In so many ways, the current discussions over Christian nationalism parallel discussions of Theonomy/Christian Reconstruction a generation ago. The Recons were also accused of fostering nominalism, seeking salvation in politics, etc. And they gave answers very similar to Joseph’s here (which I agree with). There is a massive blind spot in many expressions of Reformed and evangelical theology today. The pietistic mind cannot wrap itself around the reality that a Christian politics and Christian nations can indeed be (and have been) historical realities. The pietistic mind gets hung up on these sorts of objections because it is trapped in a pluralistic, politics-can-be-neutral way of thinking. Once you accept that there is no neutrality anywhere and Christ is Lord everywhere, everything else falls into place. But that requires refusing to live under the modern liberal gaze which far too few pastors can do.
The parallels will further repeat themselves with largely misguided, poorly informed denominational study reports.
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I have said before that I am not (and really never was) a capital “T” theonomist. But I am very much in favor of using the Bible to shape politics and culture. I am committed to biblical law as our final ethical standard. I am in favor of Christian nations (= discipled nations). I am in favor of Christendom. I appreciate the glories of the medieval era and the civilizational impact of the Reformation in general and Calvinism in particular. I am generally ecclesiocentric (in ways I have described elsewhere) because the ministries of the church bring new life to the spiritually dead, and thus power cultural transformation. I believe both the original Westminster and its American revision teach what could be rightly called Christian nationalism. So why am I not a Theonomist? And what would I put in place of Theonomy?
I really like Jim Jordan’s “Theocratic Critique of Theonomy,” available here: https://wordmp3.com/product-group.aspx?id=322…
The same hermeneutical approach can be found in David Chilton’s Paradise Restored and especially Vern Poythress’ The Shadow of Christ on the Law of Moses. One of Jordan’s basic insights is that the Torah was obviously not designed to be a complete law code. In the nature of the case, it would need to be supplemented somehow.
A good illustration/test case for this is Solomon’s first crisis as king – he is confronted with two women squabbling over one baby. There is no law in Torah that addresses that situation. So what is Solomon to do? He exercises his God-given wisdom. That wisdom can be considered from various perspectives – from one angle, it is a kind of natural law (eg, he solved the issue by taking into account maternal *nature*). From another perspective, it was a kind of sanctified and royal prudence, of the sort that all great rulers must possess and exercise. From yet another perspective, it was a clever outworking and application of basic principles found in Scripture – since he obviously did not intend to actually kill the baby (a kind of “general equity” theonomy was in play).
I think the kind of appreciative critique and biblical hermeneutic that Jordan develops could actually serve as a springboard for bringing different Reformed political subcultures on the right together. He appreciates what Theonomy got right – especially its philosophical opposition to autonomy and neutrality. But he also makes room for the kind of wisdom that is obviously necessary to mature statecraft and civil governance. This is an approach to politics grounded in biblical authority but it combines both biblical and natural revelation, Torah and wisdom.
To give one illustration of how this might work: When it comes to immigration and assimilation, Jordan is not an ethonationalist (and rightly so in my opinion). But what ethnonationalists (in their least offensive form) want to do with the biological category of race, he does with the biblical categories of language and lip (= religious confession). (Jordan is right that the Bible focuses much more on language than race per se.) Jordan’s standards for assimilation (linguistic and religious) would protect the kind of coherent culture that men like Buchanan have insisted on, while still allowing nations to be appropriately and prudentially hospitable to immigrants and refugees who are willing and able to assimilate.
This post unpacks further aspects of what I sketch out here.
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Rufo and MacIntyre are both correct – the left’s progressive coalition of feminists, Muslims, sexual perverts, socialists, and so on, is held together by envy and resentment, rooted in hatred for America and fatherhood. It succeeds precisely by appealing to those who want to make America and/or fathers the “bad guy” in the story (whether that story is considered at the personal or civilizational level). Of course, behind the hatred of America and patriarchs is a hatred for the Christian God. That’s the primal hatred, the source of all other hatreds.
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Pretty good thoughts from Sheen on why liberalism is failing us at the present moment. It seems that the degree to which you think liberalism is no longer functional depends in large measure on how much capital from Christendom you think we have left in our account. But Sheen thought we had depleted our inheritance by 1948 when he wrote these words:
“In any case it is becoming increasingly clear that historical liberalism is like a sundial, which is unable to mark time in the dark. Liberalism can function only in a society whose basis is moral, where the flotsam and jetsam of Christianity are still drifting about the world. From another point of view, historical liberalism is a parasite on a Christian civilization, and once that body upon which it clings ceases to be the leaven of society, then historical liberalism itself must perish. The individual liberties which historical liberalism emphasizes are secure only when the community is religious and can give an ethical foundation to these liberties. It may very well be that historical liberalism is only a transitional era in history between a civilization which was Christian and one which will be definitely anti-Christian…”
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“Yet there is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture…. The dominant force in creating a common culture between peoples each of which has its distinct culture is religion. Please do not, at this point, make a mistake in anticipating my meaning. This is not a religious talk, and I am not setting out to convert anybody. I am simply stating a fact. I am not so much concerned with the communion of Christian believers today; I am talking about the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is, and about the common cultural elements which this common Christianity has brought with it… It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have—until recently—been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.”
–T. S. Eliot, poet, literary critic, defender of Western civilization, and Christian nationalist [Taken from Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948).]
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Yes, it’s a great question. I do think there have been some Bible-only Theonomists like I describe (I certainly encountered quite a few back in day), but mainly at the level of followers in the movement, not leaders. Rushdoony probably came the closest to that position amongst the heavy-hitters — and I say that as someone who benefited tremendously from Rush’s writings on a wide variety of topics. Obviously, he had a doctrine of general revelation, but he called natural law (without any distinctions as far as I could tell) “heresy” and seemed to not have much *positive* use for natural revelation (e.g., natural revelation condemns man for his sins since he is always sinning against the light, but there is no need to make appeals to nature as a law in our politics because we have the Bible). I agree with you about Bahnsen, though certainly some of his followers (and critics) took him as a Bible-only kind of Theonomist. Where Bahnsen and Jordan differed, of course, was on the hermeneutics of biblical law. Even there, I wonder how far apart they really were. My sense of things is that most of the main proponents of some version of T/theonomy could be properly called “general equity theonomists.” I like to use that label for my own position because it invokes confessional language and relies on principles, case law, judicial wisdom, etc. Does that help?
https://x.com/TJSumpter/status/1938087779503857775
I responded:
Good points, Toby.
I certainly agree with your last sentence: “Theonomy means the whole Bible applied to all of life, and that same Bible requires the use of biblically trained reason, prudence, natural revelation, etc.”
Rush had in view the kind of (semi-)Thomistic (autonomous) natural law that was common at the time, but he also catches up Calvin’s “common laws of the nations” in his net. See page 9f of IBL Vol. 1.
I always found that section a bit confusing because, on the one hand, he calls Calvin’s version of the “common law of the nations” a form of biblical law, albeit diluted by pagan/Roman and humanistic influences. But then he also dismisses the common law as “heretical nonsense.”
When he discusses Rome’s version of natural law on the next page, he says “For the Bible, there is no law in nature, because nature is fallen and cannot be normative.” I think his failure to consider other versions of natural law was a shortcoming.
He says, “Neither positive law nor natural law can reflect more than the sin and apostasy of man: revealed law is the need and privilege of Christian society.” It’s hard to find a place in there for positive uses of extra-biblical revelation. At the least, some early versions of Theonomy were very underdeveloped in how to actually use biblically trained reason, prudence, natural revelation, etc.
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An alternative name for general equity theonomy: New covenant theonomy. I like that because it captures how the law has undergone transformation in the death and resurrection of Christ.
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I am a biblicist but not a narrow biblicist since I believe Scripture itself teaches that we must learn from God’s created order. Of course, Scripture guides our interpretation of nature (see John Frame on this). But nature is necessary. Scripture and nature form a single system of revelation, intended by God to function together.
Here’s a rather wild example to challenge narrow biblicism: What about the Mazzaroth, the constellations (or zodiac), mentioned in Job 38 and 2 Kings 22? Here’s a case where the Bible itself points us to nature as a source of information and wisdom about the world.
Strict biblicists might treat this as an exception — kind of like hermeneutical minimalists will say the only types in the OT are those explicitly identified in the NT. But that isn;t coherent. When the apostles do typology, they are not giving us one-off cases; they are showing us how to read the OT as a whole.
Likewise, when Scripture “reads” nature for us (1 Cor. 11 and Rom. 1 provide examples), it is teaching us how to interpret the created order. We have to learn what nature teaches. We have to learn how to make arguments from nature.
Thankfully, I think that kind of narrow biblicism is dying. I think Van Til has been misunderstood by many of his followers, but that seems to be getting sorted out. For Van Til, all of nature is revelatory, and it reveals the truth and wisdom of the living God. A proper biblicism, a wide biblicism, ultimately embraces every fact in the universe since Scripture itself tells us that everything God made bears witness to him — and the purpose of that witness is not merely to leave sinners without excuse for their sin, but to also give us a source of wisdom, filtered and sifted through special revelation. For Van Til, not only is there evidence of the Christian God — there nothing but evidence for the Christian God in the whole of the cosmos. If we don’t learn from nature as God intended, we are fools.
In the Bible, “nature” just means the design God has built into the creation. Natural law, rightly understood, is wisdom drawn from that design
We can’t live without it.
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