"The Cultural Commission"

An excerpt from Charles Colson's book: "How Now Shall We Live?"

"The scriptural justification for culture building starts with Genesis. At the dawn of creation, the earth is unformed, empty, dark, and undeveloped. Then in a series of steps, God establishes the basic creational distinctives: light and dark. "above the expanse" and "below the expanse," sea and land, and so on. But then God changes his strategy.

Until the sixth day, God has done the work of creation directly. But now he creates the first human beings and orders them to carry on where he leaves off: They are to reflect his image and to have dominion (Gen 1:26). From then on, the development of creation will be primarily social and cultural: It will be the work of humans as they obey God's command to fill and subdue the earth (Gen 1:28).

Sometimes called the "cultural commission" or "cultural mandate," God's command is the culmination of his work in creation. The curtain has risen on the stage, and the director gives the characters their opening cue in the drama of history. Though the creation itself is "very good," the task of exploring and developiong its powers and potentialities, the task of building a civilization, God turns over to his image bearers. "By being fruitful they must fill it even more; by subduing it they must form it even more," explains Al Wolters in "Creation Regained"

The same command is still binding on us today. Though the Fall introduced sin and evil into human history, it did not erase the cultural mandate. The generations since Adam and Eve still bear children, build families, and spread across the earth. They still tend animals and plant fields. They still construct cities and governments. They still make music and works of art.

Sin introduces a destructive power into God's created order, but it does not obliterate that order. And when we are redeemed, we are not only freed from the sinful motivations that drive us but also restored to fulfill our original purpose, empowered to do what we were created to do: to build societies and create culture-and, in doing so, to restore the created order.

It is our contention in this book that the Lord's cultural commission is inseparable from the great commission. That may be a jarring statement for many conservative Christians, who, through much of the twentieth century, have shunned the notion of reforming culture, associating that concept with the liberal social gospel. The only task of the church, many fundamentalists and evangelicals have believed, is to save as many lost souls as possible from a world literally going to hell. But this implicit denial of a Christian worldview is unbiblical and is the reason we have lost so much of our influence in the world. Salvation does not consist simply of freedom from sin; salvation also means being restored to the task we were given in the beginning-the job of creating culture.

When we turn to the New Testament, admittedly we do not find verses specifically commanding believers to be engaged in politics or the law or education or the arts. But we don't need to, because the cultural mandate given to Adam still applies. Every part of creation came from God's hand, every part was drawn into the mutiny of the human race and its enmity toward God, and every part will someday be redeemed. This is the apostle Paul's message to the Romans, in which he promises that "the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay" (Rom 8:21). Redemption is not just for individuals; it is for all of God's creation.

Paul makes the point most strongly clear in Colossians 1:15-20, where he describes the lordship of Christ in three ways: (1) everything was made by and for Christ: "By Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible...all things were created by Him and for Him"; (2) everything holds together in Christ: "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together"; (3) everything will be reconciled by Christ: "For God was himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven." Redemption covers all aspects of creatin, and the end of time will not signal an end to the creation but the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth: God will make all things new (Rev. 21:5).

The lesson is clear: Christians are saved not only from something (sin) but also to something (Christ's lordship over all of life). The Christian life begins with spiritual restoration, which God works through the preaching of his Word, prayer, the sacraments, worship, and the exercise of spiritual gifts within a local church. This is the indispensable beginning, for only the redeemed person is filled with God's Spirit and can genuinely know and fulfill God's plan. But then we are meant to proceed to the restoration of all God's creation, which includes private and public virtue; individual and family life; education and community; work, politics, and law; science and medicine; literature, art, and music. The redemptive goal permeates everything we do, for there is no invisible dividing line between sacred and secular. We are to bring "all things" under the lordship of Christ, in the home and the school, in the workshop and the corporate boardroom, on the movie screen and on the concert stage, in the city council and the legislative chamber.

This is what we mean when we say a Christian must have a comprehensive worldview: a view or perspective that covers all aspect of the world. For every aspect of the world was created with a structure, a character, a norm. These underlying (God's words given in Scripture) and general revelation (the structure of the world he made). They include both laws of nature and norms for human life.

This point must be pressed, because most people today operate on a fact/value distinction, believing that science uncovers "facts," which they believe to be reliable and true, while morality and religion are based on "values," which they believe to be subjective and relative to the individual. Unfortunately, Christians often mirror this secular attitude. We tend to be confident about God's laws for nature, such as the laws of gravity, motion and heredity; but we seem far less confident about God's laws for the family, education, or the state. Yet a truly Christian worldview draws no such distinction. It insists that God's laws govern all creation. And just as we have to learn to live in accord with the law of gravity, so, too, we must learn to live in accord with God's norms for society.

The reason these two types of laws seem quite different is that the norms for society are obeyed by choice. In the physical world, stones fall, planets move in their orbits, seasons come and go, and the electron circles the nucleus- all without any choice in the matter-because here God rules directly. But in culture and society, God rules indirectly, entrusting human beings with the task of making tools, doing justice, producing art and music, educating children, and building houses. And though a stone cannot defy God's law of gravity, human beings can rebel against God's created order-and they often do so. Yet that should not blind us to the fact that there is a single objective, universal order covering both nature and human nature.

All major cultures since the beginning of history have understood the concept of a universal order-all, that is, except postmodern Western culture. Despite the differences among them, all major civilizations have been believed in a divine order that lays down the law for both natural and human realms. In the Far East it was called Tao; in ancient Egypt is was called Ma'at; in Greek philosophy it was called logos.

Likewise, in the Old Testament the psalmists speaks almost in a single breath of God's preading the sbnow like wool and revealing his laws and decrees to Jacob, suggesting that there is no essential difference between God's laws for nature and those for people (see Ps. 146:16-19). Both types of law are a part of a single universal order. John's Gospel borrows the Greek word for this universal plan of creation (logos) and, in a startling move, identifies it with a personal being-Jesus Christ himself. "In the beginning was the Word (logos)," which is the source of creation (John 1:1). "Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made" (John 1:3). In other words, Jesus himself is the source of the comprehensive plan or design of creation.

As a result, obedience to Christ means living in accord with that plan in all aspects of life. Family and church, business and commerce, art and education, politics and law are institutions grounded in God's created order; they are not arbitrary in their configuration. A school is not a business and shouldn't be run like one; a family is not a state and shouldn't be run like one. Each has its own normative structure, ordained by God, and each has its own sphere of authority under God. For the Christian, there must be no dichotomy between the sacred and the secular because nothing lies outside of God's created order. Our task is to reclaim that entire created order for his dominion.

The world is a spiritual battleground, which two powers contending for the same territory. God's adversary, Satan, has invaded creation and now attempts to hold it as occupied territory. With the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God launched a counteroffensive to reclaim his rightful domain, and we are God's soldiers in that ongoing battle. "He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves" (Col 1:13). Redeemed, we are armed for the fight to extend that kingdom and push back the forces of Satan. The fighting may be fierce, but we must not lose hope, for what we are waging is essentially a mop-up operation. Because of the Resurrection, the war has been won; the victory is assured.

The history of Christianity is filled with glorious demonstrations of the truth and power of the gospel. Through the centuries, when Christians have lived out their faith by putting both the cultural commission and the great commission to work, they have renewed, restored, and, on occasions, even built new cultures. They have literally turned the world upside down."