Confessional pluralism: two interpretations

Recently I have been recommending people to read an exchange between my friends Fred Van Geest and Jim Skillen in the pages of Perspectives (which replaced the old Reformed Journal a dozen or so years ago and seems not to have a website). Van Geest's original article, "Homosexuality and Public Policy: A Challenge for Sphere Sovereignty," appeared in the December 2002 issue. Skillen's excellent response, "Abraham Kuyper and Gay Rights," appeared in the April 2003 issue, along with a rejoinder by Van Geest.

The exchange has implications beyond the issue of homosexual rights as such, and it illuminates what seems to me to be two rather different ways of articulating the relationship between sphere sovereignty -- or differentiated responsibility, as I much prefer -- and confessional pluralism. Indeed there is a tendency in some circles to jump into an affirmation of confessional pluralism (or religious freedom, as some would style it) without adequately addressing the structural issues first. Here such pluralism comes to resemble nothing more than a rights-oriented libertarianism, or what I label an affirmation of the choice-enhancement state, which has arisen in the 5th historic stage of liberalism's development.

But of course the state's divinely appointed task of doing justice means that it has to make all sorts of distinctions and to determine the varying structural characters of the things in God's world. Apart from this it cannot adequately do justice to them.