Jesus’ Lordship, Theonomy, and Sphere Sovereignty.

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Introduction

At the outset of Scripture, God gives Adam and Eve the ‘cultural mandate’, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28). It was always God’s intention to have the entire world devoted to worship. This mandate was never revoked, and we see Jesus Christ, as the second Adam, recapitulate on the plan of God for all the earth as he commissioned his apostles to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19-20). But as Adam and Eve’s descendants subdue the earth, as the church disciples the nations, what is to be the standard of instruction for how we ought to live with one another? How ought we to build societal structures? What delineations ought to exist between one institution to the next? Here enters two interrelated concepts: ‘theonomy’ and ‘sphere sovereignty’, both of which will be defined below.

Definitions

Theonomy affirms the abiding validity of God’s law in exhaustive detail across all spheres which it touches. John Calvin, in the Geneva Confession of Faith of 1536, a confession intended for the entire community, stated the following:

“Because there is one only Lord and Master who has dominion over our consciences, and because his will is the only principle of all justice, we confess all our life ought to be ruled in accordance with the commandments of his holy law in which is contained all perfection of justice, and that we ought to have no other rule of good and just living, nor invent other good works to supplement it than those which are there contained, as follows: Exodus 20: “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee,” etc.

The following clarification on sphere sovereignty was offered by P. Andrew Sandlin in his Commencement address delivered Friday, June 14, 2013, at Trinity Episcopal Church in Pharr, Texas, Edinburg Theological Seminary:

“Finally, neo-Reformational Christians espouse sphere sovereignty. This is Kuyper’s language. He means that God established separate but interrelated spheres of human life by which he mediates his authority in human culture. There are many spheres; each operates according to God’s law unique to its sphere. The institutional examples of those spheres include family, church, and state. Each has its distinct calling, and each is comparatively independent under God’s authority. These spheres may not arrogate to themselves the unique tasks of the others. For example, the family is called to propagate the human race and cultivate children and provide for its members. The church is called to declare the Word and administer the ordinances or sacraments and protect Christian orthodoxy. The state is called (in the language of the Declaration of Independence) to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These spheres (and others) all have separate but critical tasks. The problem arises when a single sphere lords it over all others, and when one arrogates to itself tasks that belong to the others”.

Implications

When we get clarity on what the Bible teaches on the autonomy of the various creational spheres (autonomy from each other, not from God) and what the Bible requires of church and family, what it does not require of the state, then we can avoid the pitfalls of 1) secular statism and 2) a top-down notion that if we just Christianize the state, without having to affect and consecrate the wider culture, then we can have Christendom 2.0, what we’ll call political soteriology. Both involve spherical overreach through different theological mechanisms: secular statism inflates the state by denying divine authority altogether and attempting to fill the moral vacuum with bureaucratic control. Political soteriology inflates the state by over-identifying it with the kingdom of God, mistakenly thinking national transformation can be top-down and coercive rather than bottom-up and covenantal.

There are two avenues of statism that are of concern. 1) Some Christians truncate the Lordship of Christ on this earth by denying His authority over civil institutions or by reducing His reign to personal piety—this inevitably leaves a void for statists to fill. Those who would not worship Christ as Lord and see him magnified will deify and magnify the state, resulting in spherical encroachments. 2) Advocates of a misguided political soteriology will abandon the task of reaching the wider culture and likewise inflate the state—yet again resulting in spherical encroachments. Both camps abuse the Lordship of Christ, inappropriately intersect spheres, and abandon and corrupt the culture.

Application

The alternative to both pitfalls is the affirmation of the Lordship of Christ over all the earth, over all institutions, and the corresponding spherical limitations placed on those institutions facilitated by the Law of God. This conjunction is exemplified in Dr. Greg Bahnsen’s Theonomy and Civil Government, where theonomy concretely informs proper sphere sovereignty. He writes:

“The biblical way to deal with the physical needs of the poor in society is by means of voluntary personal charity (love willingly extended from the heart, 1 Cor. 13:3), obedience to relevant laws of God (e.g. about lending, gleaning), and the corporate church’s tithe-supported diaconal ministry (e.g. 1 Cor. 16:1-2; Romans 15:25-27). It is not a biblical approach to use state compulsion through taxes or economic barriers that men are forced to honor upon threat of civil punishment. There is certainly a difference between the social demands of benevolence and the political demands of justice; the former calls for one to act according to grace, the latter to perform an enforceable obligation. No one may justifiably claim gracious treatment as a “right” (which conceptually entails a corresponding duty of someone else). Much less the state, like a middleman broker of power, enforce a claim to gracious treatment on behalf of others (welfare recipients). God does indeed expect kings to ‘deliver the poor and needy’ (Ps. 72:2-4, 12-14), but this means, according to the text itself, that they are to “break their oppressors” by securing fairness in the courts and protecting them from “fraud and violence” (Leviticus 19:15, etc.). It suggests nothing of state-enforced welfare programs or state interference in the free market.”

Here, Bahnsen is not simply giving a policy opinion; he is demonstrating how biblical law helps define the limits and responsibilities of the civil sphere, without confusing it with the responsibilities of the church or the family. This is theonomy rightly applied to sphere sovereignty: delineating roles, preserving liberty, and preventing encroachment—whether statist or sacralized.

Clarification on Gleaning Laws and Civil Enforcement

Some may point to the gleaning laws of Old Testament Israel (e.g., Lev. 19:9–10; Deut. 24:19–21) as evidence of state-enforced charity. These laws did, in fact, require landowners to leave portions of their harvest for the poor, and they were covenantally binding within Israel’s legal code. However, it’s important to note that these commands carry no attached civil penalty in the biblical text—unlike laws concerning theft, murder, or fraud. According to theonomic principle, only laws with specified civil sanctions fall under the jurisdiction of the magistrate. Therefore, while the gleaning laws reflect God’s moral and social concern for the poor, their enforcement rests with individual obedience, family responsibility, and community norms, not with coercive action by the state. This distinction is crucial to maintaining proper sphere sovereignty, where the church exhorts, the family provides, and the state restrains evil and enforces justice without absorbing the duties of the other spheres.

Conclusion

Above we have offered a brief introduction of the absolute sovereignty of Christ as applied to the various creation-based spheres and informed by God’s law, its abiding validity in exhaustive detail. A proper understanding of the Lordship of Jesus will guard us from the pitfalls that come from denying the Lordship of Jesus (e.g. secularism) or having an ill-informed understanding of his Lordship (e.g. confusing spheres and misapplying God’s law). These pitfalls are a microcosm of statism and totalitarianism. Rev. Dr. Joseph Boot is the Founder and President of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity (EICC).

We close with some very balanced words of his from an interview he gave for Christ Over All with P. Andrew Sandlin:

“So, the goal of Christian culture is the reduction of the state to a very limited area of life. It’s one form of government, civil government, it’s one of many governments. But because of the statist character of secularism, secular paganism—and we’ve been repaganizing, going back to this Greco-Roman idea of the state, we now are starting to engage as Christians in these statist terms. And that, I think, is a serious mistake. The answer is not the capture of the levers of political power as though we can impose Christianity. We have to in all these different areas, develop a Christian vision of reality that will, over time, involve the transformation of the political sphere, a very limited sphere of life in the biblical view.”