Should We be Focused on Redeeming the Culture?
Chuck Colson said, “Redeeming the culture is the never-ending mission of the church.”
For most fundamentalists, redeeming the culture is an unfamiliar concept. We are content to be either people of high standards or alternately worldly and living in guilt. However, the move in greater evangelicalism to redeem the culture is running now at top speed. The basic idea of the concept is that Genesis 1:26-27 is a cultural mandate that requires God’s people to bring every aspect of the world into submission to mankind and through that submission to God.
The problem with this concept is that Adam and Eve failed this command completely and through their actions and the resulting fall accomplished exactly the opposite of the cultural mandate. Human beings are sinful, and without divine intervention only produce corrupted versions of what God initially created to be good.
But, as Christians and therefore as Christ-bearers, should we not then return to the task that was originally given by God to Adam and Eve?
That is a fair question and does deserve some consideration. Let me warn you that your hermeneutic (the process by which you interpret scripture) and understanding of biblical prophecy will have a huge impact on your understanding of the responsibilities of Christians in this culture. There are also other factors that have a bearing on this discussion, such as your definition of culture itself. Initially, I would like to address how many believers today are applying the idea of “redeeming the culture.”
Jesus will redeem the culture.
The tenor of scriptural prophecy that tells us that God’s people will take the gospel effectively to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8), does not indicate that there will be gradual warming to God’s people as we move forward toward the Kingdom. As the New Testament canon drew to a close John warned God’s people that the world would hate them (1 John 3:13). Paul described a world that would sink into moral chaos (2 Timothy 3:1-9), and Peter describes the Last Days as filled with scoffers given over to their own lusts (2 Peter 3:1-10). Attempts human to Christianize the world’s culture will ultimately fail according to scripture. However, Jesus will return and He will do it. All the Old Testament passages regarding the Kingdom will be fulfilled (literally) and Jesus is the One who will make that happen (Revelation 19-20).
People must be redeemed; the culture is incidental.
Unredeemed people cannot produce a redeemable culture. They can tell the truth. We can learn from them. We can see illustrations of biblical truths in the things they produce sometimes, but that is not what God meant in Genesis 1:26-27. The Great Commission, which is the mission of the church, is about bringing people to redemption and transformation. The souls of individuals must be redeemed. Only then can the works of their hands be pleasing to God.
There is a difference between subduing creation and simply appropriating sinful culture and calling it good.
Much of what is called redeeming the culture today is seeking to see some greater biblical truths in EVERYTHING around us, but most particularly the entertainment industry. We want to take the words and messages that are intended to oppose God from people who are unredeemed and reinterpret them to say something that was never intended by the authors. Thus, redeeming the culture sees a Christ figure in Elsa (from the Disney movie Frozen), for example.
The Bible in many places commands us to separate from this sinful culture.
There is much in this culture that has no eternal value and is destructive to believers. We have been commanded to not love the world or the things that are in the world (1 John 2:15). This world is full of corrupt relationships that must be abandoned (2 Corinthians 6:14-18). We are also warned that taking pleasure in the sinful acts of others is itself a sin (Romans 1:28-32). We are not supposed to be meditating on those things that are wicked or sinful (Philippians 4:8) but rather on what is beautiful and righteous.
Yet this does not keep some Christians from filling their minds with violence, nudity, ugliness, and immorality and justifying it by supposedly drawing some sort of spiritual lesson out of it. The HBO series (I am not sure anything good comes from HBO), Game of Thrones was Romans 1:28-32 portrayed in explicit and lurid story-form and is the antithesis of Philippians 4:8. And yet some Christians chose to watch and then have spiritual discussions about the content.
There is much culture, even in this sinful world, that we can enjoy without guilt because it truly reflects the beauty of creation and the image of God in man (which remains, though marred by the fall). Beautiful art, music, and narratives exist in abundance. When we take that which is clearly contrary to true holiness–and which appeals to the flesh that remains in us–we are not redeeming the culture, we are accommodating the flesh.
Corrupting believers is the never-ending mission of the wicked one.
We have to be wiser than this.
Thanks for sharing these overarching thoughts, Dr. Schaal. No doubt there is much more you could add about the topic, since “culture” can be such a complex term.
I wonder if you can give a response to Andy Crouch’s “Culture Making,” particularly the discussion in ch 5 distinguishing between gestures and postures? He takes a broad definition of culture and then infers that there are parts of a culture we can/should fully engage with compared with others we can’t engage with. He then sees a posture as a broad settled disposition toward an aspect of culture and a gesture as momentary responses at certain moments. His discussion digs deeper then your brief post here, though I don’t see anything that contradicts your core ideas.