Q&A on Christian Reconstruction, Part 4
Answers provided by Martin Selbrede, Chalcedon Vice-President
Has your organisation identified an area of interest that seems to be the most suitable for current reconstruction, for example the area of education?
We believe that education is indeed a critical area: not only education of our children, but of adults. But we don't see education as humanists see it: as a tool of social engineering (which drives the centralizing trend within humanistic statism which conflicts with reconstruction's emphasis on de-centralization). The key is to see education in the proper light, and then to conduct it on as Biblically consistent a basis as is possible.
The error here, while understandable, still creates unintended consequences. The fundamental institution, as Christian Reconstruction understands the Biblical teaching concerning this question, is the family. Failure to reconstruct the Christian family will render most other gains temporary and/or irrelevant.
A point too often lost is the one Van Til made: if man were confronted by the witness of God everywhere, but could avoid that witness by pushing a single button, man would keep his finger on that button 24-7. As I argued in a lecture in Atlanta in 2005 at the 40th Annual Chalcedon Conference, if every field and discipline had been reconstructed with the exception of respiratory pharmacology, every humanist would want to become a respiratory pharmacologist. There can be no exceptions to the extent of Christ's lordship -- any such holes will become safe retreats for humanists, to whom Paul explicitly denies the availability of alibis or excuses. Therefore, any reconstruction approaches that forfeit some areas to concentrate on others deemed "more important" will nonetheless provide a backdoor escape hatch for humanism. We are to work to see every thought brought into captivity, not just selected thought, or socio-political thought, but EVERY thought. My argument last year at a conference in Lynchburg, Virginia summed it up this way in a key Powerpoint slide: "Your totalism is not total enough." In that lecture, which was delivered in two sessions of over an hour each, I illustrated how to take the field of linguistic science captive to Christ. In the course of that lecture, I demonstrated precisely how critical this neglected field is, and how it controls our thinking by providing a humanistic framework for the actual communication of thought itself. "The Law of Unintended Consequences," when applied to the fact that "all things cohere in Christ," indicates that when decoherence is taught (e.g., as in "it is safe to accept this subject as taught by humanists"), we end up "limiting the Holy One of Israel" in the process, and defaulting to a humanistic status quo. Full-bore reconstruction is cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, and should resist the temptation to place undue emphasis on one field over against another. Ministers of reconciliation shouldn't play the triage game. I conducted an extended exposition of Proverbs 21:4 in Atlanta ("...the plowing of the wicked is sin"), indicating that even in supposedly "neutral" contexts, the discipline in question (plowing, in this instance, which is an agricultural matter) is in desperate need of reconstruction, while the fact that there can be a godly approach to plowing is made explicit in the extended discussion appearing in Isaiah 28:23-29.
Has your organisation identified an area of interest that seems to be the most suitable for current reconstruction, for example the area of education?
We believe that education is indeed a critical area: not only education of our children, but of adults. But we don't see education as humanists see it: as a tool of social engineering (which drives the centralizing trend within humanistic statism which conflicts with reconstruction's emphasis on de-centralization). The key is to see education in the proper light, and then to conduct it on as Biblically consistent a basis as is possible.
The error here, while understandable, still creates unintended consequences. The fundamental institution, as Christian Reconstruction understands the Biblical teaching concerning this question, is the family. Failure to reconstruct the Christian family will render most other gains temporary and/or irrelevant.
A point too often lost is the one Van Til made: if man were confronted by the witness of God everywhere, but could avoid that witness by pushing a single button, man would keep his finger on that button 24-7. As I argued in a lecture in Atlanta in 2005 at the 40th Annual Chalcedon Conference, if every field and discipline had been reconstructed with the exception of respiratory pharmacology, every humanist would want to become a respiratory pharmacologist. There can be no exceptions to the extent of Christ's lordship -- any such holes will become safe retreats for humanists, to whom Paul explicitly denies the availability of alibis or excuses. Therefore, any reconstruction approaches that forfeit some areas to concentrate on others deemed "more important" will nonetheless provide a backdoor escape hatch for humanism. We are to work to see every thought brought into captivity, not just selected thought, or socio-political thought, but EVERY thought. My argument last year at a conference in Lynchburg, Virginia summed it up this way in a key Powerpoint slide: "Your totalism is not total enough." In that lecture, which was delivered in two sessions of over an hour each, I illustrated how to take the field of linguistic science captive to Christ. In the course of that lecture, I demonstrated precisely how critical this neglected field is, and how it controls our thinking by providing a humanistic framework for the actual communication of thought itself. "The Law of Unintended Consequences," when applied to the fact that "all things cohere in Christ," indicates that when decoherence is taught (e.g., as in "it is safe to accept this subject as taught by humanists"), we end up "limiting the Holy One of Israel" in the process, and defaulting to a humanistic status quo. Full-bore reconstruction is cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, and should resist the temptation to place undue emphasis on one field over against another. Ministers of reconciliation shouldn't play the triage game. I conducted an extended exposition of Proverbs 21:4 in Atlanta ("...the plowing of the wicked is sin"), indicating that even in supposedly "neutral" contexts, the discipline in question (plowing, in this instance, which is an agricultural matter) is in desperate need of reconstruction, while the fact that there can be a godly approach to plowing is made explicit in the extended discussion appearing in Isaiah 28:23-29.
