Morphing Sacred/Secular

Before secular meant something done without reference to God, it simply meant something done in the world. Hunter Baker in The End of Secularism notes

The priests with parish duties were known a secular clergy. . .  The idea of “secular” clergy going about their work administering the sacraments, giving aid to the poor, and yes, even collecting tithes, burial fees and other church revenues without reference to God is ludicrous. In the world we are discussing, secular simply referred to activities conducted in the world as opposed to those directed toward a purely supernatural plane. State and ecclesiastical authorities wrestled, but they wrestled within the context of Christian right and wrong.

It might be better stated that secular clergy worked outside of a strictly liturgical setting since all of life consists in Christ, the creational Word spoken. But secularism developed from this earlier understanding.

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), former Dutch prime minister and Calvinist exemplar, would later imply that the Roman church created secularism by wrongly dividing life into consecrated and profane sectors.

This is exactly the project of Reformed two kingdoms types. They want realms of life and society that are free of Christian dominion, not that such a schizophrenic position can be consistently defined or maintained. Ironically, these folks often insist, to the exclusion of all others, that they are guardians of the reformed confessions when in reality they are towing a Roman Catholic line of sacred/secular. Not the earlier view of a divided sacred/secular clergy serving in two places, but the later view that embraces a false neutrality where a secular realm of “common grace” somehow enables us not to name to giver of that grace at all.

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