Dedicated in hope: To my children, Naomi, Hannah and Isaac. “For You are my hope, O Lord God; You are my trust from my youth. By You I have been upheld from birth; You are He who took me out of my mother’s womb. My praise shall be continually of You.” —Psalm 71:5-6
THE MISSION OF GOD A Manifesto of Hope for Society
Joseph Boot
Toronto
Bold, provocative and illuminating The Mission of God is a potential gamechanger for modern societies. It challenges the secular modus vivendi and summons the Christian church to applied biblical radicalism. By recognising the numerous normative connections between the complex wisdom of the Hebrew Bible and the ethical authority of Jesus’ resurrection Boot successfully deconstructs Christian antinomianism and establishes the demands of Christian discipleship for a new generation. All who seek to benefit from past experience of biblical social transformation, in a world that is simultaneously secularising and desecularising, will be challenged and rewarded, even where they do not agree. Jonathan Burnside, Professor of Biblical Law at the University of Bristol Author of God, Justice and Society A hard-hitting tour de force which will no doubt inspire, encourage and provoke. We’re spectacularly missing the point if we think we have to agree with every point of Joe’s exposition. What we in the UK urgently need to take on board is his Puritan vision of Christ’s comprehensive Lordship over all society together with Scripture’s comprehensiveness to speak into every area, and where cultural mandate and great commission form one integrated mission manifesto. Recommended. Dr Daniel Strange, Academic Vice-Principal and Tutor in Culture, Religion and Public Theology, Oak Hill College, London A work of theology that can be exegetically profound, philosophically rigorous, historically aware, culturally illuminating, pastorally wise with a serious love for the church and the lost – and to be all of that at the same time is an extremely rare feat. It is not something that can be pulled off only by learning the mechanics of writing theology; it takes a certain kind of person to write a book like that, someone deeply integrated around Christ as King over their whole life to compose such a compelling and seamless vision of God’s mission for His world. I know Dr. Joe Boot to be that kind of man and that robustly Theocentric vision is precisely what he has offered us in The Mission of God – a must read for anyone seeking a more comprehensive view of God’s supremacy. Dr. Thaddeus Williams (Ph.D) Assistant Professor of Theology, Biola University Assistant Professor of Jurisprudence, Trinity Law School, California
CONTENTS I Acknowledgments II Foreword to the Second Edition III Foreword to the First Edition
13 15 17
Author’s Introduction 0.1 Epochal Turning Points 0.2 Autobiographical ‘Apologia’ 0.3 Back to the Future 0.4 Puritans Old and New 0.5 The New Puritanism Within the Context of Pluralism 0.6 The Challenge of the ‘Emergent Church’ 0.7 Authentic Pluralism 0.8 The Missio Dei
21
Part I THE MISSION OF GOD: STUDIES IN A BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE
41
Chapter 1 In Understanding be Men: The Crisis of our Age and the Recovery of the Gospel 1.1 The Lost Word 1.2 A Puritan Response 1.3 Puritanism – Alive and Kicking? 1.4 Who were the Puritans? 1.5 A Cromwellian Case in Point 1.6 Puritanism and the Missio Dei 1.7 Puritans and the Present 1.8 The Cultural Mandate Chapter 2 In Him all Things Hold Together: The Dangers of Dualism 2.1 Authority and Duality 2.2 The Consequences of Duality 2.3 Faulty Eschatology: Old Errors, New Outfit 2.4 Theological Amnesia: Recovering our Cultural Memory 2.5 Divorcing the Word: The Artificial Separation of Old and New Testaments 2.5.1 Christ and the Law 2.5.2 Paul and the Law 2.6 The Augustinian and Calvinistic Traditions Chapter 3 Known unto the Lord are all His Works: A Christian Vision of History and the Western World 3.1 Books and Barbarians 3.2 Historiography 3.3 The Bible and History: The Christian Perspective 3.4 Competing Views of History 3.5 History and politics 3.6 Western History and Culture 3.7 Law, History and Political Life 3.8 Conclusions: God’s Victory in History
43
77
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Chapter 4 No Other Name Under Heaven: The Religion of Statism and the Significance of Chalcedon 4.1 The Significance of the Challenge 4.2 Chalcedon and the Principle of Liberty 4.3 Statism and Contemporary Missiology Chapter 5 I Saw Satan Fall: Utopia, The Counterfeit Kingdom of God 5.1 Kingdom and Utopia 5.2 The Utopian Imperative 5.3 A New Doctrine of God: The Unity of the Utopian Godhead 5.3.1 Justice 5.3.2 Love 5.4 The Omnipotence of the Utopian Godhead 5.5 Posthuman Omnipotence 5.6 The Wrath of Man 5.7 The Omniscience of the Godhead 5.8 Babel is Broken 5.9 A Religious Worldview Chapter 6 You Shall Not Pervert Justice: Relating Evangelism, Justice and the Kingdom 6.1 Evangelism and the Kingdom of God 6.2 Evangelism, the Church, and the Pursuit of Justice 6.3 Defining Justice and the Social Theory of the Kingdom 6.4 Bosch and Brueggemann: Banishment of the Law 6.5 Generous Justice? 6.6 Charity, Justice and the State 6.7 Means and Motive in the Struggle for Justice 6.8 Eucharistic Faith or Environmentalism Chapter 7 Strange Fire: Understanding Jubilee and Atonement 7.1 Land, Liberty and Economics 7.2 Debt, Atonement and Jubilee 7.3 Strange Fire 7.4 Service and Stewardship Chapter 8 Sit at My Right Hand: Law, Theocracy and Contemporary Relevance 8.1 History, Continuity and Relevance 8.2 An Instituting Consideration of the Relevance of Law 8.3 The Source of Law: Nature or God 8.4 The New Puritan Perspective 8.5 Theocracy and the Kingdom of God 8.6 Slander, Fallacy and False Charges 8.7 The Slow Development of Tyranny 8.8 Law, Sanctification and Theocracy
141
157
189
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Chapter 9 God’s Servant for Your Good: Understanding Crime and Punishment 293 9.1 Whose Law and Dominion? 9.2 Cheap Grace, Costly Law 9.3 The Christian Mind 9.4 Reformers, Puritans and Penology 9.5 Foundations of Biblical Penology 9.6 Guidelines for Interpreting Specifics in the Law Principle and Practice 9.7 Law as a Value-processing System 9.8 Controversial Areas of Biblical Penology: Offenses Against the Family 9.9 Homosexuality and the Family 9.10 Abandoning the Law: The Failure of Modern Penology 9.11 Conclusions and Clarifications 9.11.1 Limits of Law 9.11.2 The End of Biblical Law PART II THE REIGN OF GOD Chapter 10 The Highway to Zion: Christ and Culture 10.1 Christianity versus the Imperial Cult 10.2 What is Culture? 10.3 Culture as ‘prejudice’ 10.4 Cult and Culture 10.5 Culture and the Fall 10.6 Cultural Cowardice 10.7 An Absent Christ – an Abandoned Culture 10.8 The Culture of Christ Chapter 11 Fill the Earth and Subdue it: Faith, Family and Revolution 11.1 The Social Revolution 11.2 The Sexual Revolution 11.3 The Family and the Basic Powers in Society Chapter 12 Let My Children Go: The Christian Mandate to Educate 12.1 Education: A Christian Heritage and Calling 12.2 Education: A Religious Function 12.3 The Myth of Neutrality: the Purpose of Education 12.4 The Battle for the Mind and the Future 12.5 The Myth of Neutrality: the Content of Education 12.6 The Curriculum of Christ
361
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401
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Chapter 13 Defence and Confirmation of the Gospel: The Reign of God and Apologetics for the Twenty-First Century 457 13.1 What is Apologetics? 13.2 Van Til: the Thomas Aquinas of Protestantism 13.3 Approaches to Apologetics 13.4 The Story of Postmodernity 13.5 Theological and Philosophical Implications for Apologetics 13.6 Responding to the ‘post’ of Modernity 13.7 Methodological Implications Chapter 14 Men of Athens: Evangelism in a Pluralistic Age 14.1 Should we Evangelize? 14.2 Interfaith Thinking 14.3 The Challenge of Pluralism 14.4 The Challenge of Inclusivism 14.5 The Response of Exclusivism 14.6 The Missional Approaches of Peter and Paul: The Audience 14.6.1 The Audience 14.6.2 The Messenger 14.7 Message and Method: Paul in Athens 14.8 Peter and Cornelius Chapter 15 I will Build My Church: The Missio Ecclesiae 15.1 The Mission of the Church 15.2 The New Puritanism and the Church 15.3 No Compromise 15.4 Idolatry – The Root of Resistance 15.5 Divine Jealousy 15.6 The Nature of Idolatry 15.7 Going the Way of Balaam 15.8 The Hopeless World 15.9 The Covenant of Hope
495
521
Appendix 1 Rushdoony, Racism and the Holocaust
555
Appendix 2 Billy Graham, Evangelism and the Evangelical Tradition: A Reformed Analysis
567
Notes
591
Bibliography
649
Index
673
About the Author
683
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? 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 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 missiology,4 and its primary 21
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areas of concern, all the more important for our moment in history. The turning point 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 22
INTRODUCTION
another generation of Christians to the foundational biblical truths that gave shape to our Christian heritage. The primary purpose of the 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 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 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 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 faithful witness in our history. The evangelical faith of these devoted men provided the sense of vision and mission 23
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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 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 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 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 24
INTRODUCTION
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 25
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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 this 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 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 26
INTRODUCTION
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 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 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 27
Chapter One IN UNDERSTANDING BE MEN: THE CRISIS OF OUR AGE AND THE RECOVERY OF THE GOSPEL The Puritans exemplified maturity; we don’t. Spiritual warfare made the Puritans what they were. They accepted conflict as their calling, seeing themselves as their Lord’s soldier-pilgrims…not expecting to be able to advance a single step without opposition of one sort or another.… Today, however, Christians in the West are found to be on the whole passionless, passive and one fears, prayerless. Cultivating an ethos that encloses personal piety in a pietistic cocoon, they leave public affairs to go their own way and neither expect nor, for the most part, seek influence beyond their own Christian circle…[but] the Puritans labored for a holy England and New England – sensing that where privilege is neglected and unfaithfulness reigns, national judgment threatens. – J. I. Packer 1.1 The Lost Word The great reformer Martin Luther once said, “No greater mischief can happen to a Christian people, than to have God’s word taken away from them, or falsified, so that they no longer have it pure and clear. God grant that we and our descendants be not witnesses of such a calamity.” There can be no doubt, however, that as Protestant descendants of Luther we are witness to this calamity in our time - in our families, our schools, our courts, in the corridors of power, and even in our churches. Any missiological analysis of the Western world that does not address this desperate reality is, to my mind, hopelessly compromised and essentially worthless. Tragically, much of the academic ‘help’ offered to the Western church to address our malady either does not see, or refuses to see, that Luther’s calamity is indeed the worst kind to befall Christians and that it is very much upon us. Commensurate with this, social and cultural decay has advanced to such a degree that we are now seeing early glimmers of a broader realization among cultural and political elites of the crisis facing the West due to its abandonment of biblical faith. In a fascinating article, 43
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the social and political commentator Dr. Samuel Gregg has noted that increasing numbers of secular commentators and leading politicians are slowly realizing the need for a decisive public return to the values and virtues of the Christian worldview if European and even North American cultural identity is to survive and social cohesion and civil order be maintained. One such politician recently making ‘politically incorrect’ remarks in Europe, he notes, is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Gregg writes: Not only has Merkel upset the European political class (especially the Left and the Greens) by saying what everyone knows that – multiculturalism has “utterly failed” – but she also argued that the issue was not “too much Islam” but “too little Christianity.” “We have too few discussions about the Christian view of mankind,” Merkel claimed in a recent speech. She then stressed that Germany needs to reflect more upon “the values that guide us, about our Judeo-Christian tradition.” It was one way, Merkel maintained, of bringing “about cohesion in our society.” And as much as significant portions of European society would like to deny it, it’s simply a historical fact that the idea of Europe and European values such as liberty, equality before the law, and solidarity did not suddenly appear ex nihilo in the late seventeenth-century with the various Enlightenments.… There is increasing recognition, for example, that the idea of human rights was first given concrete expression by medieval canon lawyers. Having noted that much of the church has reduced its contribution to society to the vague humanitarian platitudes of NGOs, he points to a quite surprising and encouraging development: This makes it even more ironic that increasing numbers of secular European thinkers believe Europe can only reinvigorate its distinct identity and values through reengaging its Judeo-Christian heritage. This is certainly the conclusion of one of Germany’s most prominent intellectuals, Jürgen Habermas. A self-described “methodological atheist,” Habermas has been insisting for some time that Europe no longer has the luxury of wallowing in historical denial. As Habermas wrote in his 2006 book, A Time of Transitions: “Christianity, and nothing else [is] the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves 44
IN UNDERSTANDING BE MEN...
from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.” 1 This is a telling statement from a leading secular intellectual, observing an historic and social reality that eludes many Christians in the West today. This includes many mainline and ‘evangelical’ missiologists, endlessly holding forth about the alleged sins of the West as they pontificate, ‘post-Christendom’ and ‘post-colonial,’ like feminist revisionists on the evils of all generations and classes save their own. This historical revisionism and pluralistic mushymindedness is utterly pervasive in the younger generation (my generation below age forty), and part of my motivation in writing this study is to help stimulate and encourage critical reflection on the biblical missiology that did so much to shape our liberties and free institutions that are eroding before our very eyes.2 It would thus seem that even the secular world is slowly beginning to realize that the decline of Christianity in the West and the virtues of the law of God are leading us to an inevitable social collapse and cultural death. We are indisputably living through a time that Martin Luther prayed he would never see: Whoso has Christ has rightly fulfilled the law. But to take away the law altogether, which sticks in nature and is written in our hearts and born in us, is a thing impossible and against God. And whereas the law of nature is somewhat darker, and speaks only of works, therefore, Moses and the Holy Ghost more clearly declare and expound it, by naming those works which God would have us do and to leave undone. Hence Christ also says: ‘I am not come to destroy the law.’ Worldly people would willingly give him royal entertainment who could bring this to pass, and make out that Moses, through Christ, is quite taken away. O, then we should quickly see what a fine kind of life there would be in the world! But God forbid, and keep us from such errors, and suffer us not to live to see the same.3 Recognizing the sad reality that we have “lived to see the same,” it must be said at the outset that the Christian faith is not simply a matter of social utility. Jesus Christ is Lord, King, and Savior who came to establish his kingdom. The Christian is to live for the glory of God and for the kingdom of Jesus Christ, even if it means suffering, persecution, or even death – not simply because it gives one a better life. Nonetheless, because of the resurrection power unleashed by Christ’s conquest of sin and death by the omnipotent working of the Holy Spirit, the transformation 45
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of all life by the mighty dunamis (power) of God is an inescapable biproduct of the ministry of the gospel. The inherent power of almighty God residing in the believer by the person of the Holy Spirit means that the power of the new creation is already at work in the world. This redeeming life and power transforms and renews all life by regeneration, so that hope, forgiveness, joy, peace, righteousness, justice, restoration, healing, social well-being, and law-abiding faith characterize a Christian people. It therefore follows, as Luther makes clear above, that when men turn away from the gospel and God’s kingdom law, social decay and every kind of evil proliferates. It is, therefore, not historical accident that modern Western history’s worst tyrants have vilified the law of God and that many revolutionary intellectuals who have transformed the way we think about ourselves have openly despised God’s law and sought to remove it from our consciousness, as Luther warned. This should not surprise us; in fact it is quite logical. Antinomianism is the spirit of lawlessness which is the very essence of the demonic. The Bible not only defines sin as lawlessness (1 John 3:4), which is the opposite of righteousness and sanctification (Rom 6:19), it also refers to Satan as the lawless one (2 Thess. 2:3,8). It is from this demonic power – the spirit of disobedience, and a life of lawlessness – that we have been redeemed according to St. Paul, who reminds us that Jesus Christ “gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14). The father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, is one example of this demonic urge in sinful man to abolish the law. He ended his days writing a book spitting out venom against the law of God, ejecting law and crime from the universe and reinventing Moses as a pagan Egyptian in Moses and Monotheism.4 Likewise, national socialist Adolf Hitler, the twentieth century’s most famous tyrant, who provoked the Second World War the same year Freud passed away, whilst claiming a belief in some kind of God declared: The day will come when I shall hold up against these commandments the tables of a new law. And history will recognize our movement as the great battle for humanity’s liberation, a liberation from the curse of Mount Sinai, from the dark stammering of nomads who could no more trust their own sound instincts, who could understand the divine only in the form of a tyrant who orders one to do the very things one doesn’t like. This is what we are fighting against: the masochistic spirit 46
IN UNDERSTANDING BE MEN...
of self-torment, the curse of so-called morals, idolized to protect the weak from the strong.… Against the so-called Ten Commandments, against them we are fighting.”5 Hitler’s god was not the God of Scripture; his god was a lawless principle of power and pleasure. Many people in our culture would not be particularly shocked by these words today because they agree with them (so long as Hitler’s name was not attached to the reference). These words could have been spoken by many a theological or political liberal, because both theological and political liberalism (by political liberalism I mean the “progressivist,” cultural Marxism of the Left) are viciously hostile to the law of God. Stalin’s Soviet Union also sought the eradication of the law of God and tried to ban even the reading of the Bible. Our culture is swiftly manifesting a like vitriolic hatred for God’s word, attempting to remove not only reference to the law and gospel of God in public discourse, but also public representations of it – a difficult proposition since many are attached to judicial and political buildings and monuments, including the Parliamentary buildings in Ottawa, Canada. All that said, since God’s power is available to the believer by the Holy Spirit, Christians cannot merely blame the culture for the growing persecution of Christianity and lawlessness at work in our time. It has been rightly said, ‘as goes the church, so goes the world,’ and so our current cultural crisis can be traced to the compromises of the church, and the private and public loss of the law-word of God by the severing of the connection between theology (religion) and every area of life. This severance begins in the pulpit, radically affects the pew, and then spreads to the culture. The greatest and most celebrated British judge of the twentieth century, Lord Denning, in an important lecture on the influence of religion on law and the social order shows the character of the connection between religion and public morality: In primitive [meaning earlier] societies the influence of religion on law was obvious, but it is not so obvious in modern societies. In primitive communities, religion, morals and law were indistinguishably mixed together. In the Ten Commandments, for instance, you find the First Commandment, which is religious: “God spake these words and said, ‘I am the Lord thy God: Thou shalt have none other Gods but me.’” You find the Fifth Commandment, which is a moral precept: “Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which 47
THE MISSION OF GOD
the Lord thy God giveth thee.” You find the Eighth Commandment, which is a legal duty: “Thou shalt not steal.” This intermingling is typical of all early communities. The severance of these ideas – of law from morality, and of religion from law – belongs very distinctly to the later stages of the evolution of modern thought. This severance has gone a great way. Many people now think that religion and law have nothing in common. The law they say, governs our dealings with our fellows, whereas religion concerns our dealings with God. Likewise they hold that law has nothing to do with morality... [but] without religion, there can be no morality, there can be no law.6 This statement makes clear the inextricable connection between religion and law, but also reveals that the present novelty is not with those seeking to uphold biblical faith and law in ecclesiastical, familial, social and cultural life, but with the ‘later stages of the evolution of modern thought.’ He goes on in this essay to show the biblical foundation of the principles of law in the Western tradition and the implicit influence of Christianity within it. It seems inevitable then, that without a recovery of the gospel and God’s total word, for church and society, without a return to the theological (religious) foundation of social order, our very freedoms and liberties, peace, justice, and truth will disappear until a faithful missionary endeavour can recover a degenerate Western culture. 1.2 A Puritan Response With the above challenge in mind, in this volume, I am arguing for the necessity of a recovery of applied biblical faith to every area of life – a vision of human life and affairs that was, I am convinced, best exemplified so far in our history by the Puritans, prominent heirs of the Reformation. The Christian academic apologist, Cornelius Van Til, reflecting the Puritan tradition, once laid out the choice in life before all men and women as, ‘autonomy or theonomy’ – selflaw or God’s law – and in past decades this antithesis has become increasingly evident in both ecclesiastical and civic spheres. At the root of all the struggles of our time is the one that Luther identified – the question of the place and authority of the Word of God – and it is here that the Puritan tradition has so much to teach us, proving its abiding relevance for the Christian church. For them, the Bible was a complete revelation from God which is final, authoritative, infallible, and to be applied to all of life. If they 48