Two Weeks to Flatten the World
The magic act of Covid vanishing from media view and public perception is not due to any medical miracle or the natural trajectory of a virus losing its potency. It was performed by those who manufactured this reality and committed countless crimes, coordinated in an attempt to slip out the back door, avoid further public inquiry and escape any legal consequences.
COVID-19 has magically disappeared.
After more than two years of non-stop bombardment with Covid “news”, there has been none at all in mainstream headlines for over a week. The media giveth and the media taketh away.
Through the immaculate erasure of the ‘Covid Crisis,’ those responsible for these harms are attempting to make us forget what they did to us, our families, and the permanent damage they caused to society.
Think back to what life was like two years ago and imagine if someone told you that a “health emergency” would require a crackdown on all social and economic life.
Remarkably, the public health orders moved quickly from “flattening the curve” and “slowing the spread” to containment, suppression, contact tracing, social isolation, quarantine, face coverings, de facto house arrest aka “lockdowns” (a prison/slave camp term), and mandated experimental injections.
In order to “keep us safe” government policies mushroomed from innocuous instructions into draconian decrees.
The limitation of the right to engage in basic economic transactions; the limitation of the right to freedom of movement; limitations on the right to practice religion; the suspension of the right to an education; the denial of the right to a livelihood; the removal of the right to receive or refuse medical attention; suspension of public meetings; suspension of juries; suppression of the right to freedom of expression; denial of the right to assembly; and much else became the new operating principles of “The Covid World.”
The institution of a bio-security police state was birthed according to health authorities and others the power to quarantine someone considered “infected” or simply to have been in contact with a purported “case.”
To make this appear necessary and acceptable, an intensive full-spectrum psychological assault on our sensibilities was implemented. Covid-19 was hyped as the ‘New Black Death’.
We were told by ‘important-looking people’ that millions will die, the entire planet is in danger, a global response is required and everyone must get in line with the program whilst “heroes” and “experts” take charge of this new global war to keep us safe.
Illogical catchphrases designed to hypnotize the public into a malleable mental state were repeated over and over in every media outlet, across virtually every social institution, and plastered throughout all walks of the public sphere.
“Flatten the Curve”, “The New Normal”, “Social Distancing” and “Follow the Science“ became the nation’s Covid shibboleths. Media bullhorns relentlessly blasted the doublespeak into the public psyche. Oxymorons and euphemisms dominated the contours of any and all “Covid-related” discourse.
Such linguistic manipulations were readily absorbed and seamlessly adopted by much of the public and became the Doublethink phraseology of the Covid Era.
Mantras of the Covid Era were followed by a fleet of psychologically disorienting and arbitrary ‘regulations’, ‘advice‘, and ‘guidelines’ which were quickly put in place, selectively enforced and subsequently changed.
No one was spared.
Children came under sustained psychological attacks, branded ‘super spreaders’, and were told to keep away from the grandparents lest they “kill granny.”
Operating in a fog of psychological trauma, everyone moved through a world devoid of smiles and laughter where faces were hidden by masks and smothered in cloth.
This barrage of brutalizing manipulations was designed to condition us to accept the tyrannical impositions of “The New Normal.”
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The Two-Kingdoms Theology and Christians Today
Written by William B. Evans |
Monday, May 15, 2023
First, the kingdom of God and the institutional church are wrongly equated by 2K advocates. There is a rough consensus among New Testament scholars that the kingdom of God is a much more comprehensive reality than the institutional church, and this misidentification of the church and the kingdom has all sorts of unfortunate results, such as confusion over the nature of “kingdom work” and the silencing of Christians from speaking to societal issues.These are perplexing times for evangelical Christians who seek to be faithful to Christ in the midst of a contrary culture. The conventional view in American evangelical circles has been what we may term “transformational,” in that it was shaped by the Puritan goal of society as a Christian covenanted community, the Awakening impulse that spawned many efforts to redeem the broader culture, and the neo-Calvinist perspective of Abraham Kuyper (and successors such as Cornelius Van Til and Francis Schaeffer) emphasizing a Christian world-and-life view as foundational to the transformation of culture. While these influences were not overtly theocratic, they did see a positive role for Christians as Christians in society.
More recently, an outspoken group has rejected all of this, contending that Christians should view themselves as citizens of two distinct kingdoms (the church and the world), and that efforts to transform society on the basis of Christian principles are wrongheaded. This perspective has been labeled “2K” (Two Kingdoms) “R2K” (“Reformed” or “Radical Two Kingdoms”), “NL2K” (Natural Law Two Kingdoms) theology, and the “common-kingdom model,” and it is particularly associated with present and former faculty members at Westminster Seminary in Escondido, California—ethicist David VanDrunen, theologian Michael Horton, historian Darryl Hart, and their students.[1] Not surprisingly, it has recently been dubbed by theologian John Frame the “Escondido Theology.”[2] While the major participants are affiliated with conservative Reformed denominations, their influence goes well beyond those confessional groups, and so this is a phenomenon well worth exploring in more detail.
That something like 2K theology would be attractive in the current context should not surprise. American culture is increasingly secular. Hostility to biblical Christianity increases, and the end of “Constantinianism” (the synthesis of Western culture and Christianity that began with the Roman emperor Constantine) is widely announced. Efforts by the Religious Right to transform America are seen as a failure, and the Christian Reconstructionist or Theonomist movement has faded. In addition, some are convinced that transformational efforts have distracted the church from its spiritual calling of preparing souls for heaven through the ministry of Word and sacrament. Thus, 2K theology seems tailor-made for a post-Constantinian context where many are concerned for the integrity of the church and its ministry, and it also seems to provide a theological fig leaf for culture-war fatigue.
What are the basics of 2K theology? First, there are two realms or kingdoms—the world, which is governed by creational wisdom or natural law accessible to all, and the church, which is shaped and governed by the Gospel. Christians are citizens of both realms and are answerable to the claims of both. Second, because the world is normed by natural law, there is no distinctively “Christian” worldview that can be applied to all of life. There is no Christian-world-and-life perspective on politics, or economics, or psychology, etc. Finally, Christian efforts to transform or redeem society are wrongheaded and involve a confusion of the two kingdoms. Thus, the ministry of the church is exclusively spiritual in nature.
According to 2K advocates, such thinking is firmly rooted in the Christian tradition, and four key sources are often cited. St. Augustine of Hippo’s magnum opus, The City of God, was written in the wake of the fall of Rome in AD 410 to the barbarians. In it, Augustine assures Christians that their hopes rest not in earthly society or empire but in heaven, and he schematizes human history in terms of two cities—the city of the world shaped by love of self and made up of those who “live by human standards” and are predestined to hell, and the city of God shaped by love for God and made up of those “who live according to God’s will” and are predestined for heaven. Thus Christians are simultaneously citizens of heaven and pilgrims on earth.[3] Here Augustine sought to express the biblical distinction between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the devil. But Augustine was no Manichaean dualist—he recognized that the inhabitants of the earthly city can accomplish relative goods, and he also believed that the efforts of Christians to better society can achieve real, if limited, results. Moreover, Augustine encouraged a public role for distinctively Christian virtues, even arguing that temporal rulers should suppress idolatry.[4] Thus, Augustine’s two cities are not the same thing as the recent Two Kingdoms.
More promising for recent 2K advocates is the distinction between two kingdoms found in the writings of Martin Luther. Luther modified the Augustinian framework by means of programmatic distinctions between Law and Gospel, the spiritual and the temporal, the inner and outer man, and so on. Thus there is a twofold rule of God—the kingdom of the world is governed by God through Law, while the church is governed by the Gospel. The implications of this move are profound. With Luther, the kingdom of the world achieves what Bernhard Lohse has termed a new “independence” over against Christianity, and a more positive view of the kingdom of the world emerges (in this sense, I would even argue that the Lutheran Two-Kingdoms doctrine was a factor in the emergence of the modern notion of the secular). In addition, the state, as an expression of the kingdom of the world, has its own integrity apart from Christianity, and Christians as citizens of both kingdoms must submit to the state. Thus there is in Luther little room for rebellion against civil government. Finally, the church has an exclusively spiritual role and is not to try to improve society.[5]
Reformed Two-Kingdoms advocates have spent a good deal of time trying to portray Calvin as a keen disciple on Luther on this issue. But while Calvin deployed two-kingdoms language, he generally did so with somewhat different aims and his practical stance was more activistic. He sought to protect the church from the encroachments of the state, and to emphasize that Christians have a spiritual obligation to the state, but the temporal realm does not have the independence that it has in Luther.[6] Despite similarities in language, this difference helps to account for the profound contrast between the passivity of the Lutheran tradition toward the state and the historic pattern of social and political activism evident among Reformed Christians. Calvin’s role in Geneva underscores his conviction that distinctively Christian concerns have an important role in the public square, and that magistrates are obligated to further Christian virtues.
These differing conceptions of the Two Kingdoms are rooted to some degree in different understandings of Law and Gospel. For Lutherans, the law always condemns, while the gospel is understood primarily as freedom from condemnation. The Reformed understanding of both differs. Here the notion of Law is conditioned by the doctrine of the covenant, and the Gospel is understood as both freedom from condemnation of sin and the power of sin. Thus, in the Westminster Confession of Faith the condemning aspects of the law are assigned to the covenant of works, while the law as a “rule of life” does “sweetly comply” with the “grace of the Gospel” (WCF 19.6-7). For these reasons, Lutherans are able to “distinguish Law and Gospel” in ways that the Reformed generally do not, and simply citing formal similarities in Lutheran and Reformed language on the Two Kingdoms and Law/Gospel will not do. One must dig deeper to discern what is really meant and what is entailed.
Given that the Reformed tradition has historically been decidedly more activistic and transformational than Lutheranism with its two-kingdoms focus, where are contemporary Reformed 2K advocates to find antecedents for their position? The answer lies in Southern Presbyterianism and its doctrine of the “spirituality of the church” that emerged with vigor in the post-Civil War period. As historian Jack Maddex argued in a seminal 1976 article, southern Presbyterians shifted from an activistic and even theocratic stance to a rigid separation of the sacred and the secular: “Smarting under northern accusations that they had formed a ‘political alliance’ with slavery, Southern Presbyterians assumed an apolitical stance. Turning from social and political concerns, they concentrated on personal piety and church organization.”[7]
Enough has been said to demonstrate that 2K claims are revisionist, particularly their Lutheranized version of the Reformed tradition. But are there theological and pastoral problems here? I think there are. First, the kingdom of God and the institutional church are wrongly equated by 2K advocates. There is a rough consensus among New Testament scholars that the kingdom of God is a much more comprehensive reality than the institutional church, and this misidentification of the church and the kingdom has all sorts of unfortunate results, such as confusion over the nature of “kingdom work” and the silencing of Christians from speaking to societal issues.[8]
Second, this 2K theology evinces a radical creation-redemption dualism that distorts the Scriptural witness at certain key points. It denies the continuity of the old creation with the new,[9] and this brings with it a suspicion of real transformation (whether personal or social) in this life. In other words, according to 2K our efforts to apply creational wisdom or natural law are not bad things, but our experience of salvation today is entirely a spiritual matter, and efforts to change this world have no lasting or eternal significance for the world to come. Moreover, this present world will be destroyed and replaced by a new creation. But while there are passages in Scripture that speak of the relationship between the old and new in terms of discontinuity (e.g., 2 Peter 3:11-13), others depict restoration rather than annihilation. Perhaps most telling is Paul’s argument in Romans 8:18-25, in which the Apostle speaks of creation as currently “subject to futility” that “will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glory of the children of God” (ESV). At very least, this suggests that 2K advocates have missed the careful dialectic of eschatological continuity and discontinuity in Scripture.
We will cheerfully admit that 2K advocates have some legitimate concerns, particularly that the mission and witness of the church not be hijacked by political and cultural agendas. But in this instance the cure is worse than the disease. While 2K theology may well scratch the itch of Christians who need a theological excuse to remain silent in current cultural conflicts, it is both less than biblical and less than faithful to the decided weight of the Reformed tradition.
William B. ‘Bill’ Evans is the Younts Professor of Bible and Religion and Department Chair at Erskine College. He holds degrees from Taylor University (BA) Westminster Seminary (MAR, ThM), and Vanderbilt (PhD). This article first appeared on his blog The Ecclesial Calvinist and is used with permission.[1] See, e.g., David VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms (2010); Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (2010); D. G. Hart, A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State (2006).
[2] See John Frame, The Escondido Theology: A Reformed Response to Two Kingdom Theology (2011); Other critiques include Ryan C. McIlhenny, ed.,Kingdoms Apart: Engaging the Two Kingdoms Perspective (2012); William D. Dennison, “Review of VanDrunen’s Natural Law,” Westminster Theological Journal 75 (2013): 349-370; and Dan Strange, “Not Ashamed! The Sufficiency of Scripture for Public Theology,” Themelios 36/2 (2011).
[3] Augustine, City of God (Bettenson trans., 1984), 593-596 (XIV.28—XV.1).
[4] For a subtle analysis of this, see Eugene TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian (1970), 268-278.
[5] On these issues, see Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther: An Introduction to His Life and Work (1986), 186-193. See also Paul Althaus, The Ethics of Martin Luther (1972), 43-82; Heinrich Bornkamm, Luther’s Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms in the Context of His Theology, trans. James W. Leitsch (1963).
[6] See Calvin, Institutes, IIII.19.15; IV.20.1-32.
[7] Jack P. Maddex, “From Theocracy to Spirituality: The Southern Presbyterian Reversal on Church and State,” Journal of Presbyterian History54/4 (1976): 448. Maddex points to Stuart Robinson as the crucial figure in this development, and Robinson’s ideas have recently been championed by VanDrunen.
[8] See, e.g., Herman Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom (1962), 354; G. E. Ladd, Theology of the New Testament (1974), 111-119.
[9] See, e.g., VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, 66-67.
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The Hope of Renewal for the Sexually Broken
Whatever your struggle, “I am with you” changes the terrain of battle. You start to see the fork in the road. There is a way of life. Your choices count, and you can choose life. A good road runs uphill toward the light, where previously you only knew to stumble over the edge into the abyss.
Identifying Today’s Skirmish
Renewal. The final word in restoring joys to the sexually broken. Our daily renewal has three parts.
First, where is today’s skirmish? Your battle always gets fought at the next step, not all at once. “Today’s trouble” is where you find God’s aid. A clear view of what you face defines your “choice points,” the forks in the road before you. Where are you tempted, now? It might be sexual. But remember that the skirmish is not always about sex. God keeps many issues in view as he works out our sanctification. How are you handling life’s pressures? Are you complaining or anxious? Does self-righteousness make you defensive and judgmental? Are you working too hard or being lazy and escapist? Are you forgetting God? What’s your relationship with money? Whenever you skirmish well in any area, it has ripple effects into every other area of life.
Is darkened sexuality even the prime battleground today? Where is today’s choice point? The current struggle is the place where the Vinedresser is pruning. It’s where you need life support from the Vine. Making all things new is always about something going on today. Restoring pure joys is not theory. It’s what’s happening here and now. It’s not about instant perfection (I hope that’s clear).
And it’s not about yesterday. If you’re still brooding and obsessing over yesterday’s failures, then today’s choice point is “How do you handle failure?” Can you quit curving in on yourself after you fall, and begin to deal with your sins by relying on free mercies? You’ll always need your Father, Savior, and Comforter to help you, forgive you, and teach you. Today’s trouble identifies where.
Finding God in Today’s Trouble
Second, what one thing about God in Christ speaks directly into today’s trouble? Just as we don’t change all at once, so we don’t take in all of truth in one massive Bible transfusion. We are simple people. You can’t remember ten things at once. Invariably, if you could remember just one vital truth in the moment of trial and then seek your God, you’d be different. Bible verses aren’t magic. But God’s words are revelations of God from God for our redemption. When you actually remember God, you do not sin. The only way we ever sin is by suppressing God, by forgetting, by tuning out his voice, switching channels, and listening to other voices. When you actually remember, you actually change. In fact, remembering is the first change.
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Corporate Worship’s Essence: Spiritual Response
It is important that we recognize the proper function of our physical expressions of worship and the fundamental spiritual essence of worship. The physical expressions themselves are never the essence of our communion with God; plenty of people do the physical stuff without truly worshiping. Rather, the physical aspects of worship should be an expression of the spiritual responses of our hearts toward God in the true heavenly temple. We cannot be satisfied with just going through the motions, assuming if we sing and pray and read the Bible and listen to a sermon, we have communed with God. No, the essence of true communion with God is in our hearts, hearts set on things above.
One of the clearest ways you can determine someone’s fundamental theology of worship is to ask them the following question: “How do you know that you have worshiped?” If our goal in worship is to commune with God, how do we know we have accomplished our goal? How do we know we have worshiped?
Embodied Expressions of Corporate Worship
As physical beings, much of what we do in corporate worship is embodied. In Colossians 3, we find a command to sing—the Greek word translated as “singing” literally means “make a melody with the vocal cords.” That may seem obvious, but some Christians in times past have argued that this passage refers to singing internally, not externally. No, we are supposed to sing with our voices in corporate worship. We cannot teach and admonish one another with singing unless we use our physical voices to do so. Likewise, Paul says in Ephesians 5:19, “addressing one another”—you can’t do that with internal singing—“in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart.” The word singing there is the same as in Colossians 3, but he also adds the word translated as “making melody,” which literally means “to pluck a stringed instrument.” So, clearly, the music of our corporate worship is a physical, audible expression.
We also necessarily use our bodies in other ways in corporate worship, don’t we? To let the Word of Christ richly dwell within us, as Paul commands in Colossians 3, we must use our eyes and voices to physically read the Scriptures. We use our ears to listen as others speak and sing. We even use our mouths and fingers as we eat and drink at the Lord’s Table. We cannot worship God corporately according to his instructions without the use of our bodies.
Indeed, the Bible teaches that the human body is good. God created the body and, therefore, by nature the body is good. Furthermore, Jesus Christ took on a human body at his incarnation, and he will have that body for the rest of eternity. Jesus died bodily, and he was raised bodily from that death. He ascended bodily into heaven, and one day he will return to the earth in his body. Job affirmed, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). The Bible teaches that God, through Christ, has saved our souls, but he has also saved our bodies (1 Thess. 5:23).
Some Christians in the first couple centuries of the church adopted a Platonic philosophy that believed the body to be inherently evil. This resulted in what is known as the Gnostic heresy, which denied that Jesus Christ really had a physical body or that he rose bodily from the grave. Gnosticism also taught that we must try to completely free ourselves from our bodies by denying our bodies what we need to survive physically and instead attempt to become one with God’s spiritual essence. This heresy is specifically what Paul was addressing in Colossians as well as in other letters, such as in 1 Timothy when he said that Jesus “was manifested in the flesh” (3:16) and that “everything created by God is good” (4:4). And John explicitly condemned Gnosticism when he said, “For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” (2 John 1:7). Orthodox theologians continued to fight against this heresy until it was officially condemned in the fourth century. The body was created by God, Christ took on human flesh, and therefore the body is good, and our corporate worship is embodied worship.
This embodied reality of corporate worship is one reason that we must physically meet together. We cannot sing to one another without physically being together. The New Testament frequently emphasizes the importance of meeting together. John said in 2 John 1:12, “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete,” and he wrote similarly in 3 John. Paul stressed several times to the believers in Rome his desire to be there with them, so that he might enjoy their company and be refreshed together with them (Rom. 15:23–24, 32). He longed to physically gather with the believers in the church at Thessalonica, saying that he “endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face” (1 Thess. 2:17), and he urged Timothy to be diligent to come to him quickly (2 Tim. 4:9). Paul recognized the importance of physically being together for fellowship.
And so, the author of Hebrews commanded, “Do not neglect to meet together.” It’s why passages about corporate worship in the New Testament frequently emphasize the physical gathering of corporate worship. In 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, Paul repeats the idea multiple times: “when you come together” (11:17), “when you come together as a church” (11:18), “when you come together” (11:20), “when you come together to eat” (11:33), “when you come together” (11:34), “when you come together” (14:26). Corporate worship assumes the necessity of a physical gathering where we do physical things. “Where two or three are gathered in my name,” Jesus said, “there am I among them” (Matt. 18:20).
Spiritual Essence of Corporate Worship
Yet that very statement leads us to the primary point of this essay. Jesus said that where two or three are physically gathered in his name, there he is among them, but is Jesus physically in the midst of us when we gather? No, not since he ascended into heaven. Stephen saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God the Father (Acts 7:56). Colossians 3:1 says that Christ is “seated [bodily] at the right hand of God.” So, if Jesus is bodily in heaven, and we are gathered bodily here on earth, how can he be in the midst of us?
Notice how the verse opens: “If then you have been raised with Christ.” The first point to recognize here is that all who are united with Christ are also seated with him in heaven. Verse 3 alludes to this reality: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Paul says it even more explicitly in Ephesians 2:6 when he states that God has “raised us up with [Christ] and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Christ is seated in heaven, and since we are in him, we are with him there. Remember what Paul says a few verses later in Ephesians 2:18: “For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” We have access to the Father because, in one Spirit through Christ, we are actually there in the presence of God in heaven.
This is a reality, and yet we also recognize that it is not yet a physical reality. Our bodies are still here on earth, while we really are seated with Christ in the heavenly places. What this reveals is the important spiritual essence of our relationship with God through Christ. As Paul says, we have access in one Spirit. The Spirit of God is the agent who makes this possible because it is a spiritual reality.
This is also part of what Jesus meant in John 4 when he said that God is seeking those who will “worship the Father in spirit and truth” (v. 23). Since “God is spirit” (v. 24) and does not have a body like man, true worship takes place in its essence in the Spirit, which is why it is essential that the Holy Spirit dwell within the NT temple—the church—in the same way he dwelt in the temple of the Old Testament. Back then, worship was limited to that physical, Spirit-indwelt temple, but “the hour . . . is now here” (v. 23) that worship takes place wherever two or three Spirit-indwelt believers gather together, for there Christ is “in the midst of them.”
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