The Critiques of Dominion Theology
Overview
Dominion theology was always controversial and Bahnsen suffered a sustained attack over his Theonomy from its publication date in 1977; the dispute over the work eventually led to his “dismissal” from RTS.[1] However, that was a dispute over Reformed theology and localized in that movement. It was also a dispute regarding the praxis of a theological position regarding the status of the old covenant Mosaic law, a position that could legitimately claim to have formed a part of the Westminster Confession. What was “new” in the Reconstructionist program was its sociopolitical extension and the demands it made for the Christian participation in and redefinition of the entirety of culture; the quiet and unobtrusive toleration of Christianity at the behest of religious privileges granted by the state, situated at the outer limits of culture, was forcibly rejected as apostate. Consequently, it was attacked in a far more broad and systematic manner from 1987 to 1990, both from within lay Christianity and from within multidenominational seminaries. As McVicar demonstrates, these later attacks formed the basis of a critical narrative that was used in virtually every subsequent attack on Reconstructionism and dominion theology.[2]
These attacked dominionism in two main ways:
- It’s optimistic eschatology.
- It’s theonomy.
This chapter considers these in turn and evaluates whether these criticisms have proved to be intellectually successful.
Eschatological Criticism
Dominionists of the Reformed tradition, such as Rushdoony and North, were exclusively postmillennial. Most modern dominionists, with a few exceptions, are postmillennial or maintain an “operational” eschatology that approximates to postmillennialism. As described in chapter 2, postmillennialism has historically been the most controversial of the eschatological groupings, so it is of little surprise that dominionists are attacked because they are or sound like postmillennialists. House and Ice, in criticizing Reconstructionism, make the blanket statement, “One cannot be a Reconstructionist and a premillennialist.”[3] Similarly, Hal Lindsey, author of the most populist eschatological works of the 1970s and 1980s, wrote,
There used to be a group called “postmillennialists.” . . . World War I greatly disheartened this group and World War II virtually wiped out this viewpoint. No self-respecting scholar . . . today . . . is a “postmillennialist.”[4]
Lindsey attacks dominion theology at book length by directly associating its prophetic viewpoint with the rise of the Holocaust:
I believe we are witnessing a growing revival of the same false interpretation of prophecy that in the past led to such tragedy for so many centuries by a movement that calls itself either Reconstructionism, Dominionism and/or Kingdom Now.[5]
Walvoord, in a more scholarly fashion, cites the following central objections: “Postmillennialism in itself does not have the principle or method to attain a system of theology.” He then enumerates his reasoning:
- The viewpoint is “not apostolic,” thus implicitly invalid for the Christian loyal to the historic faith.
- Whitby-ism (after DanielWhitby, the “founder” of postmillennialism) was philosophically humanistic, liberal, and non-Christian.
- It is based on a subjective, figurative interpretation of prophecy.[6]
A famous and radical rejection of dominionism based on points (a) and (b) was found in Dave Hunt’s 1980s triplet Whatever Happened to Heaven, The Seduction of Christianity, and Beyond Seduction. Hunt’s thesis was that the dominion movement was adopting “worldly” aims of personal success using “carnal” methods of positive confession and self-fulfillment. These, he posited, were concepts borrowed from sociology and psychology, foreign to the classical pietism and the way of victory through suffering: “They misunderstand true victory. . .. Jesus conquers sin, death, and hell by allowing His enemies to kill Him.”[7] The kingdom for Hunt was to be considered exclusively part of a new heaven and a new earth. On this basis, it is a misdirection of Christian energy, a distraction from the true mission of the church (which is evangelism), and is ultimately a demonic seduction to engage in culture with a view to transformation:
Although the kingdom begins in the hearts of all who obey Christ as King, the outward manifestation of this kingdom will not come in its fullness until God has destroyed this present universe and created a new one into which sin will never enter.[8]
Hunt epitomized the mainstream evangelical theological reaction to dominionism. Modern evangelicalism in the 1980s was becoming increasingly dispensationalist in its commitments, and the “rapture” was a popular, publicly prominent article of faith, with many expecting the grand departure of the church in 1988.[9] This increasingly dominant stream of evangelicalism had inherited an instinctive suspicion of social programs and political involvement from the early fundamentalists, who had historically viewed it as a “distraction” from the work of evangelism. McVicar summarizes this view as representative of the belief that dominionism was a “hubristic . . . attempt to Christianize a chronically un-Christianizable world.”[10] More sophisticated critiques employing the same basic ideas were presented to the neo-evangelical[11] academy and laity by a broad coalition of liberal and moderate evangelicals:
At the turn of the century . . . Abraham Kuyper was elected prime minister of the Netherlands. His opponents voiced fears of theocratic oppression. Instead his administration was a model of tolerance and public pluralism . . . that the legitimate rights of all be fully represented. . .. If Christians today understood this distinction between the role of the private Christian citizen and the Christian in government, they might sound less like medieval crusaders.[12]
As Rushdoony had appealed directly to Kuyper for his philosophical and theological inspiration, this was a pointed attack.
Theonomical Criticisms
Neo-Evangelicals and Theonomy
The Reconstructionist belief in the continuing role of the Old Testament law as normative for the Christian provoked what North described as an “ecclesiastical war against biblical law.”[13] Coverage within both the secular and Christian press became sensationalist, with even the more scholarly attempts at rebuttal sometimes reverting to evocative images of theonomists advocating capital punishment for homosexuals, adultery, the insane, and rebellious teenagers.[14]
Much was made of Bahnsen’s view that every “jot and tittle” of the law was binding for the New Testament believer, to the extent he formally responded to it on multiple occasions in subsequent editions of theonomy and also explicated the position further with two new books during the second half of the 1980s.[15]
Within the American context, there had been the suspicion that theonomical beliefs were incompatible with constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.[16] This idea had a powerful emotive imagery for the American evangelical. The “democracy works” idiom was even articulated by charismatics who had otherwise adopted large portions of Reconstructionism’s program.[17] Theonomists were thus portrayed as anti-American and anti-democratic rather than just defective on issues of theological principle.[18] It boiled over when Billy Graham’s Christianity Today ran a cover story of an “extended exposé” on Reconstructionism, which labeled Rushdoony as a “heretic.”[19]
It was argued that “theonomists” were unevangelical because of their emphasis on law, political, and civic engagement rather than “saving souls.” This sounded very much like a recapitulation of Hunt’s criticism and the criticism of House and Ice. In other words, this was the central objection to the Reconstructionist position. The pressure from mainstream neo-evangelicalism was such that Pat Robertson denied any formal links with the movement during his presidential bid of 1988, despite having hosted Rushdoony and North numerous times during the 1980s on his flagship 700 Club.
Westminster Seminary and Theonomy
The single major attempt at a concerted academic response from within the same theological family as Reconstructionism to theonomy was attempted by Westminster Theological Seminary, where Van Til himself had taught.[20] It was ten years in the making and was thus intended and expected to be a theologically rigorous and authoritative critique of dominionism. We will evaluate this assertion in the section below when I consider the response of the dominionists to the book, but if the book can be said to have a coherent theological thrust, it is expressed with the Hunt-like appeal to piety, “[the] authority of the people of God is the authority of weakness,” which was developed in the final chapter of the book with an appeal to the theonomists for a doctrinal and political pluralism:
Such [a mix of religion and politics] warn evangelicals interested in a biblical view of society to give care to safeguard the formal principle of the Reformation. Do not mix the Gospel with an overly precise, potentially extra-biblical application of the Law . . . confusing revelation with tradition.[21]
Assessing the Criticisms
Eschatological Criticisms
We noted first that House and Ice, in criticizing Reconstructionism, made the blanket statement, “One cannot be a Reconstructionist and a premillennialist.”[22] This, on the face of it, is a categorical statement that was theologically implausible even when it was written, for we have already argued classical premillennialism was triumphant in its eschatology; and many modern premillennialists within the Word of Faith and Pentecostal movements believe in social reform and do hold the two positions in an operational sense. The most we need to concede is that the theology of these latter movements may seem muddled and unintuitive to those like Walvoord and Pentecost, critiquing it from a premillennial perspective. This is reversible logic though as the reciprocal view has also been expressed: there have been plenty of Reconstructionists like Bahnsen and Gentry who have argued it is “schizophrenic” to claim to be Reconstructionist and yet to try to cling to a premillennial dispensationalism.[23]
Both sides of the argument, then, apparently converge in agreement. Either inflection of the argument might be considered as making the same logical error, but this is mitigated because the primary theological problem is the dispensationalist element rather than the premillennial aspect. Indeed, other premillennialists have explicitly argued that premillennialism and reconstructionism are not fundamentally at odds with each other.[24] That is, for clarity, what should have been said was that “one cannot be a Reconstructionist and a modern dispensationalist,” which, as we have seen, has as one of its central distinctives an intensely pessimistic and cynical perspective regarding culture generally. Modern amillennialism might also be a better fit in this same category, with its pessimistic cultural indifference, as might some modern “prophetic” viewpoints that argue for agnosticism to sociopolitical conditions.[25] Thus, in summary, the eschatological arguments are very weak and do not prove what they claim: it is perfectly permissible to be a premillennialist and a Reconstructionist. Indeed, with the extension of dominionism into the wider evangelical consciousness, it might be argued this is now the more common position amongst the Pentecostals and Word of Faith denominations.
Next, we considered Lindsey, the very popular writer of the 1970s and 1980s, and the ad hominem assault of his that no “self-respecting” scholar would be postmillennial. It is tempting to assert that this can be simply dismissed as an ignorant insult; there are plenty of “self-respecting” scholars who have been or are postmillennial. These scholars, and I count myself amongst them, feel that the overall arc of Scripture pushes in an optimistic and victorious consummation of the church prior to the return of the Lord as King, even if the premillennial thesis has the compelling feature of biblical literalism on its side. Indeed, it could readily be argued that Lindsey’s apocalyptic prognostications of rapture and nuclear Armageddon through the 1970s and 1980s, all of which failed, render his scholarship as of insufficient quality that no “self-respecting” scholar would consider it worthy of serious attention, unless it was yet another case study in the sociological and psychological pathology surrounding the rapture and Armageddon.
However, his claim that it lends itself to antisemitism and a Jewish Holocaust requires further examination because of the seriousness of the charge. First, on Lindsey’s own admission, he was merely picking up on the speculative appendix to House and Ice (who he quoted often) that the allegorical and symbolic prophetic viewpoint lends itself to a reduction in the importance of Israel as a nation and this, in turn, has been the historical root of antisemitism and the Holocaust.[26] Firstly, this has some enormous leaps of logic, and it is hardly defensible that the “historical root” of antisemitism is principally or necessarily (in the logical sense) related to replacement theology. You can believe in replacement theology and have no animus towards the Jewish nation at all; indeed, you can conclude that evangelism of the modern state of Israel must be executed on the same basis as any other nation.
It is nonsense to assert that consistent amillennialists and postmillennialists find themselves pulled inexorably towards antisemitism; some might have been convinced by the polemics of Luther to move in that direction, but historically, antisemitism was added into Christian theology for other political or social reasons, often just an outright envy of the cultural successes of the Jews and a desire to appropriate their wealth with some pseudo-justification.[27] So, for example, Sloyan, as a Jewish intellectual and writer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, establishes definitively that the roots of modern antisemitism are ethnic and racial animosity to the Jews, the religious component growing weaker with the passing of the centuries.[28]
Anti-Jewish hatred has often centered around the perceived economic advantage of the Jews that served as the template for the broader antisemitism. Hitler assaulted the Jews because he felt, in doing so, he would protect the racial, social, and economic integrity of the German republic that he believed had been hijacked by Jewish bankers; any religious element was subsidiary and only useful as providing some kind of moral compensation for the subsequent atrocity.[29] However, and more importantly, we now have the benefit of a gap of thirty-five years to test Lindsey’s thesis that Reconstruction leads to “holocaust” and antisemitism; it has simply been shown in the years subsequent his positing of this thesis, as with his other eschatological theses considered above, to have been historically incorrect.
Whilst there are undoubtedly those who are dominionists that Lindsey presents as antisemitic in language, it seems equally true there are those who he does not mention, such as Schlissel, who are dominionists, Jewish, and have added an additional element to Reconstructionist theology that recognizes the importance of prophetic Israel.[30] In summary, Lindsey’s attack was novel and ambitious but logically tenuous and seems clearly without theological rigor:
Dispensationalists believe that the Jewish people have a title to the land that transcends virtually any other consideration. . . . The reconstructionist, on the other hand, makes a distinction. He believes that the Jewish people may exercise the title [to the land] only when they comply with the condition of repentance and faith. He has nothing against Jews living in “Eretz Yisrael” per se, but he recognizes that the far more significant question is Israel’s faith. . . . If one’s heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel agrees with the inspired Apostle’s as recorded in Romans 10, can he thereby be called antisemitic?[31]
Of more substance were the academic critiques of Walvoord. The main assertion of Walvoord was that postmillennialism “cannot attain a system of theology.” However, though argued at length by Walvoord, it has been demonstrated that it cannot be sustained on careful examination, and Walvoord’s methodology itself became questionable under critique. Bahnsen characterized Walvoord’s process as “newspaper exegesis” employing an abandonment of Reformed principles of exegesis to accommodate the “signs of the times.”[32] He returns with interest Walvoord’s dismissive theological criticism:
By means of such newspaper exegesis, one could just as well discount the return of Christ in glory, saying “where is the promise of his coming?” (cf. II Peter 3:1–4). This reductio ad absurdum must be reckoned with. The fact that an era of gospel prosperity and world peace has not yet arrived would no more disprove the Bible’s teaching that such an era shall be realized (in the power of God’s spirit and the faithfulness of Christ’s church to its great commission) than the fact that Christ has not yet returned disproves the Bible’s teaching that such an event shall take place![33]
Bahnsen then argued further at great length that there was a prima facie case to recognize postmillennialism consistently within the history of the church.
Similarly, Bahnsen, Gentry, and Rushdoony all made the case that it is just historically disingenuous to present postmillennialism as the modern aberration when dispensationalism most certainly has a history and theology that can be traced back no earlier than 1820–30.[34] Most importantly, it becomes evident that the major error of Walvoord, in seeking to ensure the cogency of his critique, is that he seems to assume a seamless transition into dispensationalism from classical premillennialism, which is emphatically not the case, as we argued in an earlier chapter. Further, Gentry has also mounted a substantive theological and exegetical defense of postmillennialism.[35] Likewise, Bahnsen and Gentry have individual and joint works where they emphasized the novel character of dispensational thought and the poor quality of scholarship as characteristic of the modern dispensational premillennialism. Taken together, this body of work has certainly met the challenge of Walvoord to present a “system of theology.”
Bahnsen is even more specific on this last point by highlighting important figures within the dispensationalist movement (Newton, Zahn, Darby) who had views that implicitly advocated an abdication of social responsibility, because it was an inevitable conclusion from their logic of an apostate Laodicean dispensation, to which the church had now entered. This became explicit with the first wave of fundamentalists denouncing it as a “distraction” from evangelism. The schism with classical premillennialism is obvious at that point; Christians were known throughout the early period of the church for both their premillennialism and their charity. There were even contemporary classical premillennialists such as Schnittger who claimed that dispensationalism had produced a deadly malaise within the arena of social and political action.[36] Schnittger, a premillennialist but also self-confessedly a Reconstructionist (and thus a living, breathing contradiction for some of Reconstruction’s critics), in a few short pages, unconsciously exposes and refutes not only the dispensationalism of House, Ice, Lindsey, and Hunt but also undermines neo-evangelicalism’s central attack that there is something inherently “unbiblical” or “unevangelical” about Reconstructionism or dominionism generally.
He elegantly makes the point that whilst he can judge the “postmils” as wanting in their allegorical use of prophecy, this does not invalidate the theological verity of their overall focus of the victory in Jesus and the increasing glory manifesting within the church as history progresses.[37] This focus, as we have also previously demonstrated, was the classical premillennialist view also.[38] Thus, an answer is also provided here to neo-evangelicalism’s view that historical optimism or triumphalism reflects an import of non-Christian psychological ideas into the church. It was rather an expression of the Reformation that reestablished the principles of vocational domains and an ever-increasing glory within the church. In the light of this overall pattern of reasoning, the bankruptcy of the dispensationalist position is seen at its worst, as we consider that the neo-evangelical analysis of Hunt effectively places the Reformers in the place of deception, for the Reformers proposed a duty and obligation upon Christians to build the kingdom and establish secular authorities that honor God’s law.[39]
However, some academic criticism is worthy of further attention. We must recognize the validity of Riddlebarger’s qualification that there are issues of nomenclature that postmillennialists tend to minimize in order to claim many who may be more historically judged to have been amillennialists.[40] The obvious cases of questionable appropriation here are Augustine and the early reformers, Luther and Calvin.[41]
This tendency is clearly seen in Bahnsen’s essays, the work of Kik, and that of Boettner.[42] However, taking a step back, the debatable ascriptions can furnish further proof for our argument rather than detracting from it. The argument we have made is that there was a shift in thinking for both premillennialists and amillennialists away from their historical positions, emphasizing victory to culturally pessimistic and spiritually pietistic ones. Riddlebarger has correctly identified this change, but it does not defeat the central concept that the victorious mode of thinking now associated with postmillennialism had historical precedent within the history of the church, and in those figures especially. Bahnsen, for example, does an exceptional job in indicating the victorious expectation of a world subdued by the gospel in Calvin, regardless of whether his final status is better considered as amillennial.
We consider next the neo-evangelical Colson’s attack on the dominionists, which was a stream well represented both within the academy and the popular Christian press. Firstly, Colson had a rhetorical pattern like that of Hunt, a fellow neo-evangelical, who we have mentioned earlier in the discussion. He had wanted to consolidate the impression within mainstream traditional evangelicalism of Reconstructionism as extreme and undemocratic. This clearly had traction amongst a section of the target readership of Christianity Today. It is also clear that there were evangelicals, charismatics, and Pentecostals who were initially persuaded by Jimmy Swaggart’s concurrent accusation of Reconstructionism as “liberation theology in disguise.” There were, and still are, those who fix an unscalable wall between religion and politics and whose faith is incidental to their “secular” activities.
Yet, Swaggart’s condemnation of Reconstructionism seemed anachronistic, even as he made it, as his fellow charismatic and Pentecostal ministers were increasingly and actively embracing dominionism. He himself had even inadvertently recommended Gary DeMar’s God and Government before realizing he was a postmillennial Reconstructionist. Robert Tilton’s charismatic television ministry networked, by deliberate act, thousands of charismatic ministers with the Reconstructionists through conferences and satellite technology, with North’s and Rushdoony’s work finding its way into Oral Roberts University Law School and Falwell’s Liberty University.[43]
Secondly, we have already noted that Colson’s appeal to the pluralism of Kuyper was novel and pointed, knowing the influence of Kuyper on Rushdoony, as was his important and correct distinction between the role of the private and the governmental. However, contra Colson, Rushdoony had clearly distinguished between Kuyper’s theological and political legacies. He had also very clearly understood the distinction, like Lloyd-George after him, of the role of private Christian citizen and the Christian in government.[44] Far from being a modern crusader eager to impose a theocracy, Rushdoony was family-centric and believed in a small state focused solely on its primary tasks of providing a mechanism of justice and of securing the borders of the nation. He viewed families and communities accountable to God before the state or the church. Where Rushdoony was critical of modern Western democracies, it was because of their humanism rather than democracy per se.
Similarly, Rushdoony elsewhere had argued for a Christian basis for American history and his sociological prescription for reform was not an ecclesiocratic one.[45] This was not the revival of either a Catholic or Protestant hegemony. Rather this is a full participation in the processes of governance and the progress of the humanities and the sciences. For both Rushdoony and Lloyd-George, the Christian did not cease to be a Christian because he was in government, but his Christianity had to inform his very practice within government. This is also why Kuyper, at the opening of the Free University of Amsterdam, which he had founded, famously exploded the myth of the “secular” and the “religious,” declaring, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”[46] Most pointedly, the focus of the university right from the beginning was not just on theological studies but on scientific and technological ones as well, reflecting Kuyper’s philosophy of “sphere sovereignty.”[47]
Likewise, Lloyd-George had argued vigorously through the 1960s for Christians who were both experts in their domains and scripturally literate; it was the duty and task of the Christian professional association to work out how their Christianity should affect the working of their profession.[48] It might also be said that history has simply overturned the central charge of neo-evangelicals against dominionism of heresy because of their emphasis on social and political action. In most of the new churches within areas of the world where there has been little or no representative government, the church has had to address social and political issues as much as they have had to address spiritual ones. By necessity, they have adopted aggressive political activism and the rhetoric of victory and societal change.[49]
It can even be argued that the reconfiguration of the evangelical movement, because of the influence of dominionism, has meant that neo-evangelicalism itself has tended to have become marginalized as the primary Christian voice within the explosive growth experienced by these nondenominational churches. The rapidly growing neo-Pentecostal movement and the “fifth wave” postmodern experiential churches are often informed, admittedly, in sometimes a muddled or partially formed manner, by a dominion theology that asserts sphere sovereignty and seeks to transform and reform every aspect of culture.[50] This “new wine” dominionism may lack the coherence and abrasiveness of a Rushdoony or North, with their preference for a “compassionate Reformers” mantle, but it is now the new normal for the reformer or activist, be they evangelical, charismatic, or Pentecostal. Thus, for the neo-evangelicals of the Hunt and Colson ilk, their attack was ultimately based on straw man arguments.
Theonomical Criticisms Assessed
Of much greater significance theologically was the response to theonomy. The central force of the criticisms examined previously was that theonomy represents a reversion to pre-Christian legalism and a philosophical dogmatism, with the critics appealing instead to a pluralistic epistemology derived from natural law. For Bahnsen, it was almost trivial to dismiss the first part of this charge. Legalism is the saving by works but theonomy is seen as the means of the ministration of grace for sanctification:
[They] fail to see the relevance of God’s law as the way of sanctification and as the law of men and nations. They do not recognize God’s law as God’s plan . . . for godly authority and rule in every area of life. This anti-law attitude guarantees impotence and defeat to all churches who hold it.[51]
That is, he adeptly dealt with all the criticisms leveled at him with the simple assertion that the criticisms of him were normally substantial misunderstandings of what theonomy was.[52] Theonomy had never claimed to be a way of salvation but was the way of sanctification. Both Bahnsen and Rushdoony had anticipated this mode of criticism and had thoroughly refuted it in advance.[53]
The second part of the criticism was also swiftly dealt with. It is important to recognize that theonomy was the orthodox Reformed position held by both Luther and Calvin. Paradoxically, for the writers of Westminster’s critique of theonomy, the founder of Westminster, nearly half a century earlier, had also asserted a theonomical pretext for his belief in societal reformation:
It is perfectly clear what is wrong. The law of God has been torn up . . . and the inevitable result [what is wrong with the world] is appearing with ever greater clearness. When will the law be rediscovered?[54]
It seems the critics were chronically ill-informed or had deliberately chosen to ignore their own denominational catechisms and the epistemological foundation of their own seminary. The critique offered was anything but coherent, based on a fuzzy natural-law epistemology, as
McDade also observes,
Van Til was no pioneer in the field of ethics; he was simply restating the Reformed Faith of the Heidelberg Catechism . . . and the Westminster Larger Catechism.[55]
Bahnsen, in contrast, had understood the implications of Van Til’s philosophy and the logical outworkings of Westminster’s founding principles. This is evidenced by the fact that Van Til had recognized him as his most able student and had wanted him to succeed him at Westminster.
Bahnsen simply extended logically Van Til’s restatement of the Reformed hermeneutic to the civil realm using Rushdoony’s framework.[56] This he elaborated in the preface to his second edition of Theonomy, stating that when he spoke of the “jot and the tittle” of the law, he was not “requiring observance of ancient cultural details” but was applying the primary Reformed exegetical procedure that it is the underlying principles of the law, which “has abiding ethical validity.”[57] This sense of “jot and tittle” is the Van Tillian axiom that every sphere and aspect of humanity’s existence is subject to the law and jurisdiction of God as his creation: “All the facts of nature and of history are what they are, do what they do, and undergo what they undergo, in accord with the one comprehensive counsel of God.”[58]
An autonomous realm of humankind is antithetical to the Reformed faith. Thus, theonomy, understood philosophically, is the theological, logical, and temporal continuity between all Scripture and all human life. That is, if someone consistently follows the logic of Scripture, the same conclusions about the implications of the law for Christian ethics can be arrived at by those not sharing the denominational Reformed heritage. Thus, Cope, one of the founders of YWAM, stated it thus:
In Matthew 5 Jesus makes it clear that the entire Old Testament is the foundation for his message and his actions. . . . We do not reinterpret the Old Testament with the New, nor the New with the Old, but rather see them as a four-thousand-year line of thought that God is building. . . . In other words, greatness in the kingdom of God is being able to marry and live both Old and New Testament values. The Old Testament emphasizes nations and how we live together as a community here on earth, and the New Testament emphasizes the individual, salvation, and reaching the lost for a future in heaven. These must be married to see God and his kingdom clearly. . . . There is only one place to go in order to understand the specific definitions God gave to these terms. We must go to the law of Moses and the rest of the Old Testament. In Scripture, God has given us a set of values by which to measure and correct our own personal and cultural definitions of reality.”[59]
This is precisely what Bahnsen meant when he considered the law as the means of sanctification—the correction of our own personal and cultural definitions of reality.
Summary and Concluding Remarks
From a theological perspective, each of the criticisms we considered above appear to reduce to a variation on the classic fundamentalist position that somehow political involvement will “contaminate” the gospel message and Christians should avoid such involvement for that reason. Stated in that fashion, it should be clear that such a position is prima facie unacceptable and unscriptural; believers are called to be salt and light, and to “occupy [do the business of governing on my behalf] till [I, Jesus] come.”[60] It is also true that virtually no major Christian thinkers in history have maintained that position and others, such as Machen and Finney, with very different theologies, have argued passionately against it; the withdrawal of the fundamentalist movement from the wider culture was an aberration in Christian history.
We can see that neither the attacks on the eschatology nor the attacks on the theonomy of dominionism were anywhere close to definitive or were even of sufficient force to undermine support for the movement. In fact, to the frustration of many critics, the controversy had the side effect of raising the awareness of mainstream evangelicalism to dominionism and disseminating its ideas even more widely, as “softer” versions more acceptable to the evangelical community developed. Thus, consequently, in the contemporary milieu, it is rare for the term “Reconstructionism” to be used, but its ideas and programs are very much alive.
When it came to Westminster’s decade-in-the-making “critique” of theonomy, we must concur first with North that Westminster’s attempts at refutation were simply the “worst writing” by any of the seminary staff who contributed to the book; second, with McDade in asserting that it simply showed they were not prepared to engage seriously with the political and social implications of their own historical Reformed heritage. The latter had been restated with logical clarity by their institutional founder and their first professor of apologetics, and worked out in detail sociologically by their finest students of a generation.[61] It is now a historical fact that none of critiques of dominion theology that it included proved persuasive to any but the most partisan of reader. Theologically and rhetorically, the Reconstructionists had anticipated the criticisms and answered them quickly and forcibly in print. This academic response to Westminster’s “critique” was of a far more rigorous and researched quality, as evidenced by the editors’ extended rebuttal and exposure of the former’s poor academic quality.[62]
However, that was not to say that the decade and a half of ferocious criticism had no consequences. Bahnsen was never to teach within a Reformed seminary after his dismissal, becoming an independent scholar and starting his own study center. After his premature death, some new colleges and seminaries did attempt to continue his legacy, and some of his most notable students are working today in Reformed contexts derived from those new institutions. The most noticeable, more general negative effects of the level of publicity generated by the criticisms were for some to disassociate from what were considered the most “extreme” of Reconstructionist views, with leaders such as the elder Schaeffer and Falwell failing to give the Reconstructionists any credit for the platform built on their foundation. Thus, it accentuated the differences between Reformed and the evangelical dominion theologies of, say, Wagner, with the latter clearly attempting to publicly distance themselves from the more controversial theonomical language, such as “theocracy” or “ecclesiocracy,” and to adopt a softer idiom, even if these terms were being commonly misrepresented and misunderstood by the critics.
Nevertheless, in summary, the dominionist arguments have proved persuasive, survived, and thrived through the criticism. It should again be accepted that society cannot be changed or improved without political engagement and representation of the Christian view in the organs of power and at all the different levels of governance, from school, local community, county, state, and parliament. It is to how the Christian should engage that we now turn, with the help of the most distinguished British intellectual evangelical of the post-WWII period, Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones (d. 1981), recognized as one of the finest expositional preachers ever. We develop our political philosophy with his assistance in the next chapter, and we demonstrate the scriptural basis for our involvement.
[1] Technically, Bahnsen was not dismissed, his contract was just not renewed—RTS, at the time, employed everyone on single-year contracts; but it was exceptionally unusual to be terminated outside of misconduct. Bahnsen had even been an associate professor there as a postgraduate student studying for a PhD from 1976; he graduated with his PhD in 1978 and was “dismissed” in 1979. His academic record was exceptional, and he was a gifted teacher; there were clearly deeper reasons. His own initially private and extensive account of what happened is found here: Bahnsen, “What Really Happened.”
[2] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 203–5.
[3] House and Ice, Dominion Theology, 7.
[4] Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth, 164–65. Emphasis added.
[5] Lindsey, Road to Holocaust, 25.
[6] Walvoord, “Millennium Issue,” 23.
[7] Hunt, Beyond Seduction, 262. A similar thought has been restated recently in Stark, Prophets, Politics, and Nations.
[8] Hunt, Beyond Seduction, 224.
[9] This was based on a specific interpretation of Matt 24:32–34. The “fig tree” is taken to symbolize the nation of Israel. The phrase “becomes tender and puts out leaves” refers to the reformation of the nation, which occurred in 1948. A “generation” in Israel was forty years, so the generation that sees the reformation of the state of Israel was the rapture generation—impeccable and full of prophetic insight, but catastrophically incorrect.
[10] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 206.
[11] The distinction between “neo-evangelical” and “post-evangelical” is examined in appendix A.
[12] Colson, “Power Illusion,” 34.
[13] North and DeMar, Christian Reconstruction, xiii.
[14] Yurica, “Despoiling of America”; Longman, “God’s Law,” 41, 44; House and Ice, Dominion Theology, 63–64.
[15] House and Ice, Dominion Theology, 20, 103. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, the theonomical thesis originated with Rushdoony, but Bahnsen was the foremost exegete of it. Though the Tyler split initially affected the relationship between the two men, Bahnsen was later to consolidate his relationship with Chalcedon and Rushdoony. He was one of the few within the movement to have the standing to criticize Gary North of “logical fallacy” (Bahnsen, “Another Look at Chilton’s Days of Vengeance”) without a ferocious response from North.
Bahnsen’s second edition of Theonomy appeared in 1984, seven years after the first edition; he added a lengthy second preface as a response to his critics, xi–xxxiii. He was to publish much longer rebuttals as By This Standard (1985) and No Other Standard (1991); the latter dealt more directly with the critics, the former was more of a lay summary of the academic Theonomy; however, in the foreword to the former, he mentions the latter, so there was a considerable delay in publication probably because of the drama surrounding his work and his struggles with his denomination.
His magnum opus was his Van Til’s Apologetic, an extensive commentary on and readings from Van Til, which was completed shortly before his untimely death in 1995; it appeared in 1998. A further posthumous work Presuppositional Apologetics was in proofing when he passed and remained “lost” for over thirty years, only being rediscovered behind a filing cabinet when his office was cleared some sixteen years after his death. This was published in 2008 and was a development of chapters 10 and 11 of the multiauthored work Foundations of Christian Scholarship of 1976.
As these essays were written at the beginning of the controversy over his work, and Bahnsen worked on them as he went through the various controversies and emerged out the other side, the final editor of the manuscript viewed it as Bahnsen’s most important work, the systematic interpretation of Van Til he had sought to bring out in the Apologetic (Presuppositional Apologetics, vii). On this point, Van Til considered Bahnsen to be the best representative of his position, and he was certainly the most rigorous philosophical and theological defender of the Reconstructionist positions.
[16] In the contemporary context, the debate regarding Islam would appear to be significant and relevant here. Some are arguing very publicly for “secularism” in the public square as the only legitimate option to preserve Western values in countries that have allowed mass immigration from Muslim nations. Islam is very publicly both a religious and a political system; if Muslims become a majority in a country, they will dispense with democracy and minority rights as a matter of principle (for more on this, see Ali, Heretic, especially the chapters “Why Has There Been No Muslim Reformation,” “How Islam’s Harsh Religious Code Keeps Muslims Stuck in the Seventh Century,” and “Jihad”; Ali, Prey, especially “Part 3: Clashing Civilizations, Revisited”; and Kassam, No Go Zones). The only obligation a Muslim has is to submit to the revealed word of God in the Qur’anic scriptures (this is the literal meaning of “Islam”).
It is easy to confuse this with the theonomical position because is this not just what the Christian theonomists are arguing, the primacy of the old covenant law in the matters of jurisprudence? However, the content of the old covenant Scriptures given to Israel clearly delineate representational government and God exhorts his people to “govern themselves” in civil matters. It is in the practice of the religious cult where God declares and there is no debate.
[17] Wagner, On Earth, 11–16.
[18] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 202–5.
[19] Clapp, “Democracy as Heresy.” Graham was still actively involved in the magazine at this point, and this condemnation would have appeared authoritative to many evangelicals unsure about the movement.
[20] Barker and Godfrey, Theonomy, 10.
[21] Davis, “Challenge to Theonomy,” 398–99.
[22] House and Ice, Dominion Theology, 7.
[23] Bahnsen and Gentry, House Divided.
[24] Schnittger, “Christian Reconstruction.”
[25] Stark, Prophets, Politics, and Nations. A critical response to this perspective was the basis of my Politics.
[26] House and Ice, Dominion Theology, 397.
[27] Macneil, “Rise of Christian Anti-Semitism,” para 5. A point I make in the introduction to this essay is that it is unlikely Luther would have intended his words to have been used as a justification for outright persecution and the killing of Jews. Both himself and Calvin felt that the Papist recourse to violence was one of the elements the Reformation needed to separate itself from and that there should be a degree of religious toleration, especially towards the Jews. It is true that they might have failed in their commitment to non-violence when trying to deal with the Anabaptists, and other dissident “radical Reformation” groups, but the point remains that it was highly unlikely that Luther intended his words to be misused in that way or the way that national socialism had exploited them.
[28] Sloyan, Christian Persecution.
[29] The popularity of the fictional Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), alleging that there was a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to control the world, was not limited to Russia, where it first appeared, but was popularized by some European and US industrialists (such as Henry Ford, whose “assembly line” was inspirational for Hitler), thus lending it credibility, despite it being quickly discredited as a forgery.
[30] Schlissel, “Reconstructionism,” 56–61.
[31] Schlissel, “Reconstructionism,” 59.
[32] Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, 7, 96.
[33] Bahnsen, “Calvin and Postmillennialism,” 10.
[34] Bahnsen, “Calvin and Postmillennialism,” 7; MacPherson, The Rapture Plot, viii.
[35] Gentry, He Shall Dominion.
[36] Schnittger, Christian Reconstruction, 9–10. This was originally a radio program pamphlet intended for a self-study group.
[37] Schnittger, Christian Reconstruction, 6. Recent work by “postmils,” such as Gentry and Mathison, is of a much higher exegetical quality.
[38] Schnittger, Christian Reconstruction, 13.
[39] It is of note that Hunt wrote a number of works directly attacking Calvin as a “tyrant” and Calvinism as misrepresenting God, principally What Love Is This? He had modern dominionism in mind as he wrote them; indeed, according to the back matter, it was why he wrote it.
[40] Riddlebarger, “Princeton and the Millennium.”
[41] It might seem strange to assert that the early Reformers were his putative heirs with a gap of around a thousand years between them, but as Pawson, in his Seminars (audio), notes, Calvin might “merely” have been conceived of “writing down the theology of Augustine in a systematic manner” (Pawson, “Grace—Saving, Sovereign, and Free,” 24:00–31:00). See also “Assessing Postmillennialism,” 28.
[42] Bahnsen, “Calvin and Postmillennialism”; Bahnsen, “Prima Facie Acceptability of Postmillennialism”; Kik, Eschatology of Victory, 3–15; Boettner, Postmillennialism, loc. 162.
[43] North, Unholy Spirits, 392.
[44] Beyond the commentary below, we consider in some depth the work of Lloyd-George in our chapter on the philosophy of Christian involvement.
[45] This being his chief distinctive from Gary North’s reconstructionism, who broke with Rushdoony on this issue amongst others. See “Schism and Reformation,” 86.
[46] Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 488 (emphasis original); a very brief but informative history is found on the university website at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “History.”
[47] This is clearly exposited in his Lectures on Calvinism (1898) and an essay in Bratt’s Centennial Reader, “Sphere Sovereignty.”
[48] Lloyd-George, Romans: Exposition of Chapter 13.
[49] North, Unholy Spirits, 388–89.
[50] Birch-Machin, Speakers of Life, 16; Coates, Kingdom Now!, 18.
[51] Rushdoony, God’s Plan for Victory loc. 200.
[52] Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, xx–xxvii.
[53] Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, 89, 297, 499.
[54] Machen, “Importance of Christian Scholarship,” 91.
[55] McDade, “Problem with Christian Reconstruction,” 2. Emphasis added.
[56] Hence, the significance that Rushdoony wrote the preface to Bahnsen’s Theonomy in 1971, though it never appeared until 1977. There was clearly an ongoing conversation between them. See North, Theonomy, 17.
[57] Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, xiv–xv.
[58] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 127.
[59] Cope, God and Political Justice, loc. 306, 484, 1190, 1199.
[60] See the discussion in the preface exegeting this term and justifying this amplification of the translation, xiii-xiv.
[61] North, Theonomy, 11, 321–22. It is also of note that the publisher favored by the seminary declined to publish the work, and a non-Reformed publishing house associated with the neo-evangelical movement was used.
[62] North, Theonomy. It is also noteworthy that it took less than a year for North to publish this collection of essays in contrast to the decade it took for the seminary to publish the critique.