Should We be Trying to Redeem the Culture?
“We have a gospel mandate that makes the dominion mandate redundant. Our mandate in this age is the Great Commission. Make disciples of Jesus Christ—genuine, deep, self-sacrificing reflections of the character of Christ in personal heart and life.” - P&D
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I think I mostly agree with Kevin on this and just want to say parts of it a little differently.
It might be helpful to note that:
- The gospel mandate (great commission) is for the church
- The ‘cultural mandate’ of Genesis is for all humans
Working out what are responsibilities are as human beings vs. what they are Christians and what they are ‘as the Church’ and ‘as local churches,’ is famously complex. But we should start out by recognizing that these are overlapping categories.
As individual believers, we always have our ‘human’ hat on, so to speak. And also always our ‘Christian believer’ hat. Maybe patch or badge is a better analogy than hat—because we never have just one role.
But we don’t always have the ‘member of Anytown Bible Church’ hat/badge on. Similarly, I’m always a dad, but I don’t manage content in my day job as my son’s dad. I do it as an employee of the company that hired me.
My point is just this: We should be trying to redeem the culture as humans and as believers. As the church and church members, we should also be trying to make disciples. (The church should also be trying to help us be better believers and better humans, so there’s the nexus.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I think we are in basic agreement with what Aaron said. However, as you know there is a concerted push towards activism among some, suggesting that the church needs to become an agent for cultural change (if not domination).
We are covering this topic in more depth in the just released issue of FrontLine. I promoted it on P&D today. See here. Today I started interviewing authors for our podcast. I'm trying to build on those articles and add more value to what is being said. These interviews will come out over the next couple of months.
Kevin Bauder was the coordinating editor for this one and I'll be talking to him shortly.
So that is my shameless plug... hope everyone subscribes and profits from it!
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
Agree with Aaron that the gospel mandate is for Christians and that the cultural (I prefer Image) mandate is for all humans. To somehow nullify the Image mandate with the redemptive/gospel mandate is impossible because we can't help but image God in all the cultural activities because these cultural activities are part of what it means to be human. Whether it be using our intellegance, reasoning, language, emotions or pursue image activities such as create family, work, commerce, business, law and order, politics, culture-making, etc..., we image God, although sin has corrupted humans we go about it, which is why we need the gospel.
I would argue that when the Exiles of Jerusalem were tempted to stop living out the image mandate in Babylon, Jeremiah tells them to "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease." (Jeremiah 29:5-6) Its interesting that Jeremiah uses some of the same language as the image mandate from Genesis 1:28 where they are to "increase in number."
I don’t quite have words for this yet, so maybe it comes out garbled, but I’ll give it a shot. I often feel that there is a big missing piece in our theology in the area of anthropology. Or maybe another way to say is that as Christians, we often seem to be so busy being “Christian,” we’ve forgotten about being human.
One way I see this is in broadly negative words and attitudes about unbelievers. I realize there is a fair amount of that in the New Testament, but these almost always occur in the context of emphasizing what has changed—the old/new contrast. But we can emphasize what has changed so much that we forget what has not changed.
In a manner of speaking, we are humans first, Christians second. I understand that the two are not really separate for believers. We are ‘Christian humans’ 100% of the time. But in practice, we seem to often overlook the ‘humans’ part.
And humans who are nowhere near fully transformed.
So we get to thinking the nominally Christian version of everything is automatically superior to the ‘secular’ or just not overtly Christian version of the thing. But why should this be the case? Being regenerate doesn’t make you get everything right and being unregenerate doesn’t make you get everything wrong.
I’m rambling. But part of what I’m trying to say is that those who do not believe are our fellow humans. We should let ourselves feel that.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Aaron, I have been wrestling through a properly theological way to categorize unbelievers and even asking if it is theologically correct to categorize them. Since scripture doesn't seem to do so, then I do not think we should either.
For example, there are unbelievers who know who Jesus is and have decided that they hate him. There are also a significant number of unbelievers who have not decided to follow Jesus, but highly admire him and his followers. People like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Tim Poole, and Tom McDonald come to mind. There are also a large number of people who really haven't thought about it. Regardless, all who do not chose to follow Jesus will be lost, but depending on how antagonistic they are to him they can either help or hinder the work that his followers are doing.
If God can use a donkey, he can use an unbeliever. The problem with all these thoughts that I have been processing on this subject is that they are simply the thoughts of my limited experience rather than the insights of scripture. Regardless, it is a great reminder that God can even use unbelievers to get people talking about Jesus.
Scripture uses a lot of starkly-contrasting category pairs like the ones below. Sometimes it’s not clear if these correspond exactly to “unbeliever” and “believer” (as in ‘persons who are justified by faith’).
- Sons of this world, sons of light: Luke 16:8
- Sons of disobedience, children of light: Eph 5:6-8
- The wicked, the righteous: Gen 18:23, Psalm 1:5, etc.
- Those who are in the flesh, those who are in the Spirit: Rom 8:8-9
- Children of the devil, children of God: 1 John 3:10
These are biblical contrasts and we’re supposed to be informed and guided by them. But they can be misused. Maybe in some cases, the pairs are not symmetrical (one side is all believers, but the other side is not all unbelievers).
Probably a key is to understand that people are not all the same in every way, regardless of which side of these divides they fit into.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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