CHAPTER EIGHT
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

C&S’ new social theology desires a classic Reformed culture transformation worldview. However, it adopts much of the futurist eschatology and individual-based social ethics shared by the Radical Reformation and contemporary theologies. Like these theologies, C&S’ church centered ecclesiology and eschatology cut off from a literal creation are influenced by a non-covenantal and non-Trinitarian dualism. This it shares with medieval, neo-orthodox, and Radical Reformation theology. C&S, lastly, rejects biblical inerrancy and a biblical law based view of justice. Instead it adopts a humanist philosophy of rights.

The result is a covert radicalism seeking to realize a postulated future holistic kingdom in today’s social structures. A covenantal perspective based on biblical law and the presuppositions which C&S shares with dualist theologies cannot be fused.

While rejecting apartheid, this dissertation’s social theology acknowledges a covenantal worldview founded on literal creation design-norms and a long-term hope. Its alternative allows for self-determining ethno-culture under God in church and state yet holds to the ideal of visible structures of unity, modeled on the Trinity. It also provides for social compassion and impartial

justice for all, including aliens and the poor.

A Trinitarian model maintains visible unity and true diversity, giving an alternative to C&S’ holistic union of churches.

Mandatory Biblical Stipulations for Ethnic Churches

1. Open community. Fellowship between individuals, families, and congregations; the proclamation of the word, the Eucharist, and the baptismal font must be open to all believers.

2. One confession. All accept one common confession and the one common gospel, which establishes the one law of God.

3. Mutual recognition of courts. All are under the same church discipline, and therefore the jurisdiction of each unit’s church courts or gatherings is respected by all others.

Concentric-Circle Shaped Federal Gatherings

The unity of church courts is expressed in a series of gatherings structured as concentric circles. Each presbytery or classis would be a compact geographic area with several congregations whose elders consider themselves one church. Regional synods are not a church but a federation of churches (presbyteries, classes). This holds also for other larger gatherings.

Second, the progressively larger gatherings only have appellate jurisdiction over the court immediately next to and smaller than it. The larger gatherings do not have direct authority over all smaller courts nor over all individuals. Thus all levels of synods would serve as appeals courts alone.

Ethnic Diversity at All Levels

Regional and/or national synods could consist of self-governing, self-theologizing ethnic churches and those churches who claim not to be ethnic-based. Such federalism rejects the Roman Catholic model of one congregation for each area.

Dissertation’s Two Models for Culture Transformation

There are many excellent tendencies in Church and Society (1990). C&S rightly condemns racism and points out that race and color play no role in the Scripture. Furthermore, C&S is right in opening worship services for all to hear the Word proclaimed.

C&S shows a commendable desire to find a biblical church unity and to seek biblical justice so as to right the wrongs of the past perpetuated in the name of apartheid.

C&S still claims that the Scripture is the final authority for all questions of faith. The NGK thus has not yet denied Christ’s divinity and the theological doctrine of the Trinity.

C&S has not totally withdrawn from the prophetic function of teaching biblical norms for all of life.

Negative Tendencies

This dissertation has found that C&S is theologically closer to the Radical Reformation’s social thought than that of the Genevan Reformation. C&S implicitly rejects the classic Reformed view of Scripture. Therefore, it gives little allowance for legitimate deductions from biblical data for socio-political and economic issues. In this regard, the document is contradictory. It claims that Scripture does not give models to solve the complex ethnic problems in South Africa, but then gives an explicit blueprint for a human rights solution.

C&S implicitly rejects the concept that the creation design is good in itself. It seems to believe that the structures of created reality are not revelatory. They are mere givens. This includes the Creator’s creation, development, and destruction of various ethno-covenantal solidarities throughout history. C&S implicitly accepts the concept that redemption progressively removes all of humankind’s social or group divisions. This dissertation agrees if these divisions are sinful. However, no social divisions built on the Creator’s design and design-norms are evil or sinful.

This dissertation takes the opposite perspective. Redemptive history restores covenant fidelity to the Creator’s original design, in matured form. This applies to family, church, and ethno-national civil governments (e.g., Ro 5:12ff, Ps(s) 2, 96). God gave man stewardship to cultivate, protect, and advance God’s providential creation of languages and culture groups on earth.

God-fearing mankind, including individuals, families, the church, and socio-political entities, is obligated to protect each language and created culture under biblical norms. This includes planting churches in each ethno-covenantal solidarity. That concept is not equal to race-based churches.

C&S accepts a concept of unity that denies the equal value and eternal ultimacy of unity and diversity. Thus C&S seems to reject the Trinitarian hermeneutical key. C&S, therefore, possesses strong prejudice against applying that key to church, social, and political structures. This lends C&S a bias toward over-emphasizing church unity above inerrant biblical truth. Instead of seeing structural church unity in federal forms, it tends to see it in unitarian, centralized forms. Only a relatively small concession is given to linguistic and cultural diversity in that model.

C&S implicitly rejects a key theological concept possibly because it implicitly rejects the social and institutional implications of the Trinitarian presupposition. This concept is the distinction between the invisible and visible church. The invisible church is the New Jerusalem above. The visible church is an institutional social sphere in a specific time, place and lingual-cultural context.

C&S has anti-covenantal and individualistic tendencies causing it to lean toward equalitarian individualism. C&S, therefore, tends toward seeing the local church as a confessing fellowship made up of individuals, irrespective of family or ethno-covenantal group. Lastly, C&S has strong social antinomian and Social Democratic tendencies leading it to accept the human rights dogma of modern humanism.

C&S correctly desires to be socially relevant. However, it does not prophetically speak to many burning issues of South African church and society that should have been addressed. For example, in its discussion of social justice and human rights, C&S does not address the following pertinent issues:

1. The rapid growth of pornography and abortion.

2. The rapid impoverishment of the middle and lower classes by inflation caused by a debased currency.

3. Unjust, state-created monopolies. For example, it neglects to address the virtual monopoly on large gold ownership, monopoly on money creation by a private, elite-owned Reserve bank, and the SABC virtual broadcasting monopoly.

4. The oppression of interest-demanding loans for drought stricken farmers.

5. The massive divorce rate caused in large part by anti-biblical divorce laws.

6. The burgeoning transvestite and homosexual movements, now constitutionally protected.

7. The issue of developing a truly consequent Christian school system.

8. The rapid increase in crime and violence due in part to the releasing of and negotiations with sworn enemies of God and the banning of the mandatory death penalty for premeditated murder.

Lastly, C&S interacted primarily with one syncretistic, Christo-humanist ideology: apartheid. It did not address two other more dangerous ideologies affecting NGK members: (1) Secular and New Age Humanism and its rapid infiltration into church, school and state circles. (2) Radical evolutionism and its virtual monopoly in taxpayer-financed schools, museums and universities.

Anti-Reformational Paradigm Shift

Has the NGK actually embarked on the long process of falling away from a biblical view of the relationship of Scripture and church to social systems? Just as an angle begins with a tiny departure from the base (i.e., norm), but later is an infinite distance away from that base, so in time a small theological deviation becomes a full blown anti-Christian heresy.

The Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk indeed seems to have undergone a far-reaching paradigm shift away from a classic, Reformed perspective. That change, if not checked and reversed, could destroy the church. It could ultimately mean that the church will either excommunicate classic Reformed believers or totally alienate them from leadership positions.