The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society

By Joseph Boot

The Mission of God is a work of theological apologetics and cultural philosophy that examines the religious foundations of all thought and action in human life. In this expanded tenth-annive

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ezra Press
• Release date: Jan 20, 2025
• ISBN: 9798991693226

Joseph Boot

JOE BOOT is the founder of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the senior pastor of Westminster Chapel, Toronto. In the U.K. he is director of the Wilberforce Academy and head of public theology for Christian Concern. In the U.S.A. he is a senior fellow at both the think-tank truthXchange and the Center for Cultural Leadership. Dr. Boot holds a Master's degree in Mission Theology (University of Manchester U.K), and a Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought (Whitefield Theological Seminary, U.S.A.). His other books include Why I Still Believe (2005), How Then Shall We Answer? (2008) and The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society (2016).

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Acknowledgments

With a project of this size and scope, developed over a number of years, it is a difficult task to remember and give due credit and acknowledgement to all those who have had a hand in making this work possible. By the unmerited grace of God, I have been given a wonderfully supportive wife and family who not only give me freedom to write, but have graciously enabled my labours in England, Canada, the USA and beyond, where much of the thought content of this book has been tried in the fires of educational, apologetic, and pastoral ministry.

I owe special thanks to a number of individuals for enriching and challenging my thinking through hours of discussion and interaction, not to mention their keen interest in this project and the many articles they suggested for my reference – in particular my friends and colleagues Dr Scott Masson and Dr David Robinson have greatly enhanced the writing process and, therefore, the end product. All the staff of Westminster Chapel have been an enormous help to me, and I owe them my sincere thanks. I am greatly indebted to my friend, colleague and editor, Ryan Eras, for his painstaking and steady work with me on the manuscript, sometimes on the sunny deck of my Toronto garden and sometimes on cold Canadian winter mornings – periodically arriving bearing gifts of hot chocolate and egg muffins! His contribution has been invaluable. I am also very grateful to my friend Dianne Foster-Kent for her careful proofreading and editorial suggestions. Nonetheless, for all errors and failures of the work, I bear full responsibility.

I also want to acknowledge and thank the Westminster Chapel board of elders and EICC trustees for their faithfulness and for allowing me room to think, write, and travel. Their friendship and gracious support have made the challenging years of church planting a joy and not a misery. In particular, I want to thank my dear friend Randy Currie without whose labours the Ezra Institute would not have come into being or have been effectively founded. Not only has he worked tirelessly to see the Institute established, but has travelled many long hours with me to various destinations for conferences and debates, inspiring the work and strengthening my thinking at every turn. But more than all this, he has sat in hospital waiting rooms with me in times of great distress and peril for my wife Jenny, and comforted me in my sorrow, for which I will always be grateful.

My thanks also to Brian and Colleen Semkiw for their enduring friendship, kindness, and support in the context of church, Institute, and family life. Some of the most fertile passages of this book were written overlooking the lake during one of our many family retreats in their inviting home. Thanks are also due to the entire Westminster Chapel church family for allowing me to put the biblical content of this book into action in the life and ministry of the church. I am blessed and honoured to serve you all.

Furthermore, I want to express special thanks to my colleague Jordan Cecile and good friend Paul Aurich, for their diligent administrative and editorial work in making this tenth-anniversary special edition of Mission of God ready for publication – their Kingdom service is greatly appreciated. My grateful thanks are also due to the courageous evangelical scholar, Dr. Aaron Edwards, who pored over the manuscript for weeks, preparing an excellent study guide for this anniversary edition. His friendship and costly faithfulness to Christ in modern academia are an encouragement and inspiration.

Finally, my thanks are also due to Christian Concern, U.K. and Wilberforce Press, my publisher, for believing in this project and capturing the vision for this book, promoting it throughout the United Kingdom and taking the ‘risk’ when other publishers ran for cover. The content is challenging and controversial in a biblically illiterate and politically correct time in our history and I thank you for having the courage and love of freedom enough to publish this work.

Soli Deo gloria

Foreword to the

10th Anniversary Edition

If you have an inquisitive, solutions-oriented mind, The Mission of God will provide you with the theological and philosophical scaffolding, enabling you to see God’s grand design for His Creation, contributing to a Christian culture and city. If you love people, The Mission of God will fuel your desire to see them liberated from the chaotic tyranny of this present darkness, restructure the social order, and live in light of His Kingdom purposes. The message of this book will inspire you to worship God as King, bless your church with a renewed cultural mission, motivate you to build Christian institutions for his glory, and give you a framework to take dominion (Gen.1:26) in keeping with your personal stewardship – that’s because this book is not some dry discourse on heady, theoretical matters. It is an assessment of culture from a distinctly Christian perspective, providing a pathway for cultural reform. Drawing on the works of Puritan thinkers, Dr. Boot calls the Church to unapologetically champion and apply the full revelation of God’s Law-Word to every sphere of life. Rejecting the commonly held beliefs of two-kingdoms theology, antinomianism, and the authority of natural law (vis-a-vis divine revelation), Boot will encourage you to courageously champion the absolute authority of Christ over every square inch of His Creation and seek reform and renewal in the social order through the application of the divine Word. 

Our Christian heritage is under attack in the West due to the rise of cultural Marxism, statist and globalist ideologies, and a mishmash of ever-evolving antichrist political agendas. It is hard to keep up with the latest (I daresay daily) lies that are pressed upon us from the woke academy, state-funded media, rainbow mafia, climate cult activists, and their corporate allies. But a greater threat lurks within our Christian churches, Christian institutions, and Christian families. By limiting the hope and scope of the Gospel to the salvation of individuals unto eternal life, without acknowledging God’s history-long scheme to bring about the redemption of His Creation through the all-sufficient person and work of Christ, many Christians are disinterested in cultural reform. Simply put: the tendency has been to reduce the mission of God to saving souls and sustaining institutional churches. Some may wrongly conclude that a vision for Christian cultural reform obscures the Gospel of the Kingdom by promulgating a compulsory allegiance to Christianity–but nothing could be further from the truth. Dr. Boot asserts the need for personal repentance and faith, but rightly rejects the myth of cultural spiritual neutrality. A Christless culture is a chaotic culture that obscures the claims of Christ as the King of kings (1 Tim. 6:15), which brings tyranny and death, and, therefore, must be repudiated by faithful followers of Christ. The doctrine of Christ’s absolute authority over all of life is as expansive as His sovereignty and love and will result in blessing, and ultimately, a new Creation within which His covenant people will dwell for eternity.

A word about the author: I know Joe Boot personally. I have spent extended time with him in ministry through speaking engagements at conferences in Canada and the USA. I have visited his former home in Canada and his current home in the UK. I know his wife Jenny and have had fellowshipped with his parents and children, all of whom hold him in high regard. I also serve alongside him at the Ezra Institute. He is a genuine follower of Christ, a family man, and a wise thinker who possesses a keen wit, a brilliant mind, and a great sense of humour. You need not agree with every jot, tittle, or assertion he makes, but you can trust him as a guide to help you to navigate the complexities of culture in light of the Word of God, pointing you in the right direction so that you can live and think Christianly about all of life.

We need a new generation of reformers and puritans, unwilling to merely stare at the sky while awaiting the Second Coming, but who herald our King’s authority and transformative power right now! My own pastoral work and preaching have been amply blessed by the thinking of Joe Boot. This book, combined with his Ezra Institute teachings, has helped to galvanise my opposition to totalitarian statism in Canada and my confrontation to the ecclesial apathy towards cultural sins. Several hundred members of my congregation have read his writings or attended his conferences to hear this content presented with passion and clarity. Over the past ten years, multitudes more have found this book a trustworthy guide to analyse and respond to the crises of the moment, and its fruitfulness and influence have been proven in the establishment of new churches, business networks, political initiatives, and classical academies by people who desire to see the Word of God applied to all spheres of life. You too will benefit from reading it. 

Ultimately, The Mission of God is not about the author – it is about God, His mission, and His purposes within Creation. I like that, since too often, we read to better ourselves with only a perfunctory interest in the glory of God. May this volume serve the purposes of the Kingdom of God that the world may "praise the name of the LORD, for his name alone is exalted; his majesty is above earth and

heaven." (Ps. 148:13) 

Rev. Dr. Aaron Rock 

Fellow for Church Leadership, Ezra Institute 

Senior Pastor, Harvest Bible Church,

Windsor, Ontario Canada 

Forward to the

Second Edition

The Mission of God is a Christian classic. As a Christian barrister and, most latterly, Chief Executive of Christian Concern and the Christian Legal Centre in the United Kingdom, I have been contending for truth in the public square since 1988. In that time, we have seen laws pertaining to life, marriage, family, and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ drastically eroded. We kill the unborn child when inconvenient but use fertility treatment to have a child when we want; two men can marry and have children by surrogacy; two women by donor insemination. We create embryos, experiment upon them, and then destroy them, whilst we foster animal-human hybrids.

Our society is besieged by the opposing but cohabiting forces of secularism and Islam—anything that is anti-Christ. It appears, moreover, that the Church is weak; in the desire to welcome, we have become accommodating. Our frailty of conviction is matched only by our failure to speak, and so the gospel message is lost, taken from

the people.

How did we get to this place? And what hope can we offer? The Mission of God gives us the answer.

The Mission of God showed me that Genesis 1-3 sets the stage for the gospel—the Cross is the centrepiece, the seed is sown in Genesis. Genesis 1-3 is the context for our message of reconciliation, the meaning for our meaninglessness, and the hope for our redemption. It tells us how the cosmos got here, how it’s structured, and what God intends for it. Genesis 3:15 – Revelation 22:21 tells us how God is working to restore—and expand—His plan that sin spoiled.

The Mission of God gives us the theological framework to understand our times; to show us what God intends and what He’s doing in the world today. The book outlines the hope for our nation, our cultural mandate. The book gives us the theology to say that God didn’t create the world simply to take people to heaven. He created the world to glorify Himself, and we glorify God most when we act as God intended in every aspect of life: as an individual, in marriage, families, communities, and nations. This book is an intellectual masterpiece; it is first-rate scholarship—a theological and historical gem. But it is more than that. It is the theological apologetic to act out God’s truth in every sphere of life in twenty-first century Britain and beyond. Thank you, Joe. The book is changing lives.

Andrea Williams

CEO, Christian Concern and

Christian Legal Centre

London UK

Foreword to the

First Edition

You hold in your hands the most comprehensive and cogent argument for the perpetuity of God’s moral law as it relates to civil legislation written in over 40 years. This thesis, bold but thoughtfully nuanced, offers a breath of fresh air amid both the hermeneutical nihilism and pietistic retreatism that infests the modern church. It is a trumpet call to the reinstallation of God’s revelational standards in home, church, and the wider society. But this far-ranging book is more. It is a veritable blueprint for a restoration of the Kingdom of God in a Western culture that, at first, drifted and is now rushing headlong into apostasy from the Triune God. Dr. Boot selects as the paradigm for his blueprint the grand Puritan vision, which bequeathed to the English-speaking world the benefits — spiritual, intellectual, educational, economic, vocational — that made it the envy of the world. Ironically, in jettisoning this cultural paradigm due to its (erroneously) alleged narrowness and dourness, our English-speaking world has severed our lifeline to the godly resources of cultural virility. Even more importantly, however, Dr. Boot argues that this paradigm is atop the most God-honoring of the available expressions of Christianity — the Puritan vision seeks to honor God in every area of life and thought. It was the original if-Jesus-isn’t-Lord-of-all-he’s-not-Lord-at-all Christianity. If you want to live a 24/7 life pleasing to God, you’ll end up with a Faith that looks suspiciously like good, old-fashioned—and ever fresh and new—Puritanism.

This book is not for the timid or diffident souls who want, at best, a Sunday go-to-meetin’ Christianity that makes no demands on their comfortable, self-centered life. But if you long to please God, and wish to see Him pleased, not just in the church house, but also the school house, the state house, the courthouse, the movie house, and the art house, this book will show you the way. Dr. Joe Boot is God’s Reformer in Canada, and this book establishes him as a spiritual and intellectual force to be reckoned with both by a rapacious secular culture and a timid church culture.

P. Andrew Sandlin, S. T. D.

President

Center for Cultural Leadership

California

The Mission of God:

A Manifesto of Hope

for Society

He has shown his people the power of his works,

in giving them the inheritance

of the nations. The works of his hands are faithful

and just; all his precepts

are trustworthy; they are established forever and ever,

to be performed

with faithfulness and uprightness. He sent redemption

to his people; he has

commanded his covenant forever.

Holy and awesome is his name!

– Psalm 111:6–9

Author’s Introduction:

Fresh Water, Ancient Cisterns

0.1 Epochal Turning Points

What is the calling of God’s covenant people in history? What is the Kingdom of God and how does it manifest itself? What does the reign of God look like and how are we to discern God working? What is the relationship between faith and public morality and policy? What should be the relationship between church and state? Is religious pluralism a biblically compatible and workable theology of state? Does the church have a future in history? Are Christians called to transform cultures? In short, what is the mission of God and what part do we have to play in it? These questions have become increasingly pertinent for the church today, especially in the Western world, because it is widely recognized that Western civilization is facing an epochal turning point. The political philosopher and former president of the Italian senate, Marcello Pera has stated aptly, The apostasy of Christianity is exposing the entire West to the risk of a grave cultural and political crisis, and perhaps even to a collapse of civilisation.¹ Those who profess to be bible-believing Christians can no longer ignore a growing chorus of non-evangelical voices from theology, philosophy and politics, sounding the alarm concerning the growing threat to religious liberty, the rule of law, the freedom of the church, and the survival of the family (and hence civilization as we have known it). This threat is engendered by a growing statist vision of society, increasingly committed to a neo-pagan ideology that is now permeating every aspect of the Western social order. Even certain European heads of state have started to appeal to Christianity as the only hope for Europe’s recovery.² The Prime Minster of Hungary recently declared that European decline was a result of abandoning the Christian faith: 

The European crisis has not come by chance but by the carelessness and neglect of their responsibilities by leaders who have questioned precisely those Christian roots. That is the driving force that allowed European cohesion, family, work and credit. These values were the old continental economic power, thanks mainly to the development which in those days was done in accordance with [those] principles.³

This growing crisis has made the subject of missiology⁴ and its primary areas of concern, all the more important for our moment in history. The turning point that our culture has reached, demands an apologetic response from the church, one that articulates and defends a biblical perspective on our calling, equipping this generation of Christians to live faithfully and effectively, in word and deed. It is my hope that I may be able to play a small part in offering that apologetic response, by assisting in the equipping of Christ’s church with a renewed vision of the gospel in our hour of danger, and yet, equally glorious moment of opportunity. 

0.2 Autobiographical ‘Apologia’

Working as an itinerant Christian apologist for a number of years, based in both Europe and North America, as well as serving as a churchman and pastor on both sides of the Atlantic, in urban London, England and downtown Toronto, Canada, has given me a keen interest in the critical missiological questions mentioned above. By the gracious work of the Spirit, it has also enabled me to see their urgency. I further believe that, by the same grace, these experiences, in conjunction with my reading, have given me an insight into the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Christian church in the West. There are critical areas, in both theology and practice, where we are weak, ineffective, exposed and as a result, in peril, haemorrhaging great numbers of congregants. This book is the result of my studies and scripture-centred reflection on my ministry labours over a number of years. It attempts to diagnose some of the reasons for the church’s present weakness in the West, and offers some direction to the church for renewal, reformation, and ultimately revival. The work is far from any kind of final answer, nor do I presume to possess such an insight or ability. Furthermore, I claim no originality for this work, in the sense that I say nothing that has not been said in past generations by faithful Christians within the creedally orthodox, protestant evangelical tradition – that is to say, I draw on ancient cisterns for fresh water. So, whilst not a new brook it may nonetheless provide a valuable synthesis of a variety of streams of thought from various disciplines, coming together into a fresh tributary to refresh the thirsty faithful in a parched generation. My greatest hope is that it might function as a constructive addition to missiological reflection on the reign of God, and so for some, be a potential starting point for provoking immediate and deeper consideration of the crisis facing the church in Canada (and the West generally) and the way out. I also hope it may be a means of introducing another generation of Christians to the foundational biblical truths that gave shape to our Christian heritage.  

The primary purpose of this book, then, is not to simply add yet more academic speculation to the over-laden shelves of scholars – dense pages patiently awaiting critique and discussion – but rather to suggest, to every thinking Christian, that there is a prophetic urgency to the church’s mandate in our time, applicable to us all, which we neglect at our own peril. The Bible’s anthropology makes abundantly clear that because we are a fallen, sinful, and rebellious race, without a God given vision, mission, or purpose directing our lives, anarchy and death ensue, Where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law (Prov. 29:18). We desperately need to recover the prophetic vision of God’s Word for our lives and the blessedness of living in terms of it.  

0.3 Back to the Future

It is interesting to note how both biblically and historically, prophetic ministry begins with a backward look. The Old Testament prophets called upon the covenant people to remember God’s repeated acts of deliverance in their history, and to remember His Law, if they were to have a future. They also pointed back to faithful servants of God within that history – historical figures like Moses and the patriarchs – and used their lives and example as a means of challenging people to return to faithfulness to their God-given mission. Likewise, true reformation within the church begins with a prophetic witness that looks back to the Word of God and the example of the ‘cloud of witnesses’ in our history, who have lived in terms of it, and asks where we have departed from a fidelity to the truth. So, in order to be able to look forward with vision and hope for the future of God’s church, we must first look back to learn from the past and be resourced by it, by our fathers, and recover what is of value. Only an impudent and blind conceit could lead us to the presumption that we do not need to learn from our forebears in the faith as we face the challenges and opportunities of today. It was once commonly accepted that modern Protestants, and especially reformed and evangelical Protestants, owed a great deal to the biblical vision of the gospel and God-centred social order bequeathed to them by the Puritans – one example of a faithful Christian witness in our history. The evangelical faith of these devoted men provided the sense of vision and mission that helped stimulate, not only international missions and evangelism for three centuries, but nation-building and the establishment of free institutions in both the British Commonwealth and in the United States. In the early chapters of this book, I will be defining the key distinctions of Puritan thought, but a simple summary offered by Charles Cohen is helpful by way of introduction:  

Puritanism has been defined variously in intellectual, political, or cultural terms...it is best understood as a religious sensibility centered around conversion – the Holy Spirit’s regeneration of the soul – and the concomitant determination to restore the purity of the apostolic church and reform society according to God’s laws. Theologically, Puritanism represents an emphasis within the Reformed Protestant (Calvinist) tradition...Puritan piety was characterized by a veneration of the Bible as the rule for living righteously and a pervasive sense that God providentially supervises all human affairs. Puritanism made a substantial impact on Anglo-America...Puritan moral values made New England a watchword for sobriety – it had a lower percentage of illegitimate births than other regions – and may have instilled habits of economic discipline that abetted commercial growth...from its doctrinal and experiential matrix issued not only New England Congregationalism, but also varieties of Presbyterian and Baptist practice. Updated by Jonathan Edwards in the mid-eighteenth century, Reformed Protestantism became America’s leading

theological tradition.⁵

Puritanism had a distinctly bible-centred theology, anthropology and view of history that gave it a great missional vitality. The plain reality is that the biblical faith and sense of cultural mission that gave us so much in both the British Commonwealth and in the United States, with the rule of law, a free market, representative government, freedom of conscience and religion, and the freedom and self-government of the Christian church and family, was given to us in large measure by the influence of our Puritan forebears.⁶ What is left of this heritage has been disappearing extremely rapidly in the past two generations, and as a result, our culture is slipping into a complete loss of restraint, gripped by ideologies with pagan roots that promote a way of physical, moral and social death. A new generation now drifts without purpose and vision, with little confidence that they have a future, leaving us vulnerable to a growing religious vision of state power and authority that sees its total regulation and control as the only solution to the collapsing social order.  

It is in light of this reality confronting the church, and the challenge of presenting the gospel in such a context, that I have undertaken this study, in the hope of re-capturing the minds and hearts of another generation of Christians in Canada (and beyond) with a Puritan (Calvinist) theology of the mission – with its distinctive anthropology and philosophy of history – reminding them of the culture (indeed civilization) that this biblical vision produced. It is, then, my purpose to bring the Puritan hermeneutic of submission to God’s Word to bear on the major themes of contemporary missiology. For the sake of clarity, Johannes Verkuyl’s definition of the academic study of inter-disciplinary missiology is comprehensive and helpful: 

Missiology is the study of the salvation activities of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit throughout the world geared toward bringing the Kingdom of God into existence. Seen in this perspective missiology is the study of the worldwide church’s divine mandate to be ready to serve this God who is aiming his saving acts toward the world. In dependence on the Holy Spirit and by word and deed the church is to communicate the total gospel and the total divine law to all mankind. Missiology’s task in every age is to investigate scientifically and critically the presuppositions, motives, structures, methods, patterns of cooperation, and leadership which the churches bring to their mandate. In addition missiology must examine every other type of human activity...to see if it fits the criteria and goals of God’s Kingdom which has both already come and is yet coming.⁷

In my view, since missiology is concerned with how God brings His Kingdom into existence, most particularly by the communication and application of this total gospel and the total divine law through His people, authentic missiology is not just about constructing a theology of mission in the abstract, it is biblical theology and doxology as the mission. A biblical approach to mission is therefore biblical theology externalized and applied to every area of life. It views all theology as in some way expressive of God’s mission to reveal Himself and His purposes in history, call out a people for His own possession, and establish His Kingdom reign. The Bible is, therefore, the self-revelation of the missionary (sending) God, revealed through His missionaries by the inspiration of the Spirit, about the mission for a missionary people!  

It is obvious, then, that missiological reflection is not done in a theological vacuum but will be committed to certain presuppositions about the nature of God’s Word, how this Word is inter-related in the covenants of Scripture, and how that same Word is to be externalized in the world. As a Trinitarian and creedally orthodox believer, I look to the Calvinistic tradition as my primary guide to understanding Scripture and externalizing the faith, especially as expressed in the Puritan legacy. This is because I believe that the Calvinistic framework represents both the most faithful reading of Scripture and the most influential tradition within evangelical Christianity, profoundly shaping culture and civilization in the West.  

0.4 Puritans Old and New

Regrettably, the coherent and compelling contribution the Puritan direction of thought can make in diagnosing and addressing the critical issues facing the Western church and culture today, has been routinely ignored by contemporary evangelicals. Some of those claiming to be Reformed are overtly hostile to Puritan views on covenantal spheres of authority (what the later Dutch neo-Calvinists came to call ‘sphere sovereignty’), community or national covenant, law, culture, and by extension, Christian civilization.⁸ Yet even where the hostility isn’t overt, there is a tacit suppression of the dominant Puritan view of biblical law and gospel as it related to culture, national covenant, church-state relationship, crime and punishment, and the eschatological Kingdom of God. Certainly, there is a renewed interest among evangelicals in Puritan piety, pastoral ministry, spirituality, church government and forms of worship; indeed, these things are often celebrated. But scant attention in the popular literature is paid to the nature and character of Puritan thought as it related to their primary concern – the Kingdom and reign of God in the earth by His Spirit, through law and gospel. There appears to be either embarrassment or cowardly reluctance to raise the ‘spectre’ of the Puritan ideal of God’s reign, given the pluralistic idealism of modern Western politics. Yet the sovereignty of God and his total lordship over all aspects of life was, in large degree, the centrepiece of the Puritan worldview, shaped in the rigor of social and civil conflict, and the challenges of nation building on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, in many respects, they added little by way of theoretical theological development to Calvin (though they extensively developed the theme of covenant). Rather, as the quintessence of practical Christianity, what they did was to rigorously apply reformed thought to each area of life (both private and public, personal and institutional) in terms of practical theology (which all theology should be) in a fashion even more comprehensive than Calvin managed in Geneva. There is no understanding of Puritan thought without recognizing their view of Christ’s reign and crown rights – rights that the church is called to assert and pursue in the earth till he comes. To study the Puritans, whilst ignoring their practical application of God’s law to all of life, or their view that God’s Kingdom and total sovereignty is to be realized in family, church, school and state, is to largely fail to understand them. Is it not disingenuous to claim an affinity for the Puritans, delighting in the vitality of their prayers and piety whilst ignoring its source – their vision of God’s covenant and reign in history? There is no accurate understanding of John Knox, Samuel Rutherford, John Owen, John Elliot, John Cotton or Oliver Cromwell to be had, whilst ignoring their view of Christ’s present reign at God’s right hand as King of kings and Lord of lords, to whom all men are subject, under whose law all men are held to account (whether king or commoner), and by whose gospel alone men can find redemption and restoration.  

It is, then, perhaps, in some measure, because of the contemporary evangelical indifference to these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan convictions, that their most consistent modern heirs in the twentieth and twenty first century – the theonomists – have so often been chastised and ostracized. Since the majority of those who style themselves Puritans today systematically ignore the full consequences of the present reign of God, describing those who do not as ‘theonomists’ is a tool for marginalizing them. It suggests the theonomists’ emphasis is an obscure footnote in the present rather than a recovery of the keynote of the past. That is to say, they have been ignored or censured precisely because they have taken up and revived key elements in our Puritan heritage that the rest of the modern evangelical community has chosen to forget or ignore.⁹ A small crop of theologians, churchmen and apologists within the Reformed, Puritan tradition, over the last fifty years or so, have sought to bring to the church’s attention an area of Protestant theology and practice long neglected – a rigorous examination of the details of the Law-Word of God in both testaments, and their application to every area of life; both public and private, church and state, personal and familial, in terms of the absolute sovereignty of God. They have, likewise, sought to make Christians increasingly self-conscious of the antithesis that exists between a biblical way of living in and an understanding of the world, and a non-Christian approach. Christian thinkers, theologians and practitioners such as Cornelius Van Til, John Frame, Greg Bahnsen, Rousas John Rushdoony, Gary DeMar, Kenneth Talbot, P. Andrew Sandlin, Jeffery Ventrella, James Jordan, and many others, have sought to point in various ways, and with different emphases, to many of these critical Puritan themes, and their relevance for our cultural moment.  

Despite harsh criticism, these broadly theonomic thinkers and practitioners have, in my opinion, been largely vindicated in their observations and critiques of contemporary culture and modern Western Christianity, since over the past fifty years, the rapid degeneration of our social order, and the decline of the church, has proved their prophetic diagnosis remarkably accurate. It seems clear to me that, without being unduly anachronistic, the essentially ‘Puritan’ solutions they have suggested, which rest upon an essentially ‘Puritan’ diagnosis, warrant serious attention. This is because both the diagnosis and recommended cure are grounded upon the same theological and covenantal hermeneutic, making their biblical and cultural exegesis two branches from the same tree. If the diagnosis has proven correct, there is surely much to learn from the proposed solutions. In my judgement, the most important representative of the ‘New Puritanism,’ is the late R. J. Rushdoony. He stands out as pivotal in terms of re-laying these foundations and updating them for a new era, giving concrete shape to a revived vision of a Calvinistic social order, rigorously applying reformed theology to the cultural and missional challenge facing the church. Though most Christians have never heard of him, John Whitehead called Rushdoony, the most influential theologian affecting the Christian Right today.¹⁰

Now as anyone familiar with modern political reality will know, since anybody that opposes abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, big government and the coercive redistribution of wealth is almost immediately identified as part of the ‘Christian Right,’ this is quite a remarkable statement; although it is not a commendation that Rushdoony would have appreciated.¹¹ The historian Molly Worthen,¹² in her critical analysis of Rushdoony’s work and influence¹³ (an analysis that is less than sympathetic to the Reformed worldview), points out that little more than a superficial caricaturing of Rushdoony’s important contribution has taken place within conservative Christian circles. In light of the ‘illness’ of the West, she rightly considers this a real mistake because, When Rushdoony identified an intellectual crisis afoot in American Protestantism, he was right...; the crisis he perceived was real.¹⁴ She also incisively perceives that he was seeking to impose upon conservative Christianity an intellectual consistency that it lacked.¹⁵ So, rather than being casually dismissive of a new Puritan patriarch, she identifies him as a strange brand of theological genius whose ideas proved robust enough to sustain a movement.¹⁶ Moreover, she correctly observes that Calvin, as the godfather of the Reformed tradition and mastermind of the Genevan theocratic experiment, was his spiritual and theological role model, whilst "The Puritans – Calvin’s progeny on the British Isles – were the ancestors to whom Rushdoony...paid most frequent obeisance.... In his Institutes, Rushdoony aimed to resurrect the vision of Calvin and the Puritans.¹⁷ There is no doubt that this is an accurate picture of his intentions. Whilst his synthetic mind and unusually wide reading gave him a brilliant depth of insight and compelling originality of expression,  Worthen further points out that none of [Rushdoony’s] beliefs is unknown in the history of Protestant Christianity – nor are many of his inclinations wholly alien to British and American political conservatism – Rushdoony reformulated them in a creative critique of late-twentieth-century American society.¹⁸ His accomplishment was that he successfully, refashioned this web of reformed Christian and conservative libertarian principles into a massive cultural indictment of twentieth century America on biblical grounds.¹⁹ As Worthen correctly points out, Rushdoony’s essential thesis was that, we moderns are guilty of the heresies condemned in the fifth century at Chalcedon: we blur human and divine and worship man and his creations.²⁰ This creative refashioning did offer the Christian community a more consistent, thoroughgoing and refined Calvinistic vision of God’s reign than had been seen before in the Reformed tradition, and by applying it to the immediate challenges facing Christians in the culture, it came with fresh insight and contemporary relevance. In linking a robust reformed perspective to the immediate problems of modern life, there is some similarity in emphasis between Rushdoony and another of his role models, the Dutch theologian and statesman, Abraham Kuyper, to whom he credited the modern Calvinist re-awakening.²¹ The spiritual root of Rushdoony’s (and the other theonomists’) Puritan critique and manifesto is summarized well by Worthen, Revelation, not tradition, is the source of legitimacy.... Rushdoony viewed his mission as an attempt to restore in humankind a personal loyalty to God."²² In the Puritan thesis, obedience to the law of God and his covenant is the essence of loyalty to God and is, thus, the meaning of true Christian worship.  Consequently, Rushdoony and the other theonomists called people back to faithful obedience to God’s law, as both the expression of true sanctification in the Christian, who has been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, and as the means of glorifying God and serving the reign of Christ. In this volume, I am therefore urging, that instead of dismissing modern Puritanism, we must consider it carefully, taking what is of value for facing the difficult realities confronting the church today. Irresponsible and sensational journalism, as well as superficial evangelical criticism, has regarded Rushdoony, and the new Puritans generally, with suspicion, as though their focus on God’s law represents some sort of threat to freedom and our political institutions. Worthen rightly debunks this myth: 

The real trouble with Rushdoony’s influence today is not the spectre of Mosaic law...the tragedy, rather, is that too many Christians have picked up Rushdoony’s language without reading his books or understanding his fundamental challenge: that evangelical Christians must find a way to reconcile the Bible with true pluralism.... Every religious tradition must broker a compromise with the society it inhabits. In America, that compromise has broken down. If Christians reject Mosaic law, they still must seriously consider the relationship between the Bible and the pluralist public square [emphasis added].²³

0.5 The New Puritanism within the Context of Pluralism 

This is the critical issue at the heart of the problem of contemporary missiology; one that occupies the minds of many of today’s Western missiologists and theologians. How should Christians relate to an increasingly de-Christianized public square, where people are becoming either ignorant of, or hostile toward, the worldview of the Bible? What are Christians to do when the institutional church is marginalized, the exclusive claims of the gospel are viewed as bigotry and the moral law in Scripture seen as repressive and intolerant? In a context where, increasingly, people of other religions, from secular humanists to Muslims, coalesce (not without growing tension) under one governmental structure, and we are informed that the new state doctrine is multi-culturalism, how are Christians to understand and relate the claims of Christ and God’s law to public life – indeed should they seek to relate them at all? In addressing this renewed encounter between biblical faith and the humanistic, Islamic and pagan ideologies in our time, many Christians have decided to adopt an overtly pluralistic or inclusivist perspectives on the gospel and mission (dealt with in chapter 15 of this book), essentially surrendering moral absolutes and the binding character of God’s law altogether and re-interpreting the Christian gospel to be the embracing of many social orders and many routes to God, without the need for a saving knowledge of Christ. Is this capitulation an adequate approach for Christians, seeking to understand how the Bible relates with today’s pluralism? Indeed, can biblical faith be reconciled with the modern philosophy of religious pluralism at all? The Puritan perspective says no and regards the acceptance of philosophically pluralist and inclusivist missiological solutions as idolatry. It must be stressed that what is not being said here is that Christians cannot live peaceably in a religiously pluralistic context – the early church did, and Christians have done so all over the globe for centuries. The question is, how are we to live in that context, if biblical Christianity cannot be harmonized in a new synthesis with the religious pluralism of our day? So as Robert Bowman acknowledges in his essay on theonomy entitled, The New Puritanism, whether we like or agree with Rushdoony and the theonomists or not, they are, certainly asking the right questions. What is the proper relationship between church and state? Is a Christian culture possible? If a culture were converted to faith in Christ, how would their institutions change? What would be the basis of such a culture’s laws? Does the Bible have the answers to society’s problems, and if so, what are those answers?²⁴

0.6 The Challenge of the ‘Emergent Church’

One part of the modern church that has drunk deeply from the wells of contemporary missiology to frame and answer these questions is the emergent church movement; adopting an emphasis on pluralistic or inclusivist solutions to Christianity’s encounter with religious pluralism.²⁵ Moreover, the emergent church, which differs little in doctrine from late nineteenth-century liberal Christianity (although it lacks the intellectual and academic rigor of its forerunner), is dominated by the radical egalitarian philosophy of social justice – co-opted from cultural Marxists and utopians, and baptized in the name of ‘God’s reign’ or the ‘Kingdom of God.’ The younger generation of evangelicals are often strongly drawn to this position, being concerned about justice and equity, without understanding the philosophical and theological assumptions that underlie such a perspective. Younger evangelicals are rightly distressed that there has been an apparent lack of interest in the fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity of the previous generation, in addressing how the Christian faith is to apply beyond the walls of the church and beyond an individual concern with personal salvation. They want to know what the implications of the faith are for the problems and difficulties we are surrounded by in our culture. What does Christianity have to say concerning poverty and social deprivation? What does it have to say about the environment and care for the creation? What does it have to say about politics and the major social issues of our time like gay marriage and so forth? The silence of much modern evangelicalism (including the reformed world) has been deafening on most of these issues. The reasons for this are varied. One reaction has been to dismiss these questions as socio-cultural matters of concern only to ‘social gospel’ peddlers aligned with liberal Christianity, so by definition, they cannot be relevant to evangelicals. Another has been a retrenchment in a kind of minimalist soteriology, where evangelicals have simply said that our sole focus should be ‘the gospel’ (albeit a truncated definition concerned with little more than justification and personal salvation) and a collective reaffirmation of basic creedal statements, holding the line on the great evangelical confessions in the face of pluralism. Still others have developed theologically novel responses, holding that these wider socio-cultural challenges are all areas of ‘common grace,’ an endeavour that should be left to the state to handle – there are allegedly two kingdoms, and the Christian’s concern is only the reforming of the church institution, its confessions, liturgy and discipline, but not the shaping of a Christian approach to the pressing matters of our time and culture, which would seek to transform it. With the large-scale abandonment of the Puritan legacy in the area of applied reformed thought to all of life, and the retreat of conservative evangelicals into various theological and cultural ghettoes, where the doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture is cloistered, no longer applying to the world at large, younger evangelicals have been left floundering, looking for an authentically Christian response to the ideological changes in our culture and the urgent problems facing them in the social order. The only portion of the contemporary church, outside of broad liberal ecumenism, or the handful of new Puritan voices, that has been giving some kind of concrete response, has been the emergent church movement. They offer ‘social justice,’ in the name of the reign and mission of God – a new friendly Christianity that welcomes doctrinal change, embraces diversity, and seeks to right the wrongs in the structures of society. This call to ‘join the revolution’ appeals to young minds and has been winning many converts. But can these young people be blamed for their interest in such appeals and a subsequent defection to emergent groups that have abandoned confessional evangelical faith? Raised in a church that has offered them little by way of careful biblical exegesis regarding their relationship to culture, providing no tools from God’s law for a right biblical understanding of justice and righteousness, they have been easy prey for the purveyors of the new liberalism. What I believe we need to offer them is the new Puritanism that provides robust biblical answers and a truly Christ-centred alternative to the hybridized offspring of the cultural Marxists masquerading as a Christian conscience.²⁶ The new Puritanism’s emphatic alternative is that biblical revelation is the only guiding presupposition that will yield true conclusions to these questions, and the law of biblical revelation is the only legitimate framework for organizing a society in a manner that does not invoke the judgement

of God. 

0.7 Authentic Pluralism

This perspective is Puritan to the core because, at the foundation of Puritan theology, was the view that all factuality can only be properly understood in subordination to God. There can, therefore, be no indifference to good and evil. Thus, a pagan ‘cosmopolitanism’ that ‘equalizes’ all beliefs and faiths in a social melting pot was, in the Puritan view, little more than a Tower of Babel in pursuit of a dangerous and false unity.²⁷ This did not mean a rejection of religious toleration in terms of people’s personal beliefs, or a hostility to various people groups with other customs and ideas living in Christian lands. The Puritan thesis rejects a pluralism of law structures, or moralities as being humanistic, polytheistic, idolatrous and self-eviscerating. However, the same Puritanism promotes equality before Christian law, freedom of personal belief, and liberty of public worship of the God of Scripture (or freedom not to worship). The Puritan-inspired Toleration Act of 1650 in England repealed all acts requiring church attendance at church on Sundays (Catholic or Protestant). The intention was to provide civil equality as well as religious liberty.²⁸ This meant complete liberty for the public worship of Christians in their various denominations – though it certainly did not mean that Muslims could build mosques or madrasas and start Sharia courts as a parallel social order replete with their own legal system as in modern Britain!²⁹ The famous Instrument of Government reinforced a Christian law and order, and freedom and equality for Christian forms of worship, stating that, "the Christian religion, as it is contained in the scriptures, be held forth and recommended as the public profession of these nations."³⁰ This further meant that, as long as people did not, ‘cause civil injury or actual disturbances of others,’ they were free to publicly practice Christianity as they chose – at this time in English history, this did not extend to Roman Catholicism (for obvious geopolitical reasons) or to those who practiced licentiousness.³¹ Notably, however, not one person died for religion in Protectoral Britain. Under Cromwell, the consciences of the people were not tyrannized over, and the Jews were readmitted to England.

He proposed no legislation to prevent men and women from worshipping as they wished...a vast amount of theology he disapproved of was published uncensored; and he did not prosecute anyone for religious opinions they were reported to have shared with others behind closed doors and with like-minded folk.³² Likewise, Rushdoony and the new Puritans see themselves as the authentic pluralists, holding to the only kind of pluralism that is biblically viable, non-idolatrous and non-disintegrating – maximum liberty, plurality and freedom within the bounds of God’s moral law. This in no way excludes the realism in the face of current social realities in the West, nor ignores the challenge of functioning as God’s missionaries in an idolatrous order. Observing that the modern humanistic state is seeking a radical enforcement of uniformity, in terms of a neo-pagan faith through its public schools, that tolerates no dissent as Rushdoony writes:  

A single culture is demanded, and the public school must create it.... [A] free pluralistic society requires the abolition of the public school and tax support of the school in favour of a pluralistic education. The competitive aspect will ensure the quality of education, and the cultural implications of various faiths, philosophies and opinions can be given freedom to develop and make their contribution.³³

Here, we see a missiological strategy. By pursuing educational freedom in a society, now filled with competing philosophies and religious ideas, where Christianity has ceased to be the religious consensus within the establishment, Rushdoony believed that Christianity would inevitably win the cultural battle by virtue of the fact that it is true. The cultural implications of the faith would be proven so superior to all other competitors that the truth of the gospel, as it did in pagan antiquity, would again triumph in minds and hearts by the grace of God. This then is one-way Christians can live peaceably under an alien law structure, and by it, steadily transform the culture and restore a Christian moral order that honours God. A Puritan missiology, thus, seeks to win and not whip people into the faith, pursuing true freedom under God. The new Puritanism (theonomy), as represented by Rushdoony and others, envisions the progressive advancements of Christ’s reign and the transformation of the social order by individual regeneration and self-government in line with God’s Word. Faithful and joyful obedience to God in the family, church, school and vocations, then, follows, and only then will we see the gradual and peaceful implementation of God’s righteous law within all the various spheres of life. A Puritan missiological vision, thus, looks forward in hope. It is from firmly within this tradition that I explore the present challenge and opportunity facing the church in the West. I look to the Puritans, old and new, frequently drawing on the work and best insights of those called ‘theonomists,’ Rushdoony in particular, because I am convinced that this direction of thought exegetes both scripture and culture accurately and puts us in the right path (faithfulness to God’s total Word) for finding answers to our present crisis. Whilst I differ with Rushdoony (and others amongst the new Puritans) in a number of areas and applications, and my extensive use of his work certainly does not commit me to all his distinctive views; nonetheless, overall, I am persuaded that the new Puritanism (in which I do not hesitate to say I include myself) has a prophetic role to play in the church today and holds an important key to the church’s mission and the recovery of the gospel.  

0.8 The Missio Dei

I am acutely aware that this perspective puts me in a real minority in the field of missiology to say the least. But in light of our cultural crisis and my study of God’s Word, I have come to believe that, for the most part, both contemporary missiology, and evangelical discourse generally, in its examination of the church’s message and calling in light of God’s Kingdom mission, does not pay sufficient attention to the specifics of God’s Word. In particular, its neglect of biblical law, in its understanding of the gospel and the Kingdom reign of God, results in its impoverishment. By biblical law, I take Jonathan Burnside’s definition to be normative: "Biblical law [is] an integration of different instructional genres of the Bible which together express a vision of society ultimately answerable to God."³⁴ This implies an acceptance of the material authority of the complete divine law and mankind’s accountability in terms of it. Put simply, I believe that in general, missiologists and theologians guiding the church in dealing with critical aspects of the Missio Dei and ‘reign of God’ in a pluralistic age, consistently look to secular social and political theories, drawn from non-Christian philosophical ideas, to help define and accomplish the work of the Kingdom of God rather than resting in and building upon the clear instruction of God’s Word. In response to this deficit, I consider the material authority of God’s complete Word in the Bible to be the only standard for the defining of the ‘Good News of the Kingdom,’ the ordering of social relationships, the formation of culture and the shaping of socio-political theory – including concerns for our shared environment, economic relations, and the meaning of social or public justice. Rather than looking to theological liberalism, and political and social sciences, employing variations on the thought of Karl Marx, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Michel Foucault, Faustus Socinus, and many others, I would urge that biblical law in all of Scripture must be taken more seriously when considering the Great Commission, the Cultural Mandate and issues of justice, social order and the meaning and implications of Christ’s atonement. So, the most important questions, implicit in all the following studies are:

a) What is the relationship between biblical law and gospel, and a faithful Christian vision of the Kingdom of God and the

Missio Dei?

b) What is the nature of our current crisis of civilization and what does scripture have to say about religious pluralism?

c) How does the Biblical vision of the gospel of the Kingdom help us to understand the causes of the present theological, cultural, and sociopolitical crisis?

d) In what ways does this vision of the Kingdom of God point us out of the present morass and navigate us toward hope and

a future?

e) What can we do as Christians in our present cultural moment to build for the future faithfully?

To avoid misunderstanding, it is necessary to briefly say something about the provenance of the term Missio Dei, as its use in many circles has justifiably come under sustained attack for conflating God’s mission with the historical process, thereby, side-stepping the specific calling of the church and practically excluding evangelism. It seems this now controversial term was first used by the German missiologist Karl Hartenstein in summarizing the teaching of Karl Barth.³⁵ Barth’s name alone immediately raises many concerns for the reformed and evangelical reader because of the questionable views of Barth on the authority of Scripture and Christian theology generally – but those issues cannot be discussed here as they lie outside the scope of this work. The perception of the term Missio Dei is not helped either by its popularity within and association with, a broad ecumenism.³⁶ Nonetheless, despite its dubious parentage, the original intent of the term Missio Dei was simply to communicate that the concept of mission must be rooted in the doctrine of the Trinity, because our mission flows from the inner dynamic movement of God Himself in personal relationship.³⁷ Consequently, despite legitimate criticism of many missiologist’s use of the term, I can agree with Christopher Wright that, the expression can be retained as expressing a major and vital biblical truth...the God revealed in the scriptures is personal, purposeful and goal oriented.³⁸ The Missio Dei (mission of God) pertains then to the ‘sending of God’ (of His Son, the Holy Spirit and His church) and the universal ‘reign of God’ (basileia tou Theou) and is, therefore, not limited to earlier, somewhat truncated, soteriological, cultural or ecclesiastical definitions of ‘mission.’ The godfather of much contemporary missiological thought, David Bosch, with whom I differ profoundly in many areas, nonetheless affirms, in principle, a God-centred and not man-centred approach to mission and the Kingdom; one that begins with the Triune God and recognizes that he is not limited to the institution of the church, whilst always utilizing His covenant people as privileged participants in His work. Bosch writes that the church has to be:  

Service to the Missio Dei, representing God in and over against the world, pointing to God, holding up the God-child before the eyes of the world ... the church witnesses to the fullness of the promise of God’s reign and participates in the ongoing struggle between that reign and the powers of darkness and evil.³⁹

So, God’s mission is not limited to the institutional church sphere, but it embraces the whole organic church – God’s people wherever they are. This definition of the Missio Dei as the universal implementation of the ‘reign of God’ will be considered normative for the purposes of this book.  

However, it should be noted that the meaning and manifestation of ‘God’s reign’ within the rubric of the Missio Dei is also very much disputed by missiologists, with some scholars now viewing the very term Missio Dei as a ‘Trojan Horse’ for various rival concepts of mission to be smuggled within the walls of an ecumenical theology of mission.⁴⁰ Hoedemaker, thus, notes that the term ‘Missio Dei,’ with its theologically broad definitions, can be used legitimately by people who subscribe to mutually exclusive theological positions.⁴¹ It is into this ambiguity that covenantal hermeneutics and a Puritan approach to the ‘reign of God’ can speak with a fresh, albeit controversial clarity. I have, then, endeavoured in the following pages, to further biblical faith and life through what I hope is an engaging analysis of key themes in contemporary missiology through a reformed, Puritan lens.  As an unexceptional cultural theologian, apologist and generalist, and given the scope of this work, I have no doubt that my commentary and analysis will be lacking in places and that much deeper work and reflection needs to be done in many areas.  But I have, to the best of my ability, sought to engage the cultural challenges in a manner as faithful to scripture as I can muster.   This is done, not simply out of an academic interest in missiological concerns, but because I genuinely believe that the core elements of Puritan thought must be restated with relevance in our time, as central to both the recovery of the church, and the Western world itself from the brink of disaster – a cultural auto-homicide well underway. As already intimated, it is my sincere desire that this meager contribution to missological reflection will lead more people to take a fresh look at a reformed vision of the gospel and its corresponding social order. The primary obstacle to my modest hope in our time is due to what Marilynne Robinson called a, collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.⁴² She said this in reference to the attitude one encounters at the mention of ‘the Puritans,’ and their much derided evangelical form of civilization, since the very term is falsely associated with repressiveness and intolerance in popular consciousness. But to ignore and disparage evangelical law and social order, and the gospel of the Kingdom which enlivened it is, "to make ourselves ignorant and contemptuous of the first two or three hundred years of one major strain of our

own civilization."⁴³

---

1. Marcello Pera, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians: The Religious Roots of Free Societies, trans. L. B. Lappin (New York, NY: Encounter, 2011), 62

2. BUDAPEST, Nov. 20, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Europe must return to Christianity before economic regeneration is possible, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary said at a conference last week. According to Orban, the growing economic crisis in Europe is one that originates in the spiritual, not the economic order. To solve this crisis, he proposed a renewal of culture and politics based on