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.
As such, those entwined with the state and wielding its power
are lost and in need of the gospel. Theonomy brings them law and thinks that by
Christians imposing laws (not meant for them) at the point of the sword, the
feigned and hypocritical obedience that results somehow pleases God and will
lead to their conversion. 'Better be hypocrites than profane' as one New
England Puritan was wont to say. Unfortunately that does resonate with New
Testament teaching.
And the collapse of so-called 'Christendom' tells otherwise
and the Scriptures don't support that paradigm either. In fact the real lesson
is that such efforts in fact backfire and lead to backlash and in the long term
harm the cause of the gospel. Christendom was revealed to be just another
bestial Tower of Babel with a cheap cross on top. In the end it was a
counterfeit, a pseudo-Zion and that's all those efforts will ever be able to
produce.
And this is what Theonomy labours once more to produce and
implement. What a tragedy. What a misreading of Scripture.
The discussion further goes off the rails when the Theonomist
speaks of unconverted Covenant children therefore not being obligated to obey
their parents because – why? Because they're not in the covenant? But they are,
as your own words affirm. They are
Covenant children. We have a category error here, mixing absolutised
assumptions regarding election and restricting Covenant to simply a means or
form at work in time and space. To speak of someone being in the covenant and
yet unconverted is an oxymoron. It reminds me of Scott Clark stating
emphatically that just because someone is in the covenant doesn't mean they're
a Christian. I know what he means of course, but if you can't see that the
Scripture uses covenant in a broader sense than this – both in terms of those
who are elect, and in terms of those who are part of the Body of Christ, His
Church, and thus reckoned among the saved – then you're guilty of restricting
these terms and using them in a narrow way that the Scriptures do not. Your
theological system and method have overtaken revelation and subordinated it.
Further if someone is in the covenant they can be spoken of
as elect. DiGiacomo's rationalism forces these concepts into tight scholastic
boxes and they cannot accommodate the dynamics of Scripture and its varied
contexts which allow for a more fluid use and interaction of these terms, and
as such he falls into what must be called exegetical equivocation. So much for
the 'philosophical' theologian. The rigid grid he wishes to impose on Scripture
leads to not just muddled thinking, but a re-tooling of Biblical language in
order to attain coherence – as defined by his philosophical presuppositions. Our
theology should correspond to Scripture as it has been revealed, even if a philosophical
theologian would end up accusing Paul or the other apostles of equivocation. What
he has is a paper castle because when his theology interacts with the text it
ends up in contradiction and so the text is subordinated.
The quest for coherence and the construction of a theological
unified theory (as it were) seems in every case to require redefining Biblical
terminology and employing hermeneutical gymnastics in order to avoid
equivocation. By what standard? Paul was not equivocating, but coherence was
clearly not his goal either and as such his language is contextual and targeted
and able to operate on different levels. Once again the core problem here is
one of theological prolegomena and the no doubt well-intentioned attempt to
impose a grid on the holy text. But perhaps the reader can see how these
missteps can combine with a set of larger issues – such as the
redemptive-historical structure of Scripture. When combined, we can end up with
not only off-the-wall statements that defy Scriptural language, but in some
cases a gross misapplication and misuse of large sections of Scripture.
Statements like unconverted
covenant children tell me that whether he affirms paedobaptism or not,
whether he affirms some form of the Free Offer or not – in reality the end
result of this theological trajectory is both Baptistic and Hyper-Calvinistic,
a road all too commonly trod I'm afraid.
I have partaken of quite a bit of Irons' material over the
years and corresponded with him for a season (about twenty-five years ago).
Kuyperian Two-Kingdom Theology of the type proffered at Westminster California
is neither radical nor antinomian. It is not to be equated with the Two Kingdom
paradigm found in sections of the First Reformation or among the later Anabaptists.
Such false association isn't helpful and the views of Westminster California
being more akin to Lutheran theology and eschatology on these points is also in
many respects an outworking of the 1789 Westminster revision and its
implications. It may or may not be correct – but that's hardly radical. He's
misrepresenting Irons and I think he knows it.
The future culpability argument is interesting, maybe clever,
but it's not one made in the Scripture and the Parable of the Talents is
misappropriated as is often the case. It's one of the most abused and oft
inverted parables in the gospels.
Theonomists often play word games when it comes to questions
of coercion as is witnessed here. The coercion-aspect is removed from the
Church and relegated to those to whose sphere it pertains. As I've argued elsewhere
this is functionally the same kind of disingenuous argument used by the
Inquisition when it wanted to punish someone. Their hands were ostensibly free
from all violence and blood as they handed over the prisoner to the magistrate.
It was the magistrate's sphere (to use the modern parlance) to shed blood and
under the smokescreen of Vocation (as developed by the Magisterial Reformation),
the Christian can engage in all manner of behaviour that would not be
permissible as an individual – but may do so in the fulfillment of an office.
In other words the Magisterial Reformation's doctrine of Vocation means they
can be Sunday-only Christians that can act like violent and vengeful pagans the
rest of the week as long as they hide behind a title, uniform, badge, license, or
some other trinket or token of Babylon – or even the Christian Babylon the
Theonomist dreams of. The full horror of this doctrine was on a brutal display
during events such as the Thirty Years War.
The Westminster Larger Catechism which he utilises to make a
point is a piece of paper produced by flawed men in a flawed context. It has a
type of value but is not authoritative beyond the bureaucracies and bureaucrats
that have foolishly and sinfully sworn themselves to it. I refer here to the
institutional entity known as Presbyterianism to which the Theonomist has
allied himself.
His use of Exodus 20 is once again misguided as the servants and strangers fell under the auspices of the Covenant and the Theocratic order of which Moses (as a type of Christ) was the mediator. The covenant boundaries were a little different under that order as it encompassed a nation and Theocratic society that did not exhibit a monolithic demography. Also certain allowances were made that are eliminated in the New Testament. Unfortunately the Baptist community takes these realities, accommodations, and even loose ends and over-emphasizes them to the point of reading them back into the essence of the Old Covenant arrangement – children included. This effectively removes children from the promise in the New Testament (treating them as outside) despite the fact that they are clearly members of the New Covenant and included in its language and exhortations. They're looking for a conversion experience which is what would be expected of a pagan coming to the faith. Presbyterians do much the same. They acknowledge the New Covenant includes children but then define down and dilute the definition of a covenant in such a way that they can speak of unconverted covenant children – a statement that has no meaning.