When Everything Starts to Converge on the Point

Introduction

I would like to thank Michael Riley for his respectful discussion of the relationship of Van Til’s apologetic approach, on the one hand, and Christian nationalism on the other. His article can be found here. As a fellow Van Tilian—albeit not a purist Van Tilian, and somewhat smudgy on natural law—I agreed with pretty much everything Riley said until right near the end of his article. But he has laid things out in such a way as that I believe we can discuss the difference here with some profit. Let’s give it a go, shall we?

After I set this up, I will get to my interactions with Riley in the section below entitled The Arm of Theonomy.

The Folks in the Bleachers

But I need to set the context first. We have been doing our thing here in Moscow for some decades now. I just had the privilege of describing that work and ministry for The American Conservative, which description can be found here.

For many years, we were cultivating our own distinctive emphases here on the ground, but we were largely frozen out of some of the larger national doings. We were not allowed, for example, to have a booth at the big Reformed evangelical festival. Our name for all of this was “the embargo.” This embargo was pretty effective, at least initially, but it had some pretty deep benefits for us. One was that it allowed us to consolidate what we were all about, and we were able to get our footings pretty deep. Another benefit was that the embargo was maintained in large part by various charges (e.g. allegations that we had mishandled some sex abuse cases, and other related stuff). These accusations and charges were regularly circulated online, such that lots of people now think we are icky, but it truly had a profound benefit. When people started to move here decades ago, they had to wade through a bunch of gunk to do it, and this meant that when they arrived, they already had a pretty robust immune system from day one. And over the years, there were regular arrivals coming in this fashion, but life was still pretty calm.

But then the last three years happened, and a lot of the Reformed establishment big boys folded like a card table you once bought at a yard sale for 75 cents.

And what this meant is that some of our distinctives that used to appear somewhat offbeat were now . . . powerfully attractive. Let me single out the three that are currently being critiqued by some of our conservative Baptist brethren. I would suggest that these critiques are being raised now because in a world gone mad, these three positions, once considered beyond weird and scary, are now mighty appealing. Clown world made them so. The three positions are: postmillennialism, theonomy, and the serrated edge.

The postmillennialism means that we believe ourselves to be in a battle that we are going to win. The theonomy means that we have a standard that does not shift or slide, and is not dependent upon the whims of man. The serrated edge means that we are more interested in being biblical than we are in being fastidious, Victorian, or polite.

Victory Actually Is An Option

Back within living memory, pretty much the only postmillennialist in print was Lorraine Boettner, and things were pretty lonesome for people like him. But since the eighties, a vast library of postmill resources has been assembled, and it will simply no longer do to just throw out stock premill responses, and of a cursory nature. You could do that when one guy read enough Boettner to ask a question about it, but nobody else had, and so a superficial answer sufficed. That will no longer cut it.

The postmill vision is not a weird thing dragged out of a “quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” This is not some heterodox thing out on the perimeter—we are talking about the view held by Edwards and Livingstone, Warfield, Hodge, and Owen, and the Savoy Declaration. It has been recovered in our time, but was certainly not invented in our time. And it is not a matter of a text here and there. This represents a systematic worldview, and it extends from Genesis to Revelation, from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, and from the river to the ends of the earth.

True engagement is required, and going back to my point about the folks in the bleachers, if there is not true engagement and serious debate, then what we are drinking will look more and more attractive to them. You may dismiss it as circus water, but it is actually the unmixed wine of the covenant.

But at the same time, it is also important to note that we in the postmill camp do not believe that we are in an adversarial relationship with our premill baptistic brethren. We are standing on different parts of the walls of old Jerusalem, watching Rabshakeh ride around the city, demanding that all of us surrender. When he gets to the G3 part of the wall, he taunts them, and says they must lay down their arms. They reply, stoutly and bravely, that they “have conferred with the committee, and having spent some time in a season of incessant prayer, our reply is, with all due respect, a flat no.” This is healthy, wise and good. We are all for it. But when Rabshakeh gets to our part of the wall, somebody yells, “We don’t think so, Scooter!” There are some stylistic differences, to be sure.

So when the “defections” of Jared Longshore and Joe Rigney are mentioned, we want to note that we don’t see them as defections at all. They have simply moved from one part of the defenses to another part, from one part of the wall to another. But the more they are treated as mere defections, and somehow not worthy of discussion, debate, or brotherly engagement, the more you are going to see people drawn to these convictions. We really do live in a time of chaos, and what we are teaching offers answers, and alternatives, and a strategy, and a bracing dose of confidence. And psalms. Don’t leave out the psalms. “God shall arise and by His might/put all His enemies to flight . . .”

The Arm of Theonomy

Before getting to Riley’s point, which I will eventually do, I need to make another side observation. Taking one thing with another, many Baptists who are aware of their history with Christian states are pretty hyper about what a Christian prince might do to them. And I don’t mind them having objections to what some zealot of Anglican bishop, time-traveling from the 17th century, might do. I dare say it would be objectionable, and I would object right alongside the Baptists. What I don’t understand is how many Baptists can have such a rigid paradigm about this that they absolutely refuse to let me agree with them. I sometimes feel like Jordan Peterson starting at that lady reporter who was saying, “So what you are saying . . .”

But think this through, people. If we did get to a point where we had a Christian state that was persecuting fellow Christians, would this be happening because the state was obeying Christ? Or disobeying Christ? If the latter is what they are doing, and it would be, then it is hardly to the point for the Baptists to protect themselves by arguing that we must not require the state to obey the law of Christ. Let me get this straight. You think that such persecutions would be disobedience, and you are going to fix this by never, ever requiring obedience?

And now, finally, to my engagement with Riley’s point. He says that he agrees with me on the standard, but differs with me on the means.

And in a heartening move, the footnote to that statement said this:

But even with the correction, as heartening as it is, this is the place where I believe that we are still not communicating clearly. I do not believe that government is the means by which this standard is established. Politics is no savior. To say that politics is included among those things which need to be saved is not to maintain that politics is the entity doing the saving. There is a radical difference between Savior and savee.

The establishment of the standard will come to include the government at some point, obviously, but the government is NOT the means by which this will happen.

How will it happen? Preaching the gospel. Church planting. Bible studies. Reformation and revival in the churches. And if all this were to happen, on the scale that it needs to happen, it will come to have an impact on the government—as it has done numerous times in the past.

This is the fruit of the Great Commission being pursued by hot gospel preachers. This will happen, but it will not happen by the law.

So the law has no power to save. But can the law be saved, and abandon its pretended prerogative of chopping up babies? The answer to that is yes.

While we are here, a common objection is that the Great Commission does not target the modern nation/state. “The direct object there is ethnoi, all the tribes, all the people groups. Not modern governments.” This is like saying that Christ commanded us to disciple all the eggs, but said nothing about omelets. If we were to obey Him, and we discipled all the people groups of the world, such that the earth was as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, what would happen to our modern nation/states? Some of them would disappear, and good riddance, and the rest of them would bring their honor and glory into the New Jerusalem.

Seasoned with Salt

Scripture requires us to have our speech be gracious, seasoned with salt” (Col. ). Sometimes our critics will admonish us with this passage, saying that our speech should be gracious. See? And we reply, “Yes, seasoned with salt.”

And, given the times in which we live, there are occasions when our speech should be gracious, seasoned with jalapenos. There may even be a time or two when it should be gracious, seasoned with a Carolina Reaper.

We have published plenty of defenses regarding the satiric bite, and I refer you to them. Type satiric bite in the search bar. The central question is whether such language is biblical. The sociological point I am making here is that many of our more staid brethren have no idea how this kind of boisterousness has turned into a feature instead of a bug. But it has, and that means that a genuine level of engagement with the arguments is required. You can no longer just say that your great-grandmother never talked this way.

Jesu, Defend

Battle lines are plainly drawn, but a martial spirit is upon us. Helm’s Deep was no picnic either. And because we intend to throw ourselves into the breach with a song, it does appear to some as though we have lost our minds—as though we wanted to put on a Broadway production of Ragnarok: The Musical. But no, it is nothing at all like that.

This not the end of the world, but it is the end of an era. And this is how God closes out the books of each era; this is His signature move. Our task is to be faithful, to stay at our post, and to do so while singing.

Herbert Schlossberg put it wonderfully. “The Bible can be interpreted as a string of God’s triumphs disguised as disasters” (Idols for Destruction, p. 304).

These are the truths that enable a man to stand fast. As Richard Sibbes once put it: “That a man should be as a rock in the midst of the storm, to stand immoveable, is a mystery.”