Getting Two Kingdoms Right

While Adam is reading through Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, I am reading, in the little spare time I have, Living in God's Two Kingdoms. When I told a friend I was reading through VanDrunen's latest book and he ask me if I had seen this review of it. I had not, but since he pointed it out to me, I thought I would give it a read.

I am only into chapter 3 of God's Two Kingdom, but the thing that struck me about this review was this comment:

since in the Introduction [of Living in God's Two Kingdoms], as in Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, he began by lumping together theonomists, Kuyperian neo-Calvinists, the emergent church, and N.T. Wright as all instantiations of the same problem, the one he is going to solve.

This particular comment stuck out to me for at least two reasons. The first was that this author mentions that VanDrunen lumps "theonomists" in with these other groups, but as best as I can recall, VanDrunen never mentioned this group. The reviewer does say that this is the same as in Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, so the confusion may be that the reviewer is mistaking the one book for the other. The introduction, however, to Living in God's Two Kingdoms does not bring up theonomy as a foil. In fact, as of chapter 3, VanDrunen has not mentioned this group at all. His foils are "contemporary" movements and since theonomy is not a predominant theological view at this time, it would seem odd for VanDrunen to even bring them up.

The second reason this comment caught my attention was the lake of qualification. The way the comment stands now, it is as if VanDrunen is lumping these four (or better three) groups together in all respects. This, however, is not the case. VanDrunen is very clear that he is only grouping these views together in so far as they view creation, fall and redemption. As VanDrunen puts it:

Though advocates of neo-Calvinism, the New Perspective on Paul, and the emerging church certainly do not hold identical views on all issues, they show mutual respect for each other's work and, most significantly, they share a common vision that the redemptive transformation of culture is central to the Christian life (p. 16-17).

And so we see, VanDrunen does group the three views together (no mention of theonomy), but it is a qualified association which he draws between them. Now, I am sure that the reviewer understood this point from VanDrunen. I only wish the review would have been more careful to bring this out. The reviewer's point is that VanDrunen is confusing, and the reason he thinks he is confusing is that he is lumping all these different views together and trying to argue against all of them. However, Vandrunen's task is a bit more limited, since he is really only arguing against their common vision of a "redemptive transformation of culture" as being "central to the Christian life."