For the most part, the critics of 2k do not care for (to put it mildly) the work or arguments of Meredith Kline (who happens to be arguably the most original and creative of Old Westminster’s faculty – and still remained theologically reliable). Those who argue for a 2k-position have generally drawn from the biblical theology of Kline. In my own case, spooked from greater investigation of the Old Testament through my boot camp in seminary Hebrew, I found my way to 2k through a New Testament scholar, J. Gresham Machen, who followed the Old School Presbyterian tradition of the spirituality of the church.
So one fault line in the contemporary debate is Kline and whether you draw from or trash his work.
The other fault line is Herman Dooyeweerd and the tradition of neo-Calvinism that he handed on to 20th-century Reformed Protestantism in the United States. Thanks to his understanding of worldview and the ascendance of neo-Calvinism among evangelical academics since 1960, Presbyterians and Reformed have lost touch with an older understanding of natural law and the two-kingdoms that was part and parcel of Reformed reflection from Calvin and Turretin to Witherspoon and Robinson. This is one of several useful points that David VanDrunen makes in his history of 2k thought in the Reformed tradition. After Dooeyweerd, arguments based on distinctions between general and special revelation, between civil and ecclesiastical realms, between Christ’s creational and mediatorial kingships sound foreign and un-Reformed. The reason is that dualism is bad.
And now to connect the dots comes a section from Meredith Kline’s Kingdom Prologue (thanks to our taller mid-western correspondent). Here we see the fault line clearly exposed even though Kline freely admits that his work is “most indebted†to the Kuyperians for developing a biblical world-and-life-view (after all, he studied with Van Til):
In backing away from the mistake of identifying the city per se with the kingdom of Satan, we must beware of backing into the opposite error of identifying it with the kingdom of God in an institutional sense, an error equally serious and even more common. In the midst of the threatening world environment to which man is exposed through the common curse, the common grace city offers the hope of a measure of temporal safety, but it does not afford eternal salvation. It should not, therefore, be identified with the holy kingdom of God, which is the structural manifestation of that salvation. . . .
Characteristically, members of [the neo-Dooyeweerdian school] have been critical of schematizations that distinguish between the city of man and the city of God. In particular, they would frown on the suggestion that the city of man is common, in the sense of non-holy. They believe that they detect a scholastic nature-grace dualism lurking in any such approach. . . . The Scriptures compel us to distinguish between the kingdom of God as realm and reign and to recognize that though everything is embraced under the reign of God, not everything can be identified as part of the kingdom fo God viewed as a holy realm.
. . . . Unfortunately, however, in a philosophical zeal for an abstract structural monism apparently, the neo-Dooyeweerdians commit themselves to a view of historical reality within which the Creator himself would not be allowed to respond to the Fall with appropriate modifications of the institutional structuring of the original creation. Specifically, he would not be free to introduce a structural dualism in which there coexisted legitimately both holy kingdom institution and non-holy institution. . . .
We must apparently assume that the neo-Dooyeweerdians are prepared to repudiate structural dualism anytime, anywhere in the divinely instituted order. Otherwise it is difficult to explain their out of hand rejection of any and all views that distinguish between the holy kingdom of God and a common sphere (including the state not identifiable as God’s kingdom as just so many examples of scholastic nature-grace dualism. But how fallacious such a stance is becomes manifest when the attempt is made to carry it through to the eschaton and apply it to the eternal abode of the damned. In dealing with the phenomenon we call hell it becomes evident how necessary it is to distinguish in God’s kingly rule between holy realm and sovereign reign. . . .
If philosophical theorizing is to remain under the control and correction of biblical revelation, the neo-Dooyweerdian assumption that all creation can be identified in monistic fashion with the kingdom-realm of God must be abandoned. . . . The sphere of the state, though not exempt from God’s rule and not devoid of the divine presence – indeed, though it is the scene of God’s presence in a measure of common blessing, is, nevertheless, not to be identified as belonging to the kingdom of God or sharing in its holiness. We may not deny to the Creator his sovereign prerogative of creative structuring and restructuring and authoritative defining and redefining. And least of all should we venture to do so in the name of honoring the universality of his kingly rule. (Kingdom Prologue, pp. 168ff)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Kline is saying that 2k is more biblical than anti-2k. He also argues that 2k does more justice to God’s sovereign rule – the Lord has the rights to create a common realm – than 2k’s critics do.
How do you like them apples?.
Old Life 