Rules for Reformers

by Douglas Wilson

One of the first things a reformer has got to get used to is the experience of being despised and unpopular.

The man of integrity decides according to the law, and not according to whether the plaintiff has had a hard life.

Feminists demand that women receive equal treatment with the men, and nobody is ever more surprised than feminists whenever it happens. Feminists don’t need to be told that they despise men. They generally know that, and even when they don’t, they have certainly heard it before. What they haven’t heard very much is how much they despise women.

With regard to the latter, we must reject all forms of modernity (arrogant epistemology) and postmodernity (arrogant skepticism).

Public worship is far more important than private or family worship. The latter is crucial, but one of the main blessings of it is found in the impact it has on public worship.

My father taught me many years ago that the point is to win the man, not the argument. If you win the man, the argument follows. And if you have won the man’s attention and respect, you will have the opportunity to present an argument that will be heard.

So here is the foundational principle: Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not. Everything else in all political economy is a footnote to that profound and glorious reality.

The radical blames sex; the reformer blames lust. The radical blames money; the reformer blames mammon. The radical blames the systemic nature of oppression; the reformer blames men and women.

Here is how the whole pattern of cultural engagement has played out in our nation, and in our generation.

So we should be in the market for young Christian men and women who are willing to be trained in genuine cultural engagement. They won’t be embarrassed by old-fashioned virtues, like hard work and discipline. They will respect authority and defy the authorities. They won’t get fired from jobs because of laziness, and they will get fired from them because of something they said about homosexuality. They won’t resent money and success, and they won’t be dazzled by money and success. They will laugh at the hipsters, and they will laugh at themselves laughing at the hipsters. They will loathe the enticements of corrupt entertainment, and they will love a true story. They would rather die than become one of the cool kids. They will be cool.

Natural law is not impersonal, but is rather the will of the triune God. Natural law is not inconsistent in any way with special revelation, and natural law rightly understood is not embarrassed in any way by the specific revelation found in Scripture. You shall not suffer a witch to live, objects falling down at 9.8 meters per second squared, and nature itself teaching us that long hair is a woman’s glory are all expressions of the same personal and divine will.

In short, I hold to the necessity of natural law in the same way that the Reformers did, and would suggest that there is no way for us to assert the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all things without appealing to it. Theocracy, not mere ecclesiocracy. Theocracy, not sheer bibliocracy. Mere Christendom. When we confess Jesus as Lord, we have to take care to listen to everything He ever said, anywhere He might have said it. As it happens, He has told us a great deal through natural law, all of it consistent with everything He tells us in His Scriptures. All of Christ for all the world.

This is the doctrine that throughout human history, there will be constant, total war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. War is declared in the third chapter of the Bible, the central victory is accomplished when the Lord Jesus crushed the head of the serpent at the cross, and the rest of history consists of believers in Jesus being sent out into the world in order to manhandle all the snakes they can find. This is a central narrative thread in all human history, and failure to grasp this is prelude to being deceived and undone, as our mother Eve was.

Now I do believe that history can be “read,” and further, I believe that it must be read if we are to be faithful in our generation. And I believe that some events can be assigned as the straight line cause of other things. For example, the invention of the printing press did lead to a widespread distribution of books. The invention of the Internet has likewise led to a widespread dissemination of cat videos. But if we go out much further than that, things get rapidly more complicated, and this is where the antithesis comes in.

With regard to this issue, one side will say that we have a responsibility to read our own story accurately, and fit it into God’s metanarrative, the absolute story, the ultimate story. The theme of this world’s history is, as a friend put it, “kill the dragon, get the girl.” But God is the only one to define what the dragon is, and who the girl is.

The Father speaks, and so we preach. The Son is spoken, so we have something to say. The Spirit anoints, and so we are understood.

God offers the gift of truth, goodness, beauty. We settle for the wrapping paper of doctrinalism, moralism, and formalism.

Leaves on the tree of life are for the healing of the nations, and they cannot be applied without the nations getting better.

Love is rendered to God through your neighbor. All else is rendered into the void.

Grace does not amount to antinomianism, but for some reason real grace always brings charges of antinomianism.

But the God who passes judgment on that day is the same God who inspired the Scriptures to be written, and He is also the same God who governs the fall of sparrows, the motion of atoms in all of Neptune’s moons, the number of hairs on every head that will come up before Him at the judgment, the intricate mathematical patterns found in the waving grass in every field on earth, and the guttural praise of all the frogs in springtime.

But this means that God’s revelation of Himself goes all the way out to the edges. We can’t get away from it. God wrote two books—the Word and the world. His name is on the spine of both of them. They each can be read apart from the other, but neither can be read fully without some working knowledge of the other.

Find me one place in the universe that is silent about Him. The stars sing about Him. The oceans provide the bass line. The mountain ranges skip like a calf, and the trees reach yearningly toward the Heaven that they so wonderfully represent to us. And the azure sky tells men to stop bonking their girlfriends.

A Christian education for all Christian children should be a non-negotiable. And as a cultural activist, I have long argued that a classical Christian education is a tactical non-negotiable. If we want to graduate students who have a chronological map in their heads, with an x on it that says, “You are here,” then classical education is a necessity.

What good is a classical education? Well, one thing it can do is enable you to draft the kind of Constitution that will allow its foremost defenders two and half centuries later to not know what the heck went into it. Let’s not forget that.

A Christian education is one which acknowledges the lordship of Christ in every subject studied, and which teaches the relations of each subject in a way that is consistent with Scripture. Each subject is taught as part of an integrated whole, with Scripture at the center. Christ is the axle, and everything taught is a spoke.

A classical education has two characteristics. First, it follows the pedagogy developed over the course of Western Civilization—that of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. And second, it also acknowledges the authority of the past. Tradition is not absolute—only Scripture has that place—but respecting tradition is a way of honoring our fathers and our mothers. This is why classical education also defines the content of the curriculum—Herodotus and Augustine, Calvin and Edwards, Aristotle and Plutarch.

The simpleton thinks that ordinary things are ordinary.

First, for us this must mean a grounded and foundational faith in the penal, substitutionary death of Christ on the cross for sin. If our work is not based on an evangel with actual good news in it, then it will all come to nothing.

Second, our work of missions must be Reformed and Kuyperian. This is because cultural work must of necessity engage with the way unbelieving cultures actually are, and the task we have been assigned is utterly transformational. The only theology capable of doing this biblically is Reformed and Kuyperian.

And third, we must have an eschatology that leaves room for victory, that leaves room for actually accomplishing the mission. Otherwise, we will find ourse...

If we are going to be engaged in true cultural reformation, we need a gospel that kicks the devil in the teeth. And that means it must be a message of penal, substitutionary, vicarious, blood-bought atonement. When it comes to this substitute, we must accept no substitute.

Second, true radical discipleship is found in Kuyper’s great statement that there is not one square inch in all creation that is not in the possession of the Lord Jesus. If this is missing, radicalism in discipleship always reduces to posturing and striking poses for the cameras.

And third, an optimistic eschatological vision will prevent us from borrowing an eschatology of population explosions, monga carbon footprints, and global warming from the secularists who are without God and without hope in the world.

we must either adopt a transformationalist approach or a compromising approach. If we are not going to go the escapist route, waiting for the rapture, we must either take every thought captive, or we must split the difference.

All the Christians in the world, thinking sweet thoughts all at the same time, could not make a minimum wage law that didn’t hurt the poor.

If we are told to do good to all men, not only does it exclude leaving them alone in their misery, it also excludes doing bad things to them, creating misery for them. Keynesianism destroys jobs, wages, families, neighborhoods, education, opportunity, and more. How is it seeking the good of the city to saddle them with sub-standard schools? How is it seeking the good of the city to start subsidizing waste, fraud and abuse? All such meddling is economic stupidity, and God did not tell His people to fan out over the globe, doing stupid things to people.

if the world’s poor could be fed with leftist ignorance of economics, the world would have been satiated generations ago.

“One of the greatest aesthetic and artistic gifts the world ever received was the casting down of images in the Protestant Reformation.”

Ronald Reagan had a plaque on his desk that said “there is no limit to what a man can do if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.”

A long obedience in the same direction. Watching covenantal righteousness and mercy come to your children’s children is not an abstraction, a dry datum out of your catechism or doctrine class. This is one of God’s great promises, and it tastes just like the honey made by celestial bees allowed to forage in heaven’s clover. This is such a precious promise—a long obedience in the same direction. And no, this is not “works.” Obedience, like everything else that is good, is the gift of God, lest any should boast.