or something close to it.
The transcendent even otherworldly mindset of the New
Testament and an attitude which relegates this age to futility and refers to
the body as a tent to be disposed of is now wholly foreign to a generation of
Protestants which profess to hold Scripture Alone as their authoritative
standard. And though beyond the scope of this piece let us speak plainly and
recognize that it is this doctrine of Sola Scriptura which has been subverted
and it is at this point that the real problem is identified. Scripture is no
longer the primary let alone the sole authority for Confessionalist Protestants
and Evangelicals and this reality has opened the door for alternative
epistemologies and a complex of doctrines which in the end have brought us to
this point... wherein another gospel has become the gospel to be defended, wherein
Christ's Kingdom has been supplanted by a counterfeit, a Babel-Tower crowned
with a cross of gold.
Under this way of thinking, everything becomes the Kingdom,
the world is made into the Holy Realm. Life becomes a sacrament. What a
transformation! The baker, banker, soldier and sculptor are engaged in holy
world-redeeming Kingdom work. Perfecting the recipe and oven cycle become
equated with worship. Learning the latest way to streamline the process and
maximise profit becomes an act of devotion equal to providing for the orphan
and widow. The soldier who kills in a 'just' cause preaches a gospel just as
important as the preacher teaching through the Sermon on the Mount. And the
sculptor in bringing about high culture and promoting aesthetics is engaged in
labours equally as important as the missionary or one who would lead a Bible
study.
This is folly and not just the error of the fool but a great
danger to the Church. In never ceases to amaze this author how in Evangelical
and even some Confessional congregations the actual sacraments of the New
Testament are downplayed but increasingly the world itself and one's work and
the 'stewardship' of one's goods are treated in a true sacramental and
devotional manner. And yet given the trajectory of this new Dominionist
orthodoxy it's not too hard to understand.
Even for those in Reformed circles who would cast a wary eye
on the Natural Theology project, they at the same time effectively reintroduce
it through the Worldview paradigm. I am not only speaking of those who would
identify as advocates of Reformed Two Kingdom theology, which is really just a
variant of the Lutheran variety, neither of which accurately represent a true
Two Kingdom view. They are certainly included but I would also point to those
who reject it and are also openly disdainful of attempts to generate a coherent
Natural Theology.
Though these would be adherents of Sola Scriptura would
prioritise faith as necessary to seek understanding as opposed to the Thomistic
elevation of the natural capacity to reason toward sound metaphysics, the
Kuyperian-Schaefferian tradition ends up at the same place. Christian worldview
is formed (we're told) by synthesizing the world's knowledge with principles
(both deduced and inferred) from God's Word. The result is a holistic system,
an intellectual paradigm which seeks to create a comprehensive philosophy. This
resulting philosophy or worldview is then set alongside the Scriptures and at
least practically (if not in idealistic actuality) becomes its equal, and increasingly
(I would argue) becomes its master. The Kingdom (largely equated with Western
Civilisation) is built on a Word given in the Scriptures along with the academy, philosophy, the laboratory, historical
development and even the market. These are forged into a comprehensive and
coherent civilisational model which dominates every aspect of life.
This resulting monism which transforms Christianity into a
grand philosophy and seeks to transform and sacralise or sacramentalise all of
creation strays into the fringes and frontiers of pantheism and threatens to
undo the very Creator-Creature distinction so dear and central to the followers
of Cornelius Van Til. Aware of the danger some have attempted to arrest the
trajectory and yet the practical bifurcation and resulting conflict will result
in a victory for one side or the other. Given that the current trajectory
within Evangelical and Confessional thought is toward the elimination of all
duality, it is unlikely that the necessary state of permanent tension will
remain.
This war on Biblical duality, which is central to so many
doctrines and aspects of the Christian life, will eventually play out in the
realms of Christology, Trinitarianism, soteriology, the sacraments and
Eschatology. I would argue the transformation of these doctrines is already at work.
The Dominionist project on the one hand is but a recent iteration of the
titanic shift which occurred with the Constantine's favouring of Christianity
in the 4th century. Completely transformed over the next few
centuries one of the major themes of Church history has been the struggle
between ecclesiastical institutions and the cultural and political order. There
have been battles over ideas, wealth, corruption and raw power and yet the
basic assumptions regarding the Christianisation of culture and the rejection
of Biblical antithesis have been always assumed by the mainstream.
The unique cultural developments in the 19th
century and early 20th century put the 'Christendom' project into a
new a state of crisis. It has weathered many storms, the Magisterial
Reformation itself being one of the greatest challenges to the integrity of the
paradigm. But the Industrial Revolution, the rise of science, democracy and its
ethical assumptions, and the turmoil and tragedy generated by the world wars
placed the Christendom project in a state of existential crisis and impending
collapse. Dominion Theology while on the one hand is nothing particularly new.
It is part of the Constantinian-Theodosian heritage to be sure and yet given
the increasingly complex contemporary context it has reappeared in a
particularly robust and shall we say marketable form.
Since the Middle Ages and certainly since the consolidation
and centralisation of power which began to emerge during the 11th
century Gregorian Reform there have been Christians who have rejected this
paradigm and have viewed it as a threat to the authority of the Scriptures.
They may not have always been able to express this clearly and indeed in many
cases little is known apart from an adherence to the Scriptures accompanied by
an often categorical rejection of Roman Catholicism and the Papacy. The various
Constantinian entities, East, West, and Magisterial Protestant have waged war
on these nonconformists and dissident for centuries and yet the 20th
century has proven to be perhaps the most devastating of all. Assaulted from
every side, this witness has largely collapsed in the aftermath of the world
wars. From theological liberalism, to the perceived threat of communism the remnant-nonconformist
witness which adhered so vigorously to Sola Scriptura that the speculative and
world-accommodating system of Dominionism was rejected outright – has nearly
collapsed and what remains of it has become entrenched in the traps of legalism
and idiosyncratic knee-jerk points of dogma.
The Nature-Grace duality which understands the necessity of a
Christian break with the world has succumbed to quibbles about dress and sadly
in some cases has even succumbed to heretical views of new textual autographs
and some rather dubious 'science'... all in the name of combating the academy
and the threats posed by Evangelical worldliness and compromise. Their motives
are admirable but battered and forced into a corner they have allowed both the
world and the false church to define them. Indeed it is only in these circles
that there is a genuine adherence to an old and now largely forgotten concept,
that of the false church. Contrary to Dominionism which identifies the Church's
primary enemies as the 'outside' which in today's terms would be the ungodly
forces of humanistic secularism, the New Testament teaches that while the world
will always war against the Church, the real enemies and true threats are found
within, among the false teachers and prophets who would subvert and supplant
the Kingdom, replacing it with some variety of Hellenism or Judaism, with some
form of false gospel. The Remnant Churches, those who at one time adhered to a
sharp nature-grace distinction once understood this but in our day the concept
is (it would seem) hanging by a thread.
Both the Magisterial Protestant and Roman Catholic models of
Nature-Grace are wrong but sadly we must admit for all its deep flaws the Roman
model is actually a bit closer to the truth.
That's not a message many Evangelicals and Confessionalists
are going to hear. It will certainly be rejected by those within the Gospel
Coalition so called. For this concern strikes the very heart of what the Gospel
Coalition is and stands for. While proclaiming themselves to stand for the
'whole' Gospel of Scripture (and deceiving multitudes in the process), the
organisation in reality represents the forces of Dominionist
transformationalism, a distilled (and ever monistic and pantheistic) form of
the very Constantinianism which has always waged war against those who maintain
the distinct identity of the Church versus the world and of those who have
rested without compromise on the authority of God's Word.