Heidelminicast: We Are Not Polishing Brass on a Sinking Ship (Part 1)

It's a hypomanic cast, and now, Scott Clark.

We are not polishing brass on a sinking ship.

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Reconstructionism, don't worry, you can find them all at HeidelBlog.net slash theonomy,

and you can find much more there as well.

For the 40 years ago now, when I first came into contact with Reformed Theology Piety

and Practice, I also came into contact with the movements within the Reformed world,

known as Christian Reconstructionism, and I also came into contact with its child, theonomy.

In those days, as we discussed and argued eschatological views, mainly a version of Post-Malennialism

that looks forward to the gradual Christianizing of the world, prior to the return of Christ,

and preceding that earthly glory age is the collapse of everything out of which is going

to arise, like a phoenix, a reconstructed Christian society, and then on the other side,

there were Amalennialists, and they, of whom I am one, anticipate both periods of spiritual

prosperity and famine prior to Christ's return, but typically Amalennialists don't anticipate

a golden age on the earth before Christ returns.

As we had those discussions, one of the objections that my Reconstructionist or Theonomic

Friends, who tended to hold the Post-Malennial View made against the Amalennial View and

the opponents of Reconstructionism and Theonomy, is that it reduced the role of the Christian

in the world to, as they said, polishing brass on a sinking ship.

The image, of course, is meant to symbolize futility.

The phrase is widely attributed, following Gary North's attribution to the late dispensational

radio preacher J. Vernon McGee, who died in 1988, although his voice lives on, online,

and on the air still.

I searched years ago, the through the Bible website, but I didn't find the expression.

Still, I think it captures the way many evangelicals see their role in the world.

The dominant eschatology, which is the view of last things, among American evangelicals

and fundamentalists in the 19th and 20th centuries, was a form of pre-millennialism that

anticipated the imminent return of Christ after a series of events, including a secret rapture,

in which believers would be taken bodily from the earth, made famous in the left behind

song, Larry Norman's song, and books and movies.

And it also, of course, features Christ's millennial reign in Jerusalem, a literal thousand-year

reign in Jerusalem, where he's said to be sitting on a throne, watching Levitical priests offer

memorial sacrifices for a thousand years, even though the book of Hebrews repeatedly says that

he is the last priest, he's the final priest, the Melchizedekian priesthood replaces,

according to Hebrews, the Levitical priesthood.

Nevertheless, it's all going to come back for a thousand years, and even though Hebrews says

Christ completed all of that, once for all, it says that repeatedly, still it's going to come

back for a thousand years. Anyway, so since Christ was, according to the fever of those years,

Christ was going to return soon, and some Christians came to think of cultural engagement as

futile, and this view of Christian cultural engagement was further reinforced by a view of God

that suggested that he is selectively sovereign, or that his ability to control things is limited

by the exercise of the human will. Back then, among evangelicals of this sort, the material world

was viewed with suspicion, and sense experience was also somewhat suspect. Finally, these views

were associated with a view of the Old Testament that regarded it not only as expired, but

practically irrelevant to Christian theology and living, but the only thing the Old Testament

seemed to be good for was character studies, and that's about all anybody ever got.

They're developed among groups holding these views a strong dichotomy between the Old and New

Testaments. The reader who has some familiarity with the history of ideas will recognize the

influence of a few ancient Christian heresies, and even some pagan ideas in this complex of ideas.

It was the Gnostics in the middle of the Second Century who taught that the created material world

was inherently evil, that the God of the Old Testament was a demi-erge, a demi-god who is distinct

from the God of love in the New Testament. The Gnostics were a Christian heresy who appropriated

some Christian ideas, but redefined them and recontextualized them under the strong influence

of pagan Greek notions.

Behind those lie the influence of Plato's skepticism about the reliability of our sense experience,

and in general suspicion of the created world, where the Christians taught that God is not only

creator and sustainer of all that is, the Manikians in the Third Century divided the world into

competing principles of good and evil. You've seen that in Star Wars, where Christianity taught

that creation was inherently good, because God is good, and He made it so. The Platonic traditions

taught a sort of continuum of being a hierarchy, where in the material world is less good,

and the immaterial world is better, these ideas were incorporated to various degrees in some

medieval theology and found expression in the Elbegenzian or the Cathar movement,

to which the Western Church responded very strongly and very negatively in the 13th century,

and following. Nevertheless, for reasons that can't be described in a brief podcast,

this complex of events came to be regarded as standard Christian teaching among many

evangelicals and fundamentalists by the turn of the 20th century. Even though the Church has always

been divided on the question of the millennium, in some circles until very recently, the doctrine of

the pre-tribulational pre-millennial return of Christ was regarded as a touchstone of orthodoxy,

until the 1970s with a few notable exceptions, for example, Karl Henry, and the early years of

Christianity today, magazine, fundamentalist and evangelical cultural engagement consisted of

warning parishioners about the danger of the world, which was code for alcohol, cigarettes,

movies, and dancing. Evangelicals and fundamentalists with the Liberals supported the 18th Amendment,

establishing prohibition of the sale of alcohol in 1920, but otherwise they tended to

regard engagement with broader social concerns, for example, racism and poverty, as someone else's

business. In the 1970s, evangelicals and fundamentalists, the line between them, beginning to blur,

emerged from their social and political isolation. In reaction to the sinking ship mentality,

some fundamentalists and evangelicals rejected many of the distinctive views with which they had

been raised and embraced aspects of reformed theology and piety, but they brought with them

their old fundamentalist ethos. They transferred the old quest for illegitimate religious

certainty, or quirk, from cards and films to the correct application of the mosaic judicial laws,

and the alleged putative, coming transformation of a culture through Christian political action,

via Christian Reconstruction. The rise of this group emerging from the mainline PCUSA,

that's the old Presbyterian Church USA, in the 1950s, gave former dualists a way to think about

culture. Pesivism became optimism, and world flight was transformed into dominion.

There are alternatives to both world flight and the Theorecon ethos, that is, theotomy and

Reconstructionism. One alternative is the somewhat milder version of social transformation offered

by the, usually, Amalennial Kuiperians. We might distinguish between Abraham Kuiper and his followers,

sometimes called Neo Kuiperians, and then that would get us into a whole other discussion.

One of the points that I think I've become more aware of in the last 10 years is the distance,

I think, that exists between Abraham Kuiper and the Neo Kuiperians on a number of things.

I think Abraham Kuiper was actually, himself, more well grounded in the classic reformed theology,

although I'm not sure that everything he said was consistent with it, but he was more aware of it

than were the Neo Kuiperians, who mainly jettisoned a lot of classic reformed theology,

a lot of categories of vocabulary, and tended to be sort of dismissive of it as, as they used to

call it, scholasticism. A lot of that was a mistake, and I think one of the mistakes that the

Neo Kuiperians made was to lose track of and or reject the classic reformed understanding of nature

and grace, which is something about which we've talked quite a bit, both on the Heidel blog and

on this podcast. If you want to know more about that, check out the resource page, and there is

at least one resource page on Christ and culture. Lots of related pages, for example, on the

twofold kingdom distinction, and others, so check that stuff out. So the Neo Kuiperians were big

on affirming God's sovereignty over all things, and they were wanting to integrate faith and life,

which all sounds good, and they wanted to work out a coherent Christian view of the world,

which everybody knows now, as the world view borrowed from the 19th century German philosophy,

the belt and shung, not that everyone's necessarily conscious of that, as to whether the

Neo Kuiperians have achieved their vision of a distinctly Christian view of every human activity,

as I say, is open to question. I have serious doubts in 2026 about the wisdom of talking about

Christian math, Christian football, Christian softball, and all of that, because I think it's a

confusion of nature and grace. Math belongs to nature. God is sovereign over nature. I'm in no way

denying God's sovereignty, but there's a reason I've realized as I keep reading the 16th century

reformers and the 16th and 17th century reformed orthodox writers that they just didn't talk this way,

and that's because they had a better, I think, more robust view of nature, whereas I think the

anabaptists didn't, and I think this may upset some people, and I don't mean to upset anyone,

that the Neo Kuiperians unintentionally, at least in some cases, ended up sounding more like

the anabaptists on nature and grace than they did like the reformed, which is why I think some of

them are so confusing about, for example, common grace. Our older writers are not confused about

that at all. They used to read the pagans. They learned math from pagans. They learned physics from

pagans, and they didn't feel any need to crystallize it to baptize it. They criticized the pagans when

they were wrong, but they recognized that the pagans could learn and teach us natural things. They

couldn't teach us super natural things. Anyway, as I say, that would give us into a whole other

podcast series, and we've already done some of that. But still, this is an alternative

to the Theorecon ethos and program and eschatology. Some might even call it a kind of halfway

house, but it is probably a better way to go than the Theorecon way of doing business, re-instituting

the mosaic judicial laws and the post-millennial eschatology, which we'll return to in a minute.

Another approach to accounting for Christ's lordship over all of life, and one that I subscribe and

have advocated is sometimes called the two kingdoms theory I prefer to speak of it. As Calvin did,

and that is to talk about a twofold kingdom, one lord, one god, one king, one Christ, and two spheres

of his one kingdom is the way that Calvin spoke.

But those who advocate the two kingdoms argue that they are actually following Abraham Kuiper,

as distinct from the neo-Kuiperians by recognizing both that which, under God's sovereign

providence, is common to Christians and non-Christians, and they speak freely of common grace.

While recognizing the fundamental distinctions between belief and unbelief, which Kuiper called

the antithesis, and that's exactly right, I think there is a real antithesis between the

way believers understand the world and the way we understand the world. I don't agree anymore

that as some have said, there is no point of contact between believers, and believers, I don't think

scripture speaks that way, and our older traditional reformed theologians didn't speak that way.

There is a believing biblical, obedient, Christian interpretation of reality, and there is a way

of looking at things, and we can call that a worldview, a Christian worldview, and so at the level

of antithesis, believers and pagans are irreconcilably opposed to each other when it comes to the

interpretation of the significance of reality. But I would say still softball a softball,

football as football, plumbing as plumbing, and so forth. So this approach, however,

in its best expressions seeks to account for both that which is common to all humans,

under God's sovereignty as bearers of the divine image, and that which is not, and to account for

the distinct ways, or the distinct spheres in which God administers his good providence in the world.

Just as it was possible for ex-Evangelicals fleeing the world flight of fundamentalism,

to run straight into the arms of Christian dominionism, which is what has often happened,

so too it's possible for ex-Evangelicals fleeing the Christian triumphalism of

post-1970s, 60 Evangelicalism, to flee to the arms of a kind of over-realized eschatology

and world flight. Next time we'll talk about what it means to re-engage the culture,

in ways in which we can do that.

Thanks for listening, tuning in tomorrow for more of the Heidelcast,

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