We should remember that the Christian is only taking back from Satan that which was never his in the first place–the Christian conducts warfare to repossess in Christ’s name what was ceded to Satan through sin. There is not one element of Creation that rightfully belongs to the Devil; not children, not the family, not marriage, not education, not civil government, not science, not the arts, not language, not labour nor economics. All this and more has been usurped by him, and gladly given over to him through human sinfulness.
Free Expression
[Note–please be sure to read this article from The Federalist!]
I linked this post to a Facebook group that is for Christian Church/church of Christ ministers only. It was deleted within an hour. Ironically, this is a post about the denial of free expression and sharing it is also denied.
This is because there are, within conservative, evangelical Christianity, at least two camps of opinion about how cultural matters ought to be decided. At this time, in North America, by far the largest is the camp that believes the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) is about saving souls, and making good ethical disciples, who express their Christianity as much as they can in their businesses, places of work, schools, neighbourhoods, etc. These, however, are heavily influenced by the Adventism of the mid-nineteenth century, which taught that the end of the world was immanent, and the focus should be on individual salvation while the rest of the world, its governments, institutions, its culture is abandoned to Satan. Those who hold to this view make up the vast majority of Christians today, and it is the “received view” of most megachurches.
These are the ones who will not sympathize much with business people who, out of a commitment to Christ, refuse to celebrate same-sex marriages. They would argue that their work is secular, and that they must therefore submit to the laws of the land (Romans 13:1ff). This view is often inconsistent, as it generally accepts the sacred/secular distinction as it applies to Christians in the marketplace, but protests loudly (and rightly) at the abortion holocaust.
The other camp believes that the Dominion Mandate (a.k.a. the “Cultural Mandate.” There are some great resources here) of Genesis 1:28 has not been rescinded, and that the glory of the Lord is literally to spread “throughout the earth” (Habakkuk 2:14). The belief here is that God has sovereign rights over all His Creation, and those rights are not diminished by human reason or law. This view holds that the moral law is demanded of all humans everywhere, and that civil law ought to reflect that. It does not understand Biblical Law as salvific, that is, it does not teach that salvation comes through the Law, but rather that the implications of Christian discipleship range through all of life. In other words, it is wholistic: Christianity is not only about one’s personal ethics or inner life, or family, but demands obedience in all places, and God’s Law is to be obeyed by all. When a nation perverts this Law, Christians are obligated to prophesy against them, and to use means to bring these nations back under the Law of God.
It does not mean that a nation will become Christian, in that all, or even a vast majority of its inhabitants will be Christians, but when man’s law is in disobedience to God’s Law, the Christian is obliged to speak and to act.
As to work, this view understands that all of work is a part of God’s Dominion Mandate, and thus is holy, sacred. There is no secular world.
As Abraham Kuyper said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!'”
The Janus-Faced Covenant Breaker
“In fact the ‘free man’ of modern non-Christian thought is Janus-faced. He turns one way and would seem to be nothing but an irrationalist. He talks about the ‘fact’ of freedom. He even makes a pretence of being hotly opposed to the rationalist. With Kierkegaard he will boldly assert that what cannot happen according to logic has happened in fact. Then he turns the other way and would seem to be nothing but a rationalist. Surely, he says, the ‘rational man’ will accept nothing but what has intelligible meaning for him in accord with the law of contradiction. There must be coherence in experience. It is meaningless to talk about the ‘entirely single thing.’ But both in his irrationalist and in his rationalist features, the would-be autonomous man is seeking to defend his ultimacy against the claims of the Christian religion. If he is right as an irrationalist then he is not a creature of God. If he were a creature of God, he would be subject to the law of God. He would thus be ‘rationally related’ to God. He would know that he was a creature of God and that he should obey the law of God. If he is right as a rationalist, then too he is not a creature of God. The law that he then thinks of as above him, he also thinks of as above God; God and he are, for him, subject to a common law. If he were a creature of God, he would grant that what God has determined, and only that, is possible. He would then subject his logical manipulation of ‘reality’ to the revelation of God.
It is this Janus-faced covenant-breaker, then, who must be won for the gospel. It is he who walks the streets of New York and London. And no one but he does. All men are sinners; all are interested in suppressing the fact of their creaturehood. The irrationalist and rationalist have become friends in the face of their common foe. And this common foe is historic Christianity
The implication of all this for Christian apologetics is plain. There can be no appeasement between those who presuppose in all their thought the sovereign God and those who presuppose in all their thought the would-be sovereign man. There can be no other point of contact between them than that of head-on collision. The root of both irrationalism and rationalism is the idea of the ultimacy of man. If this root is not taken out, it will do little good to trim off some of the wildest offshoots of irrationalism with the help of rationalism, or to trim off some of the wildest offshoots of rationalism with the help of irrationalism.”
Cornelius Van Til and Eric H. Sigward, The Pamphlets, Tracts, and Offprints of Cornelius Van Til, Electronic ed. (Labels Army Company: New York, 1997).