The Mission of God:
A Manifesto of Hope for Society
By Dr. Joseph Boot
Wilberforce Publications. 674 pages. £15.99
ISBN 978 0 957 572 560
Dr Joe Boot is a British-Canadian apologist and cultural theologian. In the UK, he is Head of Public Theology at Christian Concern and directs its Wilberforce Institute training programme. His day-job is Senior Pastor of Westminster Chapel, the church he founded in Toronto. These five titles considered here (see below*) are all accessibly written and often entertaining to read.
They set out his concept of mission, summarised in the Chapel’s core values as: ‘Transformation and cultural engagement at all levels – beginning with the individual, followed by the family, followed by the community, the academy and the socio-cultural order, seeking to apply the Lordship of Christ in all areas of life and thought.’
Modern ‘churchianity’
In his most recent booklet he deplores two tendencies dominating evangelical circles.
On one side, theologically conservative evangelicalism neglects the church’s cultural mission. Content with personal holiness and church attendance, it is guilty of ‘pietism’ and ‘churchianity.’
On the other, culturally-aware evangelicals look to the false god of the interventionist state for ‘social justice’, a concept he assaults as ‘a humanistic doctrine that aims at replacing Christianity with secularism’. All culture – ‘everything from art to architecture to politics to literature’ – is founded on a religious perspective shared across a society. Lacking a biblical cultural theology, ‘churchianity’ is unresponsive to a neo-Marxist and neo-pagan worldview dismembering the Christian foundations of our law and culture.
According to Dr. Boot: ‘[The modern church] just shares “the gospel”. This typical pietism and dualism found in the modern church, even in the name of Reformed theology, provides no basis for resistance to tyranny.’
Modern mission
He wants to recall the church to the ‘Mission of God’, most fully set out in (and the title of) his 2016 manifesto. He explains how State welfare services, including education, social services and relief of need, are ‘statism’ which the church must resist and replace with voluntary Christian giving. Tax-funded social provision is ‘institutionalized robbery’ and ‘double theft from God’.
He laments the fact that statism offers ‘counterfeit salvation’ through: ‘cultural destruction of the family, carbon taxes for the myth of Western, man-made global warming and any and all means to asset-strip the productive.’
Christian mission is empty if it fails to oppose the ‘global elitist oligarchy’ working ‘in league with the modern socialistic, interventionist state’ to seize the prerogatives of God and set up a unified world state through the United Nations.
A ‘missiological strategy’ must aim at eliminating tax support for education. The UK’s ‘man-gods are seeking omniscience’ through closed-circuit television in public spaces and mental health programmes. State education is the ‘most important strategy in the utopian plan for omniscience’ and for breaking the family. ‘Elitist statist planners’ regard children and fertility as ‘slavery’ so are using abortion to ‘break down the perceived rival institution to State power – the family.’ Modern ‘liberalism’ is a system of oppression, founded in ‘cultural Marxism’.
Past influences
Dr. Boot presents his work as part of a ‘New Puritan’ movement under the broad philosophical influence of Cornelius Van Til (the exponent of ‘presuppositional apologetics’) and Herman Dooyeweerd, together with ‘sphere sovereignty’ in statecraft developed by the early-20th-century Dutch Prime Minister, Abraham Kuyper.
However the ‘most important representative’ of New Puritanism is Roussas J Rushdoony (1916-2001), cited over 200 times in The Mission of God. Rushdoony founded the movement identified with the terms Theonomy and Reconstruction. A key thinker and organiser in the rise of the US Religious Right in the 1970s, Rushdoony became notorious through his Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), apparently devoted to applying biblical law to modern society, complete with capital punishment for 18 offences including promoting false religion.
Present associations
Dr. Boot is close to some of Rushdoony’s remaining followers and is keen to salvage his reputation for, among other things, anti-semitism and holocaust denial – an appendix of The Mission of God is devoted to a rebuttal. He does not endorse the postmillennialism underpinning Rushdoony’s vision for biblical ‘Reconstruction’. He claims Van Til as a ‘theonomic thinker’, something that (in respect of politics) Van Til denied.
Andrea Williams of Christian Concern commends the Manifesto as ‘the theological apologetic to act out God’s truth in every sphere of life in Britain and beyond’.
More surprisingly, Dan Strange of Oak Hill College recommends it as a ‘Puritan vision … where cultural mandate and great commission form one integrated mission manifesto.’
Theocratic vision
Readers should handle Dr. Boot with caution. He ranges across a great selection of thinkers and writers, but often relies on secondary sources, so readers need to track down the original context and the use (or misuse) made by commentators. His facts are sometimes awry (for example he claims that ‘most families’ in the UK pay Inheritance Tax, which actually falls on about 5% of all estates).
He recycles a mythicised version of political history since the Puritan revolution, whereby the Massachusetts theocracy and the Cromwellian Commonwealth founded democracy, and the welfare state was a product of anti-Christian humanism.
Most readers of en will agree that 15 centuries of Christendom profoundly shaped modern culture, and today’s apologetics should commend this legacy and warn of the dangers of its neglect.
I don’t think it fair to describe us as ‘pietist’ – we do expect believers to be making an impact on culture. But we do distinguish between ‘gospel issues’ and social questions – a distinction that Dr. Boot dismisses. Building the right culture is, he insists, the gospel issue. We are saved in order to change culture. Cultural transformation is not a by-product, it is the end product.
The fundamental problem here is that culture is about outward performance and rewarding the ‘right’ cultural product. Dr. Boot would handle this issue better if he studied why the Massachusetts theocracy failed – it empowered members of State-approved churches, which then admitted ‘half-way believers’ lacking faith but honouring an ‘external covenant’ (Jonathan Edwards lost his pulpit for rejecting this); and it oppressed and persecuted dissenters, notably Baptists. By the 1780s the Massachusetts model was discredited, not least among Christians. The USA was not, as Dr. Boot (following Rushdoony) claims, founded on ‘a theocratic vision.’
Final analysis
Nevertheless, Dr. Boot, a self-confessing Baptist, is clear that God’s covenant in Christ is with converted people, and that the church comprises believers only. He wants us to build a God-honouring culture incorporating the whole of society in every aspect, including state and politics.
Advocates of this combination have generally relied on the regulatory effect of ‘natural law’ and/or on radical cultural separation between believers and others. Dr. Boot rejects both solutions. However, unlike Rushdoony (active in the election of Ronald Reagan) and his followers who, to Rushdoony’s distress, stockpiled guns to prepare for the coming revolution, Dr. Boot offers no practical strategy to sustain a reshaping of politics. Dr. Boot simply hopes it will follow from preaching the correct gospel instead of ‘churchianity’.
Dr. Boot’s analysis rests on these key assumptions: any society needs a common culture founded on shared ‘religion;’ and the State is a ‘ministry of justice’ instituted in Genesis to enforce scriptural law. It follows that enduring tolerance of religious diversity is, as Rushdoony and Dr. Boot argue, to establish polytheism and idolatry in statecraft. Christian mission necessarily entails cultural war and political struggle for control of the State.
But Dr. Boot offers no biblical evidence for these far-reaching assumptions. I think the simple reason for this absence is that there is none.
* The other four titles considered are:
For Mission:
The Need for Scriptural Cultural Theology
By Joseph Boot
Grimsby, Ontario (Canada): Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. 54 pages. £2.99
ISBN 978 1 989 169 025
For the hope that is in you:
Christian Apologetics and the
Biblical Story of Reality
By Joseph Boot
Grimsby, Ontario (Canada): Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. 70 pages. £2.99
ISBN 978 1 989 169 032
Gospel Culture:
Living in God’s Kingdom (Cornerstones Vol 1)
By Joseph Boot
London: Wilberforce Publications. 101 pages. £5.00
ISBN 978 0 995 683 228
Gospel Witness:
Defending and Extending the Kingdom of God (Cornerstones Vol 2)
By Joseph Boot
London: Wilberforce Publications. 138 pages. £5.00
ISBN 978 0 995 683 266
