Entering into the debate shaped to a significant extent by Karl Barth over the proper place for a doctrine of the two kingdoms and a doctrine of natural law in Reformed theology, VanDrunen presents a sure-footed path through the intricacies of historical positions on, and current approaches to, his topics. His finely crafted argument begins with a helpful survey of these topics in several streams of medieval thought. Moving behind the misrepresentations of Luther's views in much of modern scholarship, the author demonstrates that Luther's uses of “two kingdoms” terminology found rather precise echoes in Calvin's thought. VanDrunen makes it clear that Luther (without the benefit of knowing that he was creating technical terms for use four hundred plus years later) contributed to modern confusion by designating God's and Satan's warring domain as “two kingdoms” while also using the same terminology for the spheres of human relationships with God and with God's other creatures, human and non-human. Since both of these spheres belong to God, according to the Wittenberg reformer, and both serve as battlegrounds for the other two “kingdoms,” it might be best to call the “heavenly” and the “earthly” spheres of life as God created them “realms” instead of kingdoms. But Calvin followed Luther's usage rather closely. VanDrunen might have used Luther's distinction of “passive” and “active” righteousness, the key to his anthropology, to make distinctions between the two clearer. This could have provided a basis for another angle of exploration of the significance of the terms, also for Reformed theology.
Resistance theory has played a vital role in discussions of the two kingdoms and natural law in the scholarship of the past half century, especially in Anglo-Saxon circles, ecclesiastical and secular. The case for connections between Genevan and French justifications of resistance to monarchs and the resistance theory of Luther's and Melanchthon's students in Magdeburg in the aftermath of the Augsburg Interim and the Leipzig Proposal of 1548—developed on the basis of both preceptors' arguments—could have been presented even more fully than it is, along lines suggested by Robert Kingdon, to strengthen the case for continuities between Wittenberg and Geneva.
Having demonstrated the vital role which the distinction of these two kingdoms or realms and his concept of natural law played in Calvin's thinking, and the ramifications of these views for his understanding of how God works in his creative and redeeming activities, VanDrunen traces carefully, through apt selections of authors, how Calvinist “orthodox” theologians continued in Calvin's footsteps, even as they at points developed some of his accents in greater detail and addressed new challenges. The book does not ignore the development of the “covenant of works” in seventeenth-century Reformed theology and its sixteenth-century roots, but a more direct address of the ways in which this element of covenant theology relates to natural law conceptions and the distinction of the two kingdoms would have been helpful for at least this reader.
VanDrunen explores in a refreshing and insightful way the impact of developing Calvinist churches within the North American environment, distinguishing between New England “theocratic” approaches and those of Presbyterians in post–Established Anglican territory, Virginia. Focusing on John Cotton and a series of Americanizing Presbyterians, including Charles Hodge and James Henley Thornwell, the author assesses the ways in which Calvinism was adapted to make the transition from societies where it held a dominant status to the American Free Church scene, giving careful attention to the impact of political-social contexts.
Abraham Kuyper looms large over European and North American Calvinist thought in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His influence rests in part on his address of a “post-Christian” or secularizing society with traditional Calvinist thought. His “divine ordinances” and his distinction of “common grace” and “special grace” repeated significant elements of the traditional Reformed view of natural law and the two kingdoms, VanDrunen argues, even with his own unique perspectives, vocabulary, and applications. Kuyper's thought makes clear how important for social thought theologians' definitions of the church are and vice versa.
Karl Barth “represents a rather radical break from the earlier Reformed tradition, not only with the natural law and two kingdoms doctrines themselves, but from their traditional theological underpinnings” (347), as he addressed his specific contexts, VanDrunen reminds readers. He examines critiques of Barth by Neo-Kuyperians including and in the shadow of Herman Doyeweerd (Henry Stob, Cornelius Plantinga, and others) and by Cornelius van Til and some of his disciples. The former group “in their grounding of culture in creation as it is being redeemed, have placed an eschatological burden upon the cultural task that was not present in earlier Reformed thought,” VanDrunen observes (349).
Institutions, like individuals, fare poorly when their memories fade or become confused. Churches need this kind of historical reminder to find orientation for their future activity within themselves and in their environments in varying social-political settings. At the end of the volume this reader was convinced not only that “for the better part of four centuries Reformed thinkers widely affirmed doctrines of natural law and the two kingdoms and treated them as foundational concepts for their social thought” (1) but also that the reclamation of this historic part of Reformed theology has much to offer twenty-first-century ecumenical conversation and Christian contribution to public life. This reader hopes that the author continues to develop his case.
