“I don’t read books, I write them.†The first time I said that I knew it didn’t sound good. And that was the point because it was actually more a joke on me than on those who haven’t written books. Historians do not write because they are necessarily wise. And the way historians write means that they have less time to read books they would prefer to ponder. Too often I’ve spent an evening with an Edwards, Buswell, Bushnell, or Beecher and had to pass on Epstein, Berry, Machen or Meilaender. Even worse, sometimes I’ve had to read what I’ve written.
Current duties – a volume on the history of the OPC to commemorate the denomination’s 75th anniversary – forced me to take a look at a piece written about a decade ago on Orthodox Presbyterians and secularization. It was entitled, “Reconciling Two Kingdoms and One Lord: Twentieth-Century Conservative Presbyterians and Political Liberalism in the United States,†and presented at a conference at the Vrijgemaakt seminary in Kampen sponsored by the Archives of the Free University.
The conclusion is reprinted below may complicate perceptions that the editors of the NTJ are not sufficiently on board with Vos and Van Til. What is even more interesting than the views of the editors is that Vos and Van Til can be read against each other, at least when it comes to understanding the saeculum.
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>. . . the OPC relied upon three separate doctrinal strands to maintain the integrity of the church and her witness in the face of political liberalism and its secularizing effects. First, J. Gresham Machen bequeathed to the OPC the Southern Presbyterian tradition of the spirituality of the church which put limits on church power while also preventing it from intervention in spheres beyond its domain, such as politics. Second, John Murray outlined the implications of divine sovereignty for public life when he affirmed the church’s duty to speak on civic affairs because God had ordained both the church and the magistrate and so ruled over each. Finally, Cornelius Van Til worked out the inferences of the sufficiency of Scripture when he asserted that Christ’s lordship over all things made the Bible relevant for all walks of life. These three doctrines have greatly shaped the way that American Calvinists have reacted to the de-Christianization of American society, as the example of the OPC demonstrates. Furthermore, the way Orthodox Presbyterians applied these doctrines appeared to vary according to whose interests or territory were at stake. When they needed to defend the prerogatives of the church or the independence of Christian schools, Orthodox Presbyterians have relied upon the sort of logic that undergirded Machen’s defense of the church’s spiritual mission. But when American society appeared to be growing more tolerant of immorality, usually defined on pietist terms that sees godlessness in certain forms of immoral behavior, then Orthodox Presbyterians turned to notions about God’s sovereignty or the Bible’s relevance to all walks of life for the work of the church and also for the regulation of public life.
This explanation of the theology at work in Orthodox Presbyterian responses to the secularization of American politics reveals that Reformed teaching on politics as it played out among conservative Presbyterians has not been sorted through systematically. Although political liberalism represents a tradition of state craft quite compatible with the separation of religious and public spheres implied by sphere sovereignty — a notion very similar to the spirituality of the church — American Calvinists have generally regarded the reduction of religious references in public life and the prevalence of certain kinds of worldliness in society as a betrayal of both divine sovereignty and biblical authority. Although God was still sovereign and the Bible was still true when Christ suffered the unjust penalty of dying on the cross, for the Orthodox Presbyterian sampled here the proof of God’s rule and biblical authority is only substantially compelling when righteousness and divine truth prevail in civic life. In other words, despite knowing cognitively that different standards apply for the city of God, i.e., the church, and the city of man, i.e., the state, the doctrines of divine sovereignty and biblical sufficiency have tended to take precedence over sphere sovereignty and the spirituality of the church. As such, conservative North American Calvinists like those in the OPC have often demanded from the state the same kind of obedience and truthfulness that Christ requires of his bride. . . .
. . . perhaps the most significant doctrine in the OPC’s theological arsenal for coping with secularization and political liberalism may be the Vossian one that teaches about the gradual and varied unfolding of redemptive history. If, as biblical theologians have argued, the church in the period between Christ’s first and second advents is a pilgrim people, wandering in the wilderness until Christ leads them upon his return into the promised land of the new heavens and the new earth, then Orthodox Presbyterians like pastor Davison could legitimately have thought about his life in places like New Jersey more like Midge Decter thought of hers in St. Paul. In his comments on the epistle to the Hebrews, Orthodox Presbyterian theologian, Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., builds upon the insights of Geerhardus Vos to argue that the eschatology of the New Testament implies that “there is no ‘golden’ age coming that is going to replace or even ameliorate these desert conditions of testing and suffering.†Gaffin adds that “no success of the Gospel, however great, will bring the church into a position of earthly prosperity and dominion such that the wilderness with its persecutions and temptations will be eliminated or marginalized.†This eschatological reality means that as long as Christ is absent from the church, her “final rest†cannot be located in temporal or earthly conditions. For this reason, the situation of Protestants in the United States is actually more similar to that of Jewish Americans than that of the founding fathers or the Puritans who set out to make America a “city on a hill.†In which case, if Orthodox Presbyterians had reflected on and followed the insights of Vos for public life, they might have come to evaluate political liberalism and secular society less like nativist Americans and more like immigrants to the United States.
Adult Sunday school students at Calvary OPC (Glenside) had the privilege of hearing Richard M. Gamble, an Orthodox Presbyterian elder at Hillsdale OPC and historian at Hillsdale College speak on the appeal of the “city on a hill†in American civil religion. Lest some think the lesson promoted mixing biblical metaphors with America’s civic faith, Gamble indicated his own discomfort with efforts to underwrite earthly powers with a redemptive purpose. For those who missed the lecture, the following is a quotation from Gamble’s book, War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation:
