John Piper’s Saturday Night Special

In my response to John Piper’s post on guns, I alluded to some of the paradigmatic issues underlying the differences we have concerning what we should do with our guns — whether we should have them in the first place, and what direction we get to point them. One of the paradigmatic differences I mentioned was the alternative ways of interpreting the Old Testament now that Christ has come — but this is just part of a larger picture.

Now when you get to the end of all the discussion, you have a very practical situation on your hands. So there is an intruder threatening your family, and you have to decide what you are willing to do in order to defend them.

So in order to make this decision in a coherent way, we do need to go upstream a ways, farther upstream than the relationship of the Old Testament to the New, although that is also included. What we are actually debating is the relationship between the Christian as saint and the Christian as citizen. This cannot be discussed without also discussing the relationship of church and state, which in our day immediately brings up the issue of “the two kingdoms.”

Let’s start with what Wikipedia calls disambiguation. The separation of church and state — a fine and noble endeavor — is a separation of two governments in the world. Civil government is one thing and church government is another.

The separation is actually supposed to be a financial one, meaning that tithe money should not be collected by the civil magistrate in order to be dispensed to established churches with nitwit bishops. It should also mean, if we had our thoughts gathered about us, that ministers of the gospel ought not be allowed to hold civil office unless they first dimitted their office as ministers. Separation of church and state, historically understood, is a separation-of-powers doctrine, and not a let’s-exile-the-church doctrine.

Now this is something you can only do when both the civil government and church governments are explicitly Christian. When the magistrate and the minister hold their several offices distinctly, but they are both doing so under the authority and by the leave of Jesus Christ, it is possible for them to be separated in this way. Good fences make good neighbors. Because they both know that Jesus reigns, and they both know they are under His Word, they can speak sense to one another. They can each respect their respective job descriptions because they are both in submission to the one who writes all the job descriptions.

Incidentally, as we sort through all this, keep in mind that the family is to be the ministry of health, education and welfare, the church is the ministry of grace and peace, and the civil government is the ministry of justice. Not social justice, mind you. Plain old justice. The task of the civil magistrate, and I am almost tempted to say the sole task, is to make it possible for us to walk across town safely at two in the morning.

When you have this state of affairs — Christian families, Christian churches, and Christian magistrates — it becomes possible for a coherent two kingdoms theology to develop. A right understanding of the two kingdoms is essential if we want to get back to our reformational roots. This means that if we were in St. Louis we would have to head due east toward Geneva. This is 180 degrees away from Escondido, as in what geographers call “the opposite direction.” The Escondido version of two kingdoms theology is not really reformational at all, and is therefore about as fully loaded as John Piper’s Saturday night special.

The two kingdoms does not refer to the division between church and state — and still less a division between church and a secular state. As understood in classic Reformation categories, one kingdom is visible all across the waterfront. The visible kingdom includes the photographable parson, the tangible and pious dairy farmer, and the three-dimensional sheriff. The invisible kingdom includes the interior lives of all three of these gents, not to mention the interior lives of all the other saints all over the place.

That’s it. Inside everywhere is one kingdom and outside everywhere is the other. Not church over here and secular state over there.

Now I hope you can see that there has been no end to our plaguey confusions because we have been perversely taught to cut this thing crosswise instead of lengthwise. When we cut it crosswise, we wind up with two pieces, with half of us thinking that Jesus owns both pieces and the other half thinking that the devil still owns one of them. When we cut it lengthwise, we find that such confusions do not come quite so readily.

When we have a small isolated church and a pagan and unbelieving world all around, like Corinth in the first century, we do not yet have the material for a fully-functional two kingdoms operation. What we have in the church is a starter kit, a box full of yeast, and what you have in the pagan society is what Paul would call something like a “great door for effective work” (1 Cor. 16:9). Our task is not to accommodate ourselves to “two kingdoms,” as though God had signed some kind of truce deal with the devil. Rather our task is to build two kingdoms. We do this by evangelizing the world. That evangelized world will have a visible aspect and an interior, invisible aspect.

When a Christian church is first planted in an unbelieving society, we have created the possibility of two kingdoms, but we have not gotten to Christendom yet. So we do not have (a full-orbed) two kingdoms, but what do we have? More importantly, what do we have in the meantime when we have the Christian world over here and the secular unbelieving world over there? What do we have right now in North America?

Before we answer that question, we need to go through another round of disambiguation. The separation of church and state is not the same thing as separating morality and state. If I may press the point, it is not the same thing at ALL. Nor is it the same thing as separating God and state. Before the nations submit to baptism and instruction in everything Jesus taught, they are still under natural law. They are still under the authority of the God who made the world. God must always be obeyed, and He must be obeyed in everything He has said, and in any venue in which He has said it.

So this brings us to another set of distinctions — special revelation and natural revelation. But before getting into that, I have to clear up another misconception. I used the phrase natural law a few moments ago, and this would appear to bring me into conflict with Gary North’s critique of John Piper. But it is not that simple.

Think of it this way. Many American conservatives with a theocratic bent, such as myself, think that the Constitution should have had an express mention of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. But that by itself won’t fix anything. The United Kingdom is every bit as secular as we are, and then some, and they do have express references to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. All it means is that their secular ruling elites are forced to tell different lies than ours do. When it comes to disobedience, remember that you can always get there from wherever you are. Whatever your starting point, someone will always come along who is willing to tell you pleasant lies.

Gary North took the worldview of Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Piper to task, and faulted them for being willing to divide up the world into rival authority districts by assuming human autonomy, and in such a way as to enable them to become humanism’s chaplains. But many of the heirs of the reconstructionists have done no better. They have maintained the pure biblicism of Van Til, and have rejected natural law in such a way as to cede the world to the devil. Whatever your commitments, however noble they started, when the fatal temptation settles, there will always be a route that enables you to retreat to commitment.

Contemporary Reformed Christianity does not want to allow the special revelation of Scripture to be allowed to speak to the unbelieving world. This is their compromise, and North is correct about them. But the exclusion of natural law results in the same temptations toward compromise, but simply enticing a different group of folks, using different bait.

Our Reformed elites don’t want to fight about same sex mirage, for example, because they don’t want Leviticus to apply to the public square. The erstwhile recons don’t want to fight about it because biblical law is our only standard, down here inside our ecclesiastical cubby. Outside is anarchy, so they can do what they want. The difference between the two groups can be summed up in this way — one wants to keep Jesus out of it and the other wants to get Jesus out of it.

But in the world God made, in the world God governs, in the world into which God revealed His Word, things are different. The same God speaks in various ways. He created the world and embedded His character deeply within it. That same God spoke through the holy prophets and apostles. He expects His people to fellowship with Him everywhere they find Him, and they are instructed to find Him everywhere.

So God made the world, and that world reveals His character. God inspired the Old Testament, and the Old Testament reveals His character. God inspired the New Testament, and the New Testament reveals His character. God was present with us in Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ reveals His character. Combine all this with the realization that God’s character does not change, and the need for thoughtful harmonization becomes evident.

In this case, harmonization is easy. Nature teaches us the right to self-defense. The Old Testament assumes the right to self-defense (Ex. 22:3). The New Testament teaches the right to self-defense (2 Cor. 11:32). Jesus Himself teaches the right to self-defense (Luke 22:35-38). The Washington Post denies it, but keep in mind the fact that The Washington Post also denies that God made the world, that God inspired the Old Testament, that God inspired the New Testament, and that Jesus was the Messiah of God.

So with all this said, the sad thing is that we are all still in the Garden. The primeval sin began with our father Adam refusing to protect his wife from an assailant. He refused to do what the Lord Jesus did not refuse to do, which was to crush the serpent’s head. If we take all of God’s revelation together, we should understand that our duty is always to protect the bride. That is constant because God’s character never changes. The central duty is not to evangelize the serpent, the duty is to protect the bride. That is the center.

Now it is quite true that some might assume the right duty with the wrong attitude, not knowing what spirit they are of. A man might seek to protect his wife because of bluster, or bravado, or bloodlust. But this is no reason for others to refrain from doing it, just because the motives can be wrong. The thing to do is to correct the motives. After all, a man who refuses to protect his wife might have ulterior motives as well. He might have what he thinks are high sentiments about the Sermon on the Mount in his mouth and low cowardice in his heart. People doing the right thing in the wrong way can never be an argument against doing the right thing in the right way. Our task is to study the Bible to find out what the right thing is, and then to do our level best to do it while guarding our hearts.

A man’s duty is always to protect his bride. Of course, if he is steeped in reading how God tells His stories, there will be times when he will be able to break a bone with a word (Prov. 25:15). Other times he may accomplish it through deception (Gen. 12:13). In that ancient world, the brother of a beautiful woman had leverage, while the husband of a beautiful woman had none. Yet other times a godly man will protect his wife through main battle (Neh. 4:14). There are different ways to do it, but assuming the responsibility to attempt it is what it means to be a husband. Jesus did it by dying, and sometimes He has faithful servants who do it by killing. But all true husbands do it.

He is not always promised success. Outcomes are always with God, but that does not change the fact that duties are always with us. So when an overwhelming force comes against a man and his wife, that man’s responsibility is to put whatever strength he has in between that threat and his wife.

King Edmund put it this way with regard to his sister:

“As to that, I do not doubt that every one of us would sell our lives dearly in the gate and they would not come at the Queen but over our dead bodies” (The Horse and His Boy, p. 70).

As Lewis points out elsewhere in several of his essays, ungodly violence really is an ongoing spiritual affliction. He also notes that there are two basic ways that the Church has attempted to deal with the problem of violence — those two ways being pacifism and chivalry. Lewis grants that chivalry has not been entirely successful in ameliorating the violence, acknowledging that there have been lamentable failures. But he also points out that with regard to the intended goals chivalry far surpassed its sister solution. He observed that pacifism should not be considered as a nurse for all the typhoid patients, but as more of a carrier . . . like Typhoid Mary.

So chivalry for my money. But this brings us full circle. Chivalry comes tucked away at the bottom of a package, and that package is called Christendom. We cannot have chivalry without Jesus Christ, without the prophets and apostles, without the severe and abrupt reminders brought to us by mother nature, without tradition and Christian history, without the historicity of Genesis, and without the reality of the final judgment before the Great White Throne.

And apart from chivalry, we will have nothing but endless violence. That violence will not just be endless — the added secularist bonus is that it will also be pointless.