It does this by teaching the nations God’s law and working to implement it. Rather, the church must also work for transforming the kingdoms of this world into the kingdom of our Lord and Christ. It means the church has not fully accomplished its mission by preaching the Lord Jesus, his law, and his gospel to every tribe and tongue for the conversion of souls and the building up of churches. Though Adam sinned and brought the curse upon the earth, Christ came to save his people, which includes enabling us to accomplish the original mandate given to Adam. Theonomists teach that the true mission of the church can be seen in the mandate God gave to Adam in the garden to take dominion over the earth and subdue it.
They teach that Christ obtains his victory over the world through the church’s obedience to God’s law and society’s implementation of God’s law across every domain, especially the self, the home, and the civil government. The whole gospel, they say, involves proclaiming and practicing God’s Old and New Testament law in society as the way to obtain God’s social and cultural blessings on earth.
Today’s theonomists teach that the church has rightly preached Christ, justification by faith alone, and the need for reconciliation of individual sinners to God, but it has ignored the public aspect of the gospel. They say society’s ills can be traced, in part, to the church’s neglect of theonomic principles. In the past five years or so, a number of voices have begun to answer these questions. Do churches need to reexamine their message and mission? Have American Christians been wrong about the church’s responsibility and perhaps even the gospel? In the wake of these social realities, some Christians are asking tough questions. Secular and Christian pundits alike are sounding alarms about the present state of American culture and civil order. Basic social values that once seemed immovable appear to be collapsing, particularly sexual ethics. Many faithful Christians today sense that the world has been turned upside down.
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