And so does rejection of a gay self-conception united to one who is united to Christ. We cannot be those who apply good and necessary consequence to our doctrine, yet refuse to apply it to our ethics. Even though in this life Christians still battle and experience temptations and sin, such sins do not define us anymore. Those things are who we were, not who we now are. What defines those of us who have been washed in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ is that we are in Christ.

This year, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America will once again be addressing issues pertaining to human sexuality in the church. This is because sexuality has become one of the primary points of conflict between the church and the culture of this age and, rather than being conformed to the world, the church of Christ must stand firm upon the truth of God’s word. One of the many questions facing the church today is whether or not a Christian may identify with a homosexual or transgender self-conception. More simply, can a Christian identify as a “gay Christian”? While there have been many excellent resources written on this topic, to my knowledge, none have interacted directly with the interpretative principle of “Good and Necessary Consequence.” When viewed through the lens of good and necessary consequence we will see that for a Christian to adopt a homosexual or transgender self-conception is an unbiblical contradiction in terms and must be rejected by those who view scripture as the only rule of our faith and practice. So, it is helpful to begin with understanding this principle.
Historically, Reformed Christians have adhered to and applied Scripture in accordance with a principle known as Good and Necessary Consequence. This is the approach to Scripture that teaches that we are to believe and obey not only those things that are explicitly stated, but also that which may be deduced or inferred from Scripture as a necessary implication. The Westminster Confession of Faith says, “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (WCF I.6, emphasis mine). Some doctrines and commandments are spelled out for us, while others are implied or systematically pieced together. For instance, there isn’t a single verse citation we could make to spell out the doctrine of the Trinity, and yet by good and necessary consequence we rightly deduce that there is one God who exists in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are the same in substance, equal in power and glory. This same principle that leads us to affirm the doctrine of the Trinity likewise has led Reformed churches throughout history to believe in and practice infant baptism, the regulative principle of worship, and Sunday as the Christian’s Sabbath. None of these doctrines are explicitly spelled out in the New Testament, yet we believe they are rightly deduced from Scripture by this principle of good and necessary consequence.
This principle can be demonstrated in numerous places in the New Testament, but the clearest example can be seen in Jesus’ dispute with the Sadducees found in each of the synoptic Gospels.[i] In Matthew 22:23-32 the Sadducees try to trap Jesus with a hypothetical scenario involving the obscure case law of levirate marriage, hoping to demonstrate that belief in the resurrection is ridiculous. Jesus’ response to their denial of the resurrection was to quote to them Exodus 3:6 where, when speaking to Moses at the burning bush, God introduces himself by declaring “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” With this single quotation, Jesus demonstrates that “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” and silences the Sadducees. Jesus proves that there is a resurrection by citing the fact that God introduced himself to Moses by saying “I am the God of Abraham,” and not “I was the God of Abraham.” His entire argument hinges on the conjugation of one verb in the present tense instead of the past tense, which is sufficient to demonstrate the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.
Significantly, the passage from which Jesus quotes, Exodus 3, isn’t explicitly about the resurrection – it’s the call of Moses to be Israel’s deliverer. The passage doesn’t even mention words like “resurrection,” “heaven,” “hell,” “soul,” or “eternity,” all terms we associate with the resurrection. And yet Jesus’ rebuke of the Sadducees is to say, “You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” This harsh rebuke demonstrates that this is not merely a principle for Jesus alone to use in interpreting Scripture, but one he expected them to have applied as well. No Christian has a right to object, “If you can’t show me the Bible verse that says it, then I’m not required to believe or obey it.” On the contrary, if a truth or commandment may be proven from Scripture by good and necessary consequence, then yes, you are required to believe and obey it.
As Reformed Christians, this is a principle that ought to be kept in mind as we consider the question of a Christian’s identity. At the 47th General Assembly of the PCA, the assembly voted to declare the Nashville Statement to be a biblically faithful declaration on human sexuality. And yet, there were many who objected. Particularly, one stated reason was opposition to Article 7’s denial which reads, “We deny that adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.”[ii] Put simply, the Nashville Statement says that it is unbiblical to identify oneself as a “gay Christian.” While this statement is not explicitly spelled out for us in any one verse, it does not need to be because it is rightly deduced from Scripture by good and necessary consequence.
One of the places we see this most clearly is 1 Corinthians 6:9-11. Paul writes, “Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, 10 nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God” (NASB). Notice the way Paul speaks of these Christians in verse 11. You were these things. Significantly, Paul does not merely say you used to practice these things. He goes beyond that and addresses their identity. It’s also significant that Paul says “you were” and not “you are.” In Greek the imperfect indicative ταῦτά τινες ἦτε makes the statement even more forceful, highlighting the radical change that has now taken place through union with Christ. The descriptions of verses 9 and 10 are who these Corinthian Christians were, not who they now are.  And this is a vital distinction. In Jesus’ own rebuke of the Sadducees this same kind of distinction was sufficient to demonstrate the resurrection of the dead and warrant the harsh rebuke that his opponents did not know the Scriptures. God is the God of Abraham. And who are Christians? You were adulterers, homosexuals, drunkards, and covetous, etc. And by good and necessary consequence the text teaches that this is not who a Christian now is. This is because to be washed by Jesus Christ cleanses us from more than just legal guilt. If you have been washed by Christ, you have a new identity.
This is why it is correct to say that adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception or identity is unbiblical. As Reformed Christians, we cannot be those who apply the principle of good and necessary consequence to our doctrines of God, worship, and the church, and yet fail to apply it to our ethics.
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[i] For a full treatment of good and necessary consequence, see By Good and Necessary Consequence by Ryan McGraw (Reformation Heritage Books).
[ii] You can access the full Nashville Statement here: https://cbmw.org/nashville-statement/

The City of Man and the City of God cannot be collapsed into one another without compromising the latter’s identity and mission. Coercing the world into the Christian faith contradicts its teaching regarding free will, while accommodating the City of God to secular beliefs risks undermining, if not vitiating, Christian doctrine.

In the second century, the Greek philosopher and anti-Christian Celsus warned: “If Christians refuse to perform the usual sacrifices and to honor those who preside over them, then they should not be allowed to be emancipated, marry, raise children, or fulfill any obligation in public life.”
For a good Roman citizen, such an opinion made sense: the preservation of the Pax Romana depended not only on the military’s might and citizen’s virtue, but the appeasement of the gods who protected and blessed the empire. By refusing to offer oblations to the pantheon, Christians threatened to throw the entire social order into chaos. “It only remains for them to go far away and leave no posterity behind. In this way such scum will be completely eradicated from the earth,” declared Celsus.
There are signs that some inhabitants of the formerly Christian West are beginning to think similarly. In 2013, British professor Richard Dawkins provocatively claimed that the kind of “religious indoctrination” impressed upon the young by their parents amounted to child abuse. Almost a decade later, such opinions are less unusual. Parents who shield their children from transgender ideology or critical race theory are censured as bigots whose parenting choices are harmful. In 2019, a presidential candidate endorsed financially punishing institutions who refuse to support same-sex marriage, while books that reject the dominant narrative on sex and gender are delisted and defamed. Those who refuse to bow to the twenty-first century gods of sexual and racial identitarianism must be rebuked, canceled, and banished to the margins.
French historian and philosopher Étienne Gilson (1884–1978, a member of the Académie française who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature) saw this crisis coming long ago. Apart from his impressive academic credentials, Gilson was also involved in the attempts to remake Europe in the wake of the devastation of the Second World War. He served as a member of the French delegation in creating the UNESCO Charter and took part in the 1948 Congress of United Europe in The Hague. A newly published translation of his The Metamorphoses of the City of God illuminates the origins, story, and timeless tensions between what St. Augustine termed the City of God and the City of Man.
The City of God and the City of Man
In response to Celsus and other ancient critics of Christianity, many early Christian writers argued that, while it was true that their refusal to participate in Roman religious rites represented a new civic reality, the Christian faith was a blessing rather than a threat to the empire’s survival. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian all made such arguments. “Caesar is more ours than yours, for our God has appointed him,” declared Tertullian, and Christians “do more than you (Romans) for his welfare.” Or, as Gilson writes: “The best thing that can happen to the Empire is that Christian teachings be faithfully observed.”
Much of the reason for this has to do with the nature of Christianity itself. Gilson explains:
The God of Christians requires them to do for love of him what they lack the strength to do for love of their country. Thus, amid the universal shipwreck of morality and civic virtue, divine authority intervenes to impose frugality, continence, friendship, justice, and harmony among citizens, so much so that anyone who professes Christian doctrine and observes its precepts will be found to do for the love of God everything that the mere interest of his fatherland would require that he do for it. . . . Have good Christians, and good citizens will be given to you in addition.
Counterintuitively, the transcendent quality of Christian belief and practice—which directs the worshipper to the eternal—serves as an unparalleled motivator for civic virtue.
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The secular vision of equality is fighting against the reality of God’s world. It will be forced to try and smash the family, because that’s the source of inequality and difference. So, as Christians, we have to take the family seriously, now more than ever…Jesus Christ is rebuilding a family, an organic, inter-connected, inter-dependent humanity, where all are welcome, all have a place, and where great glory and honour is to be found, not by merit, but by grace. This is a great opportunity for the church to showcase and invite people into a very different vision of humanity.

In 1516, the Dutch scholar Erasmus wrote a book called The Education of a Christian Prince. He wrote it for the Spanish Prince Charles, advising him about how to rule. It contains this line:
“it is not equality for everyone to have the same rewards, the same rights, the same status; indeed this often results in extreme inequality” p.72, Education of a Christian Prince. 
Erasmus’ vision of equality is very different to the vision offered us by secularism today, where statistics of inequality in education, income, and health automatically represent injustice. I think Erasmus’ vision is much closer to the Bible’s.
biblical equality
The Bible’s vision of “equality” is glorious. The doctrine of man taught in Genesis chapter 1 dignifies every human being (Gen 1:27). Many in the Ancient Near East believed that only kings and princes were the “image of God”. But God’s word democratises the concept – from the drunk in the gutter, the embryo in the womb, the enemy in combat, through to the rich and powerful (James 3:9). Jesus’ famous parable of the Good Samaritan taps into this same truth, as he instructs us that even my enemy is included in the list of neighbours I am to love (Luke 10:29ff).
Clearly, the true religion of Israel and the coming of Jesus Christ has unleashed powerful equalising forces into this world. Paul uses the concept of “fairness” to argue for redistributing goods within the Christian church (2 Cor 8:13-14). He argued masters are to treat their slaves “justly” and “fairly” (Col 4:1), profound concepts that still underlie ideas of a minimum wage and workers’ rights today. Jesus causes goods to flow between people in a very different way to both feudal and capitalist economies (Acts 4:32, 34).
secular equality
There’s no doubt that the secular vision of “equality” draws deeply from these Christian roots. After all, it’s not obvious that being committed to Darwinism and the “survival of the fittest” gives any real grounds for a vision of “equality”. You won’t find equality touted in ancient paganism. But secularism is offering us a distorted, somewhat grotesque, vision of the Bible’s equality. It’s an atomised, statistical version of humanity, as opposed to a corporate and organic vision.
unequal families
A key thing missing in this vision is family. Between individuals and society there is this mysterious thing called “family”. No two families are equal. Families have histories and exist through time. No two mothers or fathers are the same. They have different grandparents and different great grandparents. Their geography is different – growing up in the countryside is not an equal experience to growing up in a big city.  No two children born to those parents are the same. They have different physiology, and DNA, with the specific opportunities and disadvantages those particular bodies create. Childhood experiences differ between families – attitudes towards cooking and diet, health and hygiene are different. No amount of social engineering can erase that family history.
What’s more, families accumulate things over time, and they pass these things on to the next generation. This is called “inheritance”. It’s no surprise, therefore, to see a celebrity like Daniel Craig say “inheritance is distasteful”. In an interview, he’s stated that he doesn’t intend for his children to get his Bond millions. If we’re all inherently independent individuals, then why should one child stand to gain from what an adult has done? Families introduce inequality!
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Do we indwell a therapeutic culture? In one sense, unfortunately, yes: Rieff, Jones, and Trueman rightly lament the self-centered psychologizing of our society. In another sense, sadly, no: Nearly every aspect of our culture militates against true therapy. The pervasive noise of distractions hinders the gospel’s healing touch.

Talking about the gospel as therapeutic is dangerous. Not wrong, just dangerous. I used to think it was wrong, since Philip Rieff famously inveighed against the psychologizing of the self in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, his prophetic 1966 book. His critique fueled my suspicion of all things therapeutic.
Noted theologians have taken up Rieff’s mantle. Gregory Jones warns in Embodying Forgiveness (1995) that in our therapeutic culture, we are in danger of manipulating forgiveness by turning it into a self-help process: We are told to forgive others not for their sake but for ours, since it gives us psychological relief. The result, Jones rightly insists, is that we no longer “discern whether there are tragic misunderstandings or culpable wrongdoing and brokenness that need to be dealt with through practices of forgiveness and repentance.” Rather than work through the mess to make things right, we turn forgiveness into a tool for restoring our own inner peace.
More recently, Carl Trueman has turned to Rieff to trace the genealogy of contemporary culture. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020) follows Rieff’s claim that our therapeutic culture has two baleful effects. First, it treats the community as oppressive and therapy as a means to counter this. This leads to the second effect: It subverts the proper relationship between individual and society. Whereas the individual once learned to take his proper place within the broader community, the community now serves the psychological wellbeing of the individual.
Rieff, Jones, and Trueman all warn against a therapeutic culture’s dangers. In their august company, one might think twice before putting up a defense of a therapeutic culture.
Let me nonetheless give it a try. It’s not that I disagree with the famous troika. Their critique of contemporary culture is truthful, incisive, and indispensable. Still, a caveat is equally indispensable, for the gospel’s very aim is therapeutic.
The Greek verb therapeuein means “to heal” or “to cure.” The purpose of the gospel is arguably that we be healed. Metropolitan Hierotheos discusses theology as a therapeutic science and speaks in detail about how to heal the soul. His book Orthodox Psychotherapy: The Science of the Fathers argues that priests are in the therapy business: They “not only celebrate the Sacraments but they cure people. They have a sound knowledge of the path of healing from passions and they make it known to their spiritual children.”
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A major part of discipling others is displaying for them the worth and value of Jesus. Since the Gospel is at the heart of the Christian faith, you always return to it. You show how it is Jesus and Jesus alone who gives rest for people’s souls. And this rest was only made possible by His sacrifice.

Once Jesus was resurrected, He commanded His disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations.” But what does that discipleship look like? How does one go about obeying this command practically? How would the original apostles have gone about doing this? I think the answer is clear: Jesus had spent the past several years discipling the apostles, setting an example for how discipleship is to be done. In short, the apostles would have learned their discipleship principles from Jesus. And so should you.
In this post, I want to extract practical discipleship principles from Jesus by looking at how He behaved towards His disciples. This post will look at the Gospel of Matthew in particular. There are many different ideas and methods put forward today for how to disciple someone. But the most important and foundational principles are laid down by Jesus in the Gospels. You must internalize and meditate on how Jesus interacted with His disciples in order to be effective at discipling others in obedience to the Great Commission.
1. You must initiate the discipling relationship
While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he (Jesus) saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.
Matthew 4:18-20 ESV, emphasis added
It goes without saying, but the 12 apostles didn’t choose themselves to become Jesus disciples. Jesus initiated the relationship. Jesus called the 12 from their different areas of life and commanded them to follow Him. Furthermore, in Matthew 4 Jesus states His goal with discipling Peter and Andrew: He will make these brothers fishers of men.
“Fishers of men” is an apt metaphor for discipleship. No one goes fishing by sitting at home and waiting for the fish to swim up on land and come to them. Fishing means going out and catching the fish yourself. If you want to disciple other people, you are going to have to initiate the relationship. If you sit around waiting to be swarmed by individuals dying to glean wisdom from you, you will be waiting a long time.
Now, unlike Jesus who has all authority, not everyone you approach with immediately follow you as Peter and Andrew did Jesus. But this discipleship principle from Jesus still holds: if you want to have a discipling relationship with someone, you are going to have to take the first steps.
2. Discipleship involves both direct teaching and setting an example with your lifestyle
The 12 apostles were around Jesus for the length of His earthly ministry. During that time, Jesus both taught the disciples directly, and set an example by His conduct. The Gospel of Matthew contains several sections recording the teaching of Jesus, including the famous section “The Sermon on the Mount.” Beyond this formal teaching, the 12 apostles received teaching not given broadly, such as Jesus interpreting parables for them.
But it would be foolish to limit Jesus’ discipleship of the apostles to His teaching ministry. The apostles also:

Witnessed Jesus’ miracles
Watched Him respond to the Pharisees
Listened as He answered questions from the crowd with wisdom

And more. Because the apostles were around Jesus constantly, they had the unique position to both hear what Jesus said and observe how Jesus acted. And this “hearing and seeing” is crucial to any discipling relationship. Certainly a good amount of time discipling others will involve teaching. But just as important is how you yourself behave and conduct yourself.
Just like Jesus, you need to model in practice what you teach in precept. You oftentimes have more opportunities to display godly character in action than you do communicating godly characteristics in word.
3. Discipleship is honest about the joy of following Christ and the cost of following Christ
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Matthew 11:28-30 ESV, emphasis added
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Matthew 16:24-25 ESV, emphasis added
Jesus did not sugarcoat the cost of following Him. Neither did He undersell the peace and joy He provides. Discipling involves teaching this tension. Following Jesus will lead to suffering and difficulty in this world, but Jesus is worth it. If you lose either part of this tension, you will end up obscuring the Bible’s teaching.
A major part of discipling others is displaying for them the worth and value of Jesus. Since the Gospel is at the heart of the Christian faith, you always return to it. You show how it is Jesus and Jesus alone who gives rest for people’s souls. And this rest was only made possible by His sacrifice.
But at the same time, you don’t ever want to make Jesus sound like a “ticket to heaven” or a means to material gain or someone who demands nothing of His followers. Just as Jesus called His disciples to self denial and dying to themselves, so to you will make it clear to all you are discipling that following Jesus requires leaving behind much of what people hold onto in their flesh.
4. You cannot disciple everyone at the same level
Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.
And he called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction.
And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves.
Matthew 5:1, 10:1, 17:1 ESV, emphasis added
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The gospel encompasses a wide-range of ideas and images and we should not limit ourselves to thinking about it in a one-dimensional way. The gospel is gloriously multidimensional and we give God the glory when we contemplate on the gospel as such.

When it comes to theology, we tend to take a doctrine and strip it down to its basic form, leaving out all the intricacies and complicating details. We zero in on a particular verse or repeated theme in Scripture and then we say “That’s what it is all about.” We do this so that we can fit the doctrine neatly in our minds, keep it there, and pass it on to others.
One manifestation of this tendency is seen with respect to how we define the gospel. We ask: What is the gospel? We answer: It is the forgiveness of sins. We might add that the good news is being saved from the wrath of God through the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ – sin condemns us to death, Jesus takes our sin away and satisfies the justice of God. That, we could say, is the essence of the gospel. However, while the gospel is nothing less, it is more. Forgiveness of sins is one dimension of the gospel, but not the only one.
If we insist on restricting the gospel to one-dimension, we rob it of its multifaceted glory. We see its multifaceted glory in a passage such as Colossians 1:12-14. Paul has begun his letter to the church in Colossae by giving thanks for the faith of the Christians there and for their reception of the gospel. Paul explains how he and others are praying for the Colossians, specifically for their growth in the gospel. As he then shows them how the gospel itself is the source of sanctification in the Christian life, Paul uses several different ideas to describe the gospel.
“the Father, who has qualified you”
God qualifies the believer by justifying the believer. God declares the believer to be free of sin and in right standing before him.
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It was among the worst of times when Paul wrote to Titus around AD 65. Ruling the world during this age was Nero, an equally corrupt successor to the degenerate Caligula. By comparison to these two, every President the United States has ever had has been choir-boy-esque. Among Nero’s many inventive ways to do evil (Rom. 1:29–31), he murdered his mother and two wives to secure his throne. He is also believed to have intentionally started a massive fire in Rome which he then blamed on Christians, leading to significant persecution of the Church. Such were the times.
And Crete was the place. Some early Mediterranean converts who were recently delivered from bondage to lots of ugly sin (Tit. 3:3) had planted several local churches there under Titus’s pastoral oversight (Tit. 1:5). Theirs was a culture infamous for its moral bankruptcy. Cretans were known as inveterate liars who were enslaved to evil, beastly behavior, and lazy self-indulgence (Tit. 1:12). If not the worst of times and places, this certainly was a very bad time and a very hard place to live out the virtues of Christ, quite likely worse and harder than ours.
By Way of Reminder
So in Titus 3:1 Paul tells Titus to remind his flocks of seven important Christian virtues. Their need to be reminded implies a tendency to forget. Apparently, top-to-bottom cultural corruption creates a need for repeated conscience re-calibration. While we might not be in such ugly times now, the message Paul didn’t want the Christians in Crete to forget is one God also doesn’t want local churches today to forget.

In surveying their eschatological vision of culture and the resulting imperative for Christians to be diligent in the cultural labors out of a sense of calling in light of God’s future work of recreation, Kuyper and Schilder impel Christians towards similar ends. Further, their respective differences, owing to divergences in their understanding of God’s purposes in creation, can help strengthen the others’ view by adding a counter-stress against where they each descend into problematic conclusions.

Abstract
Abraham Kuyper’s theology of culture is gaining interest in the English-speaking world, especially among those outside the Dutch Reformed tradition. Historic debates in the Dutch Reformed tradition over Kuyper’s hallmark doctrine of common grace often seem parochial or irrelevant to contemporary engagement with his thought. Revisiting one figure in those debates, this essay argues that Klaas Schilder, one of Kuyper’s most vocal critics, offers an important counterbalance to problematic features of Kuyper’s theology. While the divide between Kuyper and Schilder has historically been severe, consideration of their similarities regarding their eschatological vision of Christian cultural creation offers a way to harmonize their differences.

“Kuyperians were pluralists before pluralism was cool,” writes James K. A. Smith.1 Indeed, neo-Calvinists in the tradition of Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) display a marked fondness for stressing the possibility and imperative of shared cultural labor between Christians and non-Christians in society.2 Christians can work alongside non-Christians to create God-glorifying artifacts of culture, such as art or music, as well as less tangible elements of culture, such as share values, language, philosophic systems, or social and political institutions. While Smith certainly appreciates such contributions of the Kuyperian tradition, his critique aims at correcting what he perceives to be far too great an interest in the commonness which Christians share with the rest of society, at the expense of neglecting their distinctiveness. Neo-Calvinists have lost a sense of Christianity’s prophetic cultural witness, he argues. Or, to put it in more Kuyperian terms: neo-Calvinists have neglected the ecclesial contours of the antithesis between Christ’s work of redemption and humanity’s rebellion in sin. More specifically, they have failed to live out the active ministry of the institutional church of shaping communities in the distinctiveness of Christian liturgical life, which in turn is to serve as a leavening force in society for civic virtue.3
To rekindle the force of the Kuyperian antithesis, Smith has shown interest in the lesser known influence of Dutch theologian Klaas Schilder (1890–1952). Schilder, a strident critic of Kuyper and his legacy, provides what Smith sees as an element lacking in many contemporary neo-Calvinist theologies of social and cultural life. This is namely a “dispositional deflection” away from public life steeped in non-Christian principles, while at the same time providing a call to remain faithfully present within society, for its good and for Christ’s glory.4 Smith is not alone in recognizing the value of the greater emphasis Schilder puts on what neo-Calvinists call the antithesis, the epistemic and existential divide between regenerate Christians and the unregenerate, especially concerning social and cultural cooperation. A growing group of Kuyperians have begun to look to Schilder in an effort to strengthen their Kuyperian heritage.5
This willingness of those sympathetic to Kuyper’s theology of culture and common life to reach across what has been a bitter divide in the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition represents a promising new chapter in the conversation. Schilder rejected Kuyper’s foundational doctrine of common grace with great skepticism, and any effort to harmonize their thoughts must begin elsewhere. This essay proposes to put Kuyper and Schilder in conversation yet again, seeking to find some constructive unity in their varied understandings of culture, the antithesis, and common life shared between Christians and non-Christians. Whereas much of this discussion has historically focused on areas of disagreement, little serious effort has been given to those areas where Schilder and Kuyper’s theology bear similarities and can in fact work well together. The way to do this, this study proposes, is to begin where these similarities are the strongest.
For various reasons, Kuyper and Schilder disagree about much regarding creation, divine providence, and doctrines which serve to construct a “protology,” that is, a doctrine of the axiomatic beginning of all things. However, their eschatological vision for culture and human life does possess some crucial harmony. This study will therefore begin at the end, so to speak, examining both Kuyper and Schilder’s eschatological visions of culture, in order to discern how Christians in the present ought to understand their cultural task in light of the future. To frame this proposal, this study will survey the nature of the divide between Kuyper and Schilder on culture and common grace, before turning to their respective eschatological visions for culture to begin to work of synthesizing their views.
The Nature of the Divide
Beginning with the end of all things is a fitting endeavor in the study of Schilder’s theology of culture. “All threads of life and revelation,” he says, “lead in the end to heaven.”6 Though his thoughts on the cultural life of the eschaton certainly diverge from Kuyper’s, they do find significant common ground here as well. Schilder’s main conflict with Kuyper concerns instead the beginning of history. Kuyper is famous for his expansion of the doctrine of common grace in Reformed thought as the basis for his theology of cultural life. For Kuyper, God’s design for his creation is for humanity, his vice-regents, to develop the hidden potential sown into the created order as seeds awaiting germination.7 Cultural life, that is, the fruit of human labor as they interact together with God’s created order, is but one element of this latency.8 Humanity is charged with the task of creation’s development in Genesis 1:26–28 as part of God’s command to both fill the earth and to subdue it. The fall and the entrance of sin into the life of humanity, however, raises the question of how such a task and humanity’s capacity to fulfill it is affected by so deep a rift in God’s design for things. For Kuyper, God’s common grace accounts for the existential reality that humanity has indeed been able to develop creation’s latent potentials, sometimes for better though often for worse. Common grace, therefore, serves as Kuyper’s account for how cultural life remains possible, and reveals that God’s design for his creation has not been aborted, but continues to unfold and advance in this life prior to its consummation in the eschaton.9
Schilder, writing a generation after Kuyper, rejected Kuyper’s accounting for human cultural life in common grace, partly because of what he saw as problems inherent in Kuyper’s doctrine of divine providence. While both Kuyper and Schilder adamantly embraced a supralapsarian vision of God’s eternal decrees, the nature of Schilder’s critique highlights the supralapsarian tendency to frame the situation in more absolute terms.10 For Schilder, it cannot be the case that what allows both sinful humanity and the redeemed to both seemingly develop culture can be called grace.11 In reality, what Kuyper calls “grace” is simply the prolonging of judgment that will ultimately result in grace for the elect but condemnation for the reprobate, justified by reprobate humanity’s sinfulness manifest and magnified by their cultural labors.12 What accounts for present cultural life is a common “tempering” of God’s judgment against sin, so that his equal plans of both grace and wrath might come to completion in history.13
Despite such a dire prognosis, Schilder does retain a fundamentally positive view towards human cultural life, going so far as to call cultural abstention on the part of Christians a sin against God’s creational calling.14 For Schilder, cultural life is one area of responsibility for humanity under God’s covenant of works, which God entered into with the whole human race via Adam in paradise. This covenant bears actual expectations for faithfulness, namely to live out the fullness of the imago dei for which God created humanity and to the development of creation’s latencies in cultural life—covenant expectations which remain in force for all humanity even today.15
One Culture or Two?
One can begin to see in the above outline of Schilder’s thought the emergence of his emphasis on the antithesis. For Schilder, to properly speak of culture in its present reality is to speak only in connection with its ultimate telos. The problem of the fall is that it detaches human cultural striving from its proper integration with right orientation of cultural life, which hinges on right worship of God.16 The hope of the work of Christ is that regeneration restores the possibility of properly integrated cultural labor, that is work which sees “every part in its proper place in the whole”—even if this is only provisionally possible this side of the eschaton.17 The recognition this brings is that according to Schilder’s thought the vast majority of cultural development throughout history is debilitated by sin, even if cultural life as such remains inherently good according to God’s designs.
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