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A higher throneEvangelicals &public theologyIn the public arenaA HIGHER THRONE At last, a Daniel come to judgment — or rather three Daniels and a Danielle (!) — by which I mean the four Oak Hill lecturers whose outstanding contributions make up this important volume on public theology, with David Field easily the most trenchant and uncompromising ‘Daniel’ of the bunch. For what Oak Hill and IVP have provided us with is a clear and uncomplicated — and long overdue — exposition of the traditional Reformed view of how Christianity relates to government. The view is unpopular in evangelical circles today and as often as not lampooned as anachronistic, triumphalist or, in a single (swear-)word, ‘Constantinian’! Hence David Field’s comment, ‘…there are few things better able to raise evangelical hackles than the idea of the confessional state…’ (p.94). The expression ‘confessional state’ means simply that a nation chooses to have the Christian faith as its frame of reference — not Marx, or the Koran or the liberal humanist agenda. So David Field selects Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex (1644) as a useful illustration of what this might look like and his ‘Sixteen Objections’ — plus careful though necessarily brief qualifications of Rutherford Ð cover most of the standard arguments one hears today, for example, No. 4, ‘The confessionally Christian state… imposes belief on people’, or No. 5, ‘The confessional state has a bad record’, etc. In which regard satire seems the only appropriate vehicle: ‘The self-loathing of evangelical Christians in the West that has allowed the humanists to intimidate us with a few mentions of past failures is ridiculous: ‘Oh I love you Jesus, I believe the Bible is true, so please, please don’t put political power in my hands because I might misuse it…’ (p.99). More importantly, both Field and Strange take the prevailing evangelical approach called ‘principled pluralism’ to task. And if Samuel Rutherford’s presence looms large on the distant horizon, it is Oliver O’Donovan’s unmatched erudition and profundity which hovers over the present, hence Kirsten Birkett’s chapter expounding and applying his ideas. The fact that she opens her argument the way she does indicates another valuable aspect of the book, clarified even further by Daniel Strange’s superb survey in chapter one: ‘Is full-time preaching the only thing worth doing? Should Christians be involved in social justice and public service? Or is that genuinely a waste of time because all such structures ‘will burn in the end’? …’ Answer: of course not, but this needs to be made explicit because often contradicted, which the book does admirably. Finally, Gary Williams’s tour de force ‘Gabbatha and Golgotha: penal substitutionary atonement and the public square’ is easily as significant as anything else in the book, yet sits somewhat uncomfortably alongside the rest. For one thing it is as long as the Birkett and Strange articles combined. Secondly, it encompasses vast areas of theological reflection. Thirdly, it is far less accessible to the non-specialist. What is needed, surely, is a separate monograph. Well done, Oak Hill! Well done, IVP! At last something to get our teeth into. Ranald Macaulay, © Evangelicals Now - September 2008 |