Responding to Intolerance: World Transformation
Increasingly we find ourselves in a society that treats us with hostility for our Christian convictions.* What do we do? How do we respond? First, we allow the gospel to transform our lives, impacting our heads, hearts, and hands, as the saying goes (see Responding to Intolerance: Life Transformation). However, salvation is about more than our personal redemption; it’s about the renewal of the world. Thus we respond to intolerance by finding our role in God’s eschatological plan for world transformation. In exploring this point, we’ll trace the Biblical narrative from the cultural mandate to the gospel message to the Christian’s mission.
The Cultural Mandate
When God created mankind, He created him with the function of filling, subduing, and ruling the earth (Gen. 1:28). This is known as the cultural mandate, and has resulted in the establishment of cultures and all they contain. As the Creator’s image-bearers, we act in this world as His vice-regents in relation to these products and institutions. Thus part of our purpose is to build, cultivate, manage, and receive culture. This is what we were created for as human beings.
However, sin has infected the world, which includes its humanity and its culture (Gen. 3). Though God created us to govern, we don’t know how due to our fallen estate, and we’re even incapable of knowing how apart from God’s grace. Thus God sent forth His Son to redeem “that which was lost” and reverse the effects of sin (Mt. 18:11; cf. Gal. 4:4-5). While this redemption includes our personal salvation, it also includes our fallen capacity to function as God’s rulers of the world. Through redemption, our responsibility as God’s vice-regents in the world is being renewed.
Redemptive renewal means that we should actively invest ourselves in transforming this world and its cultures, societies, governments, and institutions in a manner that God intended from the beginning. This includes the arts, education, medicine, sports, technologies, and all other cultural artifacts. This transformation will be ultimately realized in the eschaton, which leads us to our next point. World transformation isn’t simply animated by a renewed cultural mandate though; it’s animated by the gospel itself.
The Gospel Message
Just as God sent His Son into the world, so His Son sends us into the world to preach the gospel and its implications for life and the world (Jn. 17:18). “As the Father has sent Me, so send I you” (Jn. 20:21). What does this gospel message entail though, we ask.
To answer this question, we’ll consider the Bible’s creation-fall-redemption-consummation arc. In this arc, redemption leads to renewal, personal renewal (life transformation) and cultural renewal (world transformation). Redemption leads us forward to consummation by taking us backward to creation, our original function, and thus the cultural mandate. This is part of the reason we see echoes of the Garden of Eden in the Bible’s descriptions of the new heavens and the new earth (cf. Isa. 65-66; Rev. 21-22). In fulfilling our responsibility before God the Savior (gospel message), we learn better how to fulfill our responsibility before God the Creator (cultural mandate). The two are inseparably linked.
We see this link in Matthew’s account of the Great Commission:
All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age (Mt. 28:18-20).
Here Jesus explains that He has received “all authority.” This is an exhaustive, all-encompassing expression. God alone has “all authority.” Thus this is a statement of identity. This is further confirmed by His inclusion of “in heaven and on earth.” By so stating, Jesus echoes some of the very first words of Scripture: “In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth.” Jesus establishes continuity between His Great Commission and the creation of the world, where we don’t have any sin, sickness, disease, and death, and where God commissions the cultural mandate. This echo is neither unintentional nor inconsequential; and we would expect this similarity in the Gospel of Matthew, the most Jewish Gospel.[1] In the gospel, Jesus is making all things new.
Indeed, Jesus’ redemption is bigger than you or me; it includes the whole world. Thus Paul discusses “the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph. 1:10). God isn’t going to renew the world by obliterating it first, but by transforming it, much like purifying gold or silver.[2] “In Christ,” Russell Moore explains, “God is tearing down the ruling structures of this present order and replacing them with the dynamic reign of God in Christ Jesus.”[3]
Jesus then tells His disciples to “go” and “make disciples of all nations.” We do this first, He explains, by baptizing those who accept God’s free gift of faith. Baptism signifies our death to sin, and our resurrection to new life in Christ, and it is the entryway to church membership. However, He doesn’t stop there. He continues by saying, “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” This is the third time we’ve seen “all” in these verses: Jesus has all authority, we preach to all the nations, and we teach them all Jesus commanded. The emphasis of “all” in these verses speaks to the sheer scope of Jesus’ redemptive program. Throughout His ministry, He spoke of the self, friends, family, church, children, the poor, orphans, outcasts, culture, society, government, justice, healing, and much, much more. In a word then, teaching Christ-followers to observe all that Jesus commanded means showing them how the gospel has transformative implications for everything. Again, referring back to Ephesians 1, Paul says that “all” things will be summed up in Christ (Eph. 1:10). That is the Great Commission.
The Christian’s Mission
The Christian’s mission then is living out Christ’s mission. “You are the light of the world,” Jesus explains in the Gospel of Matthew. “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Mt. 5:14-16). In the Gospel of John, He states, “While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world” (Jn. 9:5). He then illustrates what this means by healing a blind man. His commission for us is that we would carry on His work as light in dark world. We don’t hide our light or keep it private; and it certainly isn’t ineffectual. Paul writes unequivocally, “But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light” (Eph. 5:13). In our own day and age then, we respond to intolerance by living in view of the gospel’s broad implications for life and the world, which is a renewal of the cultural mandate. Yet how is it that we do this?
We function as God’s ambassadors (2 Cor. 5:20) in our spheres of influence. Indeed, this is our mission. We are the vessels through which the gospel has its renewing, transformative effect. And we do this in our respective vocational contexts. Our primary vocation concerns our families; this is our most local vocation. By building godly families, we work toward building godly cultures. Carl F. H. Henry writes, “I cannot escape the conviction that, immense as the Christian stake in legislation and education and culture may be, the Church is grievously wrong to plunge into these concerns at the expense of neglecting its prior responsibilities toward the family and vocational calling.”[4] That said, Henry would not stop there. Transformation begins with redemption in Christ, renews us as individual, which then affects any and all things in this world.
Indeed, the Church needs Christian administrators, artists, authors, businessmen, counselors, fathers, filmmakers, journalists, lawyers, mothers, musicians, news reporters, personal trainers, preachers, psychologists, public servants, scientists, teachers, theologians, and other vocational pursuits. We need Christians to go into all of those institutions that set the tone for culture—in film and television, journalism, sports, politics, local school boards, colleges and universities, and so forth—for the supremacy of Christ reaches even there. Or as Abraham Kuyper put it, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”[5]
As we find ourselves amidst these professions, the fruit of Christ and of His Spirit, and Christian values like love, excellence, and wisdom should aid us as we go. We don’t separate what we do from who we are in any area of life. Just as secular humanist ideals inform secular humanists’ contributions in these areas, so should Christian values inform ours. This kind of institutional, transformational change doesn’t occur over night though, but over generations. Thus we must be vigilant, perseverant, and patient.
Conclusion
How do we respond to the growing intolerance in American society? We remember that we the Church are the vessel of salvation to a dying world. As such, we must commit ourselves to moral living. Though we are called to be in the world, we are not called to be of it (Jn. 17:14-16; Rom. 12:2). Though we are called to take the gospel forth to transform the world, we are not called to let the world transform us. Whatever pressure our society may give us, we must resolve to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). When life gives us difficult circumstances, sometimes the right course will be hard but clear; other times it will require great wisdom.
But we must go forth. For “how can we so let our light shine before men in such a way that they may see our good works, and glorify our Father who is in heaven” (Mt. 5:16), except that we go forth? And in so doing, we have God’s promise His Word will not return void (Isa. 55:11). With certain people, in certain contexts, and for certain seasons, the gospel will have a renewing, transformative effect. Since everyone can’t do everything, we are reminded that God’s mission is for the whole church, as we all work in our respective vocational contexts. We have different callings; yet they all contribute to God’s mission, and as such we are all involved in ministry.
Finally, we must remember that people are still free, moral agents who will make their own decisions. Sometimes they will respond positively to the gospel. Other times they will not, and may resolve all the more to stand against us. Whatever the case, God calls us to go forth, as persons with Christian integrity who love and pray for our neighbors, and to preach and live out the gospel and its implications for life and indeed for the world.
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[1] See Christopher J. Wright, The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (2010).
[2] See Stephen Witmer, Eternity Changes Everything (2014).
[3] Russell Moore, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Pamphlet, 12.
[4] Carl F.H. Henry, Aspects of Christian Social Ethics (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1964), 10
[5] Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Eerdmans, 1998), 488.
*An earlier version of this article series appeared in The Brink Magazine, Summer 2015, 38-42.
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