Christian Nationalism has gotten the attention of multiple denominations especially those across the Presbyterian spectrum. Following the release of the PCA’s special committee report on Christian Nationalism, the OPC, meeting in their General Assembly, has ratified Overture 1 to create their own committee during the Monday session of their synod.
That the 92nd General Assembly form a special committee of five with two alternates with a budget of $10,000 to study matters pertaining to the proper biblical and confessional understanding of how the church relates to the state, with particular attention to teachings commonly called Christian Nationalism, with a view to giving a clear statement to assist the presbyteries, sessions, and members of the church in their understanding of these important matters, reporting back to the 94th General Assembly.
The mandate appears to overlap with that of the PCA committee report, and it can be expected that their findings will likewise be of a similar variety. The PCA report functionally reinterpreted the 1788 Westminster Confession of Faith, which is also the standard of the OPC, to incorporate religious tolerance for all religions into Chapter 23, which only extends such tolerance for Christian denominations.
The primary difference will likely derive from the personnel on this committee:
The Assembly then proceeded to elect members to the committee. Elected were Ministers David VanDrunen, (Professor at Westminster Seminary California); Alan Strange, (President of Mid-America Reformed Seminary); Lane Tipton (Trinity OPC, Easton, Pennsylvania); Ruling Elder Daryl Hart (Hillsdale OPC, Hillsdale, Michigan); and David Innes of (Calvin OPC, Phoenix, Arizona). Elected as alternates were Ruling Elder Zachary Lautenschlager (Berean OPC, Clearfield, Utah), and Rev. David Noe (Reformation OPC, Grand Rapids, Michigan.)
As a positive note, David Innes has written for American Reformer, which is Christian Nationalist adjacent, so this will perhaps be more balanced than the PCA’s committee. In a recent appearance on Sola Media, David VanDrunen argued that because the 10th commandment is impossible for the magistrate to enforce, this means the natural law cannot be enforced. He also argued that nowhere in the New Testament are gentile kings called to honor the First Table, but Isaiah 60:12 does prophesy, “For the nation and the kingdom which will not serve you will perish” pertaining to the gentile nations coming to Christ. Lane Tipton is against Thomism and is an adherent to Cornelius Van Til. Alan Strange has previously critiqued Stephen Wolfe’s ideas, though often conflating them with postmil-theonomy. Zachary Lautenschlager is associated with the National Association for Gun Rights.
Perhaps the most clownish appointee to the committee would be Daryl Hart, who is a terminally online elder.
Of all the people on the committee who “engage” Christian Nationalism, Hart is foremost on the committee and this above tweet is a good depiction of his intellect. No Christian Nationalist, and hardly anyone (if at all) on the Right Wing is advocating their version of Affirmative Action. If anything, Christian Nationalism argues against the Civil Rights Act and for a removal of all Affirmative Action and DEI programs from society, which if removed, the cream will rise to the top. These programs that favor all groups except whites so the removal of such will remove factors that artificially suppress whites. This is the intellect of Hart, whom the OPC appointed.
Overall, the OPC has a much flashier list embodying its committee on Christian Nationalism, one that likely will draw similar conclusions to the PCA, but its personalities might also undermine the credibility of their eventual conclusions.
3 Responses
It looks like the OPC is going to deliver a report heavily based on R2K (radical two-kingdom theology) and other tri-covenantal theologies. The OPC itself has been throughout its history been influenced by tri-covenentalism, even in the cases of those who claim to be anti-Kuyperian. (Abraham Kuyper is the source of tri-covenantalism.) What this is is the rejection of the Reformed by-covenantal theology in order to introduce a third, “common” or Nohaic, covenant where all sorts of matters in creation can be separated from God’s redemptive program in the second covenant, the Covenant of Grace. This makes it possible to arbitrarily dissociate matters from being church or Christian related. For Kuyper the third covenant gave Christian culture a special protected status. The R2K inverts this using the third covenant to deny to culture a Christian status.
I always just assume anything Kuyper is bad, but that tri-covenantal theology is something to look into.
The people who might be interested in the problems around tri-covenantalism are already either committed to tri- or to monocovenantalism (as in CREC), and think that the bycovenantal Federal system of the Confessions is incoherent. So you don’t get a good examination, just monos and tris throwing bricks at each other. (I discuss it in places in my Theosophy, Van Til, and Bahnsen, but it is not the focus of the book.)
Kuyper, by the way, also invented three kinds of grace. There is common grace that emanates from the Father and goes to all creation, there is church grace that emanates from the Son and goes to church members, and there is individual electing grace that emanates from the Spirit and goes to the individuals that are actually elected and regenerated. The fact that he assumed that grace emanates like an energy beam shows how he was thinking about grace in the wrong way from the beginning.