The radical two-kingdoms perspective has recently addressed homosexual marriage. The result has been erudition in the service of confusion. This result includes the familiar R2K progression: 1) There is a social conflict involving civil law and Christian values. 2) “Christians should not seek to promote distinctively Christian doctrines and practices through the properly coercive power [...]
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When Jim Wallis declares that he opposes “American exceptionalism,” no one should be surprised. Wallis’s first commitment is Marxism. He started his career in activism not as a church minister nor as a Christian, but as a member of the Students for Democratic Society, a socialist organization originally known as League for Industrial Democracy (LID). [...]
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It’s best not to accuse others of being motivated by old grudges when you yourself are leading a whole movement based on one. Something I once heard about splinters and planks. . . . Just some brief comments today on John Frame’s great new book The Escondido Theology: A Reformed Response to Two Kingdom Theology, [...]
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I haven’t had the chance to read John Frame’s The Escondido Theology yet. If it is anything like what Dr. Frame has written before, it will be a very good book, I am sure. In fact, I already know it is a very good book, even without reading it. How do I know? Michael Horton [...]
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The modern argument of the two kingdoms is a fairly recent development; it appeared in the late 1990s as a rhetorical retort against Theonomy. For over 20 years after the publishing of R.J. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) and over 10 years after Greg Bahnsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics (1984), the Reformed seminaries – [...]
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A colleague asked me about a claim made by Michael Horton: allegedly John Calvin referred to “Christendom”—the idea that Christianity should prevail in all aspects of society—as a “contrived empire.” “Did Calvin really say that?” was the question, because, “I can’t find it anywhere.” So, I set out to see what Horton said that Calvin [...]
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A missionary in Latin America told me not long ago about the problems he has with the local Christians. He is on the board of the local seminary, and when a meeting of the board is called for a specific time and day, all the other members of the board arrive an hour later after [...]
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Students at Reformed Theological Seminary, where I was a student from 1974 to 1979, who were interested in worldview thinking first were directed to Abraham Kuyper’s 1898 Lectures on Calvinism. It was here that we were told that we would find a fully developed, comprehensive, biblical world-and-life view. Kuyper’s brand of Calvinism has been described [...]
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When I was a student at Reformed Theological Seminary (1974-1979), I was taught that certain cultural applications flowed from a consistent application of Calvinism. Calvinism is synonymous with a comprehensive biblical world-and-life view. It’s not just about TULIP (Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, Perseverance of the saints). Simply put, we were told [...]
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Reviving the Rotten Corpse of Natural Law
Filed under American History, Apologetics, Articles, Christian Worldview, Ethics, Featured, Law by Gary DeMar on July 17, 2011 at 9:25 pm {8 comments}When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas appealed to Natural Law theory in some of his legal opinions and writings, there were those on the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings in September 1991 who took exception. The most vocal critic was former Senator and now Vice President Joseph Biden. As long as Thomas defined [...]