I just showed that the theme at the beginning was that this place earth was under a King. The covenant thing is minor by comparison.
?????
God is certainly King
from the beginning, but A King that does not covenant with his people to save his people is normally called a despot. That is the problem to be solved, is it not? Was the tyranny of sin replaced with a divine tyranny?
There is redemptive history that is not covenantal.
Another false dichotomy. Why must the two be separated?
God wanted to free people from the control of Satan once he tried to gain it.
That's a temporal condition. God is neither bound by/to, nor dependent upon temporal conditions,
especially not ones that are sinful. This statement, "God wanted....," contradicts the claim of Kingship. Do you not see it
(josh asks without any intent to be snarky)? The minute
any decision of His is dependent upon the existence of si He ceases to be both God and King!
The fact that the image means this place is God's means that Satan's goal is to take that away and make it his. There's no covenant per se in that.
Alas, this idea the world is Satan's is a myth.
Satan is a created creature who is himself enslaved by sin. He's not actually in charge of anything, not even himself! Satan is and has always been a minion.
The thing is Arial is that you are saying this while the neo-orthodox theology question is not resolved about John Bauer.
Yeah..... no.
There is nothing that difficult about understanding what Schaeffer said about the new theology, but if you are set on seeing covenants everywhere.....
Hmmmm....... I do not think you have correctly grasped either author correctly. Ironic, off topic personal snide remarks about others' faculties of comprehension aside
(I'll let @John Bauer and @Arial address those comments)..... Both men were classic covenantalists who would have readily asserted a pre-existing covenant between Father and Son. I've already implied an understanding of Lewis shouldn't be pinned on "
Man or Rabnit."
Am I understanding correctly you mean to be asserting God as a covenantless Kin, or at least a King whose covenant is irrelevant to His Kingship? And you're basing that on Lewis' "
Man..." and Schaeffer's ?????
(I didn't read a specific source of Schaeffer's has been provided)? Scheffer's problem with neo-orthodoxy was its subjectivism, a subjective due to the rise of experientialism and the misguided division of revelation and faith from reality. Neither the Bible's report of covenant relationship nor Covenants as understood by Covenant Theology do so. Covenant Theology is creedal in practice, not experiential. It asserts reality from the divine perspective, and the sovereignty of both God and His word
(the two aren't very separable in Schaeffer's view). Schaeffer's chief concern with CT was the extreme application
some held and its misuse/abuse by the evangelicals of his day, not with CT in general. He, like me, held concerns about the inferred covenant of grace being misused - like any bias does - as an eisegetic filter that prevented a wholer understanding of scripture. He, again, focused this complaint on the handling of covenant theology by the evangelicals of his day. It is, again, ironic, because Schaeffer considered himself an evangelist, not a theologian. Schaeffer the evangelist is the same subscriber to Covenant Theology that wrote "Genesis in Time and Space, thereby demonstrating CTis not incompatible with the reaility of creation nor the historical facts of scripture. Influenced by Van Til, Schaeffer arrived at his position
presuppositionally.
Besides no one here in this conversation with you subordinates scripture to post-canonical man-made doctrine. It was plainly stated at the beginning of this thread that Covenant Theology is simply a framework for understanding scripture, not scripture itself. The op is simply asserting the distinction and the superiority of Covenant hermeneutics over the Dispensational alternative. No one here
(as far as I can tell (and I have previously argued with most of them about these matters 
) holds CT above scripture or holds the two to be identical or synonymous.
If your hermeneutic is the fabric of the modern intellectual climate , then........ (emphasis mine)
Have you bothered to prove anyone here is holding to a "
the fabric of modern intellectual climate" Or demonstrated Lewis or Schaeffer were not antithetically bound by the same problem)?
If not, the entire dissent is based on a strawman because the "
if" does not (yet) exist or apply in this thread. It appears a failure to understand Schaeffer's concerns with evangelicals was mistakenly thought to apply to CT as a whole and the distinct way traditionalists
(for lack of a better word) apply the schema in comparison to the evangelicals of his day. Schaeffer's chief theological influences were Machen, Van Til, Dooyeweerd, Kuyper, and Rookmaaker, most of whom were Dutch Reformed and at least two of which were neo-Calvinist. Lewis was also an influence on Schaeffer, but to a much lesser degree, and chiefly by way of the covenant theology to which the synergist-leaning Lewis subscribed as an Anglican. Schaeffer is made to be hugely self-contradictory if he is understood to be opposed to Covenant Theology as a whole. The same holds true if any of the hermeneutical particulars listed in the first eight posts of this thread are thought to be denied by Schaeffer. I think you may have misread Schaeffer, not seen the problems with Lewis' pov, and mistakenly conflated the covenantalists' posts here with evangelical abuses of the theology. To find out, read through them again while asking yourself, "
Which if these principles would Schaeffer deny?" and
if one is found then ask whether or not the problem is with the hermeneutic or Schaeffer. I don't think you're going to find any discrepancy. The principles and methodology described in the opening posts is holy consistent with Schaeffer's emphasis of objective reality (from the divine perspective and the historicity of scripture.
Someone recently asserted a single comment by Ayn Rand as a wholesale opposition to government regulation preventing pouring toxic chemicals into a river. When I point out that Rand's Objectivism cannot be made to support that position because she was wholly and consistently opposed to one entity abusing the property of another, the critic refused to grasp the premise no one statement anyone makes can be construed to be in opposition to that person's larger philosophy (without either proving the person hypocritical or the statement an exception to the rule). Inconsistencies like that are usually due to errors on the appraiser, not the one making the statement. Schaeffer cannot be thought anti-CT because he was a covenantalist, profoundly influenced some of modernity's greatest Covenant Theologians.
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