That is funny. Somewhere Art Linkletter is smiling to himself like a Cheshire cat.

But from what I recall in my Early Childhood Development courses, preschoolers have an excuse: they are in the throes of a brutal concreteness. It’s part of what makes mine such (relatively) good catechumen. But one wonders what explanation big people have. Smile, it’s a joke.

Trace the word CAN below. Then write the word once in each space below

CAN
once
once
once
once
once

The literalist apple falls close to the tree, no?

JRC

One of the ways this came up in your last comment is your assertion that you think the Decalogue applies to everyone and 2k does not. Well, actually, 2k believes the decalogue does apply to everyone — it condemns the unrigheous (2nd use), and it provides a guide for the saved (3rd use). I’m willing to allow the magistrate to use the decalogue, though I’m not sure I’d want to live in that polity. But I would never think that the magistrate was using the law for gracious ends. It would be a standard for judgment and justice. It would not be a means of grace and forgiveness.

I think that is the biggest mistake of your conflation — to think that the magistrate is doing something Christian by meeting out justice. The covenant of grace has never been about law and justice. If it were, it would be the covenant of works.

I suppose I am still unsatisfied with the principled difference between “filtering for consistency” (you) and “RPWing all of life” (Bahnsen). I rather conceive our charge as believers to be (imperfect) covenant-keepers with lives structured by the explicit and clear stipulations of the moral law.

Maybe I’m just this side of cynical after a worship committee meeting today with some from the campus, but I’m not sure Calvin College should be the litmus for Calvinism; but I get your point and appreciate it.

It has been fun. I think you’ve been a good sport in all this. 2K is at odds with most default settings, if you ask me, and can be an acquired taste for most.

Be good and stay well.

My shot clock has expired, and I must return to civilian life.

Thank you for your patient endurance of my questions and challenges. In the immortal words of Bob Lynn, I’ve been the “little dog gnawing on your ankles – rrr, rrr, rrr.”

I’m taking away two things:

(1) A greater appreciation for the underlying motivations of REPT — the desire to uphold the Gospel without the need for physical props in this world; the desire for the Church to be the Church; a genuine concern about the implications of transformationalism and its aggressive cousin theonomy.

(2) A better (but still incomplete) understanding of the arguments underpinning REPT.

I’ve hoped to communicate two things:

(1) The question, “What does the Christian magistrate do with himself?” is the money question.

(2) There need not necessarily be two poles of answers – theonomy or else REPT.

This dialog has been challenging, but I’m walking away with a greater sense of rapport with you than I began with.

Grace and peace to you, and God’s blessings on your ministry.

Jeff Cagle

At no point have I called your general “Calvinist” credentials into question. From here, you seem at least as Calvinist as many at Calvin college. I have disputed the “paleoCalvinist” label because it seems to mislead wrt Calvin’s views of the state.

But I consider myself a Calvinist and disagree with Calvin’s views of the state, in part. In fact, I think Calvin’s thoughts on the magistrate contain a hiccup that requires disagreement somewhere.

You two are certainly Calvinist as far as I can see.

JRC

Zrim: But my question to you is this: if everything must justified by its “being consistent with Scripture”…But I still want to know how you justify being an American by scriptural inference when Scripture no where says, for example …

There’s a confusion here about what “being consistent with” means. Let’s take for a moment the Gordon Clark thesis that Scripture is mostly propositional (I don’t buy this for an instant, but it’s a helpful model for understanding what follows). Let’s say for simplicity that Scripture teaches X, Y, and Z.

Then, any propositions that do not contradict X, Y, or Z are “consistent with Scripture.”

So if Scripture says nothing about being an American, and says nothing that is contradicted by being an American, then being an American is “consistent with Scripture.”

What you were on about was something stronger: everything must be justified by positive propositions from Scripture. But if that were the case, we couldn’t use telephones or do math. I think we agree that that’s silly; it is the RPW applied meticulously to all of life.

So being “consistent with Scripture” is not a justifying move for me, but a filter — anything inconsistent with Scripture is rejected.

JRC