Last week I published a post, Reconciliation is not the core task of the people of God. It highlighted an excerpt from Armand Larvie’s book After Sunday and stimulated some great discussion. This post is a more detailed presentation of my point of view. Here is my thesis:
The primary mission of the people of God is not to be the church’s bridge to the world for doing reconciling works of evangelism and justice. The primary mission of the people of God is the cultural mandate (a.k.a. creation mandate) and it is the role of the church to equip the people of God for reconciliation within the context of their primary mission.
What do we mean by mission?
I used the word “task” in the title of the post. A better word is mission. Mission means being sent for a purpose by another.
What do we mean by the cultural mandate?
The cultural mandate is in Genesis 1:26-28. Humanity is commanded by God to “fill the earth,” and to “rule” and exercise “dominion” over the earth. Creation is not complete and as God’s agents we are to bring the earth to fullness. The cultural mandate includes improvement of human flourishing and the development of all the attendant institutions and spheres of activity that entails.
What is the significance of the cultural mandate?
The cultural mandate functions within the context of a larger narrative. Two metaphors give context to the mandate: Temple and Kingdom
Temple
John Walton, in “The Lost World of Genesis One,” does a masterful job of showing that Genesis 1 is related to Ancient Near East (ANE) cosmologies. Like ANE cosmologies, Genesis One is not about how things were made. It is about the functions things serve and who assigns them their function.
The narrative begins with a functionless earth. The first three days establish three basic functions:
Day 1 = Night and Day mark TIME.
Day 2 = The vault above the earth is where WEATHER takes place.
Day 3 = The land emerges and provides for AGRICULTURE.
Other ANE cosmologies. Then God installs functionaries:
Day 4 = The sun and moon are installed to actually carry out the function of marking time.
Day 5 = The sky and sea are populated with functionaries that serve to fill the earth.
Day 6 = The land is populated with functionaries that serve to fill the earth.
But the climax of the sixth day is God creating his ultimate functionaries who bear his image and have responsibility for all that has been created:
Gen 1:26-28
26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
As Walton points out, the earth is portrayed as God’s temple. We are God’s chief functionaries in the temple. At the end of this story, in ANE fashion, God inhabits his temple and enjoys all he has made.
Several things are unique about the Hebrew narrative. First, God does not emerge from primordial chaos. God simply “is.” Everything in heaven and earth is functioning under his command. Second, the creation is not complete. The earth is not filled and there is work to be done in subduing creation and bringing it to higher ends as God’s agents/functionaries in the temple. Third, ANE cosmologies offer competitive gods vying for dominance. Humans are created largely as slaves to carry out the dirty work of these capricious characters. In the Genesis narrative, humans are esteemed as God’s primary agents/functionaries at work in his temple. (Also see Psalm 8)
The biblical narrative is not one of restoration to a garden. It begins in a garden and ends in a city (New Jerusalem), the primary symbol of human learning, government, art, and commerce. Humanity shares God’s creative qualities. Humans are to transform matter, energy, and data from less useful forms to more useful forms in sustainable ways in community with God and each other as God’s agents in his temple. That temple mission is marred by sin but fully redeemed at the consummation of the new creation.
Kingdom
The cultural mandate includes the language of “rule” and “dominion.” The Psalmist writes about humanity, “You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet.” (Ps 8:6.) This evokes the imagery of a Kingdom. Kingdoms have four essential components: king, subjects, domain, and ethical code.
What we have in Genesis One is God as King. Humans are God’s vice-regent subjects who rule as his agents. The rest of the beings in created order are the subjects of humanity. The earth is the domain. A code and a mission are given.
In subsequent chapters, humanity rebels and turns to false kings, or idols. As Christopher Wright (Mission of God) so eloquently illustrates, God’s response is to rebellion is to develop a covenantal triangle to reconcile humanity to himself and reestablish his kingdom. That triangle is God, the Israelites, and the land of Israel. The Torah becomes the code. God’s mission is to expand the triangle until the Israelites expand to encompass all of humanity and the land of Israel expands to encompass all the land.
Jesus speaks repeatedly of the “Kingdom of God.” That Kingdom of God is not an ethereal community of like-minded people in a disembodied state who have warm feeling toward God. In its consummated form …
“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever." Rev 11:15b
It is a Kingdom with a King, subjects, and a domain. As we learn elsewhere, it is a Kingdom with a code that has as its base:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12:30-31
But also, as with Genesis 1 and Psalm 8, it is a Kingdom that has vice-regents, exercising dominion over creation:
2 Tim 2:11-12a
The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; …
Rev 5:9-10
They sing a new song: "You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth."
Rev 22:5
And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
So over what subjects will the elect reign? They will reign over the created order. We are back to Genesis One and the cultural mandate.
The metaphors of temple and kingdom are pretty much the same in the ANE world as religion and government were not separate spheres. The two metaphors are two aspects of the same thing in the ancient mind.
The primary mission of the people of God.
The primary mission of the people of God is to reign over creation in holy communion with God and with each other. Caring for the earth, bringing it to fullness, and working the cultural institutions that bring flourishing to the earth and to humanity is what we do first and foremost.
But in this time between rebellion and the consummated new creation, there is a supplemental but essential call: The mission of reconciling the world to back to God and restoring humanity to functionary status in God’s temple-kingdom. Yet, reconciliation is not the primary mission. It is the essential work that restores people to community and to their primary mission.
Armand Larive explains in After Sunday that Soren Kierkegaard once likened the liturgy to theater. (143) There are three roles in worship: God, congregation, and officiant (pastor). There are three roles in theater as well: Actor, prompter, and audience. So how would these roles line up with each other in worship?
Larive writes that most would say that the minister is the actor … performs the sermon, sacraments, and prayers for the people (To this I think we can add the choir or the praise band.) The congregation is the audience for the performance. God is the prompter, prompting the minister in his performance. But in reality, the actor is to be the congregation. God is the audience. The pastor is the one prompting the people in their acts of worship of God. The first scenario is a breed of clericalism. The second sees the people of God as the central actors in worship.
I would extend this analogy even further. We do not only worship as the gathered people of God on Sunday. We worship each day as the people of God dispersed in the community through our daily response to the cultural mandate. But because of the clerical notion of worship, the worship we do in living out the cultural mandate is emptied of meaning. We learn on Sunday that reconciliation and praising God is something done by professionals for the “lay” Christians. The work of the pastor is to recruit extension agents from among “lay” Christians to take aspects of Sunday worship into the world. The pastor and church structures may even devise reconciling works of justice and recruit the “laity” as their extension agents to perform these as well. But the fitting of pipes, balancing of debit and credits, stocking of shelves, debugging of programs, researching of markets, and so on, … all elements of the cultural mandate … have no intrinsic value. The context of our daily lives is emptied of worshipful value except as it exists as a platform to be “lay” extension agents “professional” Christians and the ecclesial structures, namely evangelism and rectifying injustice.
Throughout the week, God is the audience to acts of worship offered him by the people in their response to the cultural mandate. The people are the actors. The pastor is the prompter who equips and encourages the people to be a reconciling presence as they go about their primary mission of the cultural mandate.
So as I said at the start:
The primary mission of the people of God is not to be the church’s bridge to the world for doing reconciling works of evangelism and justice. The primary mission of the people of God is the cultural mandate (a.k.a. creation mandate) and it is the role of the church to equip the people of God for reconciliation within the context of their primary mission.
[Update: No sooner had I posted this than I saw a tweet about this article at Remnant Culture, The Redemptive Road Trip: Church Is Not a Gas Station. The author is summarizing a book by David VanDrunen, Living in God's Two Kingdoms: A Biblical Vision for Christianity and Culture. This is a perfect description of clericalism I referrenced from an Evangeclical perspecitve. Progressive versions tend to reduce mission down to communities of justice but both see virtually no intrinsic value in the day to day work of the people.]
