The book is Mission of God by Joe Boot. It was originally published in 2014 by Freedom International Press Inc. I read the second edition hardcover published in 2016. I read it in March of 2024.
I don’t remember it specifically mentioned in the book but to me the meaning of the title is what God is doing in the world. Redeeming the world. The mission of God is to bring the world back to himself for his glory.
A new heaven and new earth. And that will happen in the end. It’s already been declared. The victory has been won. But we in our time can be part of the redemption process. Although we are fallen in a fallen world, we do have the power of the Holy Spirit and we can be about the business of taking dominion of this Earth for our king Jesus Christ. That was the original mandate to Adam and Eve and there is no reason we should not be continuing that restorative effort.
I read this book because it was given to me by one of my pastors, Jonathan Ellis. He and I often have little discussions about theonomy. We’re very much on the same page as far as I know, and we’re both still learning a lot. He gave me this book and wanted to know what I thought about it. He gave it to me last year and I’m just now getting to it.
Last February Joe Boot was speaking at a local church and we got to go see him. I asked Dr. Boot a question. I asked how we should approach sharing the truth in an increasingly unreal world, ie. virtual reality, AI deep fakes, and metaverse. I regret the question. Dr. Boot gave a genaric answer about how AI is a tool just like anything else that can be used for ill or for good. That’s not really what I meant.
If I could re-ask a question I would ask him this; How should we respond to being called Christian Nationalists simply for believing that our rights come from God instead of man? I’ve heard Dr. Boot reject the term Christian Nationalist. But I think it’s becoming increasingly unavoidable. I embrace it.
I’m a Christian and I want my nation to become Christian. If you want to call me a Christian Nationalist for that then fine. I have no problem pissing people off with the term either. It’s provocative. In fact, when someone asks me if I’m a Christian Nationalist, I say “actually I prefer the term Christ Supremacist.” Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers.
In this book, Dr. Boot gives a theonomic argument for Christian Nationalism (though he wouldn’t call it that). He’s saying our laws should be biblical and honor God. Man cannot invent laws any more than we can invent a sunset. Law does not come from man but from God.
Every time man tries to make up their own laws it turns into tyrannic authoritarianism resulting in mass death and suffering.
God’s law is good and holy. And there is no reason we ought not to abide by them in our nation today.
The laws that set God’s people aside for atonement and salvation have been fulfilled by Christ on the cross ie. laws about eating, dressing, temple sacrifices. Those should not be implemented and enforced in our society (how could they be?). But the civil laws in regard to running a functional society should be implemented and enforced ie. Laws against murder, theft, and sexual immorality.
The main questions I had going into this book were about how exactly Christian biblical laws would be implemented? How does a Christian nation get created? Does it start by voting in Christian politicians? A violent Christian rebellion? Also, how would Christian laws be enforced? Would we stone homosexuals and rebellious children?
Joe Boot had answers to all of these questions.
Regarding the implementation of biblical law, Dr. Boot (maybe a Rushdoony quote) writes the following.
“God’s law can only be effectively applied when a godly people demand it in terms of oath and covenant, and this is how the Puritans viewed their society, as a missionary people in covenant with God.
…legal reform without religious reform is not a tenable hope. There must be religious reformation before there is judicial or civil reform, or the alternative is coercion. Coercion eventually produces greater evils.” (p310)
But this raises another question. How is this approach any different from the traditional evangelical mindset?
It sounds like the goal is to share the gospel, bring a majority of people in our nation to Christ and then that majority will change the culture and vote in Christian leaders and laws. But isn’t this what Big Eva is already trying to do? Even the doom and gloom premil dispys can agree to that. The most anti-CN Joe Shmoe Christian would get on board for that.
Coercion is the big fear. I can’t think of any Christian who would say no to the idea of a majority Christian culture voluntarily voting in biblical laws for our country.
This book made me think about my specific role in creating a Christian nation. I was pleased to read that I’m already doing what I’m supposed to be doing (or at least trying to).
“The key to godly transformation, the key to the future, is in our homes, as individuals living in humble obedience to Christ and as families saying, , “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:14-15). This is the key to the flourishing of the kingdom of God.” (p424)
Our family verse is Matthew 6:33 “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
I am focused on creating a productive household and leading my family in Christ. I’m taking dominion of my household. My wife stays home. We homeschool. We read the Bible and pray together every night. We have chickens. I do house and car repair myself. If creating a Christian culture is the way to save the world, I’m doing my part.
That’s been my thinking for a while now. If we want a radical Christian movement to take over the world, then just be normal. Get a good job. Get married. Have kids. Keep them and educate them in Christ. Work hard. Have a Christian home. Be actively involved in your local congregation. Just be normal.
If believing that our rights come from God makes you a Christian Nationalist in the eyes of the mainstream culture, then there’s no use in arguing about whether or not to claim the label of CN. They’ll label you that anyway. Just be about the work of taking dominion and redeeming every part of this world for Christ who is already king.
Dr. Boot is clear in his writing. Although this book is overwritten, Boot explains his point well. Still, it could’ve been about 200 pages shorter.
My one complaint about how this book was written is with the large quotations selections. Whole page quotations from his sources. It’s good information but I’d rather Dr. Boot consolidate that material into his own words in the book. It got confusing as to which sections were written by Boot or someone he’s quoting.
I learned a lot from this book. We need to be Puritans, and I need to learn more about the Puritans and how they lived.
I’d recommend this to all Christians. We need to step up and get normal. It’s a long book but worth it.
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Notable Quotables
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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. (p31)
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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.
A Puritan missiology thus seeks to win and not whip people into the faith, pursuing true freedom under God. (p35)
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“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 from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.” (P44-45)
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the family lays the foundation for human society for the believer and non-believer alike and is the nursery of knowledge, worship, government, and all social order. Thus, when the family collapses, all society breaks down. (p67)
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there is no social substitute for the family in either church or state, so the church today must labour to train, protect, and equip the family.
The qualifications for eldership are all familial (1 Tim. 3:1-7) and the church was therefore to model family (Eph. 3:15; 1 Cor. 4:15-17; 2 Cor. 6:16-18; 1 John 3:1).
Thus the Puritan, and to my mind biblical, vision for the development of God’s mission in the world, begins with evangelism and an expectation of success for the gospel amongst individuals and families, not with nationwide coercive Christianization’ as is often charged. (p68)
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When Christians obtain positions of civil authority, they must operate in obedience to God, since the Lord has ordained their authority (Rom. 13:1-7). This, Kuyper argued, means that civil government must “restrain blasphemy, where it directly assumes the character of an affront to the Divine Majesty.” The constitution of the state should acknowledge God as supreme ruler, and government should set aside its regular activities on a Sunday and protect it as a day of worship. (p78)
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the historic post-millennial and a-millennial views of time and the future (the church age is the kingdom age), are jettisoned in favour of explicitly pessimistic views of history that have sadly produced, to a large degree, cultural retreat, social stagnation, and an escapist mentality amongst many believers. (p88-89)
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Deism, the religious faith of the so-called Enlightenment, substituted for the Christian belief in divine law a belief in God-given reason and the supremacy of public opinion. (p92)
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We have seen that without the transcendent, ontological Trinity and a personal creation in terms of which all things are known, planned and ordered by the providence of God, man has the impossible task of locating all definition and rationality in himself, imposing his abstract ‘idea of events upon reality, leaving himself confronted finally with the “irrational moment.” (p119)
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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. (p133)
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Bainton points out that when the barbarians invaded the West and the Roman Empire’s government collapsed, “the church stepped in to assume many of the functions of government. The great task was to convert the barbarians to orthodox Christianity… the process of their education and civilization also fell largely to the church.”S Thus orthodox Christianity, recognizing Christ Jesus as God and king, both fully man and fully God, led to the flourishing of a free church that was able to assume godly responsibility in numerous areas of social and civil life. Simply put, Christianity won the argument with paganism in the ancient world, intellectually and socio-culturally. (p142)
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Although it is abundantly clear that Christ is the servant king who suffered at the cross at the hands of sinful men, we should also notice he is no longer on the cross according to Scripture, but is raised in glory far above all power and dominion in this age, with all authority in heaven and in earth in his hands (Heb. 1:1-13, Eph. 1:20-23; Matt. 28:17-20). (p148)
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Whether the utopian delusion is expressed as a form of Marxism, National Socialism (fascism) or some other political permutation, power is the central theme. Both Marxism and fascism are totalitarian ideologies; one centred in class warfare where people are divided up into oppressor and oppressed groups, the other in elitism in which the superior must crush the inferior and weak. One calls for the dictatorship of the proletariat or the common people, the other for the dictatorship of the supermen. Both are instruments of naked power for the creation of a utopian society where, one way or another, man is becoming a god. In the twentieth century, both resulted in the expression of naked power involving brutal and horrific slaughter on an unprecedented scale. (170)
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As such, utopian education is not preparation for life and freedom with the goal of enabling children to think critically, equipped with the tools necessary for a life of learning and inquiry. Instead, education is social activism, and the goal is a homogeneous, predictable product, less able, less critical, less inquisitive, more pliable, not nurtured in divisive Christian understandings of life but with feelings of equality, fraternity and dependency. Whilst formal, graduated education is on the surface still encouraged, its goal is no longer the achievement of excellence for the individual, but rather the fusing of the personality of the child with the common mass. (p182)
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The Puritans recognized that the only way to have justice and righteousness was to have it on God’s terms. Perhaps their greatest achievement was their communitarian social order that emphasized the common good through corporate responsibility in caring for the poor and needy. In this social order, charity, employment creation and training were achieved through a personal and voluntary obedience to God’s law, not by coercive government and its agencies. (p202)
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This is because, unlike sharia law, biblical law is nascent in the history of English law and so continues to be an influence on many citizens. It is simply unrealistic to suggest that we live in a wholly secular legal system….nor have politicians been successful in finding a dominant alternative discourse to the ethical language of the Bible.’ (p255)
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Rushdoony remarked, “Justice is not social: it is individual. The doctrine of social justice goes hand in hand with the doctrine of social guilt. Social justice is not only an attack on individual responsibility but also on the immunity of the innocent.” (p260)
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How can a fallen world give us law? We can agree that there is a law over the universe, and that this law is operative within the universe, but it is God’s law, not Nature’s…. Natural law is usually invoked to evade God’s law while having some transcendental reference. (p262)
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Natural law has its appeal because it pretends to neutrality and so is perceived by many Christians as a ‘non-religious” paradigm and therefore a useful tool for engagement with the ‘secular’ sphere. But the reality is, “Natural law theory serves temporarily as a believable political philosophy only when there is a common religious agreement beforehand. Shatter that religious agreement, and natural law theory becomes useless.
The emphatic shattering of the Christian consensus in the West came in the wake of Darwinism and naturalistic evolution for how could an ethical ‘oughtness’ arise from a self-generating cosmic and biological ‘is?’ (p265)
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Mark Rushdoony comments, “Theocracy is falsely assumed to be a take-over of government, imposing biblical law on an unwilling society. This presupposes statism which is the opposite of theocracy. Because modern people only understand power as government, they assume that’s what we want.” & In a telling interview in 1992 Rushdoony stated categorically, “I don’t believe in compulsion in these areas. I believe that we must work to bring people into the faith, not whip them into …. I am not trying to deprive anyone of their freedom.” (p273)
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We will either live under God’s order or that of an idol. Theocracy is thus an inescapable concept. Rushdoony summarises the subject most effectively:
That fact is that all law is “religious.” All law is based on some ultimate standard of morality and ethics. (p291)
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God’s law can only be effectively applied when a godly people demand it in terms of oath and covenant, and this is how the Puritans viewed their society, as a missionary people in covenant with God
legal reform without religious reform is not a tenable hope. There must be religious reformation before there is judicial or civil reform, or the alternative is coercion. Coercion eventually produces greater evils.” (p310)
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First, the law of God cannot be applied comprehensively in modern nations where there is no covenanting with God (clear profession of faith) amongst the people (as there had been with the Puritans) and no desire to obey God’s standards. We have already seen that modern Puritans equally hold that biblical law cannot be imposed upon an unwilling people, but only applied when a godly community or nation demand it. (p316)
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We see at the outset then that God’s law has much wider concerns than individual consent and personal gratification when it comes to legislation about sexual crimes.
Modern law has come to view consent as the sole issue of significance in determining legitimate sexual relationships, whereas biblical law seeks to direct sexual energy in a manner that creates community and mutual responsibility, not rugged individualism and irresponsibility. (p326)
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In Leviticus 18:22-23, both homosexuality and bestiality are condemned together because they deal with one subject abomination (lit. filth or abhorrence) and confusion (lit. repulsive disturbance or audacious depravity violating the natural order).
This is why the condemnation of homosexuality is alongside the condemnation of bestiality both are ‘confusion’ that reduces man to the purely animal and the image of beasts, marring the image of God their maker. (p335)
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The purpose of these laws against sodomy, as we have seen regarding adultery, was to teach and preserve Christian social values, not hunt people down for execution, Because of biblical laws of evidence requiring two or three witnesses, it can be seen right away that few homosexuals, if any, would ever be executed under such a law. (p337)
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The biblical law regarding a stubborn and rebellious son (Deut. 21:1821) has been routinely attacked by humanists (and some Christians) as an illustration of the supposed barbarity of biblical law because it is said to condone executing disobedient children. This is both ignorant and idle criticism. This law has in view the incorrigible juvenile delinquent who cannot be restrained from criminality by his parents he is old enough to be a drunkard and therefore it is clearly not a reference to naughty children. (p344)
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As Hegeman notes, “Christians, in their zeal to honor God for His abundant redemptive graces and to proclaim this salvation to the whole of creation, have all but lost a strong sense of man’ s original cultural calling. In far too many cases, a vision for man’s vital role as cultural-maker is altogether absent from the believers’ mind.” (p366)
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The critical point here is to recognize that there are no neutral cultures. A society may be full of competing claims, but it is impossible for it to be neither one thing nor another. The culture shapers are tilling the minds of others with a specific worldview in mind. Someone’s morality will be legislated, someone’s philosophy taught in schools, someone’s vision of beauty and reality idealised in art. (p372)
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Christians often fail to appreciate that humanistic sociologists and educators have invented the sociological concept of the ‘teenager’ (or adolescence), with inevitable expectations of rebellion and sexual experimentation in order to destabilize the family, alter the beliefs of the young and alienate them from the morality and thinking of their parents.” (p420)
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The key to godly transformation, the key to the future, is in our homes, as individuals living in humble obedience to Christ and as families saying, , “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:14-15). This is the key to the flourishing of the kingdom of God. (p424)
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The reductionism that shapes all areas of anti-biblical education today is antithetical to the Christian approach. The Christian does not (indeed cannot) reduce history and social order to economics like the Marxists, or meaning and morality to linguistics like the deconstructionists, or science to the sensory like the materialists. 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. Unlike non-Christian education, we do not reduce any aspect of reality to one or more created properties, but understand all things in terms of the sovereign and triune God of Scripture. (p447)
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Infants who die without reaching an age of comprehension and those mentally handicapped whose judgement is impaired are left in the just and merciful hands of God. Since our knowledge is so profoundly limited and God alone knows the heart, we are to occupy ourselves with what is revealed (Deut. 29:29) and not make pronouncements on things about which the Scripture is silent. We shall examine whether or not the exclusivist view is implicit in the engagements of Paul and Peter. (p502)
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the falsely labelled ‘Enlightenment,’ whose creed was faith in mankind for them the public sphere is not subject to God’s revelation, but to reason, or natural law? This new ‘faith’ offered a new plausibility structure, which, whilst not denying religion a seat at the table in adjudicating and regulating human affairs, relativized the absolute and exclusive claims of Christianity, thereby steadily pushing it from the public to the private realm. (p525)
Solomon White 
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