Christianity & CulturePart 2: The Cultural Mandate

Introduction

We began our new series last week by asking the question, “What is culture?” While admitting with Ken Myers that “defining culture is not at all an easy task,” we noted with John Frame that “culture is not only what we grow, but also what we make, both with our hands and with our minds.” In review, my favorite definition of culture was given by Ken Myers: “Culture is a dynamic pattern, an ever-changing matrix of objects, artifacts, sounds, institutions, philosophies, fashions, enthusiasms, myths, prejudices, relationships, attitudes, tastes, rituals, habits, colors, and loves, all embodied in individual people, in groups and collectives and associations of people (many of whom do not know they are associated), in books, in buildings, in the use of time and

Introduction

space, in jokes, and in food.” In short form, Frame maintains that “creation is what God makes by himself, and culture is what he makes through us.”Today’s lecture will take us to the first chapter of Genesis where we will consider what is commonly known as the Cultural Mandate. While many have heard of the Great Commandment and the Great Commission, few have heard of the cultural mandate or understood its meaning and the implications for living life under the sovereign lordship of Jesus Christ. What is it that God created us to do during our three-score and ten years upon the earth? What does it mean that we are to exercise dominion over all the earth?

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

LL Ori and the Orion NebulaNASA Pictures

John C. Lennox, PhD, DPhil, DSc

“According to Genesis, you cross neither the gulf between nonlife and life nor the gulf between animals and human beings by unguided natural processes. God has to speak his creative Word in both instances. Without God speaking there is an unbridgeable discontinuity. The image of God in man was not produced as a result of blind matter fumbling its unguided way through myriad different permutations. Thus Genesis challenges atheism’s fundamental assertion that human life has appeared without the activity of God’s mind, so that there is nothing special about human beings.”

John C. Lennox1943 –

Professor of MathematicsOxford University

Sir John Polkinghorne

“I am a passionate believer in the unity of knowledge and I believe that those who are truly seeking an understanding through and through, and who will not settle for a facile and premature conclusion to that search, are seeking God, whether they acknowledge that divine quest or not. Theism is concerned with making total sense of the world.”John C. Polkinghorne

1930 -English theoretical physicist, theologian, writer, and

Anglican priest priest

Blaise Pascal

“If man was not made for God, why is he only happy in God?

If man was made for God, why is he so opposed to God?”

- Pascal, Pensées, 399

Genesis 1:27-28

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

The Creation of AdamMichelangelo

“God blessed them…”

• After God created Adam and Eve, the Scriptures tell us that God blessed them.

• George van Groningen asks three questions regarding this blessing:1. When God blessed the male and female, did he pronounce a benediction

on them?2. Was the benediction one of enablement to carry out certain requirements?3. Was the benediction intended to include an expression of what God not

only enabled them to do, but mandated them to perform according to his will? (this is the most likely case).

• “God blessed the male and female in order that they would be assured that they could carry out the purposes for which they were brought as royal beings into the cosmic kingdom” (van Groningen).

Introducing Meredith G. Kline

Dr. Meredith Kline received a B.A., Gordon College; Th.B., Th.M., Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia (1947), and a Ph.D. in Assyriology and Egyptology from Dropsie University (1956). He was an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and had a long career as Professor of Old Testament at various institutions, including Westminster Theological Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Westminster Seminary California.

1922-2007

Meredith G. Kline on Creation

“In the original creation record of Genesis 1:1-2, the triumph (or at least the display of God’s absolute sovereignty) and the house-building are concurrent aspects of the one creation process. The vast deep-and-darkness which God first created, he then bounded and structured until the divine design for creation was realized that it should not be a chaos but a habitation (Is. 45:18). In the midst of the earth stood the holy garden of God, his microcosmic royal sanctuary, the dwelling place into which he received the God-like earthling to serve as princely gardener and priestly guardian. Then the Creator enthroned himself in his cosmic house, the heaven his throne, the earth his footstool; on the seventh day, he sat as king in the archetypal place of his rest” (Is. 66:1).

The Cultural Mandate

• In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (ex nihilo) and everything that exists.

• On the sixth day, God created man, male and female.• In Genesis 1:28, God commanded Adam and Eve to “multiply and fill

the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” In Genesis 2:15, we see the cultural mandate expressed again: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

• Adam and Eve were created to be God’s vicegerents.

Van Groningen on Vicegerents & Viceregents

• A vicegerent has royal status and position and rules under the king. Consider Joseph: “Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘Since God has shown you all this, there is none so discerning and wise as you are. You shall be over my house, and all my people shall order themselves as you command. Only as regards the throne will I be greater than you.’ And Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘See, I have set you over all the land of Egypt’” (Gen. 41:39-41). Joseph was always second in command.

• A viceregent rules in in place of a king. • “Joseph and Daniel were not kings; they had a royal status, position,

and privileges as the highest officials under their respective kings.”

Psalm 8:3-8

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.”

Winston Churchill

“Once, when Winston Churchill was on holiday staying with friends in the south of France, he came into the house on a chilly evening, sat down by the fireplace, and stared silently into the flames. Resin-filled pine logs were crackling, hissing, and spitting as they burned. Suddenly his familiar voice growled, ‘I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed.’”

Winston Churchill1874-1965

A Royal Being

“Man was formed from the dust; he had a direct relation with God; he lived because God directly infused the breath of life into him. In this mysterious, scientifically inexplicable way, God brought his image-bearers and likeness into existence. A miracle of the greatest dimension was wrought. A royal being was brought into existence from the earth he was to rule over, develop, and live from; the royal being was given the status and potential to be a royal agent on behalf of God because God himself breathed into him, thus forming his own image and likeness” (van Groningen).

Two Elements of the Mandate

Filling and Ruling1. Filling: Adam and Eve are to have children, grandchildren, and so

on. The man is to “leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24), thus establishing a new home. Ultimately, there would be a multiplication of new homes around the world.

2. Ruling: Adam and Eve are to rule over the world as God’s vicegerents.

Man’s Duties Before God

“They are to march through the world as kings and queens, taking possession of everything. They are to harness animals, the heat and cold, the electricity and seismic energy, to serve their own purposes. That means development. Adam and Eve are not to leave the world untouched, as some radical environmentalists would prefer. Rather, they are to use the resources of God’s creation, to bring out the potential of the heavens and the earth, to facilitate their rule under God. They are to turn their creation into a culture, into a home for human society.”

- John M. Frame

Carl F.H. Henry

“Biblical theologians contend that divine revelation provides the one and only reliable exposition of human meaning and worth. The pattern of biblical history begins with God as sovereign creator of the worlds and of man who promptly profanes the moral-spiritual purposes for which he was divinely made. It centers in God’s gracious offer of redemption pledged in the call of Israel and fulfilled in the gift of Jesus Christ, now the risen head of the church. It focuses on a global society of redeemed and renewed persons whose present mandate is to proclaim to all men the divine offer of life abundant in God’s kingdom and whose future inheritance includes sharing in God’s triumphant divine vindication of righteousness. Man is made to know and love and

Carl F.H. Henry

serve God and, under God, is to reclaim the earth and mankind for the Creator’s holy purposes. Only if man lives in the light of this scriptural perspective can he escape ensnarement by ancient and modern myths.”

The Cultural Mandate: A Summary

1. God created the heavens and the earth in six days (“however long those days may have been” – John Frame) and rested on the seventh.

2. The Cultural or Creation Mandate was a command given to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. They were created in the imago Dei(the image of God) and thus prepared to fill the earth and to have dominion over all. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). Culture is an extension of creation.

3. The ultimate reason for God’s command to Adam and Eve was for His own glory.

The Cultural Mandate: A Summary

4. God initiated culture, so it must be His desire and delight for man to work with his hands and his mind to rule over His creation.

5. Cultures inevitably have a value element. “Is there any permanent standard by which we can compare one civilization with another?” (T.S. Eliot). Are there transcendent norms for assessing culture? Is there a difference between a Rembrandt painting and the work of a graffiti artist? What about cultural relativism? Who is the better thinker: Thomas Jefferson or Bruce Springsteen? Are certain cultures superior or inferior to others? How can we determine if a culture is progressing or in decline?

The Cultural Mandate: A Summary

6. Culture involves the imagination. What does God want us to do?7. Culture cannot be preserved or developed without religion

(remember that culture and cult come from the same root word). “Culture is religion externalized” (Henry Van Til). To fulfill the cultural mandate, we must know what we believe.

8. We are God’s vicegerents.9. The cultural mandate means that we are to reclaim the earth and

mankind for the Creator’s holy purposes.10. The Holy Spirit calls us and empowers us to accomplish our work for

King Jesus.

God Has Ultimate Dominion

• “Dominion and fear are with God; he makes peace in his high heaven” (Job 25:2).

• For kingship belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations” (Ps. 22:28).

• “He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords; who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light; whom no man has seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen.” (I Tim. 6:15-16).

• “…so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belongs the glory and dominion forever and ever” (I Pt. 4:11).

Abraham Kuyper

“There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’”