A Guide to the Journal
9Marks | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.30.2023Since it’s unusually long, we thought a more careful guide to the Journal might help.
Authoritarianism and Gospel Authority
A New Christian Authoritarianism?
By Jonathan Leeman | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.29.2023Creeping politicization implies a creeping authoritarianism.
What Authority Has God Given to Governments?
By Jonathan Leeman | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.29.2023The government’s job description: To administer the justice requisite for protecting human life, secure the conditions necessary for fulfilling the dominion mandate, and provide a platform for God’s people to declare God’s perfect judgment and salvation.
Say No to Christian Nationalism
By Jonathan Leeman | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.29.2023If you don’t get your doctrine of the church right, you’re going to get your doctrine of the government and the nation wrong.
Theonomy and Christian Nationalism Basics
Theonomy Primer: What Is It and How Does It Work?
By Tom Hicks | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Theonomy has a view of the gospel and of the church’s mission that goes beyond preaching Christ and him crucified and risen for the conversion of sinners and the building up of churches.
Reconstruction Theonomy vs. General Equity Theonomy
By Joseph Thigpen | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.19.2023Several distinctions can be made among the theonomists of our day.
The Many Faces of Christian Nationalism
By John D. Wilsey | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.20.2023In all our social media hot takes on Christian nationalism, we miss how nuanced nationalism has been in the American experience.
Theological Critique
Theonomy: Serious Theology, Serious Politics, Seriously Wrong
By Al Mohler | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Theonomy risks conflating the identity of the church and civil society as a matter of law and polity.
The Noahic Covenant’s Importance for Government
By David VanDrunen | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.18.2023Christians’ political thinking and conduct should always reflect the fact that our governments are in covenant with God through the Noahic covenant.
Is It Possible to Be a Baptist Christian Nationalist?
By Matthew Y. Emerson | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Is Christian Nationalism compatible with historic Baptist distinctives—with credobaptist, congregational convictions?
Postmillennialism and Theonomy
By David Schrock | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.27.2023Christ is reigning, and he will accomplish his purpose on earth as it is in heaven. But that purpose is best seen in the beautification and building up of the church in the midst of nations, not a final golden era among the nations, where all the nations are made Christian by the church’s influence.
Relating Moses’s Law to Christians
By Jason S. DeRouchie | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.20.2023How does Moses’s law apply to believers today when so much has changed with Christ’s coming, not least of which is that we are part of the new covenant and not the old?
Four Critiques of Theonomy from Three Perspectives
A Presbyterian Perspective: The Intellectual and Sociological Origins of the Christian Reconstructionist Movement
By Ligon Duncan | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023It is not our primary purpose here to provide analysis, but to describe and define, and to supply a preliminary sketch of the theoretical and environmental origins of the Christian Reconstructionist movement.
A 1689 Baptist Perspective: Confessionalism and Theonomy
By Justin Perdue | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Confessional Baptist theology disputes theonomy in three areas.
A Progressive Covenantal Perspective: Paul and the Tripartite Division of Moses’s Law
By Joshua M. Greever | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.20.2023Christians must call their governments to pursue and maintain a divinely-given, objective standard of morality. But Paul did not hold forth the law of Moses as this standard.
A Progressive Covenantal Perspective: Theonomy and Moses’s Law
By Jason S. DeRouchie | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.20.2023Theonomy fails to recognize that the New Testament applies Moses’s law through Christ only to the church and never to the state.
History, Culture, and Conversations
Theonomy and Sharia Law
By Matthew Bennett | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Christian theonomy poses some of the same dangers as an Islamic state.
Culture Warriors: The Good and the Bad
By Michael Horton | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023The witness of the early church exposes us to a sort of culture warrior, but one who contrasts rather sharply from what’s usually meant by that term today.
Against Religious Establishment in Baptist Political Theology
By Nathan A. Finn | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023From the beginning of the Baptist movement in the seventeenth century, the vast majority of Baptists have rejected religious establishments as a threat to flourishing faith.
To Study History, Exercise Virtue
By John D. Wilsey | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Virtues help us to guard against the extreme vices of nostalgia and cynicism in our historical thinking as we come to grips with what it means to be an American.
Utopian Seductions
By Matthew Arbo | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Nationalist sentiment has come and gone, each time a different flavor, perhaps, but always the same recognizable brand.
John Gill on Theonomy
By Ian Hugh Clary | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Baptists who care about the integrity of their own tradition would do well to leave theonomy to the side and embrace the thinking of theologians like Gill whose thought well-represented the best of both Reformed and Baptist theology.
Government’s Two-Edged Sword
By Matthew T. Martens | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.20.2023To what extent should the government use its coercive power to enforce Christian ethics?
Charlemagne and the Legacy of Christian Political Violence
By Dustin Asbury | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023When the church possesses coercive power, it invariably becomes warped and corrupted.
Pastoral Encouragements
The Aim of Preaching in an Increasingly Hostile Culture to Christianity
By John Piper | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 11.21.2022John Piper was recently asked, “How can American pastors begin to prepare the churches for persecution?”
Three Building Blocks for a Christian’s Political Theology
By Kevin DeYoung | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.14.2023Every pastor desires to see his congregation formed theologically. Part of this theological formation involves thinking through a number of questions that relate to church and state.
What Is a Greater Grief: A Compromised Church or a Compromised Nation?
By Jeremy Walker | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Which more afflicts the heart of God’s people—a morally declining country or a spiritually diseased congregation?
“God Is (Not) an Englishman . . .”
By Jamie Southcombe | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023We should never confuse God’s kindness to our home nation with the idea that nationality is his primary interest.
Baptist Covenant Theology: A Pastor’s Best Defense Against Theonomy
By Jeff Wiesner | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023In the face of today’s so-called «culture war,» Theonomy and Reconstruction teachers often take bold stands on social issues that attract anxious evangelicals. How can pastors guide and guard their sheep from possible error?
Ten Diagnostic Questions for the Potential Ideologue
By Ken Barbic | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.29.2023Be wary of anyone who casts their political strategy and positions on less clear matters with a “thus saith the Lord” level of certainty.
How I Went Too Far with Politics
By Dave Brown | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023How do we as Christians know when we’re putting too much hope in politics?
International Pastors on Culture War—Why or Why Not?
By Benny, J. Lithell, J. Manley, S. Masters | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.20239Marks asked several pastors outside of the U.S. to answer this question: in your context, do you think of yourself as a culture warrior?
Samples of Public Prayers Prayed by Pastors
By J. Owens, J. Sanchez, M. Dever, R. Shannon | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Read the prayers of four pastors at city, state, and national governmental gatherings.
Book Reviews
Book Review: The Case for Christian Nationalism, by Stephen Wolfe
By Andrew T. Walker | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 12.09.2022‘The Case for Christian Nationalism’ trades the beatific vision for Bible verses at the DMV.
Book Review: On Earth as in Heaven, by Peter J. Leithart
Review by Dan Darling | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023Leithart’s view of the church’s mission roots in postmillennialism, which yields not just an optimism about the future, but risks placing an eschatological and redemptive burden on Christians’ work in the world.
Book Review: Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America, by Crawford Gribben
Review by Joseph Thigpen | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.28.2023After reading Gribben’s account, one matter is clear—these are not your father’s (or grandfather’s) theonomists.
Book Review: Empires of Dirt, by Douglas Wilson
Review by Paul Alexander | 9Marks Journal: A New Christian Authoritarianism? | 04.27.2023Precisely here is where theonomy is in danger of becoming a new legalism: demanding of the church what Jesus does not demand and what the church cannot in any case do.
Free Download
PDF file will be sent to this email address. As part of our community, you will receive content & communication from 9Marks. You may unsubscribe at any time.
