Premier Andrews forces us to think about Christ and Culture

So the aggressively progressive Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews is still trying to get his Equal Opportunity (Religious Exceptions) Bill 2016 through the Legislative House (Update: it was narrowly voted down) and into law. Basically the law forces religious organisations to prove that a religious confession of faith is an "inherent requirement" to be employed by a Christian organisation. (The law's logic is bizarre, you have to employ someone with the opposite values of your organisations in the name of open-minded tolerance!?) It's unclear if Andrews is simply securing his political left-flank to prevent more progressive parties gaining a foothold or if he is a genuine ideologue.

But the introduction of this law highlights an important aspect of how modern Australian evangelicalism views the relationship between Christ and culture. Many (some?) evangelical Australian leaders would say "the gospel does not change everything". This is based on the idea that the "ministry of the word" (Acts 6:4) is primary, and that the sermon is the central focus of the service. Therefore making this activity and role primary, and everything else secondary. Unintentionally this coincides with our culture's focus on specialisation and professionalisation, the pastor becomes the gospel specialist. So apart from the chaplain who else would need to be a Christian at a Christian school?

Now, apart from belonging to Jesus, what else really matters, in the end? The gospel is central to life and faith. Also specialisation can be useful. Now i've blogged before about the seven big ways the gospel changes culture (ethics, purpose, patterns, pictures, boundaries, occasional details and the meta-narrative). Note that I'm not arguing for an extreme Christian presuppositionalism, crudely: 'that only the things a Christian sees exist'. Aerodynamics, a creation trope, is useful for both Muslim and Christian pilots. But the big story you belong to ultimately and intimately changes everything. Otherwise ironically in an effort to elevate gospel preaching we narrow and diminish it, application is truncated, the scope of Biblical history becomes lopsided and we are unequipped to handle the madness of Daniel Andrews.

[Daniel Andrews in Tiananmen Square, China. - 2015 ABC News]

Christ and Culture and the God of the gaps

Another of way of thinking about the relationship between the gospel and culture is to see the parallels with thinking about the relationship between science and philosophy. Brian Cox in the very readable Human Universe takes a look at the big questions of the universe. When it comes to the question of "why are we here?", his answer is a sort of philosophical version of the 'God of the gaps' theory, where the bits we don't know about are the realm of metaphysics. "All scientific 'Why?' questions end with 'I don't know' if you pushing far enough, because our scientific understanding of the universe is not complete." (Brian Cox, Human Universe, 168) For Brian the first cause of the universe, or thinking about the edge of the universe, are questions for philosophy until science furnishes a workable answer. In other-words, he is buying into the old fact-feeling split. Upstairs we have Romantic world of philosophy and religion and downstairs we have the hard factual world of science and reality. As if science and reality can be considered in the absence of philosophy!

There's a similar danger when we narrow our view of 'Christ and Culture' (aka Gospel and Culture) to a small band of religious activity; prayers, sermons and Bible reading on one hand, and then all the other practical dishwashing, ditch-digging and driving on the other hand. If we divid the gospel from reality like that we're inadvertently saying the gospel is about feelings, and the rest of ordinary life is about facts. But just as philosophy is required to make sense of all of life, all parts of culture are effected by either the good news or the bad news of the gospel.  It's worth remembering that just as we'd want to avoid a 'God of the gaps' theory when we think about Science and philosophy we want to avoid a 'God of the gaps' when it comes to the relationship between the Gospel and culture.

Culture Wars

Two Kingdom Errors

• The Gospel doesn't apply to everything
• Gospel and Culture are so seperate, that it's assumed secular neutrality exists

Transformational Errors

• Institutional Church is the best vehicle for transforming culture
• Theonomy, replacing the uniqueness of Israel with universal application of OT laws

The Gospel and Culture

Another painting from the Red Thread collection, 'Running Home'. The girl is like Paul Revere riding across the countryside to warn the colonialists of the approaching redcoats. Her movement across the sky towards the light on the hill should be a warning to the village below. The gospel is like that, the warning is true and urgent and changes everything around us, like a light on a hill, illuminating our reality.

That is what makes Carl Trueman's criticism of the "transformative" view so frustrating. How would something so important and urgent as the gospel not be a warning to the world around, not shine out like a light illuminating the surrounding world?  'Ideas have consequences', the gospel changes everything. The Gospel motivates us to care for the treatment of children in detention centres, to be frustrated by the hollow denouement of Madmen and to seek human flourishing across our desks and kitchen tables. How could it not?

Another version of Trueman's two kingdom approach to 'Christ and culture', is artificially separating conversion (aka gospel ministry) from the rest of life. As if making disciples (Matthew 28:19), is only about first-contact and not your wallet, bed-sheets or screen. The gospel is heard, understood and applied in a million small ways, during movies, across breakfast or in a ditch. Now, we don't have to blur genres so to speak; painting Bible verses on surfboards in order to apply the gospel to surfing. The local church has a narrow purpose, to make and gather disciples, but God's Kingdom extends way beyond 10am on Sundays. In other words theology like medicine should be studied and understood and then if it's true, applied.

This isn't to condone clumsy campaigns to ban books or to implement the Old Testament laws on modern society (Theonomy) but it does mean we should be having the discussion about what gospel shaped human-flourishing should look like and how in a hostile world do we live out what we believe. Contra Trueman, civilisation ebbs and flows and sometimes the cultural impact of Christianity is disproportionate to it's size. I need all the encouragement I can get to live out the gospel in every aspect of my life. 

The Jars of Clay thing: logic, gender, sex and culture

Logic
Reductio ad absurdum is a useful tool for testing the truth (correspondence to reality) of a premise by seeing if it's true in all cases. However it's also just that, a tool. Logically an argument can be valid (arguments should be valid, premises true and terms clear) if the claim is that 'gender and sexuality should be ordered a certain way.' Firstly, there is no contradiction if an exception is found, for example gay dolphins or consenting adults; because the original argument is contingent, gender and sexuality should be ordered a certain way. But secondly it's a fallacy to say 'gender and sexuality are whatever we want them to be because of those examples', that's making a inductive claim about the whole world based on a limited set of exceptions, an argument from selective observation.

Gender
At the moment it's very controversial to link a discussion of gender to the male and female sex organs. This isn't say that the expression of gender is cultural; with lots of regional variation but nonetheless the categories exist and Scripture wants us to affirm the cultural expression of distinct genders. In other words the Christian claim is that God made genetic gender differences and the cultural differences which flow from those genetic distinctions. Regional cultural variations, ambiguous gender at birth and variations in your internal sense of gender are not in of themselves logical arguments against affirming gender distinctions.

Sex
Sexual activity, like all of ordinary life has an existential effect on our psyche but like other ordinary activities (such as eating or travelling) shouldn't be the source of our identity. The essence of being human isn't our rationality, appetites, appearance or our sexuality. There are a range of sexual activities, desires and situations that we have access to; that's why those Old Testament laws focus on sex acts and not on sexuality. This is also why "same-sex attraction" is a more accurate term than "homosexuality", which seems to mean a certain set of cross-gender behaviours.

Culture
So the front man of Jars of Clay has come out in support of same-sex marriage, you can read out it here. My knowledge of the Christian music genre is limited, but for me they represented the archetypal Christian-band. After the Enlightenment, it seemed the world was divided between the real rational stuff and the esoteric irrational stuff, with the history of philosophy since then defending the primacy of one or the other. The variety of relationships between Gospel and Culture are often an echo of this philosophical history. Jars of Clay represented the impulse to Christianise certain aspects of the real rational world, 'see Christ does speak to the real world, this is a Christian pop-band.' I think this Jars of Clay thing signals the end of that particular approach to Christ and Culture. 

Meta-narrative: How do we know what matters?

Part of a small series about how the Gospel changes everything (2 Timothy 3:17 & 2 Peter 1:3). 1. Ethics. 2. Purpose 3. Patterns  4. Pictures  5. Boundaries 6. Occasional Details 7. Meta Narrative

God promises David a Kingdom that will last forever (2 Sam 7:13), and then in Daniel we get the promise of a Kingdom starting small and growing to fill the world (Daniel 2:31-35). Jesus' parables about the Kingdom flesh out more of how the Kingdom works, how it grows and what it's like. Like everything else in the Bible it's only a partial picture, we need to fill it out with logic and imagination. What's important here though, and this is one of NT Wright's themes but he's only echoing earlier Reformed thinking, is our glimpse of the meta-narrative. The story we are being saved into. Salvation is for being rescued from the shadowlands into eternity with God and all the adventures that follow. This is more than recognising a biblical or earthly pattern, this is moving from the perspective of character to narrator. There is an uncompromising cultural authority about this viewpoint and the exclusive Christian glimpse of it. This may not be the starting point for apologetics or preaching but it should lurk behind every statement behind every motivation, as God's people we have been given access to a greater story.

[Digory in the Garden of Youth, Magicians Nephew]

Occasional details: What matters?

Part of a small series about how the Gospel changes everything (2 Timothy 3:17 & 2 Peter 1:3). 1. Ethics. 2. Purpose 3. Patterns  4. Pictures 5. Boundaries 6. Occasional Details

The Bible is also a very practical document, Jerusalem is an ancient city located on the Judean plateau inland from the Sea. Or in another example Proverbs advises against overstaying your welcome when visiting a friend. Not only do these details matter by themselves, why did God pick them and not others but they also show us that God is concerned with the individual details of our lives. The schematics of a new skyscraper, have a divine origin. This isn’t to justify obsessive compulsive behaviour, because the Bible skips details at some weird moments. Our job is to delight in the details while simultaneously figuring out which ones to concentrate on and which ones to ignore.

[Western Wall, Jerusalem] 

Boundaries: Where's the edge?

Part of a small series about how the Gospel changes everything (2 Timothy 3:17 & 2 Peter 1:3). 1. Ethics. 2. Purpose 3. Patterns 4. Pictures 5. Boundaries

We've already established it's impossible, without creating a universe-sized-Bible, for God to give the astronaut instructions on how to fly her space ship. But while the morality of space exploration, the ordered science of rockets, the purpose of space travel and the feelings evoked are all found in Scripture so are the boundaries of space travel. Not ethical ones, but actual boundaries from membranes, to political lines, the edge of the Solar system all the way to the edge of the universe. Where one thing actually ends and another begins. God creates and maintains boundaries but also crosses them. Both to mitigate their blurring or to intentionally delete them. This is probably the most abstract of all the ideas in the series but one that's personally important.

[Dutch-Belgian border at Baarle-Nassau]

Christianity and the public sphere

I think that Christians who have appeared on the ABC's Q&A are helping to break down a popular misconception of the phrase "separation of Church and state." They're showing that there is an interaction but not a separation between the Church (Christians collectively) and the public sphere. What I'm describing here is not how my faith affects me as a cultural creature, but how my faith affects other people and their culture. Collectively it's the question of how we shape the shared public sphere. It's the practical question of all human civilisations; what should the shape of all of us together look like?

The public sphere (politics, society and culture) should ideally encourage human flourishing. This means the moral and aesthetic values of life, liberty and truth. These are or at least should be the guide and telos of our earthly civilizations. They spring out of a Christian worldview but they're also naturally attractive for a shared public sphere. This is why ideological pluralism flourishes in most liberal democracies, compare for example India with Saudi Arabia, or even nominally Communist China with North Korea. Thinking about the public sphere flows out of two aspects of Christian theology. Firstly, life, liberty and truth foreshadow the shape of our eternal life with God and secondly not everyone who belongs to the visible church is part of the invisible church* and it's not our job to sort out who's who (Matt 13:24-30), we have to get along together on this side of eternity. 

There are several practical benefits from thinking like this. Evangelistically, having the public sphere arranged like this prompts the question of why those particular ethical values. Sociologically encouraging human flourishing benefits everyone, secularists and co-religionists. Additionally, just the concept alone of a robust shared public sphere, encourages the discussion of ideas which in turn lays a strong foundation for ideology and therefore theology. 

[A picture of Thomas Jefferson who first articulated the concept: "separation of church and state." But interestingly not quite as it's commonly understood.]

Sharpening of ideas: h/t Will Briggs ;-)

Pictures: Which life?

Part of a small series about how the Gospel changes everything (2 Timothy 3:17 & 2 Peter 1:3). 1. Ethics. 2. Purpose 3. Patterns 4. Pictures

But neither is the Bible completely rational, it's also an existential document. It forms an impressions, creates pictures. Tolkein and Lewis saw the writer as being a co-creator, perhaps this is the image of God on us, an imagination? The Bible provokes an emotional, imaginative response and provides and emotional imaginative benchmark.  Can I, should I and how should I feel this, describe this? Not ethically, although that's a separate consideration but impressionistically.  God doesn't save the mind and then the will and then lastly the desire and emotions. The gospel isn't just for philosophers, it needs to be proclaimed, understood and applied artistically.

Patterns: What is life?

Part of a small series about how the Gospel changes everything (2 Timothy 3:17 & 2 Peter 1:3). 1. Ethics. 2. Purpose 3. Patterns

Solomon was doing philosophy before Plato, Aristotle and Socrates were setting up Western Civilisation in Greece. God invented rationality, it's a post-Enlightenment aberration to make religion solely irrational. Not only is the Bible characterised by patterns, genealogical lists, organisation of thematic material and numerical symbols etc but it assumes the world is a place that can be explained and understood. All theology (both the conscious academic ivory tower type and the unconscious bible thumping hillbilly string of proof texts) is a form of pattern making. Adam names the animals and John counts the saints around the throne. Our task is to make sense our local patterns and fit them into God's larger patterns.

[Dead Sea Scroll fragments]

Purpose: Why should I live?

Part of a small series about how the Gospel changes everything (2 Timothy 3:17 & 2 Peter 1:3). 1. Ethics. 2. Purpose

Purpose is provided Scripturally in four directions, past, present and future. God made the world a particular way, he was involved from the beginning. In the present God's providence, His ongoing control of events demonstrates an ongoing concern about the significance of what's happening at the present time. He also promises a future, giving us some clues about what to expect. Scripturally this framework is mapped out and the implication is that everything falls within it. It seems almost too obvious to say this but God made everything, keeps it all going and has a direction for everything. This is why the Lord's prayer sweeps from the epoch level, "your kingdom come" to the basic "give us this day our daily bread." The application here is firstly assume a purpose exists and then secondly figure out how it fits into the larger framework. The Bible doesn't provide them because that'd be like having a map of everything drawn to scale, you gonna have to skip some details!

[Brean Down aerial bombing site directional arrow.]

Ethics: How should we then live?

Part of a small series about how the Gospel changes everything (2 Timothy 3:17 & 2 Peter 1:3). 1. Ethics.

If we understand who God is and how he saves us, and then share in this divine life, then we'll also want to share in God's character which is holy and good. This is ethics at the personal level, scaled up to the level of civilisations it is about asking what encourages human flourishing, which is life, liberty and truth. Life has a moral dimension, both personally and culturally, as a society. Scripture provides both the starting point, why we should be moral, and a system of ethical principles, how to be moral. 

How the Gospel changes everything

The gospel is more than a ticket for the ferryman across the styx. It's really more like popping the red pill in The Matrix, and realising what's really going on.  Virginia Owens in And the Trees Clap their Hands: Faith Perception and the New Physics says when we know God we become like spies, secret agents in a world where every clue matters.

The Bible is not just a religious document, it's ideological one, and in it God expresses an opinion about everything. 2 Peter 1:3 "His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life." and 2 Timothy 3:17 "... so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." You don't being stop being  godly or cease being responsible for doing good works while drinking coffee, interrogating a suspect or making love.

Now it's true that the Scripture doesn't include detailed instructions on about how to travel between the planets or how to bake nice fluffy scones. You could say that Jesus didn't say anything about cars, but does that preclude God having an opinion about if we should make them, what we should do in them and what their place is in our lives? God has an opinion about everything and the Bible speaks to everything in these seven ways.

1. Ethics
2. Purpose
3. Patterns
4. Pictures
5. Boundaries
6. Occasional details
7. The meta-narrative

6. Worship and, ... politics!

While I'm not sure if I'm a Libertarian, the video is produced by a political lobby group called the Institute of Faith, Work and Economics and it explores some of the ideas surrounding the nature of worship I've been blogging about for the last couple of months. (h/t Ted Baehr of the MovieGuide fame.)

5. Apollo 13 and the Regulative Principle

Photo of the surface of the moon from the Apollo 13. Wikipedia

Westminster Confession of Faith 21:1 (WCF)

I. The light of nature shows that there is a God, who has lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and does good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might.But the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture.

This section of the WCF describes the 'Regulative Principle': only what is permitted by Scripture ("through good and natural consequence") is allowable in public worship. As opposed to the 'Normative Principle', if Scripture doesn't prohibit something, then it's OK for public worship.

Presumably the good men of the Westminster Assembly didn't stop worshiping God as they departed the church building. So I'm following John Frame here who writes: “all human actions are ruled by divine commandments. There is no neutral area where God permits us to be our own lawgivers. There is no area of human life where God abdicates his rule, or where his word to us is silent.” ('Some Questions About the Regulative Principle,' Westminster Theological Journal,  54, 2 (Fall 1992), 362)

Scripture speaks to all of life comprehensively but not exhaustively. For example there was nothing in the Bible to help the astronauts of Apollo 13 fix their space ship, but plenty of principles for everything that they were experiencing. This next comment might sound naughty, but I mean it positively and creatively: the Bible speaks on nothing exhaustively, not even our salvation! We work that out with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12), and when Jesus says "we'll go on to do greater things" (John 14:12), putting the cessationist debate to one side, He is probably pointing to the gigantic scope of the gospel across all His people through space and time.

• Deuteronomy 6:4-9    Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 
• Mark 12:33    To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbour as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.
• Acts 17:24    The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth
• Romans 12:1    Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.
• 1 Corinthians 10:31    So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

4. 'Heaven: It's Not The End Of The World'

'Heaven: It's Not The End Of The World' by David Lawrence

"Seeing God's ultimate plan for us as being 'heavenly' and 'spiritual' has led us to imagine that spiritual things are God's chief concern. If a spiritual heaven is God's greatest good for us, then the earth and our physical existence on it must be somehow 'second best'. Consequently, many Christians hold the view that the only reason God created the earth was to give people somewhere to live whilst they decide whether or not to follow Jesus!" (15)

Old Testament Survey
Lawrence makes the case for continuity between this world and the next, between creation as we know it and the new creation after Judgement day. This paradigm is first expressed in God cleansing the earth with Noah's flood, here there is a judgement and a recreation but not an extinguishing of what was. Lawerence then traces the significance of this world through biblical history. From the scope of the Abrahamic blessing to the practical expression of God's character in the Old Testament laws. The importance of land is another demonstration of God's involvement with his creation. Lawrence ends his brief Old Testament survey by noting that the ultimate restoration outlined by the prophets is often described in physical terms.

New Testament Survey
Jesus didn't describe the end of space and time but a radical judgement and restoration, in the age to come. He ascends with a promise to return to this world in glory. Jesus promises renewal not discontinuity (Matt 19:28)  “I am making everything new!” says Jesus on the other-side of eternity (Rev 21:5) Interestingly the wicked are removed, sent away (Matt 25:46), but the faithful remain, here on this earth.  Moving to the Apostle Paul, Lawrence describes the frustrating incompleteness of 'the now but not yet-ness' of this present age (1 Cor 13:12). Then there is this great quote from Berkouwer: "If the future is an unknown 'reality', why do the Old and the New Testaments not talk about an unknown 'x' - an unknown quantity - instead of arousing these various concepts of what the new heaven and the new earth will be like and talking about the longing of creation for freedom from its perishability?" Tangentially Lawrence rightly observes that the fire of judgement in 2 Peter, should be understand in the same way Noah's flood functioned. Finally he closes the Biblical survey by showing a metaphorical return to Eden in Revelation where God dwells with us (Rev 21:1-5).

Heaven
In the next chapter Lawrence explains that heaven is not a separate post-world destination but a current invisible reality, "an unseen portion of the cosmos."Heaven is the dimension in which God exists (Eccl 5:2). There are a variety of views about where the dead reside but Lawrence suggests the faithful are spiritually with God until the final judgement and restoration of all things. The invisible supernatural forces of heaven interact with this world. Heaven like the world, will be remade (Rev 21:1).

Sheol and Hades?
We might be tempted, as we listen to Jesus' prayer on the cross (Lk 23:46) to think that our spirit is the only thing of significance that lasts. But Jesus returns from Sheol, the realm of the dead, in a resurrected body. Lawrence then helpfully explains that Hades is probably better understood as a resting place for the dead, until the final judgement.

The Resurrection
The cross, without an empty tomb is no gospel at all (1 Cor 15:17-20). Lawrence observes how much of Peter's Pentecost speech is focused on the resurrection (Acts 2:24-32). Quoting John Stott: "The resurrection of Jesus provides solid, visible, tangible, public evidence of God's purpose to give us new bodies in a new world." Lawrence points out that Jesus showed the disciples that it was really him, alive and well. Not simply a resuscitated corpse but a physical body recreated with an eternal life-span. A body "the same yet not the same; this body, but adapted to the new conditions of heavenly existence." (88) The Pauline spiritual gifts and blessings are to be understood in contrast with fallen things and not a final description of our nature. "To follow this train of thought, the resurrection body is 'spiritual' not in the sense of 'immaterial' but of 'supernatural.'" (91).

What might the New Heavens and the New Earth be like?
"The future of the believer is inextricably bound up with the renewal of all things. God has promised a new earth as the inheritance of his people and what God has promised will come to pass. With G C Berkouwer, we affirm then that 'it is precisely ordinary earthly existence that is redeemed'." (99) We're given more than a vague optimism about the future. Just as Jesus was recognisable to the disciples after death, our memories and identity will not be erased. Our relationships won't cease to exist, we'll remember who people are on the other side of eternity. "Isaiah foresees the day when God's people will 'build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.' (Isaiah 65:21)" (116)

"Surely it is a very narrow view of God's involvement in his world which he maintains that all he is interested in is the salvation of our souls. We have seen that God is the God all creation. We noted at the outset that the earth was not just a disposable space-station on which God could work his salvation mission, but it was - and still is - his creation and at every step of its development he has been sustaining it. I am sure that many great works of art, architecture and music, along with scientific discoveries and technological advances have delighted God.  ... But it is unthinkable that God should judge all the progress made (by his enabling) though human endeavour worthless - as deserving to be burnt with judgemental fire." (124)

Contemporary Relevance
Ever present dangers include losing sight of the Creator, by focusing too much on the creation. Another is making God impotent or distant, disconnected from our current pain and pleasures. The suffering of the world it not just answered in the age to come but in this world, in this age. "Miracles do happen. God does answer prayer. Sick people are healed. God provides enough evidence of what life will be life there to keep me going when faith is at a low ebb." (147) As people of the New Covenant, we no longer have to worry about the distinctions between the 'spiritual' and the 'physical.' "All of life has eternal significance." (151) We should see our redemptive activity as the "recovering of creational goodness through the annulment of sin." (157) Christianity is a lived-out theodicy, working against sin and it's expression across all the cosmos. 

3. Worship and Vocation

Thinking about worship and vocation

The structural redemption of vocation is an aspect of our participation in God’s story and his participation in our own stories. Vocation is a cultural structure, part of the human experience. The direction of this structure is marred by sin, a noetic effect of the Fall. Nothing is neutral, everything like the universe is on the move in one direction or another. However like Adam whose stewardly role including naming, we should articulate as Christians what is part of the original structure of vocation, what is broken and how the truth of God’s redemption can help restore and change vocation. In other words “how can I speak truth into ‘vocation’ and bring it into God’s large story?” When thinking about vocation it would also be worth remembering and acting on the question: “how God is with me in the midst of vocation.”

A critique of the alternative

In my first response to Paul Grimmond's article about vocation, I was concerned by his methodology. In his article for The Briefing: 'God's plan for work', his aim is to be  "thinking about the nature of the work that God has given us in Christ, as his people." It's a variation of the gospel and culture question, what's the relationship between the gospel and culture? Grimmond opens by reviewing the "cultural mandate." His definition (sourced from Wikipedia) is a little vague, and misses the idea of 'stewardship'. A better one comes from Albert Wolters in Creation Regained: Biblical basics for a Reformational worldview.

"In the human realm men and women become coworkers with God; as creatures made in God's image they too have a kind of lordship over the earth, are God's viceroys in creation." (Wolters, 14)

Grimmond then goes on to observe that the cultural mandate is "almost entirely obliterated by the fall." It's true that the material and noetic effects of the Fall are devastating, but this comment exaggerates the category of the Fall over the categories of Creation and Redemption. Grimmond then argues that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Cultural Mandate. In effect this theological move isolates the Gospel from the rest of creation and culture.

A common accusation of Christianity's opponents is to say that the Bible doesn't speak to a particular topic, of that Jesus wasn't concerned with it therefore Christians should not concern themselves with it. This line of reasoning is a close cousin of Grimmond's next step in talking about work and vocation: "there is a very real ambivalence about the significance of human labour in the Scriptures." He argues rightly against the view that because God made work, it's merely good in and of itself. "Work is not an automatic good because it is created by God" But both Grimmond and the argument he is opposing miss God's metanarrative and miss the way in which, vocation and all the structures of creation fit inside God's larger story. Because Grimmond has narrowed the boundaries of Scripture's relationship with Culture, all that's left is a 'work at whatever you like but don't steal the stationary approach.' For example Grimmond writes: "As far as I can work out, the only career paths clearly rejected by the Bible are thievery and prostitution (and the second of those only by inference)."

2. Worship, the Gospel and Culture

Culture "consists of all the shared products of human society,” (Sociology, Robertson 1987, 55.) from everyday objects to invisible structures such as a field of knowledge. Traditionally there have been a number of paradigms describing the relationship between Christ and culture. However, a right view of worship and a broader definition of culture changes the way we view that relationship.

Groups of people naturally develop sub-cultures. What’s the relationship then between the Gospel and a particular sub-culture? Roman Catholicism continues the Old Covenant paradigm of dividing culture, the sacred from the profane. The first Protestant error is selectivity, God only speaks to some aspects of culture, for example marriage and preaching. The second (and more obscure) Protestant error is Theonomy, which is selective about which aspects of the Gospel, in this case the Old Covenant law, applies to the wider culture. Ideally the Reformed approach is to view all of culture equally and the Bible holistically, through the Gospel categories of Creation, Fall and Redemption.

God created everything and put man in the centre of his creation to rule as his steward. However man falls from this place in the cosmos and introduces evil into the world, is cursed for this by God and the order of things is broken, a brokenness that corrupts all of culture. The truth of the gospel is that God restores us through the sacrifice of Jesus back into worship. The truth of this restoration shines out across all culture. Christians are sometimes ashamed of the cultural patterns that they develop or thoughtlessly buy into the wider cultural patterns of other ideologies. But the personal salvation of particular individuals has wider cultural implications. Gospel ideology like any other ideology has cultural implications and if true, eternal consequences. 

1. Worship

Our daily life is an act of worship. But this is a difficult task because of the diversity of the world and the size of God. Paganism emphasises the diversity of the world, imbuing every piece of landscape, activity and object with spiritual importance. However monotheists find the sheer size of God more compelling, and either worship him in one all consuming monochrome posture or worship him in only the parts of life where it "counts".  Reformed Christianity at its best recognises the diversity of the world and the size of God. He is the divine author who delights in the diversity of the details. Worship is one of the main organising paradigms of the bible and it defines our relationship to culture. The God we worship enters into the details of this world, and we speak the truth of this good news into every structure of culture.

Worship is one of the central biblical paradigms. We were created in Adam to be stewards, 'gardeners and librarians', working and naming (Gen 1:28, 2:15 & 20). Adam and Eve walked in the presence of God, they worshiped him in close proximity (Gen 3:8). After the Fall they were cut off from this worship (Gen 3:23-24). Part of the good news of the Gospel is the restoration of this worship. Despite the sinful gulf, God interacts with Abraham (Gen 12:1-3) and Jacob (Gen 32:30) and then speaks through fire to Moses (Exodus 3). Moses has to remove his sandals, because the ground around the burning bush was sacred, he was in close proximity to the presence of God. The Jewish people were to be a nation of priests (Exodus 19:6), dedicated to worshiping God, a witness to the surrounding people (Ezk 39:27). The prophecy of Zechariah points to the denouement of the history of redemption, when the ordinary pots become holy, concluding the old Covenant division of sacred and profane (Zech 14:20-21). Jesus is the temple, we no longer have to travel to mount Zion to worship him because we have him here in the flesh (John 4:21-26). When he dies, the temple curtain is torn, from top to bottom (Mark 15:38), to paraphrase Calvin Seerveld, “we all should now remove our sandals!” We’re all now living sacrifices (Rom 12:1) with freedom, from the Old Covenant division, by the power of the Holy Spirit.