Theonomy: An Informed Response (e-Book)

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E-Book (PDF format), 415 pages

 

About the Title: "YOU CAN'T BEAT SOMETHING WITH NOTHING"

This is a fundamental law of politics. It applies equally well to theological debate. A critic who challenges the worldview of a rival needs to present a developed, workable alternative. It does no good to label a rival theological position as deviant, heretical, peculiar, and so forth unless your own position is specific, comprehensive, and practical.
The faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary ignored this basic rule of confrontation.

 

In the fall of 1990, their collective effort at long last appeared in print: Theonomy: A Reformed Critique. It included sixteen chapters, fifteen of which were on the topic. Like a team of paid accusers who failed to coordinate their testimonies in advance, Westminster's faculty attacked theonomy from mutually irreconcilable positions. They challenged theonomy with a jumbled mixture of Dooyeweerdian jargon, Anabaptist politics, "hermeneutic multi-perspectivalism," and Gordon-Conwell Dukakisism. Rejected by a Reformed publishing firm, the book was published by Zondervan, the main publishing arm of modern dispensationalism. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Theonomy: A Reformed Critique reveals a startling decline of theological scholarship at Calvinism's premier academic seminary. This decline accompanied a quarter century of institutional drift. The seminary has still not recovered from the ideological and theological disruptions of the late 1960's. By the time the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Cornelius Van Til had retired, and the seminary no longer spoke with a unified voice, or spoke much at all, for that matter. Theonomy: A Reformed Critique is the seminary's theological self-justification for not having presented a systematic challenge to the humanist order in this generation. It is a defense of pietism's thesis: a forthright rejection of the Bible's judicial relevance in a morally disintegrating secular world. This is why Zondervan was willing to publish it. Biblical law is an offense.

Theonomy: An Informed Response is a mopping-up operation. It completes what Gary North began in Westminster's Confession: the Abandonment of Van Til's Legacy and Greg L. Bahnsen extended in No Other Standard: Theonomy and Its Critics. The authors challenge the Westminster's faculty's assertion that biblical civil law is no longer binding in the New Covenant era, especially its mandated negative civil sanctions against convicted criminals. The authors ask the faculty: What does the Bible require of civil government if a resurrected Old Covenant law-order is not applicable? What is the Bible-sanctioned alternative? In short, "If not God's law, then whose?" Westminster needs to answer.