Right, wrong, and silence.

What They Got Right

Affirmation/denial #1 of the PCA’s interim report on Christian Nationalism (pg 8) gets a fair few things right. The civil authority is indeed ordained by God; it indeed has a “legitimate role” in “preserving justice, restraining evil, and promoting the conditions necessary for human flourishing.” Further, the civil government is indeed incapable of accomplishing the “redemptive work that belongs to Christ along.” Admittedly, that last bit is pretty close to a tautology: if Christ alone can do it, the state, not being Christ, obviously can’t do it. The qualification technically means that the hypothetical ‘salvation is by the state’ person would actually agree with that. But we all know what the report was trying to say, even if it didn’t actually say it: the state doesn’t save our souls.

Got it.

What about the rest?

What They Got Wrong

The crucial difficulty lies in the contrast established in the text between the church and the state. “The church,” it avers, “not the nation,” is the “primary community through which Christ manifests [His] reign in the present age. Civil government remains provisional, penultimate, and subject to divine judgement.”

Let’s parse those sentences. First, the contrast between church and state established in the first sentence (the second in the actual paragraph) establishes the paradigm in which “remains” appears, the thing that the “nation” isn’t, which it remains-as-not. By implication, then, ‘provisional, penultimate, and subject to Divine judgement’ are three qualities the “primary community” doesn’t have, as they are corollary to the nation not being the “primary community.” Similarly, if we look in the previous sentence, the second sentence appears, when we parse the paragraph, as an explanation for the second, a clarification, which implies (though it does not necessitate) that whereas the civil government cannot accomplish salvation, the church can.

We can dismiss some of these implications as the result of poor draftsmanship. Unless the PCA has gone full Rome, its leadership does not believe that the church “can accomplish the redemptive work that belongs to Christ alone.” Further, I doubt that the committee would defend the idea that the church is ultimate (instead of penultimate) or not subject to divine judgement. The problem isn’t that they’ve accidentally espoused an impressive level of heresy; it’s what they’re actually saying.

The contrast they draw here reflects a belief that the church is higher than the state in relationship to God, in most of these areas at least. But….

The institutional church and the state are both provisional, due to be superseded by Christ. He reigns as the King; He is the High Priest and Prophet. Our human institutions presage and will be replaced by His Divine rule. As such, both are penultimate.

The institutional church is no more able to save men than the state. Men can be saved outside both (Luke 23:43). The proper state of affairs, though, has man sanctified in part through participation in both (Rom. 13:1-7; Matt. 18:20).

The nation and state are subsidiary to salvation and to His rule, but so is the institutional church. We must never forget that.

What They Don’t Answer

The report has another weakness: it never provides a standard for “justice.” Theonomy is definitely out, of course, but the report provides no substantive standard for civil justice which could not be found by reading the Westminster Confession of Faith. I don’t mean that it agrees with the WCF; I mean that its most substantive statement is the WCF, slightly repackaged, without any further detail or explication.

This, unfortunately, vitiates nearly all the virtue of their affirmation.

God bless.