“So, how does the
message of Christian Reconstruction affect your practice in the mission field?”
I have been asked
this question many times. Most of those who asked me that question were
missionaries hostile in their views to the message of Christian Reconstruction.
Some of them were convinced that Christian Reconstruction doesn’t care about
the “heart of man,” that it is all about “externals,” but the prevailing
pietistic model of missions cares about the heart and therefore will produce
more converts. Many of them couldn’t see how unbelievers would pay attention to
preaching that speaks to things like law, economics,education, etc.; that is, to what constitutes
the total nature of man, not just his inner subjective feelings.
Many missionaries, led by their pietistic theologies, are convinced that “the
gospel” only concerns the inner man and his personal salvation, but that it
doesn’t touch issues like his family, his work, or his society. So when they see a
missionary who doesn’t shy from preaching the Biblical message to every area of
life, not just man’s personal subjective feelings, they are wondering: How is
this guy going to win any converts?
Not that modern
pietistic missions are producing many converts. The majority of converts in the
modern growth of Christianity are in areas of the world where cultures are so
far from the Christian principles, and therefore the societies are so desperate
for any cultural guidance, that missionaries willy-nilly bring some new
cultural influences, even if they never mean to. Even there, I can safely
predict, the growth of the church may begin to subside if the growth in the
number of converts is not paralleled by a growth in teaching about the
comprehensive cultural demands and application of the Christian faith, and if
the cultural idols are not challenged.1 But
in places of more advanced cultures where the prevailing pagan ideologies are
much more subtle, mission efforts have produced very negligible effect, and
active Biblical Christianity has remained a peripheral influence, at best.
Witness that “graveyard of missionaries,” Europe. And the reality is,
when a missionary’s message is so truncated as to affect only the periphery of
a culture, his listeners relegate him and his religion to the periphery of the
culture. It is that simple.
The question still
remains: How does the message of Christian Reconstruction affect the work of
missions? I have been asked that question by well-meaning missionaries as well.
Most of them simply can’t see how a mission can work outside the context of converting
souls and planting churches. How does one do distinctly theonomic missions
today?
The major part of
the confusion comes, of course, from the established belief that the mission
field is an existential “sharing of the gospel” and “witnessing” to individuals.
Within such a box, there isn’t much that a missionary can do. But in a
theonomic framework, the work of the missionary changes: Its purpose now is todisciple
the nations (Matt. 28:18-20), which means, to work to change the whole
moral, legal, intellectual, economic, etc., outlook of the culture he is sent
to. The conversion of individuals is still important, and contrary to the
misunderstanding of some about Christian Reconstruction, there is no compromise
about the fact that any change in society starts with change in the heart. But
a theonomic missionary recognizes the fact that no heart is really changed
unless it is taught to apply its faith to all of life. And therefore, a
missionary preaches to all of life, to the individual and to the society that
individual lives in, to man’s institutions and his business activities, to his
schools and to his scientific rooms and laboratories, to his government
structures and to his music halls and art galleries. The message of Christian
Reconstruction requires that the same moral and spiritual principles that the
Gospel has for the personal life of man be applied to his society and culture
also.
A missionary, in
short, must be the modern equivalent to an Old Testament prophet: Declare
judgment to a nation, and offer the grace of God in repentance, as salvation to
that nation. And preach change of heart only in the context of God’s
covenantal, comprehensive dealings with the whole culture of man, not just with
his individual heart, or just with his local church.
The theonomic
missionary, then, will have to take on a new burden on his shoulders. It won’t
be enough for him to only study what I call “pure” theology: the “ivory tower”
discipline taught in our modern seminaries, entirely divorced from any
practical or ideological applications or implications, except may be a few
obscure disciplines like “pastoral care” and “counseling.” (Not that pastoral
care or counseling are necessarily obscure, but they are certainly so as taught
in the modern seminary.) He will have to master a discipline which I call,
tongue-in-cheek, “dirty” theology, or theology applied to the real world. R. J.
Rushdoony is reported to have given to the question, “What do you think the
most important discipline aspiring ministers should study?” the surprising
answer, “Economics.” Surprising, that is, only to those who never saw economics
as the study of the moral actions of men in the marketplace. And if they are
moral actions, then they are regulated by the same spiritual principles that
regulate man’s personal life under the Gospel. But economics is not the only
such discipline. Civil government is a study of moral actions. Education is a
study of moral actions. Every social and ideological discipline is a study of
moral actions; and therefore a missionary must be prepared to give an answer to
every question in every field of study and action. There is such a things as
Biblical economics, for economics is not morally neutral; and a missionary must
understand it and preach it to his listeners. Same applies to every other
field. Nothing is morally neutral; everything must be under the power and
authority of Lord Jesus Christ.
A missionary, then,
must also make available to his listeners a body of literature which applies
the Gospel to every area of life. I have written in other places about the
necessity of building the intellectual foundation of a Christian civilization,
as a reference point for future generations of Christians.2 He
must become first and foremost a librarian to his listeners and converts,
leading them to the richness of available knowledge of how a culture must be
rebuilt on the foundation of the Biblical message. The books he makes available
must be self-consciously teaching that “dirty” theology I mentioned above;
abstract, irrelevant, over-intellectualized or over-spiritualized literature
can’t build a civilization. The temptation, of course, even for the most
motivated missionary, could be that translating books in the local language is
a long-term, tedious enterprise, and could be put off until there are enough
willing readers for the books. But such delivery of literature in the language
of a nation is an investment in the future. Common sense tells us that we don’t
wait until the future is here to start investing in it. If by the time the
missionary has the willing readers he doesn’t also have the literature
available to them, it will be too late to start working on it, for building an
intellectual foundation is not an ad hoc activity that can be done overnight.
Investing in the future through building an intellectual foundation should be
the priority for any missionary; without that intellectual foundation, a
missionary will see his mission remain stagnant or even die out when he leaves
the field to go back home. Books are missionaries; and leaving a legacy of
literature is the best service a missionary can do to the culture he is sent
to.
Admittedly, side to
side with the long-term investment in literature, there has to be short-term
work in teaching people and their culture the Gospel. After all, the change in
the hearts of men is the necessary condition for the change in the culture.
(Although, sometimes a culture can change by way of imitation, without a
corresponding change of heart. Such cultural changes, though, are shallow, and
seldom survive one generation. The Westernization of the Muslim world in the
1950s through the 1990s was a good example of such short-lived attempt at
imitation.) And here, in the immediate work on the mission field, Christian
Reconstruction is much superior to all other theological movements and doctrines.
It not only successfully converts unbelievers (of course, as inferior cause;
the superior cause for conversion is always God),3 it
alsoconverts the individual entirely, in his inner man, in his
understanding of reality, in his understanding of righteousness and justice in
the surrounding culture. Man is thus converted as a whole being integrated in a
new culture, challenging the old culture; not as an atomistic particle
insulated from the world and the culture, helplessly waiting for the world to
end.
How to Start Theonomic Mission Work
It starts with the
realization, that as far as the work of the missionary is concerned—his
preaching, teaching, counseling, declarations of judgment, advice, etc.—there
is no area outside a missionary’s “perimeter of action.” Every area is, so to
speak, “fair game.” We saw above that the new missionary is supposed to take on
a new burden on his shoulders: to master the wide array of applications of his
theology to every area of life. This new burden, of course, and this new
knowledge is not to remain locked up in him. He must use it extensively in his
missionary work. In short, he must speak, to everything and
everyone, about everything that happens in the society, from their personal
psychological fears and hopes to the economic policies and political practices
of the civil government. A missionary is an ambassador of the
King, and the King is King over all. Therefore, the ambassador must speak to
all.
The superiority of
Christian Reconstruction, under such view of missions, is easy to see, and easy
to take advantage of. It has both the One and the Many, so to speak. It has a
comprehensive, coherent theology of all of life. It has a theological foundation
which is not dualistic nor fragmented, that is, it doesn’t allow for different
moral principles in the different fields of man’s thought and action. The
theology of Christian Reconstruction doesn’t allow for the fragmentation of
knowledge insisted upon by the other theologies. (See, for example, the
dualistic separation between the “common kingdom” and the “redemptive kingdom”
of the Two-Kingdom Theology, or the truncated, limited definition for “gospel”
of dispensationalism.) It takes all terms and all meaning back from the
prevailing pagan ideologies and redefines them according to the Bible’s view of
reality and God. The roots and foundations of all knowledge, including the
theory of knowledge itself, are in the Bible, and the theology of Christian Reconstruction
is explicitly motivated by the desire to return allknowledge – not
just theological knowledge – to its Biblical foundations. And it has the
immediate, practical application of that logically consistent theological
system to life. Remember, if all of life is religiously motivated, as Van Til
taught, then every single action of every man or every institution can be
analyzed and evaluated on the basis of the Biblical message. The content of the
newspapers, from the section on politics to the section on sports or art, is
all open to a missionary to take and dissect, bringing every individual event,
thought, idea, or practice under the light of Scripture and exposing the idols
of the culture in those practices and ideas.
The rival
theologies within Christianity have nothing to compare, and therefore a
missionary of a different theology can’t compete against a theonomic
missionary. If he wants to be faithful to his truncated, limited theology, he
must remain silent on most central issues for a culture. His main concerns will
be only peripheral to the majority of his listeners; and therefore he will be
relegated to the periphery of their attention. But if he wants to rival the
theonomic missionary and actually say something about any practical issue, he will
have to do it in contradiction to his theology. Thus his commentaries will be
self-contradicting, incoherent, and will leave his readers more confused than
before. (That is happening with the attempts of many Two-Kingdom theologians in
the US to give relevant opinions on events in the so-called “common grace
kingdom.”) As of today, Christian Reconstruction is the only intellectual
movement in Christian circles that has a comprehensive body of literature
giving solutions to every area of life, explicitly based on Biblical
revelation. If you are a theonomic missionary, you have the Biblical answers to
everything your listeners may ask you, or at least the principles that can help
them find an answer.
In the age of Internet, therefore, our
missionary must become a blogger. (Our modern equivalent of newsletter writer
in the not-so-distant past.) He must know well the culture he is sent to, know
its idols,4 and
know how they work in that culture. Every event, every news is an opportunity
for him to expose those idols, for he has a comprehensive worldview, and he can
detect their influence in everything. Our modern “high places” are everywhere,
on the job, in the Parliament, in the kindergarten, on the TV and radio. All
these areas are ravaged by idolatrous ideologies and are subject to the Curse.
And therefore, all these areas are crying out to God to send His sons to speak
His Word to them, tear down the idols, and re-capture them for the Kingdom of
God.
A missionary must
preach salvation. But too often, in the preaching of modern pietistic
missionaries, salvation is a mystical, surrealistic, existentialist notion with
very little connection to the life of the person and his culture here and now.
In fact, in many cases, trying to make any connection between salvation and the
world outside the person’s soul is actively discouraged. The popular phrases of
our modern pietism reveal such disconnect between salvation and the practical
life of the believer: “The church is constantly mourning by the rivers of
Babylon,” “we are royal exiles in this world,” “this world is not my home, I’m
just a-passing through,” “we need to live a pure life in an increasingly
unclean world.” Under such view, the dominance of the curse in the practices of
a culture is considered normative. A Christian should not expose it, and should
not fight the curse in those areas, for it is considered almost an imperative,
if we are to have a strong church with strong believers. An increasingly Christian
culture is considered by the pietists to be dangerous for the spiritual health
of the soul of man. Therefore, even when they comment on current events in the
culture, it is only to declare that the Curse is normative, and that Christians
should learn to live with it.
But salvation can
not be separated from its practical application in the personal and the
cultural life of a person. Just as faith without works is a dead faith,
salvation without practical applications is a fake salvation. The dichotomy
between the cosmos and the soul of a man is not Biblical. Therefore, a
Theonomic missionary can and must connect the salvation he preaches to every
event, every practice, every policy, every custom, every business transaction
in the society. Righteousness can not be separated from justice; the two are
the foundation of God’s Throne in a culture (Ps. 89:14).
The local culture,
then, with everything that is happening in it, gives the missionary a
practically unlimited supply of things to write about, preach about, and teach
about. And I am not talking about taking moralistic, teary stories out of it to
season his otherwise dry and boring sermons. I mean applying a covenantal,
ethical/judicial analysis to everything happening in the culture, and exposing
the idolatrous doctrines and beliefs at the foundation of it. This is the
advanced equivalent of street preaching where the Word of the King is declared
in open, to the crowds of people, and people are made to listen in their
everyday context. With modern technology and Internet, street preaching can
expand its horizons and truly meet every man in every place and in every aspect
of culture that affects him directly. Thus the curse – and therefore salvation
as well – is not abstract and surrealistic; it is concrete reality, and it is
as close to man and threatening to man as close and comforting is the word of
faith that we profess. Like a fish in an aquarium who can’t see the water, the
pagan man in his pagan culture can’t see the curse unless it is shown to him in
the light of the Law of God, in every little detail of the life of his culture.
Once it is shown to him in concrete and real terms, he will be looking for
salvation.
And salvation,
again, can be preached to him in concrete and real terms, as well as in
spiritual terms, because in the message of Christian Reconstruction, there is
no dichotomy between spiritual and concrete. A missionary who writes or speaks
about the tax policies of the government, compares them to the Law of God in
the Bible, and gives his readers or listeners the Biblical solution to the
problem, leads them much more solidly and securely up the path of salvation
than a missionary who speaks only about their eternal salvation, divorced from
justice and righteousness here on earth. A missionary who exposes the evil of
the modern prison system in the light of the Bible, and offers the Biblical
justice of restitution and redemptive private slavery, is a true witness for
Christ and His Kingdom compared to a missionary who completely ignores issues
of justice and law as irrelevant to his “gospel.”
And this is where a
theonomic mission must begin: (1) Take the pagan man’s concrete, everyday
reality, show him the curse in it in concrete, material, visible terms, show
him (2) how that curse is caused by the rebellion against the Law of God in his
own life and in his society, and that (3) that rebellion is a moral issue, not
a technical, or political, or economic, or physical issue. Then show him that
(4) the solution to the heart problem is in Christ’s redemption and
justification, and then (5) show in concrete terms how that salvation works in
concrete terms, in a society dominated by the Law of God, and therefore offers
true justice and liberty for all.
Thus, in every
little thing the missionary is speaking or writing about, sinners will have the
chance to see in concrete terms their bondage, understand the spiritual reason
for their bondage, learn about the spiritual solution to their bondage, and see
how that solution works out in practice to produce liberty in real, concrete
terms. Thus, a comprehensive reality based on the Biblical message will be
presented to the sinner, and a comprehensive redemption will be also presented.
The sinner will have no excuse.
An article about
everything that happens, every day, in every area, in every place. When a day
passes without the missionary, in an article, pointing to the bondage to idols
expressed in the events of the day, that day is wasted. When a day passes
without his readers or listeners learning about the specific solutions God has
given in His Law, that day is wasted.5
But that won’t be
the end of it. As the missionary progresses in his work, he must work to
replicate himself in his listeners. As they grow in knowledge and
understanding, they will first, of course, apply what they have learned to
their own personal life, families, workplaces, businesses, political and social
actions. But more important, they will grow in their ability to convey the same
message and apply it to their specific geographic area, or their specific area
of professional expertise, or to their specific political and social context. A
missionary may live to see a nation fully converted and Reformed through his
efforts, or he may not. But at the very least, his vision must be to have
hundreds of writers and preachers who read the same books he reads, and are
faithful to constantly bombard the pagan intellectual and moral climate of
their culture with commentaries on specific events from a theonomic
perspective, along the lines I defined above. A Christian blogger or speaker or
teacher in every town, every office, every school, every professional guild,
who openly challenges the dominant pagan ideas and presents the Biblical
solutions: this is the dream of the theonomic missionary. And it can be achieved,
because only Christian Reconstruction has a consistent, coherent, and
comprehensive message for all of life. Any change in the culture is preceded by
change in the intellectual atmosphere of that culture, in the way people think
about their everyday reality. When the meaning of words is captured, capturing
the culture is only a matter of time. People can respond to irrational fear for
a time; the only true lasting change in the heart comes only by destroying the
intellectual strongholds of the enemy, and by the renewal of the mind of the
listeners (2 Cor. 10:4-5).
The local churches will come as a
logical and inevitable result. When the local church is the goal of a
missionary, it remains insulated, pietistic, and inefficient. When the local
church grows naturally as a covenant community of believers6 who are committed to apply the Word of God to
every area of life, challenging the surrounding pagan culture and offering an
alternative to it,7 it becomes a powerful social force that blows the
gates of hell in the culture out of existence, and truly brings Christ’s
blessings, far as the curse is found. And the people around the
church, when they see the superior knowledge, and understanding, and Law she is
bringing to their culture, will acknowledge the Lordship of Christ and will
submit to Him (Deut. 4:5-8).
So, if you are a
missionary, how will the message of Christian Reconstruction affect your
mission work?
Immensely. It will
turn you from a salesman into a prophet; from a peddler of spiritual
experiences into an ambassador for a King; from an insignificant visitor
concerned with peripheral issues to a central, relevant voice in the culture;
from a stranger babbling about abstract things into a man of Issachar who
understands the times and knows what Israel should do. You will be the only one
in a culture who has real answers to real questions.
Just be courageous
to ignore the modern pietistic views of missions. Take on the idols of the
culture, in their everyday works, in the immediate context of the men in that
culture. Write articles, speeches, blogs, about the application of the Law of
God to every area of life, from the least to the greatest, and show the bondage
to sin in concrete terms in everything around you. And, of course, offer the
solutions of the Law of God, the perfect law of liberty.
And God won’t tarry
for too long to reward your faithfulness and courage.
1.
See my article, “Missionaries of the Ax.” [↩]
2.
See, for example, “The New Missionary.” [↩]
3.
See Calvin, Institutes, Book 1, ch. 17. [↩]
4.
See Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for
Destruction. [↩]
5.
And, admittedly, I have wasted many such days in my
work as a missionary. [↩]
7. J. H. Bavinck, An Introduction to
the Science of Missions (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Company, 1960), p. 28-29. [↩]
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