If you’ve been wanting a good summation of the hot issue of Christian political involvement, look no further. I read this article a little while back when it came out, and when just now I ran across a few quotes I saved from it, I knew I had to recommend it to you and you.
Dan Strange writes with exceptional clarity on a hot issue, and I love his title: “The Sufficiency of Scripture for Public Theology.” Not everyone, it seems, believes in that sufficiency. Here’s Strange laying out the program for his article.
In what follows I compare and contrast two broad positions within Reformed theology:
- The first, and at the risk of caricature, are those who both for theological and tactical reasons argue for the ‘insufficiency’ (or maybe less polemically ‘illegitimacy’) of the use of the Bible in the public realm but rather the ‘sufficiency’ (or probably better, ‘legitimacy’) of natural revelation embodied in a natural law.
- The second argue for precisely the opposite.
To whet your appetite further, here’s a great quote he offers from John Frame:
The Great Commission is the republication of the cultural mandate for the semi-eschatological age. Unlike the original cultural mandate, it presupposes the existence of sin and the accomplishment of redemption. It recognizes that if the world is to be filled with worshippers of God, subduing the earth as his vassal kings, they must first be converted to Christ through the preaching of the gospel.
And lest you be afraid of anyone who brings up the cultural mandate at all, look at his summary of the view he argues for:
In this vision, if cultural transformation is a desired end, this should not and will not come about by imposed morality but by men and women being converted and willingly submitting themselves to the King of Kings and his rule.
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