My book City of Man, Kingdom of God: Why Christians Respect, Obey, and Resist Government, officially releases today. Last week I described who this book is for, and here I want to give an overview of its content.
City of Man, Kingdom of God is a primer on government. First, it argues that God designed government. Government did not simply fall from the sky, nor has it always existed. For example, there were no governments between Adam and Noah. Rather, government was instituted by God after the flood.
Why does that matter? Because when God instituted government, he gave it four specific tasks, detailed in Genesis 8-9. Government was to facilitate worship, protect the food sources, guard the family, and protect human life. As designed by God, those are government’s basic functions.
My book spends the first chapter defending those four areas where government should have oversight. But I’m not naïve. I know that governments often fail to regulate those areas. Some governments fail by attacking religion, family, and life. Other governments fail by going too far, and attempting much more than those basic tasks. The result is an almost ubiquitous sense of injustice in the world, so in chapter 3, I address how Christians should operate when confronted by injustice in the world.
Chapter 2 is probably the most unique part of the book. Here, I argue that the oft repeated adage “obey government at all times, unless it commands sin,” is woefully inadequate for navigating the kind of moral dilemmas with which Christians are often confronted. Many turn to Romans 13 and argue that there Paul tells Christians to obey government because God established it—so unless the law actually mandates sin, you should follow it. But this understanding of Romans 13 is simply not supported by much of church history. While certainly it was the view held by Rome, as well as Lutherans and many American theologians, it is not the view held by the Puritans and non-conformists. Instead, they typically argued that Romans 13 should be read in light of the purposes for which God established government—and when government goes beyond God’s purposes, it has stopped being God’s servant for good.
But the heart of City of Man, Kingdom of God is chapter 4. The book concludes looking at the showdown with the Herodians in Jesus’s last week of ministry before the cross. I argue from what is called the “two-kingdom” perspective, meaning that I see Jesus as teaching that every Christian is a citizen of their earthly kingdom as well as heaven. In a rich economy of words, Jesus forcefully argues that our taxes belong to the earthly kingdom. Left unsaid—but strongly implied—is that our worship belongs to the realm of heaven. Therefore, I argue, that governments err when they seek to regulate the worship of God’s people, and when the do so, they are not owed obedience and Christians are right to resist.
If any of those topics interest you, please check out my book at this link here. It is available in hardcover, Audible, and Kindle.
By the way, if you are in the Washington DC area, it will be for sale at a 50% discount at the G3—Just Thinking About the Bible conference this week. More info on that conference is here.