Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David VanDrunen is the Robert B. Strimple Professor ofSystematic Theology and Christian Ethics at WestminsterSeminary California, an ordained minister, and an attorney.

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Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface.........................................................................................................ix1. Natural Law, the Two Kingdoms, and the Untold Story of Reformed Social Thought...............................12. Precursors of the Reformed Tradition.........................................................................213. Reforming Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: John Calvin and His Contemporaries...............................674. Natural Law in Early Reformed Resistance Theory..............................................................1195. The Age of Orthodoxy: Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms in Reformed Doctrine and Practice.....................1496. Theocratic New England, Disestablished Virginia, and the Spirituality of the Church..........................2127. An Ambiguous Transition: Abraham Kuyper on Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms..................................2768. The Christological Critique: The Thought of Karl Barth.......................................................3169. The Kuyperian Legacy (I): Herman Dooyeweerd and North American Neo-Calvinism.................................34810. The Kuyperian Legacy (II): Cornelius Van Til and the Van Tillians...........................................386Conclusion: The Survival and Revival of Reformed Natural Law and Two Kingdoms Doctrine..........................423Bibliography....................................................................................................435Index...........................................................................................................463

Chapter One

Reformed Christianity is widely respected for having a vibrant tradition of social thought. Whether the examples be taken from John Calvin's Geneva, Puritan New England, or Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands, friend and foe alike often admire Reformed Christianity for inspiring its adherents to think not only about ecclesiastical piety but also about the wide spectrum of political and cultural affairs. Many people, accordingly, have written about the tradition of Reformed social thought from a variety of angles. Yet there are important aspects of this tradition that are largely unknown and frequently overlooked in such studies. The place of the natural law and the two kingdoms doctrines in the development of Reformed social thought is one of these aspects.

For the better part of four centuries Reformed thinkers widely affirmed doctrines of natural law and the two kingdoms and treated them as foundational concepts for their social thought. In affirming natural law they professed belief that God had inscribed his moral law on the heart of every person, such that through the testimony of conscience all human beings have knowledge of their basic moral obligations and, in particular, have a universally accessible standard for the development of civil law. In affirming the two kingdoms doctrine, they portrayed God as ruling all human institutions and activities, but as ruling them in two fundamentally different ways. According to this doctrine, God rules the church (the spiritual kingdom) as redeemer in Jesus Christ and rules the state and all other social institutions (the civil kingdom) as creator and sustainer, and thus these two kingdoms have significantly different ends, functions, and modes of operation. Furthermore, classic Reformed theology interconnected the natural law and two kingdoms doctrines, particularly in looking to natural law as the primary moral standard for life in the civil kingdom. Through these two doctrines, therefore, the older Reformed writers rooted political and cultural life in God's work of creation and providence, not in his work of redemption and eschatological restoration through Jesus Christ.

In the present day, however, at least in North America, most adherents of Reformed Christianity look with suspicion upon or expressly reject the doctrines of natural law and the two kingdoms. And most outside observers of Reformed social thought would not think to identify these two ideas with the Reformed tradition. For many contemporary Reformed people, natural law is at best a sub-theological Roman Catholic idea wedded to Rome's unduly optimistic view of human moral and epistemological capabilities and unduly low view of the importance of Scripture. At worst it is an Enlightenment idea designed to foster social dialogue without reference to religion or apart from God altogether. Contemporary Reformed people also typically dismiss the two kingdoms doctrine as a Lutheran construct that creates an unwarranted dualism between the church and the world, which in turn tends to confine religion to private life and to encourage uncritical conservatism and passivity in public life. In other words, recent Reformed writers have not simply set aside the previously common categories of natural law and the two kingdoms but have rejected them as inherently foreign to Reformed theology. Yet, with some exceptions, they have done so without demonstrating significant acquaintance with how the earlier Reformed tradition actually defended and used these categories. It is this often forgotten story of the place of natural law and the two kingdoms in the Reformed tradition that this book seeks to tell and to interpret.

Before I proceed, a few comments about my use of potentially slippery terms such as "social" and "culture" in this book are appropriate. By "social" or "society" I generally refer to the common life that people live together in their various economic, political, and legal (etc.) relations. By "culture" I generally refer to that vast range of activities that constitute human life, including but not limited to our commercial, scientific, artistic, academic, familial, and recreational endeavors. These terms do not mean the same thing, but they are largely overlapping (though some cultural activities are not strictly social) and sometimes I use them virtually interchangeably. In both cases I use such terms to refer to activities and institutions outside of the church and other religious bodies. This is not to say, of course, that religious bodies are not social and do not have their own cultures which may influence and be influenced by the world at large. As will be evident to readers, however, this book is very much concerned with how ecclesiastical society and culture relates to the society and culture of the world more broadly, and hence my use of terms such as "social" and "cultural" in a non-ecclesiastical sense.

Contemporary Reformed Social Thought

A number of writers, from both mainline and smaller, conservative Reformed circles, have offered various alternatives in place of the older natural law and two kingdoms categories. For the introductory purposes of this chapter, I will take one popular perspective among many self-consciously Reformed writers today in North America as representative of a contemporary Reformed approach, namely, the school of thought often referred to as neo-Calvinism. Those taking this perspective continue to commend a high view of God's work of creation and many other themes clearly reflective of historic Reformed theology. But for them the foundation for cultural activity is not so much the...