God calls us to spiritually claim all aspects of our lives, including our culture at large. To claim that the institution of marriage, for instance, is not an institution of the Church is simply ludicrous! This type of teaching is a prime example of Gnosticism. When, for instance, a man and a women cohabit together and raise a family outside of a sacramental context, the couple simply practices fornication. But when this lifestyle contains Christ-centered spiritual and ethical boundaries, lead by the Church, then this lifestyle ceases to be sin and begins to glorify God. The Psalmist teaches that we must practice holiness in everything we do, which would include our participation and leadership in culture:

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? - Psalm 139:7

When God created man, He gave him a task to tend the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15). When man transgressed God’s law, God allowed him to fall into a curse (Genesis 3:14-24). However, man’s task to tend the garden was not abolished; rather, it was modified to the extent of becoming more laborious. God told Adam that he would have to “till the ground,” meaning that nature would no longer provide for Adam like it had before the fall. Tilling the ground did not mean that he would merely have to dig when planting crops; it meant that life would now become more laborious for him and all his descendents. Also, when God told Eve that she would “desire the [position of the] man” and “bear pain in childbirth,” this did not mean that women would have to keep quiet and pregnant their whole lives. The curses that man and woman brought upon themselves do not leave man in complete turmoil with very little to do in life. On the contrary! These curses were accompanied by a covenant of grace, which has enabled men and women throughout the ages to work in harmony for the sake of God’s kingdom - or “culture,” if you will.

The transgression of Adam and Eve against God’s command did indeed result in much suffering, but it primarily resulted in grace. God establishes this proto evangelium (first actual sign of the gospel, in its eschatological sense) in Genesis 3:15 when He says that the seed of the woman would crush the seed of the serpent - the seed of the woman representing God’s people and their Savior; a people that would learn to live righteously and promote God’s Good News through their ethics.

Genesis 1:26-31 shows how God created the earth for man to take dominion over and to have an actual vocation. After the fall, this call to take dominion was not abolished; rather, it was mortified, which means we are recovering from this mortification through the redeeming power of God’s Good News. Now, our call to life is not to simply evangelize in an exegetical fashion through preaching and teaching to one another. In fact, God says in Hebrews 8:11 (a quote from Isaiah) that evangelism will one day be outmoded due to the gospel and its advancement, proof that we are slowly but surely - and maybe one day more suddenly - redeeming mankind and the earth that God has provided for us.

God created man so that he could enjoy God by discovering His marvelous beauty within His nature and the cultivation of it. And while righteously practicing (ethically, and in faith) this cultivation, man would be many times, inadvertently (since we can’t always see God’s handiwork) proclaiming the gospel to mankind.

It is from a terrible deception that we, as followers of Christ, no longer desire to be architects, artists, writers, politicians, teachers, law enforcement officers, etc. As a whole, we have left what our culture calls “the public sector” and many of the vocations that relate to the public sector. We have become enslaved to the very same institutions that we have created. What on earth has happened?

Where Christians stood in the fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen hundreds, secular humanists and liberals stand today. Most Christians now believe that the worse life gets, the closer we are to the end. This usually results in an apathetic attitude towards the redemption of culture. Rather than taking spiritual dominion over the culture, we are putting our tails between our legs by wearing our “Jesus Saves” shirts to make us feel as if we were bold for Christ. We forget how the first century Christians were persecuted, not for having a personal relationship with Christ or even for persuading others through conversation and debate, but for becoming a threat to the Greco-Roman culture at large. Do t-shirts, stickers, and even pop-music songs threaten the culture at large, or do they just show that we are unwilling to embrace the aspects of culture that require certain sacrifice?

To deny the call to sanctify the culture is to deny the covenants of God. John MacArthur, a popular evangelical Baptist pastor, states “‘Reclaiming’ the culture is a pointless, futile exercise. I am convinced we are living in a post-Christian society - a civilization that exists under God’s judgment.” I’m sure MacArthur teaches in some form or fashion that we should practice holiness outside the church, but for some reason he has no interest in sanctifying culture, including politics. This is a serious contradiction in his theology! When we begin to practice holiness in all areas of our lives it is inevitable that a need to organize culture will arise. Even if MacArthur were to say that we should work in culture, but not lead it, he would still be in serious error. Giving our society over to liberals, as we seem to be doing, so we can cry “persecution,” is absurd. To hand the spiritual and physical well being of my family over to these lawless people would be very sinful. We should not flee from the call to form culture, even under judgment. No, actually, especially under judgment!

The irony of MacArthur’s Baptistic theology is that the very reason the culture is so corrupt is that we are no longer involved in redeeming it to God’s standard. So the more we obey these unscriptural commands to flee from culture, the smarter and more holy these men look. This movement has gotten so bad that a new theology of the end times has been formed, proclaiming that all is lost and that the worse society gets, the closer we are to Christ’s return. Nothing could be further from the truth! This is a false hope, created by desperate men who are not willing to face the reality of the cross. God’s desire is for us to lead the culture, disciple all nations, and for Christ to “reign till He has put all enemies under His feet.”⁷ We are digging our own grave by heeding to these types of messages.

The mere fact that Christians have their own radio stations, skate-nights, movies, etc, shows that Christians really do believe in a Christian-dominated culture. But because of the threat of persecution, most are not willing to admit it and so would rather create these ghetto-style cultures or preach abandonment of culture. Others insist that we only create these partial cultures in order for us to have a foot in the door of the world for evangelism. But true evangelism involves submission to the entirety of God’s Word and Spirit, demonstrating His word in both truth and deed, preaching and living!

Working for the Sake of Dominion

 Most of our occupations do not promote sin in themselves; they promote and cultivate the gospel within the lives of others.  They are callings that are necessary to do as Genesis 1:28 says, which is to take spiritual dominion over the earth and subdue it. Both Christ and Paul the apostle support this by stating that a man must work, provide for his family, and advance the law of God in an ethical manner - all through the grace of the gospel. And Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:17-24 that a Christian should “remain in the same calling in which he was called.” In this passage, Paul is refuting the Corinthians for turning to a so-called holy way of living through Jewish customs and turning away from their occupations, including slavery (at that time slavery was an accepted system to pay off one’s debt).

Old Covenant Church

Captivity did not stop the Old Covenant church from cultivating society. Scriptures such as Jeremiah 29:4-7 and Ezekiel 33:30-32 show how God actually commanded His people to do all that they were able to do in society, including seeking “the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you will have peace.” Professor Eugene H. Merrill cites a number of Jewish records that confirm both the well being of the Jews and that many of the Jews even rose to high political office while in captivity.¹⁰

This is what is so baffling about the theology of many Christians today. Many are confused about how to spend their time, for what to go to school, for what to volunteer, or even about what to think.  There seems the same radical kind of swing with the theology of vocation. Many think that it simply does not matter what they do as an occupation because nearly anything can glorify God. And others believe that all occupation outside of ministry is worthless and secular.

We live in a society with many biological and industrial complications. The renaissance of the 1600s was most likely the beginning of this era (although the Renaissance was in many cases God-glorifying). I believe the 1960s was, in some sense, a renaissance. At that time in America, society came to a new understanding of most everything; the pursuit of autonomy became the driving force, resulting in moral chaos. With the surge in technology, medicine, the personal computer, nuclear energy and weaponry, etc., we were left in a moral whirlwind of not knowing how to be ethical within these complex industries.

It’s time to get our theology of vocation back on track and seek to simplify culture as well as teach the ethics of vocations that must remain complicated. We need to prioritize our vocations and vocational ethics and be willing to make financial sacrifices to take our callings back. This will include but not be limited to teaching and training our young people to engage in noble tasks that may not pay the higher wage and also teaching them to become leaders in society who will not buckle when threatened by the liberals.

The gospel does not stop at the heart. It manifests into actions. It changes culture. We are not called to separate from the culture and enter it only when evangelizing. God calls us to stay in it through our work (1 Corinthians 5:10; 7:24), as there is an objective to accomplish within the culture.

The early church completely understood their call to redeem the culture. When they proclaimed, “Jesus is Lord,” they were not making a cultic statement. They were proclaiming that Christ was the Lord of every area of their lives, which was a huge threat to the Roman government, market, and hospice. Worshiping Christ in a cultic manner was not forbidden in early Rome. In fact, Tiberius the Emperor attempted to consecrate Jesus as one of the Roman gods. All religions were welcome in Rome at that time, in the cultic sense, but not all religions were welcomed into the affairs of the state. This clearly parallels with today’s culture in America! Nearly all state and federal entities claim to be neutral by dodging all religious vocabulary and outward proclamations of God. But we know there to be no such concept of spiritual neutrality. Neutrality is epistemologically impossible, and secularism is without a doubt another religion and philosophy. Much of America, through the pursuit of neutrality and so-called secularism, attempts to strip away the cultic aspect of religion, thereby gleaning from the existential benefits of religion that much of the law of God produces. Stripping the cultic aspect from Christianity, or any religion for that matter, cannot create neutrality.