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.
Passages such as Genesis 3 and Genesis 9, not to mention
significant portions of the New Testament testify to the desacralizing of work
and the social order. Man's work is under curse and no longer connected to the
garden-tending or Kingdom-building work of Eden. It is no longer holy but
common or profane. It is pursued by Christians in a Christian manner, but the
work itself and its results in this age are part of an order that is destined
to perish and burn.
Israel's calling, just like the New Testament Christian
calling is in reference to identity and union with Christ. Thanks to the sacral
impulses of post-Constantinian theology which would include Catholic
Integralism and Protestant Dominionism (of which Theonomy is an extreme), these
categories have all been muddled – leading to the sanctification of Babel and
both functional and actual apostasy.
The Mosaic Period was parenthetical and typological –
something Theonomy still fails to grasp. Our pilgrim status in the New
Testament echoes that of the ante-Mosaic period, that of the Patriarchs. The
theological method of Theonomy will not allow the New Testament to define,
exegete, and interpret the redemptive-history of the Old. Instead the Old more
often than not defines the New and overrides it – an error very much akin to
the Dispensationalism, which twentieth-century Theonomy was in many respects an
over-reaction to. Both camps are guilty of Judaizing and when combined with
philosophical-theological methodology and systematizing, the results are
disastrous to say the least.
Additionally and as already hinted at, it must be noted that
the Confessional rock upon which the Theonomist hopes to stand is revealed to
be little more than a pile of sand. The crisis of the eighteenth century and
the collapse of Christendom as heralded in the American colonies by the events
of 1776-1787, led to the modification of the Westminster Confession in 1789 –
another critical year in the dismantling of Western Christendom. The initial
stages of the French Revolution were foundationally connected to the American
rebellion which preceded it, a point that has been deliberately obscured and
forgotten by many. The context of France was however different and as such its
revolution permutated and fell into an extremism not seen in North America. But
at their root, these movements drank from the same philosophical waters and in
North America, this reality continues to plague and confuse the Church,
resulting in syncretism, divided allegiances, and ethical imperatives and
values nowhere found in Scripture and in fact antithetical to it.
Akin to the effect of the Fourteenth Amendment on the US
Constitution, the 1789 Westminster revision produced changes in the Confession
that would reverberate throughout the entirety of the document and shake the
very foundations upon which it was built. It generated contradictions beyond
those already extant and to this day some of the questions regarding the
universality and definitions of Divine Law, the role of the state, and the
dynamics between Church and state have not been resolved and in some cases
scarcely reckoned with. This certainly affects questions concerning
Westminster's flawed categories of Law, and its misidentification of the
Decalogue as the Eternal Moral Law. The Sabbath, and questions of the state and
society are part of these equations as even many Theonomists have recognized. Getting
up on Sunday morning and turning on the light switch causes someone to work and
as such the problems inherent to this question and its application in a
post-industrial context seem to be a little deeper than the Theonomist in
question seems to grasp. I refer him to Gary North's essay which is an appendix
at the end of Rushdoony's unfortunate and misnamed volume – The Institutes of
Biblical Law.
Confessional subscription is a Presbyterian concept, or
perhaps a legacy or outworking of the Magisterial Reformation and its
political-ecclesiastical struggles. It has nothing to do with the polity of the
New Testament. Functionally it is about control of bureaucracies and
institutions and many portions of the Confession are nebulous, made further
nebulous by revision, subject to debate, or in other cases functionally ignored
or downplayed. And given the way that its supplementary documents (which are
not subscribed to) are utilized and manipulated, employed, and ignored at the
convenience of those wielding political power in the schismatic denominational
framework, the call to subscription and the placing of the Confession in a hallowed
place of authority needs to be called out for what it is – political
manipulation and self-serving deceit.
Perhaps the greatest irony is found in the final point – the
charge of antinomianism. At this point another article is linked which I could
interact with but it's probably not worth bothering with apart from its great
ironies – as the author (contra Irons) stands by the authoritarianism of the
Bush administration, the very kind of heavy-handedness the Christian Right
condemns when their political opponents are in power. Irons has his problems to
be sure, and yet his largest is perhaps his inconsistency on the question of
Two Kingdoms. I wish he were 'radical' and at that point the question of
politics and its associated reasoning would take a very different turn and
result not in a drift toward the Left but in a rejection of the entire system
and its presuppositions. That said, his critic in the linked Triablogue piece
makes just as many problematic statements, non sequitirs, and false
assumptions. Irons like his critics fell into the political binary trap. Right
to oppose the wicked and hypocritical policies of Bush, the answer is not found
on the other side of the political aisle – though I can certainly sympathize
with what he was saying in the quoted sections, and find the Triablogger's
responses to carry little weight and in many cases can be dismissed out of
hand.
Another flaw with Irons is his Presbyterianism. Like it or
not, even with the 1789 revision to Westminster, the tradition is one of
political Christianity and its history as such is marked by a rejection of New
Testament doctrine, epistemology, and ethics. It is not the religion of the New
Testament.
Irons was hated by the Theonomists in his presbytery many
years ago and run out of the OPC. Many believe he was targeted in lieu of his
mentor Meredith Kline, one of the main antagonists of their movement. Kline
could not be reached by the presbytery in Southern California and so they went
after Irons his protégé, and ruined him.
Vengeance, mammonism, and the ethics of sword and coin
characterize their movement. They think they honour the Law of God as revealed in
the Old Testament. They do not. Frankly they don't even understand it. And when
it comes to the New Testament, it is Theonomy that reeks of antinomianism and
lawlessness. For in their politicised gospel and cheapened and synthetic view
of the Kingdom, many have combined the ethics of the Enlightenment with their
Judaizing – leading to epistemological and ethical chaos as they try to wed
American patriotic idealism and its concepts to their erroneous theology. Both
erroneous, they are nevertheless incompatible. And in most cases their schemes
for political advancement are not rooted in any kind of ethical principle apart
from the end justifies the means. That is their real law in the end and their
'theonomy' is just an attempt to sanctify mammonism, worldliness and a lust for
power and domination. This is well known by many and not much more needs to be
said on this point.
See also:
http://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2010/07/interacting-with-theonomistsdont-let.html