The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society

by Joseph Boot

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.

there is a prophetic urgency to the church’s mandate in our time, applicable to us all, which we neglect at our peril.

Puritan hermeneutic of submission to God’s word

missiology is concerned with how God brings His kingdom into existence,

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.

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 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 the only legitimate framework for organizing a society in a manner that does not invoke the judgment of God.

Rushdoony believed that Christianity would inevitably win the cultural battle by virtue of the fact that it is true.

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.”

In this worldview to discriminate against anything (except Christianity)

First, he does not explicitly make justice and righteousness virtues that are clearly defined by God’s law, and consequently, ‘doing justice’ is not consistently viewed as being concerned with obedience to the law of God. Secondly, a failure to presuppose the validity of biblical truth and a misunderstanding of common grace leads him into concepts of shared ideals, learning experiences and cooperation with non-Christian visions of justice that are totally unbiblical. This

“No fixed limits are given them, but the whole world is assigned, to be reduced under the obedience of Christ, that by spreading the gospel as widely as they could, they might everywhere erect his kingdom.”

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Their passion for learning was largely driven by a dual awareness that first, all truth comes from God and so rightly apprehended must lead back to him, and second, that education is a fundamentally religious task and is the surest means to transform the values of a culture.

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A full-orbed Christian education is the logical outworking of biblical faith in obedience to the command to raise our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6:4).

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It is therefore no surprise to find that the Tenth Point of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto was a demand for free, state schools.

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It is therefore noteworthy that the advent of state education in the United States was directly related to the breakdown of Puritanism.

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education in a series of subsequent court rulings.13 Having begun firmly in Christian foundations – where teachers were expected until the late sixties (according to Ontario’s Mackay Committee in 1969) to “bring home to pupils, as far as their capacity allows, the fundamental truths of Christianity and their bearing on human life and thought”

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Of course, the meaning of the demand to end indoctrination in a religious faith was merely the repudiation of Christianity in favour of indoctrination in the religion of humanism and democracy.

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A social revolution has already taken place in North America and Western Europe, and therefore effective change for Christ’s kingdom and reign will not come about simply by direct political action or an activism to get Christians onto school boards (as helpful as that can be in slowing decline). The notion that lasting change can take place top down, and not by regeneration and faithful Christian schooling at the grassroots, has proven mythical.

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humanistic thought pre-supposes a cosmos of autonomous, self-generated and therefore meaningless factuality, that is, meaningless ‘bits of reality’ coming up from the void.

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Reality is therefore impervious to interpretation, because what is, is not rationally related.

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true freedom is liberation from the past, from authority or revealed truth, and ultimately from God himself. Freedom in this view is not the result of salvation in Jesus Christ; freedom means instead liberation from previous constraints.

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Because education cannot be neutral, it is a field of conflict, a battle for the minds of the young and a dispute regarding the shape of the future; it is a conflagration in which there can be no neutrality.

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The historical narrative of the Old Testament tells of a particular siege in the Northern kingdom of Israel, when Ben-hadad, the King of Syria, surrounded the capital Samaria. The then king of Israel, Ahab, was hemmed inside the walls of the city with just 7,000 fighting men. As was common in cases of overwhelming odds, Ben-hadad offered the besieged Ahab terms of surrender; they were not palatable. The king of Syria required that the gold, silver and the wives and children of Ahab be delivered to him. This was not a random request, but carried enormous significance. To surrender his wealth would leave the royal treasury empty and Israel asset-stripped, with no ability for future resistance. To surrender his wives to be raped and placed in Ben-hadad’s harem would humiliate and shame Ahab and greatly undermine what was left of his power with the people. The biggest and most significant demand, however, was that his own children be handed over (again this was not uncommon in antiquity). His sons and daughters would be taken and re-educated in terms of an alien faith, religion, and morality. The plan would be that when they were returned to succeed to the throne of Israel, they would recognize and serve the foreign imperial power that had indoctrinated and raised them. Today, not unlike pagan antiquity in many respects, the state increasingly lays siege first to our property (through property taxes, progressive taxation and inheritance taxes in many western countries), then o...

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Godless education denies that we are created in the image of God and are responsible to God, which entails the notion that human identity is a social construct and we cannot transgress God’s law.

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That is to say, all things are only seen as they truly are when they are understood in the light of God and his revelation.

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Since God is the creative source and designer of the relationship between all the laws and properties of experience, there is a distinctly Christian way to approach history, economics, epistemology, linguistics, science and every other subject.

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Are we to be governed by the Ten Commandments, or the ten thousand commandments of the state or mob?

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evolved by chance, from the goo, through the zoo, to you,

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What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.

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The Church has no right to be so absorbed in helping the individual that she forgets the world.

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The man who denies meaning in life writes out his denial in grammar that he is sure will make sense to those who read it.

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It is a proclamation that God’s truth, evident in the “things that are made” (Rom. 1:20) must be embraced as the truth of my life in details, not just in general.

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Puritan mind-set resting in the Lordship of Christ and the authority and sufficiency of his infallible word,

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economics, education, history, politics, law, art, psychology, science and every sphere,

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it must be asked, are these approaches to apologetics methodologically the most biblically faithful, theologically consistent and helpful models for defending the faith today?

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It holds that the almighty and all-conditioning God is not subject to the subjective and self-sufficient court of human reasoning, but is the very foundation and pre-condition of the possibility of human reasoning.

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Autonomy (self-law and rule) over theonomy (God’s law and rule) thus invades human thought.

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This is simply nihilism. Whatever motif it adopts, human rational autonomy ends here in ruin, annihilation and meaninglessness.

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What I tried to do was to stand on my own shoulders, to super-impose nature upon nature, denying a creator God, insisting that the world lives on itself; feeds on its own excrement, as I say somewhere among my notes. Where did Titanism of defiance lead me? To the same pit as Schopenhauer’s Titanism of denial – to moral and spiritual exhaustion, to the nothingness of the Abyss.

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Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the most-cited thinker in the humanities today. Though many postmodern thinkers deny they are true nihilists, Foucault was a self-conscious follower and admirer of Nietzsche, and like Nietzsche, he was a sexual deviant – dying of AIDS as a result of homosexual behaviour.

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The postmodern historiographer Greg Dening argues that recorded history is no more than an illusion of the past and that in reality it is determined by the cultural context and personal preferences of the historian. He claims, “History is something we make rather than something we learn.”32 Since power relations are allegedly at the root of all such ‘histories,’ relativism is seen as a moral imperative.

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they must root themselves in the transcendent authority of biblical revelation and its law to ground all moral judgements.

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a justice that is always on the horizon but never achieved since a definite justice would be a contradiction for post-modern thought.

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An ‘arrived-at’ justice would itself need deconstructing.

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It is very telling that we have now reached a very clear antithesis between biblical faith and autonomous human thought. In our day Western thought has come to the dead-end of deconstructing life, meaning, morality and history into the void, from a platform of illusions. By contrast Van Til’s reformed thought was concerned with seeking to reconstruct life, meaning and morality in terms of the infallible foundation of the Word of God.

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Finite human beings, based on autonomous reasoning, cannot set up the objective universals necessary to give an authoritative and binding account of reality that must control valid conclusions. Such a role is for God alone.

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you begin with the self as the ultimate ground for truth and reality, you can only end with the self, with truth as an aspect of individual consciousness.

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Thus we may rightly ask how one could proceed to verify the Word of the God of all knowledge? On what possible basis could the Word of the creator, sovereign and all-conditioning God be verified or denied – by what standard? God declares who he is in Scripture: “I Am that I Am,” that is to say literally, “I Am He who is” (Ex. 3:14), beyond all man’s limiting definitions, because God is the source of all definition.

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unless the apologist stands on a specifically biblical epistemology – revelational presuppositionalism – that is neither classical foundationalist nor post-foundationalist in orientation, he is unwittingly building on the same false assumptions as the non-believer and thereby undermining himself and his witness.

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Christianity is thus proven true by the impossibility of contrary accounts or stories of reality.

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