By Adi Schlebusch
When God initially created Adam, he was alone, which God declared to be “not good” (Genesis 2:18). This is very striking, since with all the other things God originally created, He expressly declared to be very good. The sole exception was Adam’s isolation as individual apart from a family, that is, Adam’s existence in the absence of human community. God consequently created Eve. When sin entered the world it not only disrupted our covenantal relationship with God, but also our covenantal relationships with one another. Sin thereby destroys the very notion of home and community. Liberalism as a modern fruit of sin has also largely dedicated itself to undoing the work of God in the creation of the woman. In the name of equality and liberty it has effectuated the atomization and isolation of the individual from those most intimate relations created by God—the family and the local community. It has done so by purposefully uprooting man from his home through propagating a new “global community”—an abstraction lacking any concrete reality, and a universal brotherhood which deprives brotherhood of its very meaning. But this abstraction of community and brotherhood in the name of globalism and tolerance, always tends to effectuate increasing isolation and loneliness.
In his 2021 book, The Confessional County: Realizing the Kingdom through Local Christendom, Raymond Simmons, in advocating for Christian socio-covenantal confessionalism, notes:
Only by Christ’s power can we begin to have a righteous society. Only by covenant is Christ’s power available to us. The covenant required for this is a social covenant. Societal curses are caused by societal sins and are only removed by societal confession.[1]
As Abraham Kuyper taught, there is no aspect and no reality in creation over which Christ does not have a legitimate claim to Lordship.[2] If we acknowledge the existence of a family, Christ is to be Lord over that family. If we recognize the existence of a city or community, Christ is to be Lord over that city or community. The same applies to nations. Understanding the reality of Christ’s claim to Lordship over every societal structure and unit in existence and the redemptive significance of His victory over sin and death for all of creation—including every unit of human society—is the key to understanding why every community is a covenantal community. The only question is whether it is an obedient covenantal community functioning and prospering in accordance with God’s will, or a degenerate one doomed for destruction.
In his book To Be as God: A Study of Modern Thought since the Marquis de Sade, Rousas John Rushdoony explains how the Liberal war against morality in the form of sexual licentiousness and perversion in opposition to God’s Law has resulted in the death of community itself:
Now the triune God of Scripture is the source of all definition and meaning. The origin of the Fall is Satan’s temptation in Genesis 3:5, the claim that man can be his own god, knowing or defining for himself all good and evil, all law and morality, in short, everything. Self-definition now prevails among fallen men: they decide for themselves what is good and bad, and the result is that, instead of the common language of God’s law and meaning, they have only their purely personal ideas and meanings. The result is the end of community, communion and communication.[3]
The humanity of Jesus Christ, in the fullest sense of the word, is central to his redemptive work. 2 John verse 7 goes as far as to call anyone who denies the humanity of Jesus “a deceiver and an antichrist.” Being fully human means not being an abstracted individual, but living and being in community. The key to understanding how Christ restores home and community lies in the Biblical doctrine of Christ as the Kinsman-Redeemer which, astonishingly, is one of the central doctrines of Christianity which remains most neglected in our day and age.
The Old Testament law regarding the kinsman-redeemer (see, for example, Leviticus 25:25) not only points to Christ Himself, but also tells us something of the nature of Christ’s work of redemption. The kinsman-redeemer redeems the land, property and even the persons of his kin from slavery. This law finds its fullest expression in Christ as fully God and fully man. As sinless Man, He is our perfect Kinsman-Redeemer, and as God, completely efficacious in that work of redemption of the families and property or land upon which community itself is built.[4]
Recognizing the covenantal reality that “what God has joined together, let no man separate” (Mark 10:9), necessitates a social ontology that views the family—as opposed the abstracted individual—as the basic constitutive unit of community and society. Man, as he can be found in reality, is, like the incarnate Christ, our Kinsman-Redeemer, embedded in communities maintained by relationships of a familial, local and national nature. Because in practice the individual can never be abstracted from his family and community, individual repentance cannot take place in isolation from these social or covenantal realities. It is for this reason that Christ commands us to evangelize the nations with the gospel and command those nations to live in obedience to His Law.
Christ, as Redeemer, is also the covenantal head of not only individual believers, but of families, communities, tribes and nations who live in obedience to Him—as the “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” (1 Timothy 6:15; Revelation 1:5, 17:14, 19:16), He is the Federal Head of the nations represented by those kings and the families, communities or cities represented by those Lords (Psalm 2:8). Therefore, the gospel of Christ necessarily restores and sanctifies those very social structures—communities and homes—which Christ came to redeem from the effects of the fall, calling not only individuals, but families, communities or cities and nations to repentance and obedience to Him.
The author is a senior researcher at the Pactum Institute.