Theonomy: Sanctified by Law reconstructionism; or the Tower of Babel
Theonomy reaches to the Christian’s personal life and then to the nations of the world through the church’s work and witness.
On the personal level, reconstructionism strikes a welcome note against the antinomianism inherent in much of modern evangelicalism, particularly in dispensationalism. But it goes too far.
According to Rushdoony, “Man’s justification is by the grace of God in Jesus Christ; man’s sanctification is by means of the law of God” (Institutes of Biblical Law, p. 4). Again, “The law is the way of sanctification” (p. 3). These statements set law as the antithesis of grace. They present a theory of sanctification that is not by grace but by works of law. (Alan Cairns, Dictionary of Theological Terms (Belfast; Greenville, SC: Ambassador Emerald International, 2002), 367.)
Theonomy: A Critical Assessment with Lane G. Tipton
Theonomy in its contemporary form was just beginning to emerge as Van Til’s career was ending. Bahnsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics did not appear until five years after Van Til’s retirement in the Spring of 1972. Therefore Van Til has no public account which permits us to determine how he evaluated Theonomy.
This surely accounts in part for the fact that both Theonomy and its detractors claim to be influenced by Van Til. The matters which we have considered indicate that, in our judgment, Van Til would have distinguished himself from Theonomy. Indeed, in private communication, Van Til indicated reticence to be associated with Theonomic ethics, at least insofar as it was manifest in his day:
Then too I am frankly a little concerned about the political views of Mr. Rushdoony and Mr. North and particularly if I am correctly informed about some of the views Gary North has with respect to the application of Old Testament principles to our day.
My only point is that I would hope and expect that they would not claim that such views are inherent in principles which I hold. Letter to C. Gregg Singer, May 11, 1972, procured from the archives at Westminster Seminary.
T. David Gordon, “Van Til and Theonomic Ethics,” in Creator Redeemer Consummator: A Festschrift for Meredith G. Kline, ed. Howard Griffith and John R. Muether (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 277.
To comfort [those who mourn: its interpretation], to make them understand all the ages of t[ime] …
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,”
“He has not merely read the scripture; as King’s messenger he has turned it into a royal proclamation of majesty and release.”
His sacrifice has introduced the age of the Holy Spirit, when all acceptable worship must be spiritual, that is, Spirit-inspired (John 4:23–24; Phil. 3:3), and the ‘spiritual sacrifices’ of Christians (1 Pet. 2:5; cf. Rom. 15:16) include acts of worship, such as praise and prayer (Heb. 13:15; Rev. 5:8; 8:3),
but also acts of witness and service, such as evangelism, gifts to the ministry and gifts to the poor (Rom. 15:16–17; Phil. 4:18; Heb. 13:16), and comprehensive attitudes and expressions of devotion, such as faith (Phil. 2:17), the consecration of one’s life to the will of God (Rom. 12:1) and the laying down of one’s life for the sake of the gospel (Phil. 2:17; 2 Tim. 4:6; Rev. 6:9).
The priests who present these sacrifices are those who give them, i.e. Christians (1 Pet. 2:5, 9; cf. also Is. 61:6; Rom. 15:17; Rev. 1:6; 5:10; 20:6), and the sanctuary where they present them is not the temple in Jerusalem, but heaven, to which after the rending of the veil, those who are in the Spirit already have access (John 4:21–24; Heb. 10:19–25).
R. T. Beckwith, “Sacrifice,” in New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, ed. T. Desmond Alexander and Brian S. Rosner, electronic ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 761.
‘Seventy weeks are decreed … to finish the transgression’.
Nevertheless, consistently with sound faith, one may take it to be the godless city as opposed to the city of God, men and women without faith as opposed to those who believe.
How should such Men be Mistaken? which is a poor Argument; and a great Reproach it is to such Persons:
For their Faith, it seems, stands in the Wisdom of Men, and not in the Power of God, or certain Testimony of his holy Word.
Benjamin Keach, The Ax Laid to the Root, Parts I & II (London: John Harris, 1693).
To begin with, since Christians were living in expectation of the end of the world, they had neither the inclination nor the ability to initiate an ethical renewal of a world which seemed to be doomed for destruction.
As the years passed, however, everyday problems required with ever increasing urgency a Christian answer from the churches. However, the ethical directives of Jesus—the only materials of their own with which the Christians could supply the need—by no means covered all the areas of life and culture for which decisions had to be made. (Martin Dibelius and Heinrich Greeven, James: A Commentary on the Epistle of James, Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 3–4.)
For most early Christians from the NT era onward, the law of Moses was in some respects obsolete, and hence no longer binding, at least not in the same manner as it was before the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ (Melito).
To read the vast sweep of Torah regulations as if they were all still to be carried out literally was to commit a—or perhaps even the—capital hermeneutical error, inasmuch as to do so would be a failure to grasp the pivotal significance of the paschal event, and its aftershock, the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, for the divine economy of salvation.
Patristic authors were also inclined to underline both the limited aims and the limited efficacy of the law’s pedagogy. With respect to its aims, the morality promoted by the law was imperfect when compared to that required by the law of Christ (Ambrose).
For instance, Tertullian notes how the Mosaic law allowed for vengeance while the new law of Christ promotes peace. The law of Moses’ aims were also soteriological limited. God did not give the law in order to justify (Augustine) or to foster faith (Ambrosiaster, comm. in Gal. 3.12).
Cyril of Alexandria offers one of the most thorough patristic accounts of the manifold salvific goods that the law could not pretend to provide:
true knowledge and vision of God, intimate access to God’s presence, and sanctification.
B. Lee Blackburn Jr, “Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation, ed. Paul M. Blowers and Peter W. Martens, First Edition (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 563,564.
How infinitely does the glorious Gospel of God transcend the impoverished thoughts and schemes of men! How immeasurably superior is that “everlasting righteousness” which Christ has brought in (Dan. 9:24) from that miserable thing which multitudes are seeking to produce by their own efforts.
called everlasting, or the righteousness of ages, of ages past; the righteousness by which the saints in all ages from the beginning of the world are justified; and which endures, and will endure, throughout all ages, to the justification of all that believe; it is a robe of righteousness that will never wear out; its virtue to justify will ever continue, being perfect; it will answer for the justified ones in a time to come, and has eternal life connected with it;
But Israel is saved by the LORD
with everlasting salvation;
you shall not be put to shame or confounded
to all eternity. Is 45:17.
Trust in the LORD forever,
for in the LORD GOD
you have an everlasting rock. Is 26:4.
John Gill, An Exposition of the Old Testament, vol. 6, The Baptist Commentary Series (London: Mathews and Leigh, 1810), 344.
Greater far is the difference between the shining light of the midday sun and the blackness of the darkest night, than between that “best robe” (Luke 15:22) which Christ has wrought out for each of His people and that wretched covering which zealous religionists are attempting to weave out of the filthy rags of their own righteousness
It is not that the justified soul is now left to himself, so that he is certain of getting to Heaven no matter how he conducts himself—the fatal error of Antinomians.
No Indeed. God also imparts to him the blessed Holy Spirit, who works within him the desire to serve, please, and glorify the One who has been so gracious to Him.
“The love of Christ constraints us … that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again” (2 Cor. 5:14, 15). They now “delight in the law of God after the inward man” (Rom. 7:22), and though the flesh, the world, and the Devil oppose every step of the way, occasioning many a sad fall—which is repented of, confessed, and forsaken—
nevertheless the Spirit renews them day by day (2 Cor. 4:16) and leads them in the paths of righteousness for Christ’s name’s sake. (Arthur Walkington Pink, The Doctrine of Justification (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2005).
Theistic arguments are at best like the law that convicts but cannot save. They cannot lead anyone to salvation apart from the gospel of Christ (Rom. 10:13–17). The Canons of Dort link the “light of nature” with “the law,” and then state,
“What therefore neither the light of nature, nor the law could do, that God performs by the operation of the Holy Spirit through the Word or ministry of reconciliation, which is the glad tidings concerning the Messiah, by means whereof it hath pleased God to save such as believe, as well under the Old, as under the New Testament.”
Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology: Revelation and God, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 241.
sensus divinitatis: sense of the divine; viz., a basic, intuitive perception of the divine existence; it is generated in all persons through their encounter with the providential ordering of the world. The sensus divinitatis is therefore the basis both of pagan religion and of natural theology.
Because of the fall, the religion that arises out of this sense of the divine, or seed of religion (semen religionis,), is idolatrous and incapable of saving or of producing true obedience before God.
Our sensus divinitatis, thus, is capable only of leaving us without excuse in our rejection of God’s truth.
Then only and only so long is it regenerate as it follows the light of the Word, and judges concerning the mysteries of the faith, not by its own principles, but by the Scriptures.
Common Sense Philosophy was for a time (until about 1850) a distinctively national philosophy. It had a great appeal to many Scottish ministers who liked its emphasis on intuitive principles and self-evident truth. Both moderates and evangelicals in the Church of Scotland readily espoused it and saw it as a powerful tool against skepticism.
They held that God planted self-evident truth in man.
Indeed, some went on to say that God was one of the self-evident truths. That God exists is a self-evident truth that any rational person, not blinded by prejudice, would accept.
Therein is the weakness of the theory. Where in all the world is there an unregenerate man not blinded by his own sin?Totally depraved men have their understanding darkened. The light that is in them is darkness.
The principles the Realists sought to establish were real enough, but not self-evident to the depraved and darkened mind of fallen man. (Alan Cairns, Dictionary of Theological Terms (Belfast; Greenville, SC: Ambassador Emerald International, 2002), 102.)
In the nineteenth century, natural theology almost completely disappeared from Germany. For Schleiermacher (1768–1834), it deserved nothing but ridicule:
“the malady of fragments put together from metaphysics and morality that one labels reasonable Christianity.”
Joar Haga, “Natural Theology,” in Dictionary of Luther and the Lutheran Traditions, ed. Timothy J. Wengert (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic: A Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2017), 537.
Unfortunately, the conclusions of natural knowledge are sometimes combined with Christianity. The notion that God can be known in his power and majesty and appeased, even manipulated, to respond favorably to our earthly struggles and sufferings through human religious activity is called a theology of glory.
It seeks God on human terms. Inherent in this teaching is the notion that human actions such as rituals, prayers, works, or sacrifices can appease God’s wrath, and that human beings have the ability to solve the great problems in nature and society.
God is reduced to act in ways that make sense to us. Questions such as “Why is there suffering in the world?” or “Why do believers suffer?” lay demands on God from our point of view alone. The answers are sought in human deductions, not in his word.
Steven P. Mueller, ed., Called to Believe, Teach, and Confess: An Introduction to Doctrinal Theology, vol. 3, Called by the Gospel (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2005), 31.
Man, with all his powers, including reason, Luther holds, is a creature of God and has some knowledge of God. Reason, therefore, is naturally aware of God’s law, and knows that we ought to do good and to worship and serve God.
What it does not understand, however, is how and why we ought to do these things.
It is with reason as with the rest of our powers, for they are all corrupted by sin. The flesh, for instance, is a creature of God, yet it is not inclined to chastity, but to unchastity; and the heart is a creature of God, yet it is not inclined to humility and the service of its neighbors, but to pride and self-love.
In a similar way, reason, knowing that good is to be done and God is to be served, imagines the good to be that which pleases itself, and thinks to serve God by rites, ceremonies and observances, which it elects to regard as ‘good works’.
It is of interest at this point to refer to what some of his critics have been pleased to regard as Luther’s most infamous words—his well-known, but little understood, description of reason as ‘the devil’s whore’.
In the light of what has just been said, his meaning is not very difficult to perceive.
If reason opposes Christ with His message of grace, then it espouses the cause of His adversary, it prostitutes itself to the service of the enemy of God.
Because God is the God of the law, men assume that He must deal with them on a legal basis of merit and reward, and they seek to establish their own relationship with Him accordingly. They seek to gain His approval by performing what they elect to regard as ‘good works’.
For this [says Luther] is the imagination of them all:
If I do this work, God will have mercy upon me: if I do it not, He will be angry.
And therefore every man that revolted from the knowledge of Christ, must needs fall into idolatry, and conceive such an imagination of God as is not agreeable to His nature: as the Charterhouse monk for the observing of his rule, the Turk for the keeping of his Alcoran-Koran, hath this assurance, that he pleases God, and shall receive a reward from Him for his labor.
Philip S. Watson, Let God Be God!: An Interpretation of the Theology of Martin Luther (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000), 87–90.
Running your race got twisted in the church to mean that God set up a distant goal of virtue and provided the means for you to reach it through two gifts: one a created free will and the other the law as a guide.
The old trope is all about two things: the free will and the law as guide.
Salvation is not the progress of a spiritual athlete for whom practice in the law makes perfect. It is not even like a sick person getting well on the medicine of grace, for those pictures of Christian life leave Christ on the sidelines while human free will takes center stage. Such notions leave Christ idle, displacing him by the star of that drama, the free will that dreams of becoming ever more holy under the law.
Why then the cross?
Did Christ come simply to remind people of the law that Moses already gave, or even to give an improved version of the tablets of stone?
Is Christ to be patient while you try to solve the puzzle of God’s law? The story of Scripture, Luther began to understand, is not how we make our way up the mountain by getting grace and then topping it off with love and works.
Scripture is the story of how God came down to meet us—while we were yet sinners. Christ is the mover and shaker, the active subject, the star of the show. And when Christ comes the law ends.
Luther coined a phrase—crux sola nostra theologia (the cross alone is our theology)—and put it in capital letters to stand out boldly as the chief truth he found while lecturing on Psalms for the first time.
Steven Paulson, Luther for Armchair Theologians, Armchair Theologians Series (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 62–63.
And how is it that this faith that is made by God as righteousness apart from the law comes? It comes by a simple promise. Reason is bewildered at this.
It comes apart from deeds, apart from judging and giving to each according to what is due; it comes apart from merit, wrath, punishment, and the law; it is apart from harmonies, various participations in God’s being, equalities of material and spiritual goods, virtues, morality, orders, systems, and reason itself.
The Father makes right in this old world only by raising his crucified Son from the dead and giving that Son to his enemies as a gift that comes in the form of a simple promise “for you.”
Nothing could remain the same if that were true—not the identification of a self, or of God, or of what is “good” or “true” or “right” or, for that matter, what the course of history itself is.
Faith in Christ’s promise, not works of the law, alone saves. But we will have to be very careful, since the word “faith” is one of the most abused words in our vocabulary.
It does not mean for Luther “accepting,” or “deciding for,” or “committing oneself to Christ,”
or any of the misuses this word has received. Faith is perfect passivity (that is, they do absolutely nothing at all) for Luther—being done unto by God, or simply suffering God.
It is literally being put to death as a sinner and raised as a saint, which is decidedly God’s own act through preached words.
Steven Paulson, Luther for Armchair Theologians, Armchair Theologians Series (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 49,51–52.
The modern idea that natural evolution and the efforts of man in the field of education, of social reform, and of legislation, will gradually bring in the perfect reign of the Christian spirit, conflicts with everything that the Word of God teaches on this point. It is not the work of man, but the work of God to bring in the glorious Kingdom of God.
This Kingdom cannot be established by natural but only by supernatural means. It is the reign of God, established and acknowledged in the hearts of His people, and this reign can never be made effective by purely natural means.
Civilization without regeneration, without a supernatural change of the heart, will never bring in a millennium, an effective and glorious rule of Jesus Christ. It would seem that the experiences of the last quarter of a century should have forced this truth upon the modern man. The highly vaunted development of man has not yet brought us in sight of the millennium.-L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans publishing co., 1938), 718–719.
Kline’s exposition of covenant theology suggests that an appropriate place to begin a biblical-theological formulation of the doctrine of God is John 4:24, where we read of Jesus instructing the Samaritan woman in the true nature of God and in the worship of God.
“God is Spirit, and they who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth” (cf. Jn 6:63).
The eschatological contrast is between the provisional Aaronic institution of Israelite worship and true (“abiding”) worship in the Spirit (cf. Jn 15:4, 26 and 14:15–17): the contrast is between old and new economies of redemption, between types and shadows on the one hand and truth (in the Johannine sense) and reality on the other.
The restoration of man’s communion with God is explained in terms of the substance and reality of the new covenant, namely, Jesus the Christ (cf. Lk. 24:13–47). Jesus portrays this (“Spiritual”) blessing of redemption as the satisfying of man’s thirst with the water of life flowing from him who is life-giving Spirit (cf. Jn. 7:37–39; 1 Cor. 15:45; and 2 Cor. 3:18).
Mark W. Karlberg, “Reformed Theology as the Theology of the Covenants: The Contributions of Meredith G. Kline to Reformed Systematics,” in Creator Redeemer Consummator: A Festschrift for Meredith G. Kline, ed. Howard Griffith and John R. Muether (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 241.
Everything that proclaims something about our sin and God’s wrath is the proclamation of the law, however and whenever it may take place. On the other hand, the gospel is the kind of proclamation that points to and bestows nothing else than grace and forgiveness in Christ. (Robert Kolb, Timothy J. Wengert, and Charles P. Arand, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 583.)
Even before sin, God threatened Adam with death and so with a law. In sin, God gives the law in the first place to curb sin by threat of punishment. In this, while restraining sinners outwardly, it ultimately failed to make people righteous inwardly.
But second, the chief office of the law is to reveal original sin and the evil that comes from it.
Only the gospel may then free sinners from sin, death, and devil. The gospel is the story of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became flesh and was crucified for our trespass, raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25), and established as Lord of a new realm whenever this is preached for the ungodly.
The proper function of the gospel is to forgive sins in the form of a promise that functions differently than a command.
The promise depends upon God’s faithfulness and the power of God’s Word to accomplish what it says and make sinners into believers, persons who trust in God.
Steven D. Paulson, “Law and Gospel,” in Dictionary of Luther and the Lutheran Traditions, ed. Timothy J. Wengert (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic: A Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2017), 415.
The New Testament retains this office of the law and teaches it, as Paul does and says, in Romans 1:18: “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all” people. Also, Romans 3:19–20: “So that … the whole world may be held accountable to God” and “no human being will be justified in his sight”; and Christ says in John 16:8: the Holy Spirit “will convict the world of sin.”
Now this is the thunderbolt of God, by means of which he destroys both the open sinner and the false saint and allows no one to be right but drives the whole lot of them into terror and despair. This is the hammer of which Jeremiah speaks:
My word is a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces” Jer. 23:29. This is not “active contrition,” a contrived remorse, but “passive contrition,” true affliction of the heart, suffering, and the pain of death. (Robert Kolb, Timothy J. Wengert, and Charles P. Arand, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 312.)
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