Searing criticism of ‘pansy’ Christians who fail to challenge godless culture.

Much of Western society has been bewitched by a political elite seeking to change the order of God’s creation, with the result that the Church has lamely retreated from the public square with a message that could otherwise challenge it.

In a passionate call for Christians to engage with today’s world (Gospel Culture, published by Wilberforce Publications), Joseph Boot packs a powerful punch. Rarely do you find an academic/theologian calling a spade a spade, but it was a most refreshing experience as I became thoroughly absorbed in this scholarly work despite the author’s frequent use of words with which I am unfamiliar!

He castigates many of today’s Christians as being part of a “weak, ineffectual, intellectually impotent, compromised and complacent church culture of inward Christian pansies” by the way in which they have allowed the world to dictate how the Church should be run.

And he concludes that much of the Western Church has failed in its mission to bring the Word of God to every aspect of life. For the most part, he argues, we have subscribed to a heretical ‘Two Kingdom’ theology separating the sacred from the secular as a convenient excuse for not engaging with an apostate Western culture.

We retreat into our holy huddles and dare not raise the issue of politics in our pulpits, with the result that congregations are rarely, if ever, encouraged to weigh topical debates in the light of Scripture.

The Bible Speaks to the World

But this is God’s world, and the Bible speaks of all life – there is no big issue of our day on which it doesn’t have something pertinent to say. On the issue of abortion, for example, Boot’s experience has clearly mirrored my own with the way some church leaders don’t seem to see this as a topic on which the Bible speaks, and on which they ought to be giving guidance to their congregations.

In a passionate call for Christians to engage with today’s world, academic/theologian Joseph Boot packs a powerful punch.

When I was asked to lead intercessions at a church of which I was once a member, I included this issue in my prayers as it was being discussed in Parliament. But after being told off by the vicar for doing so on the basis that there were politicians in the church who might have been offended, my wife and I promptly left the church – for good!

Joseph Boot says we are not only called to win converts to Christ; we are called to be salt and light in a dark world and thus affect the culture around us, as our forebears did in bringing an end to slavery, child labour, illiteracy, poor health and much more.

But more recently we have allowed the secularism and humanism of the political and media elite to influence how we think, so that we are now effectively conforming to the world rather than being “transformed by the renewal of our minds” as St Paul urged the church at Rome (Rom 12:2).

Recovering the Full-Orbed Gospel

Boot argues that today’s political agenda is a resurgence of ancient witchcraft with its manipulative and brainwashing techniques.¹ And many of our churches have been influenced by it – a pretty damning and alarming thought. Disengaging from the public square was a “fatal flaw” which led to endless divisions among Christians “frantically drafting peace treaties with non-Christian thought”.

I guess this is why I’ve struggled for 40 years to convince Christian leaders in this country of the need for a media bringing a biblical worldview to mainstream debate. And I concur with the author’s statement that “for us to deny that we have a task on the earth to apply his salvation victory and lordship, his beauty and truth to all aspects of life and thought is to renounce Christ.” (author’s emphasis).

Boot argues we are not only called to win converts to Christ; we are called to be salt and light in a dark world and thus affect the culture around us. 

Just because culture is being relentlessly driven in the opposite direction to Gospel teaching, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge it. It leaves the public at large not only alienated from God (and we are called through the Gospel to reconcile man with God) but now seeking to alienate God’s world from its Maker - “to separate what God joins and join what God separates”.

We desperately need a recovery of a truly scriptural view of life – “a full-orbed gospel” that takes God at his word and understands and applies the implications of Christ’s resurrection to all of life.

Dr Boot’s sphere of influence straddles both the UK and Canada. As well as being founder of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and senior pastor of Westminster Chapel, Toronto, he is director of the UK’s Wilberforce Academy and head of public theology for campaign group Christian Concern.

Gospel Culture (2017, 128pp) is available for £5 + P&P. Also available as an e-book.

Notes

1 Boot writes: “If we are to understand the radical changes in our society today as inspired by diabolic principalities and manifest in ideological strongholds that set themselves up against the knowledge of God (Ephesians 6.12; 2 Corinthians 10.4-6), then we must grasp the essential instrumentality of modern political life as engaged, wittingly or not, in witchcraft – employing a ‘secret’ (elitist) knowledge in an attempt to join opposites.”

He further explains: “Our current culture is thus bent on defacing the image of God by denying that man is man and woman is woman, by negating the God-given nature of marriage and by politically manipulating people to believe and act as though an illusion were true – that homosexuality is normative, gender is fluid and that androgyny is the human ideal.”