Culture and the cultural mandate
Lovingly God brought all things into being in moments of hovering holy imagination.
Man and woman were formed as those who would bear the image and the imagination
of their Creator. Conscious of our relationship with God, bonded in mutual
love, and maintaining respect for the natural order, we have been invited
to cultivate the earth—and cultivate our own living practices accordingly.
We are stewards of creation and of all the practices involved in caring for
that creation and making it grow. The end result of cultivation is the development
of culture. We are by our very nature created to be cultural beings that are
actively involved in the constant re-creation of our world.
For the purpose of our paper, we will define culture as “the sum total of human activity that is superimposed on God’s Creation.” Culture includes our geographical location, race, gender, sexuality, language, ideas, beliefs, values, customs, rituals, ceremonies and social behavior. How we treat each other and what we expect from one another is informed by the culture we create together. Culture is also expressed in the way we work, play, dress and relate to one another, and through various art forms such as story-telling, dance, music, drama, visual art and literature.
A cry for healing and renewal
Unfortunately, our world is so much about the exchange of goods and services
that what we understand about one another’s cultural integrity has been
compromised or reduced to mere economics. We are increasingly saturated with
goods and the drive to possess more, while poverty looms large and the resulting
illness and devastation has meant the loss of countless lives. Children all
over the world are living in garbage dumps, in sewage systems, subway tunnels
and under highway overpasses. The whole world and all its members are groaning
and travailing as we search for meaning and purpose.
Personal and social conflict often follows between those who wish to preserve their traditional practices and those who adopt contemporary cultural trends. In our urban centres we are bombarded with images and sounds, and eventually become overloaded in a way that desensitizes us to one another and to the values that can best contribute to human community. The outcome is often a spirit of indifference and a sense of powerlessness. It is a social catastrophe. With passion deadened, dreams are cast aside or simply disappear, and imagination fails to do its good work. A sense of hopelessness makes change difficult to imagine. The loss of imagination is a crisis that has reached global proportions. Our current cultural malaise cries out for healing and renewal.
Engagement or withdrawal
In the face of such great need we cannot justify remaining aloof from those
who believe differently than we do. It is no small matter to be invited to
participate in the redemptive work of care and compassion. Withdrawal is not
only contrary to the cultural mandate, but also to the gospel invitation to
be salt and light in the world. If we view cultural engagement as off-limits
for the Christian, we support the sub-biblical idea that God is interested
only in the church and is not at work in our world. The call for the church
to take up engagement with the culture in which it is located is a call to
be the embodied, active healing and redemptive presence of Christ in the world.
Withdrawal has also led to our neglect of the arts. In so doing, we have muted
a voice that can speak to issues of oppression and dehumanization as prophetic
critique and a resource for healing.
The church and culture
The church is called to live out a story that can make a difference. It is
a story that can ignite the imagination and bring the joy of hope and promise
out of the dust of social and personal despair. Once again the arts are an
efficient helper to assist in reshaping the imagination and opening a window
on the grand vista of God’s redemptive purposes in Christ.
However, the presence of the church in the world is often defined solely by its effort to do evangelism. This has sometimes resulted in a lack of genuine involvement in individual, social, community and global issues. We must reclaim the cultural mandate as an inherent part of our responsibility as those who seek to live out of the biblical story. Our cultural work will include the cultivation of the arts, which in turn will be indispensable in bridging our differences and offering us a language that penetrates deeply into the heart and soul.
The twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth spoke of the task of culture as “the realization of our humanity.” Surely we can say that the gospel and the incarnation in particular have this same purpose. It is evident that our culture and the Christian faith will propose quite different answers to the question of what it is to be human. The culture may say that wealth and pleasure are central, or education or power. Christianity sets forth its answer in the person of Christ who is the model of humanity. To be fully human requires that we be in relationship with God. Perhaps we can see how important it is for the faith community to have its voice present in the culture of which it is a part. The gospel comes as an alternative to the agenda of the society; it offers a different understanding of what it means to be human. Art is able to express this in subtle and meaningful ways and to do so in a “language” those outside the church will understand. In this way the art of the Christian can be what one author has called “redemptive art”:
By ‘redemptive artistry’ I mean something much closer to what the dove did for Noah in the ark. Noah was wondering whether the punishing flood had receded and the earth was now habitable again. The dove came back bearing fresh olive leaves (Genesis: 8:11), a token that the faithful Lord was giving new life on earth after the awful judgment on world sin. Maybe we could consider artistry by the redeemed for their neighbour as simply giving a metaphoric promise of life and hope at the gracious Rule of Jesus Christ on earth … Redemptive artistry will be bearing fresh olive leaves.4
TO: Act 3 Scene 2