Culture and the Biblical Story
Culture is part of God’s good world, and Christians’ instincts should never be to see culture in itself as a deformation of God’s pattern for life. Certainly, the Bible offers warnings to flee from “the world,” so as not to be conformed to it (Rom. 12:2), to receive the Spirit of Christ and not the spirit of the world (I Cor. 2:12), and not to love the things of the world (I John 2:15). In fact, Jesus says that he has chosen and called his people “out of the world” (John 15:19), and Christians’ true citizenship is not in this world but in heaven (Phil. 3:20).
Many Christians have taken these descriptions of the world to be injunctions against participating in any form of culture amongst our neighbors and communities outside the church—as if such a thing were even possible! In so doing, they equate “culture” with the popular spirit of the age, something definite that we can resist or reject. But as we have argued, this misses the point that our entire existence is cultural, and we share in the forms and patterns of life with those around us whether we realize it or not.
Still, this instinct to be on guard against the dominant culture around us, which throughout history has often been hostile to God’s truth, raises an important second point about culture and cultural engagement. Though culture is God’s good gift to humanity, because of sin and the fall it not only provides great opportunity for us to image God well, but also great power to obscure his image by our sinful cultural expression.
If the question of proper Christian cultural engagement inquires about how we are to live among the cultural values and patterns of life around us, then we need to turn to Christian Scripture to consider what it says about the blessings and dangers of human culture.
Scriptural Clues to Culture
Culture and cultural expressions are found throughout Scripture. We see culture in the patterns for building the tabernacle God gave the Israelites, and the ways he equipped artisans by his Spirit to create it (Ex. 31:1-11). In a literal sense, the Lord’s Supper is cultural celebration in that it is a ritual of remembrance, but also in that the wine and bread are things that humans must cultivate through natural processes. The Psalms, as poetic verses of worship, are culture. The crowd of people gathered around the throne of the Lamb at the end of days, from every “nation, tribe, people, and language,” is a multitude characterized by culture (Rev. 7:9). All of these are the ways and products of creatures in God’s creation, called to advance God’s way in his world. Culture is assumed throughout the entire biblical story as something natural as well as something we bear clear moral responsibility toward.
We see that specifically in the first chapter of the Bible, in which God creates humanity and instructs them to “be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it” (Gen. 1:27-29). These are cultural tasks, and as many have pointed out, convey that humanity was created to image God through their cultural labor. In fact, some biblical scholars such as Gordon Wenham and William Dumbrell offer strong evidence for seeing the language used to describe Adam’s God-given tasks in the garden to “work it and watch over it,” as conveying imagery of worship, as the Levitical priests did before God in the tabernacle. Through culture we are able to reveal and magnify God in the ways for which we were created.
Indeed, culture is not limited to this present life. For in the life to come, in the New Heavens and Earth, God’s people will inhabit a cultural existence in an eternal heavenly city (Rev. 21:1-4), worshipping the Lord’s name through language and feast (Rev. 19:9), and we will be given new names inscribed upon stone (Rev. 2:17). Each of these reveal that culture remains part of our future as God’s new humanity in his fully redeemed creation.
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