‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’: The Cultural Mandate Is Work for Image-Bearers
Written by N. Gray Sutanto |
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
If religion should animate humanity’s work, the dominion that image-bearers have over creation isn’t merely kingly but priestly—the cultural mandate is at once a heavenly mandate, as that vertical relation with God determines how humans represent God on earth. Joshua Farris sums this up well: “As priests of creation, humanity has the function and privilege to assist the creation to realize and evidence its rational order and beauty and thus to express God’s beauty and being back to God.”
The responsibility of humanity to obey the “cultural mandate” is well recognized in evangelical discourse as a way of understanding the relationship between Christianity and culture. But perhaps less known are the textual origins of this discussion, in the tradition of neo-Calvinism, and the relationship of that mandate to the metaphysical makeup of human beings.
There are two aspects to the cultural mandate in the state of innocence: (1) the task of begetting and the organic multiplication of people and (2) the task of forming a diversity of cultures.
Embedded in the creation of humanity, therefore, is a teleological orientation—humanity was meant to spread and cultivate creation in obedience to their God, and no single community can possibly reflect the richness of the image. Irwyn Ince writes, “The image of God is much too rich for it to be realized in a single race, ethnic group, or culture.”
Exercise Dominion
The call of the cultural mandate therefore fittingly corresponds to the proper dominion that image-bearers of God are supposed to have over creation. It’s recognized by more contemporary thinkers as the “vocational” aspect of the image of God.
God gave the tasks of work and cultivation before the fall, showing the inherent goodness of human labor in culture making. To “be fruitful and multiply” refers to the natural multiplication of human beings and the work that cultivates nature for their own good, in accordance with God’s command.
William Edgar aptly describes the labor of image-bearers in obedience to the mandate as an exercise of “analogous power” given to human beings from God:
Embedded in this human activity is (at least in germ form) the development of agriculture, the arts, economics, family dynamics, and everything that contributes to human flourishing, to the glory of God. This management is of course in imitation of God’s greater stewardship over his creation. The so-called nature psalms attest to the overarching sovereignty of God over his creation, and yet to his delegating analogous power to human beings.
Psalm 104:14–15 situates human work as in parallel with and yet dependent on God’s work. God causes the livestock and plants to grow so that humanity might make wine and bread to gladden his heart. To put it in theological terms, God creates ex nihilo while humans create ex naturam. God speaks and nature comes to be, but humanity, in an analogous fashion, creates out of the preexisting natural material God creates.
Dominion, therefore, refers to this human cultivation of the natural world, going with the grain of God’s design. Human dominion thus means stewardship, displaying both humanity’s dignity and humanity’s servitude before God. J. H. Bavinck says it this way:
We, the human race, are predestined to fulfil a distinctive calling in that history; as humanity, we are assigned an exceptional place in the greater context of the kingdom from the very first. We are simultaneously subjects and to some extent co-rulers, viceroys over certain regions. Not everything is subjected to us: we are not given authority over the course of the stars and the planets or the tides of the never-resting seas.
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The Living Word
The beating heart of the Scriptures is the good news of salvation bound up in Jesus Christ, something Peter has summarized (1 Pet. 1:20-21), characterized (1 Pet. 1:24-25), and actualized (1 Pet. 1:23) in the accomplishment of God’s saving purposes. All this serves as a reminder for us of what we possess in the holy Scriptures. Through them the Spirit nourishes us with the truth and invigorates us for our journey as aliens and sojourners.
But the word of the LORD endures forever. (1 Peter 1:25, NKJV)
Peter held a high view of the Bible. He regarded it for what it is, the word of God Himself. In his second epistle Peter explains to us the nature of Scripture: “no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:20–21).
In this affirmation, Peter recognizes that the written Word does not ultimately originate with man but with God. He particularly identifies the Holy Spirit as the One who brings truth to light. The Spirit inspires, illuminates, and accomplishes His purposes through the Bible. Those Scriptures relate to the Old Testament and also to the New (cf. 2 Pet. 3:15-16).
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Welcome to Gospel Ministry (Part 2)
The church needs a growing number guardians of the gospel who, strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, recognise false teaching and teach the truth empowered by grace to one another. Is that you? Not a heresy hunter, but a gospel of grace teacher. Taught so that you can teach others in whatever context that is.
Paul’s second call that flows from the first, is to multiply guardians of the gospel. Those who know grace and strengthened by grace contend for and teach the gospel.
It’s not good to be alone. That’s a universal truth of the human condition, it’s the way God has made us. It’s true for Adam in the garden and it’s true for us today. But it’s also true for us in serving Jesus in the church. It’s true for ministers and for ministry leaders. A sense of loneliness in ministry, of bearing the burden and responsibility alone is incredibly isolating and weighty.
Whose job is it to guard the gospel? Be honest, what’s your first answer? We live in an age of professionalism, where we pay people to do jobs, take responsibilities, so we don’t have to. And so in many churches the answer, not in words but in reality, would be it’s the pastor’s job to guard the gospel. Or maybe the elders job. And there is some truth in that. They do have a particular responsibility to do that. But it’s not solely their responsibility.
In 2 Timothy 2v8 Paul tells Timothy that he must train up others who will teach others. Timothy needs to train up guardians of the gospel there in Ephesus, how?
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How Individuals Enable Tyranny
Mill, Havel, and Kundera all point us to a terrible truth: our moral weakness, desire to evade responsibility, and illusion that the majority makes right have led us down the slippery slope of forfeiting our freedom. How do we respond to those working to undermine human rights? The solution is simple, but not without personal costs. Stop lying, stop degrading yourself, stop pretending to believe what you don’t, and resign from the role as an enabler of tyranny.
In Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a Czech refugee living in Paris joins a protest march against the 1968 Soviet invasion of her homeland. To her surprise, the refugee could not bring herself to shout with the other protesters and soon left the rally. Her French friends didn’t understand her reluctance. The refugee silently mused that her friends could never understand that “behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.”
Beware of groups marching in lockstep, even for a seemingly good cause, Kundera warns.
In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill pointed us in a similar direction when he observed a tyranny as terrible as any imposed by “public authorities.” Mill called it the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”
Mill described “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.” Mill counseled, “individual independence” protected from “encroachment” from the tyranny of the majority “is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”
The tyranny of societal mandates, Mill warned, can be “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, … it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”
On Liberty was published in 1859. Sadly, the tendency Mill described is all-too-common among individuals living in 2023 who believe “their feelings… are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary.”
Often such “feelings” are based on the prevailing orthodoxy disseminated by The New York Times, NPR, and other such media outlets.
Worse, feelings-driven individuals up the ante and demand others conform. Mill explained, “The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathises, would like them to act.”
Others may share your feelings and preferences. Yet, Mill reasoned, even when shared, individual preferences are not elevated to a guide for living for others:
No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person’s preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people’s liking instead of one.
Here is Mill’s bottom line: “[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” Your feelings, your opinions, your sense of what is good for you, your sense of what will make you happier “is not a sufficient warrant” to interfere with the individual sovereignty of any one else.
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