Sunday Worship
1st Worship Service
8:30 a.m.
Sunday School
10:00 a.m.
2nd Worship Service
11:00 a.m.
Church Office
1600 Colonial Ave
Norfolk, VA 23517
(757) 466-0989
Culture
The Foundational Command, the Cultural Mandate
The Cultural Mandate is the first and foundational commandment for people of faith. In Genesis 1:26-28 and 9:1-11, God commands humans to “subdue” the earth—to engage the world with an organizing force. In Jeremiah 29:4-7, God commanded Israel to build themselves as a culture through architecture, agriculture, culinary arts, marital unions, offspring, and politics.
The Cultural Mandate not only compels the Christian to participate in culture, it also directs the Christian how she or he should live in relationship to culture. Some Christians act as though their faith is subordinate to culture. In this sense, Christianity is merely a human product. Other Christians look on culture as something that is inherently evil. Culture either needs to be destroyed by Christianity, or, at the very least, needs to be avoided. Christians should find both views unacceptable because culture is a glorious gift from God that needs to be consecrated.
In order to participate in the consecration or redemption of culture, Christians should both appreciate and engage the culture in which they live. Because we are made in God’s image, we are commanded to appreciate all kinds of creation. If we diminish high art or pop culture, then we show contempt for the Creator of both.
Christians also need to engage the world in which we live. Although we live in a world created by God, it is a world marred by sin, and discerning good from evil is no simple task. Not only do weneed to engage the ‘surface attributes’ like gratuitous violence and sexuality, but we also need to uncover ‘hidden attributes’ that are not so easily discernable to our American, middle-class culture—values like individualism, entitlement, racial and gender stereotypes, and self-reliance.
Both of these elements, appreciation and engagement are necessary to understand God’s world in a distinctly Christian way. If the Christian only appreciated the world, she or he would become a glutton and consumer, submitting to the world rather than to Christ. Conversely, if the Christian were to only engage, she or he would become a cynic. Because Scripture seems to consistently connect faith, wisdom, and imagination, nurturing our imaginations is vital to our lives of faith. Therefore, we fulfill God’s foundational command as we live in the tension of appreciating and engaging the earth with and for Christ.