Review of VanDrunen's "Living in God's Two Kingdoms"

Here's the link to a recent review of VanDrunen's outstanding book on the two kingdoms

Review of VanDrunen

Comments

[Aimee Byrd]

Great review. I loved this book, and cannot believe how much teaching was provided in 200 pages. The tone of VanDrunen's writing is friendly and respectful enough to recommend to my "transformationalist" friends. This is very helpful in tearing down steriotypes made against 2K'ers. I wish he would write another book to expand on his last chapter: Education, Vocation and Polotics--particularly on the roles among parachurch ministries. Maybe Riddlebarger will take on this task?

[Richard]

Amen to what Aimee says! This book is sooo good. I dropped what I was teaching in our adult SS class to go through this book and used some of Kline's stuff in "KIngdom Prologue" to supplement. Gave another copy to our pastor, who loves it. This is so needed in our PCA denomination to counter some of the transformationalist garbage we get.

[Alan Roebuck]

I have a question about 2K, but it will require some background explanation:

We observe that American society is seriously disordered, and becoming more so. For example, homosexuality, abortion, vulgar popular culture, increasingly tyrannical government, divorce and cohabitation, and so on. It’s not just that the incidence of disordered activity increases. The fundamental problem is that we are expected to approve of the disorder.

This is because our leaders, especially our intellectual leaders, approve of the disorder, and a nation always believes (for the most part) what its leaders say it ought to believe.

There does exist some organized opposition to the disorder, an opposition commonly called the conservative movement. But conservatism is obviously failing in its putative goal of properly re-ordering America, because the disorder is obviously spreading. The basic problem is that the leaders of conservatism mostly share the liberal premises of the Left, and they only object to some of the Left’s excesses. Organized, mainstream conservatism is only slowing down the rate at which the Left is imposing its beliefs on society.

What organized force, then, is capable of re-ordering our society? We know that a properly-ordered society (in which the disorders mentioned above exist, but are kept under control) is possible, because such societies have existed. America was relatively properly ordered until roughly the early 60’s, when the forces of disorder began to gain the upper hand.

Normal people (that is, people who are not theologically sophisticated) tend to assume that the church has a vital role to play in the re-ordering of America. The left, after all, regards Christianity as its primary enemy. And John Q. Public believes this not just because he doesn’t know about justification by faith alone and the church’s mandate to spread the uniquely Christian message of the Gospel. He believes it because he believes God has something to say about the ordering of society.

But the 2K theorists, apparently, deny this. 2K appears to say, and many people take it to mean, that Christians ought not to be involved with political efforts to resist the disorder. Many Christians, for example, opposed (or did not vote for) Proposition 8 because they felt that it is not the government’s proper business to define marriage. The argument that Prop. 8 was the government, at the direction of the people, attempting to block evildoers from officially perverting the definition of marriage apparently never occurred to them.

Non-liberal Christians generally seem to take the position that we must only spend our time in personal evangelism, and that if enough people come to faith in Christ then society will somehow spontaneously become more properly ordered. But the ordering of a society is never spontaneous. It requires deliberate action.

So my question is this: Other than the church, what organized force exists that is capable of effectively opposing the disorder? Remember, the conservative movement is obviously failing to stop, let alone reverse, the disorder. And if the answer (as appears to me) is “none,” then what does 2K say about this situation?