Instead of laying before men their calling in Christ to minister God’s Kingdom life in every area, in their families and vocations, as priests unto God, they are told that their family, work, money, the education of their children and leadership in society and culture is merely a ‘creation mandate’ that is not related to our redemptive calling – it is ‘law’ not ‘gospel.’ Men are drilled instead to believe that the kingdom work is the work of churchmen in their institutions (the sacraments) and that their ‘secular’ role in life is to be kind and ‘loving’ at work, to be a sanctified husband and father in personal piety and then pray for the return of Christ, and if possible, on route, snatch a few brands from the burning.
Joseph Boot in The Mission of God
Law and Theology
Laws are always theologically based, whether or not they are so acknowledged.
Herbert Schlossberg in Idols for Destruction
What we Tolerate
A society that cannot tolerate a judge beyond history will find that it can learn to tolerate anything else.
Herbert Schlossberg in Idols for Destruction
Wearing Pink Tutus and Riding Unicycles
When your opponent admits they’d wear a pink tutu and ride a unicycle if the government told them to: you win; they lose. I know that’s in the rules somewhere.
It’s Working!
Remember, the same people labelling everything they don’t like ‘misinformation’ are the people who told us Level 4 had worked.
Education is not simply a means of data transfer. It is not reducible to state-certified techniques. Education, when it succeeds, is the result of a child wanting to be like someone else. If you take away the drive train, can you really be surprised that the car won’t go? Fathers are essential to any successful school system, and no system of education can successfully compensate for the abdication of fathers.
Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger
Education and Fathers
The Church, the Clergy, the Laity and the Kingdom
“[The] church is more than the local building and congregation. The term is closer in meaning to the kingdom of God. It has reference to the called-out people of God in all their work together for the Lord.”1 This means that the structures of the church institution are never to be a limiting factor in extending the reign of God and pursuing the work of the kingdom – the work of ordained clergy and elders in their institutional role does not exhaust the calling of church, leaving the laity to merely ‘secular’ tasks. Neither is the church to become self-serving by becoming a wealth and power center for its own sake. The church is to be a servant institution that equips, empowers and sends out every Christian in terms of God’s glorious kingdom purposes.
Joseph Boot in The Mission of God
1. Rushdoony, Systematic Theology, vol 2, 670
Why Modern Christians Separate Faith and Politics
In every culture, law is religious in origin and so it must be recognized that in any social order the source of law is the god of that society and that to which the people have bound themselves. To change the law order is then an implicit or explicit change in religion – revealing a change of gods (allegiance) in that political realm. This further implies that no absolute disestablishment of religion is actually possible in any society. A culture can certainly disestablish one faith or church, but it merely replaces that faith with another one, be it Islamic, Buddhist or any other humanistic faith. This is clearly what has taken place in the modern West. We have traded the God of the Bible for the god of the state (man enlarged), where the ‘will of the people,’ personified by an elite bureaucracy, now redefines law in the name of the people, the new god. This has been in no small part due to a faulty theology amongst Christians and the consequent abdication of responsibility by the church in the socio-political sphere. Due to the philosophical dualism that has so greatly influenced the church (discussed in chapter two), modern Christians have tended to separate God’s law and covenant from real history and implicitly assumed that the state is not actually accountable to God’s standards.
Joseph Boot in The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society
Should We Seek a Secular Public Sphere?
What most modern Western people (including many Christians) are asking for in the name of ‘freedom’ is in fact a new slavery, when they attempt to secularize the public sphere and pursue freedom without the Lordship of Christ. To object to this by saying that non-believers are not accountable to God’s covenant law (moral law) is finally to say that we have no basis for presenting the gospel to the unbeliever – since Scripture defines sin as lawlessness and only lawbreakers need the gospel!
The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society by Joseph Boot)
Eternal Fire Insurance Marketing
The modern evangelical tendency to reduce evangelism to a form of ‘eternal fire insurance marketing’ seriously impoverishes our ability to capture a vision of the Messianic kingdom that the evangel is meant to announce and embody.
“The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society” by Joseph Boot