From J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (1994) Once the Revolution had been firmly identified as the first crusade of the American civil religion, it became necessary to canonise the zealots who had brought it about. The Founding Fathers, where possible, were turned… Read More→
The more committed you are to a high view of the church (teaching, worship, and government), the less concerned you are about political causes and cultural transformation. This law came back to me after reading a post that commended an article by John Frame, who was yet again singling out Mike Horton. At one point,… Read More→
As astute as these two critiques of Reagan’s civil theology are, they fail to consider one widely neglected but critical question: whether Reagan, or any American leader for that matter, should ever have called the United States the ‘city on a hill’ in the first place. Americans need not choose from among an anti-religious secularism… Read More→
If Westminster Seminary were hoping for a media bump from its decision to sue the federal government over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Affordable Care Act, they couldn’t have picked a worse day. The seminary’s press release did reach at least one Roman Catholic website, but events at the Vatican absorbed most… Read More→
When I heard reports that Benedict XVI’s butler was imprisoned for leading secret documents to the press, I was skeptical of the idea that the accused was actually locked up in a Vatican prison. Talk about a violation of two-kingdom theology. But thanks to the long and contested history of the papacy, it does turn… Read More→
Over at Matt Tuininga’s blog, the inveterate critic of 2k, Mark Van Der Molen, makes an interesting point. In response to the charge of theocracy that came from his assertion that the state needs to be subject to God’s law, he wrote: “theocracy is the merging of church and state into one power.” In other… Read More→
Scott Clark has also picked up the discussion about conservative Presbyterian influence. In what may amount to the comment of the day, he replied with the following: Influence is mediated and the the media have fragmented. There was a time when one of us might have snuck into a position of influence, when the media… Read More→
Confessional Protestants complain often about the way that partisan politics has driven the wedge between evangelicals and mainliners more than doctrinal or liturgical matters. That is why two-kingdom theology has some appeal. It prevents concerns for social-well being, which are legitimate, from undermining the identity and mission of the church (“let the church be the… Read More→
To what kingdom does New York City belong? Cutting through the redemptive historical hooey surrounding certain claims made on behalf of Manhattan Island, may we speak of New York City as a kingdom? Hardly. Even Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to restrict Big Gulps is not going to make him a divine right monarch. So, when thinking… Read More→
Protestants and Assimilation, Republican Style
One more thought about republican forms of government and what they require of believers who would be citizens. Analogies between twentieth-century France and the nineteenth-century United States suggest that Americans demanded conformity from “outsiders” in ways comparable to the French more recently. The great complaint about Roman Catholic Irish and German immigrants was that their… Read More→