The Forgotten Doctrine Every Christian Man Needs (but 99% of Pastors Hate)

We are going to spend time thinking about the word dominion and what dominion means in Scripture.

First of all, we find it twice in the most valuable real estate in all of Scripture — Genesis 1. We find it once in Genesis 1:26 and again in Genesis 1:28. It is so important. They did not repeat any of the days — it is not like Monday and then Monday again. But the Holy Spirit, God the Word, God the Father, thought it so vital that dominion be mentioned that he mentioned it twice in that most important passage. That is worth thinking about. We realise then that dominion is exceedingly important to God. He put it there, and he put it there twice.

This is Nathan Conkie for God’s World, God’s Way.

Dominion Is Part of Who We Are

Dominion may not be important to men. In fact, a lot of men — good men — reckon that it is a dangerous word, held in suspicion. But we go by what God says. God says it is important. That is a good rule: value what God values.

The first thing to notice is that dominion is important to God. The second thing is that it is part of who we are. You can remove certain organs — some people do not have their gallbladders. But you cannot remove the heart without giving up. You cannot remove the lungs. You cannot remove the kidneys for very long. But dominion is such a part of us that we cannot even reach in and get it out. It is almost like it is in every cell of our bodies. God speaks over us and he said, before we were ever made, let them have dominion. So it is not even an instruction given to us as conscious beings — the covenant was not given to Abraham when he was conscious, and similarly, when we were yet unformed, God spoke this into us: “Let them have dominion.”

What does that mean? Well, it is what Rushdoony calls an inescapable concept. It is also an inescapable fact of life. If you want to help anybody who is a little bit unbalanced, a little bit suffering — particularly in their psyche, in their mind, their heart — you have got to know what normal looks like in order to return them to normal. And one key aspect of our normalcy is dominion. In fact, if you take godly dominion away from a person, they are not quite right. They cannot really be quite right.

Consider the prisoner in the film The Green Mile — the huge man who says: “I am tired, boss, I am tired.” Being a prisoner, he is going to be psychologically afflicted, because he cannot express his full self. He does not have the ability to do meaningful work. So dominion is so much a part of us that it is necessary for your mental health to have it. And I think this is especially so for men. Maybe you think you are less of a man if you do not have dominion in a particular field. At the ultimate extreme, you are just out of your mind — you have to put yourself in a fantasy world, because dominion is just that much a part of us.

Where Suppressed Dominion Goes

Another inescapable concept, by the way, is sanctification. But so is dominion. Why? Because you cannot take dominion out of a person — it always has to go somewhere. It is a little bit like the knowledge of God. You can hold it under, as Romans 1 says, but it is going to pop up somewhere else. Well, I do not like dominion as the Bible describes it. In fact, I think it is a dangerous doctrine. You can say all these things and really mean it in your heart, but it is not going to get you very far, because that ball you are holding under the water is going to shoot up somewhere else.

Where does that shoot up for some people? Well, we live in a passive age, so people consume a lot of content — video content. In the olden days it was movies and television. For a man, you could watch an action hero — Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger. You are physically passive, but in your mind, your mind associates with the action hero who can do anything he likes, really. He can pick men up and throw them across the room with one hand. It is even worse with superheroes. But you have a false dominion that you identify with. Filmmakers are very clever, because they may not be able to articulate it in theological terms, but they do realise how men are made — and men are made to have dominion.

For some people it is passive, watching other people. It can be very dark, how people watch a thing and think they have dominion in a particular area. But people are canny, and the world is canny at capturing people. So instead of having dominion in their own lives, in the field that God has called them to, they are in this trap where they imagine they have dominion because they watch the person, and by some process of the mind, associate with them — and they make no progress in their own lives. They are consumers of entertainment, consumers of content. They are not doers.

Another way, for church people, is to seek dominion by church politics. They want to get ahead. They want to be part of the church bureaucracy, to be on a church board of some kind — a synod, a presbytery — in order to boss people around. Or you can do it at a very low level: just after the church service, you carve the turkey, and you carve the meat, and you eat the minister — you tear strips off him. The minister did this, and the minister did not do that.

But it will manifest. It just must manifest. It is just a part of who we are. You cannot get rid of it. Not with any drugs. Consider the drug addict. What does someone on drugs imagine? They want a sense of euphoria, a sense of transcendence — the feeling that comes from dominion, but without paying a price for it. They want an easy fix. Of course, the drug addict is a weak person physically and mentally, and the passive person who consumes entertainment, to the degree that they do so, becomes weak in their ability to interact with the real world where dominion is taken.

The Fall as an Anti-Dominion Event

So dominion is a necessary concept, an inescapable concept. But if we think about Genesis 1, 2, and 3, we find the first great strike against dominion in Genesis 3.

What was the temptation in the garden? In part, the temptation was about dominion. Dominion is demanding. It requires that you get up in the morning, do all the things, get your boots on, and go to work. Instead, what did Satan offer? In the place of steady work — which was, really, actually impossible work, because if you think your job is impossible, consider poor Adam’s commission to take dominion over the whole earth — Satan’s alternative was: well, you do not have to work. All you have to do is disobey God, and then you will become like God.

So Satan’s alternative to dominion — and he is the leading anti-dominionist — is to be a God. You do not have to work. You just consider yourself a God, and all your problems disappear. Of course, that did not go as planned. Instead, extra problems were introduced: thorns, thistles, and the animals did not cooperate as they used to. At the extreme, Cain was even driven from the lands, and he went away and built his own city.

There is an opposite of dominion. It is the devil who is the great hater of dominion, and his alternative is essentially sin and self-deification — becoming your own God. So when you see people speaking against dominion, refusing dominion, saying it is a terrible idea, if they are our brothers in Christ, we must love them. If they are a teacher, we must respect them. But we know, to be very blunt about it, they are taking the side of the devil.

Dominion Is Godliness

Now when I say someone is godly, what is the picture that comes up in your mind? What does a godly man look like? What is he doing? In the writing of the church and in church history, it has tended to be — especially in Catholic circles — that the saint, the godly man, is particularly drawn-looking. It is hard to imagine a Friar Tuck being put forward as the primo Catholic poster-boy of godliness. They tend to be rather weak and sickly.

But before I explain what I was going to explain, what does the word godly actually mean etymologically? It means like God. So we cannot be like God in certain ways — we cannot create out of nothing, we can never know everything. But God stamps his image upon us uniquely, and a big part of that image is dominion. Let us make man in our image — next words out of his mouth: let them have dominion. So according to God, the first aspect that really sets us apart as image-bearers, the first thing that makes us god-like or godly, is our taking dominion.

Many would be tempted to say that the marker of godliness is that you pray more, or that you can articulate theological concepts, or that you can preach well. But if we are having our minds renewed by God’s Word, when we think godly, we must think: this is a man who is taking dominion in his field.

Dominion Covers All of Creation

Let us look at what the Dominion Mandate says in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

See how close together bearing the image of God and taking dominion are. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air. Then cattle. Cattle here can mean not just cows, but any kind of livestock. Who in the Bible kept livestock? Abel was the first. Abraham. Isaac. Jacob. David. Elisha. Job. King Saul — and we first meet Saul not having dominion over his donkeys, which is interesting. The shepherds were the first to see Jesus. Even the term for a Christian teacher is pastor, which comes of course from pastoral agriculture — caring for animals. And Jesus comes as the Good Shepherd.

And it says having dominion over all the earth. When we say all the earth, that widens things out considerably. We have a case law principle operating here, just as the apostle Paul applies the case law about not muzzling the ox to the payment of ministers. The specific things mentioned — fish, birds, cattle, the earth — expand outward to cover everything that falls under those categories.

So, for example, dominion over the earth encompasses mining. How do you get gold out of the earth? You dig down. You refine it. Who in the Bible was rich in silver and gold? Abraham. So the accumulation of wealth through skilled work in the earth is itself part of the dominion mandate.

What about oil? You have to find it — that requires the geologist. You drill — that requires the engineer. You refine it — that requires the chemist. You transport it — that requires the logistics operator. You turn it into products — that requires the scientist and the manufacturer. Once you start talking about having dominion over the earth, you are instantly into everything. So do not make the mistake of thinking that our modern world of the internet and AI is somehow separate from all of this. It is all earth-based. Every server farm runs on minerals pulled from the ground. Every chip is made from silicon. Dominion over the earth is dominion over all of it.

Why Pastors Hate This Doctrine

Why, then, is this doctrine so suppressed? Let me take a stab at it.

First of all, creation is not a popular doctrine. Many people, even within the evangelical world, think that a literal six-day creation is just a myth. And so of course the dominion mandate, as part of that creation account, will be treated as myth too.

The second thing is that the dominion mandate has the character of law. It binds us. It says: this is the way, walk ye in it. And there is a general distaste for law in the evangelical church. Anything that reeks of law, of being binding, is viewed with suspicion.

Third, there is this idea that the material, physical world is lesser — even that it is evil — and that the goal of the Christian life is to transcend the material world and spend our lives in the spiritual realm. This is a very deep, deep, deep Greek pagan thing which runs through all of Christian history — this dualism: matter bad, spirit good.

And you could also put it down to people simply not reading their Bibles. It is very interesting how much Myron Golden, just by reading the Bible, just realised all this stuff. If we simply read the Bible and meditate upon it as if it were a book that is understandable and asks us to put things into practice, we discover all these things.

You can also put it down to the idea of the pastor being like a priest — and only the priests can do the special spiritual stuff. The Bible being this spiritual book that only really spiritual people can understand. We cannot really understand it. We have to sit under the minister and take what we are given.

You could add to that list dispensationalism — the idea that God is dealing with us in a new way, that it is the age of the spirit, and that the Old Testament does not really apply to us anymore in any comprehensive sense.

Identity and Dominion

And so here is where it all comes together. If you want change in any area of your life, it starts with be, then do, then have. It starts with identity. Who am I? And in relation to dominion, I am — by God’s grace — a dominion man. But if your identity is different, if your identity says: I am a pilgrim on this earth, this world is not my home, I am just passing through — then you will live it out. You will be exactly that: a stranger in a world that could have been yours.

Just as I become a dominion man in my own area — not forcing my will on anybody else — God will give us more responsibility, and we will become those men who are capable again, perhaps in several generations, of ruling as our forefathers ruled.

Dominion necessitates technology, and that is what was on display throughout the whole history of Genesis. Who are the innovators? There are two groups in the book of Genesis after Cain and Abel — the line of Cain and the line of Seth. And it is through Seth’s line that the great work of civilisation, of dominion, of taking the creation and developing it for God’s glory, proceeds.

Let us be dominion men.