Academy: Christianity is the Foundation

Apologia Studios

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But for the most part what we have is a radically secularised culture.

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So the spiritual mainspring of Western culture has undergone this seismic shift and so the

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Christian gospel, the Christian faith has ceased to give clear direction to the development, the historical development of our society.

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And that leaves us in a precarious situation because there's a crisis that's emerged at the foundations of our culture.

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That's why we see so much conflict in the media, so much conflict in areas that used to be areas of agreement, the nature of the human person, the intrinsic value of life in the image of God, the nature of human sexuality, the nature of marriage and so on.

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These are now areas of radical conflict because we have this spiritual uprooting that's going on all around us.

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Henry Van Til then probably most succinctly summarised this religious character of culture.

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He accurately defined it as religion externalised. Religion externalised.

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All culture is the expression of a people's worship in terms of which they will cultivate their society, be it

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Islamic, Hindu, humanistic, pagan, Christian, Marxist, whatever.

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So that's the meaning of culture itself when we look at it sociologically.

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What does the Bible say? How does the Bible understand the character of culture?

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Well in biblical categories culture is essentially what human beings do with God's creation.

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It is directional, it does concern worship and at root it's about what human beings do with the creation.

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Those of us here in this audience are sat on a piece of human culture. It has meaning only in terms of human culture.

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If you stick a chair out in the wilderness, animals might make a shelter of it, birds might build a nest on it, it might be incorporated into foliage eventually but it doesn't have the meaning there outside of human culture that it has for us.

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So culture is everything that we do with God's creation. This is what our first parents were set in the garden of God to actually do, to cultivate

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God's creation as his royal priests. In many respects Eden was like a cosmic temple.

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There God sets his royal priesthood in the garden, these kingly priests to worship and to serve, to take that creation and by their faithfulness, by their work turn it into a

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God glorifying culture as an act of worship. And actually the commandment given to our first parents in the garden of God has never been rescinded.

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The reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, he points out and I quote, Genesis 126 teaches that God had a purpose in creating man in his image, namely that man should have dominion.

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If we now comprehend the force of this subduing, this dominion, under the term of culture, we can say that culture in its broadest sense is the purpose for which

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God created man after his image. Culture in its broadest sense is the purpose for which

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God created man after his image. That's remarkable, that's true.

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It actually means that culture making is inescapable for all God's image bearers, all

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God's creatures, human beings who bear his image will make culture inescapably as an expression of their worship.

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This idea of image bearing in the Bible is a directional idea. Sometimes we puzzle ourselves as Christians over which part of us reflects the image of God.

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But actually that's really the wrong kind of question. It's led some people to think of the idea of the rational soul or some other part of the human person, although we don't, scripturally we don't find the

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Greek idea of this absolute form, this rational soul. But it's led people to try and identify some aspect of the human person as the image of God, when actually image bearing is a directional idea in the

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Bible. It concerns the way we bear God's righteousness, holiness, and dominion to the creation.

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How do we reflect God's will and purpose to the creation? It's one of the reasons, by the way, that God forbids the making of idols in Scripture.

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One of the Ten Commandments, you shall have no other gods before me. In the second commandment you shall not make for yourself an idol.

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And the reason is God has already made an image of himself, in a sense you could say an idol of himself, to bear his image, human beings.

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So to make some other, to mess around with God's image bearer, so when you try and redefine the human person, for example, when you try and say as our culture is doing in the modern world that the human person is a fluid construction, a socially constructed idea.

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When we start to mess around with human beings we are actually trying to make a false god, we're actually making an idol, we're trying to mess around with God's image bearer that reflects

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God to the creation. And the result is the creation of an apostate, rebellious culture that's imaging an idol.

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Man becomes like the idol he worships and then he bears the image of that idol to creation.

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So this is why God forbids the worship of idols, of making, of messing around with God's image bearer.

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So human beings, as they image God, will turn the visible and the invisible materials of God's creation into culture, either as covenant keepers or as covenant breakers, obedient or disobedient as human beings stand inescapably, every single one of them, in relationship to God.

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And so what happens in cultural life according to Scripture is that an antithesis develops.

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In the Word of God we saw at the beginning of this lecture, God publishes his thesis. The creation order and norms are his thesis.

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He republishes it in his Word. But in rebellion against God, in apostasy when men and women turn from the worship of the living

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God, we see the antithesis take shape. And this is something that Paul teaches in Romans 1, that there are these two possible directions for culture.

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Very simply, Paul says there's the worship of the Creator or there is the worship of creation, of creation.

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Human beings set in God's creation are office bearers as they stand in relationship to God.

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They are appointed to an office to worship and to serve as a royal priesthood.

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As we do so, we will either worship the living God or our hearts will be turned towards idolatry, which is to say we will worship some aspect of the temporal order, the temporal cosmos of the creation or some aspects, plural, of it.

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And what that means, the easy thing to deduce from this is that it is impossible to have a neutral culture.

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On the basis of what Paul teaches, it isn't possible to have a neutral institution of education, a neutral government, a neutral approach to business, a neutral approach to the arts.

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There is no cultural activity that can be religiously neutral. There is a specific direction inherent in all our activities rooted in the human heart.

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Now of course it is true, and I can almost hear the question now, that Christians who worship the living

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God, the Creator and Redeemer, the root of all things, Jesus Christ, that such people,

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Christians and unbelievers, not non -believers by the way, there's no such thing as a non -believer because we all are religious beings, but there are unbelievers who deny the

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Creator and they worship one or more aspects of creation. Yes, they pursue many of the same cultural tasks as we do.

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Non -Christians and Christians get married, they build families, they establish educational institutions, they make films, they write books, they do paintings, they create music, they practice medicine, they practice law.

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The issue is though, as the Bible teaches, that human beings cannot free themselves, as much as they try with their humanistic and apostate philosophies, we cannot free ourselves from our creaturehood, nor can we shake ourselves free from the creational structures and the creational norms that God has established.

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Try as we might, we cannot shake ourselves free from those. That's why the writer of Proverbs says, he who sins against me wrongs his own soul, all those who hate me love death.

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We cannot shake ourselves free from God's creation. So the structures, the norms that surround us in creation, for example, the structure of music, musical notation, of course it remains the same for both the

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Christian and the non -Christian. There's not a non -Christian B -flat and a Christian B -flat, as it were.

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However, the direction of the music of a believer and a non -believer is going to be different.

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If you compare, for example, the compositions of John Cage with those of Johann Sebastian Bach, you will note very quickly and very clearly the difference in direction of the music.

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In the same way, the legal structure of marriage may well be the same, in many instances, for both the

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Christian and the non -Christian. The structure, as I've said, concerns the creational laws and ordained pattern or the ordained norm that pertain to that particular structure.

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So, for example, the structure of the family, the norm for the family, the norm and structure of the church, the norm and structure of the state.

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So whereas the direction of these, whereas the structure of these things concerns the norms and laws, the direction concerns the religious orientation that they have.

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So we're all participating in the same creational structures, but the direction of what we're doing within creation is radically different.

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Now, there are many, many structures and norms that God has established for creation. You can read about one in Romans 13, where Paul speaks about God's norm,

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God's structure for the state, for example. But there are only two directions possible, ultimately.

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When you boil it down, there are only two directions for culture possible. Many structures, but only two directions.

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We're either oriented towards God or towards idolatry in marriage, family, church, state, art, science and every other life sphere.

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We're either going to serve and glorify God in each area of our lives, or we are going to move in an apostate direction that has no place for God, has no place for His word revelation, has no place for the