As Christians live out the power of the Cross and the Lordship of Christ in all arenas of life, this will inevitably lead to the challenging and shaping of human cultures.  Ultimately, the battle for the nations of the earth will be a battle for culture. Even elections, like the stunning victory of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate seat this week--are a battle for cultural direction.

There are basic principles that apply to all human culture. Most of these you may not have learned in your normal sociology class.  A culture makes a nation. A culture forms the boundaries and creates the distinctives of any group of people.  If we are to understand what Jesus would have us to do to see whole nations changed by the proclamation and demonstration of the Gospel, we must understand what He wants us to do with human culture.  A good  place to start is the following premise:

All culture is religious. We cannot separate culture from religion because the very essence of culture is the expressing of values or worship among a people. Ray Sutton gives us an excellent basic definition of the concept of culture when he writes, "There are no sacred/profane categories inherent in creation. The original garden had zones that were nearer to and further away from God, but everywhere was sacred.  Corporate man, male and female, was to spread ”culture.” What is culture? "Culture" comes from "cultus" meaning worship.  Thus the task of dominion was to transform the world into a place of worship, and thereby create true culture.  Dominion is not secularized work.  It is sanctified labor involved in making society into a proper place to worship God."
    
The very nature of culture is to make worship.  It is to create societal forms and expressions that represent the values or gods of that particular group of people.  It is these expressions (and they come in many diverse forms) that define the group of people and give them their identity.  No cultures are religiously neutral.  All culture is directly or indirectly related to what a given society values. 

To understand a culture is to perceive and understand its world view, which ultimately relates to its gods or concept of God. To express these values in sacrifice, in family relationships, in ceremonies, in art, in labor, in dress, and in custom, is the activity or development of culture.  All cultures have a religious foundation (including atheistic ones such as Marxism-Leninism). After all, the basic concept of religion, taken from the Latin word"re-ligare" simply means that which one ties back to, or the ultimate upon which one relies.  A nation's culture IS a created expression of its religious moorings.

Culture, in essence, is really a silent way of expressing its religion.  It is a way of stating its philosophy and beliefs without all the trappings of ceremony and form.  Allan Bloom says that "The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it.  Culture is a synthesis of reason and religion, attempting to hide the sharp distinction between the two poles." He goes on to add, "a shared sense of the sacred is the surest way to recognize a culture, and the key to
understanding it and all its facets. . . What a people bows before tells us what it is."

It is not always easy to see "what a people bow before."  But as you analyze any given culture in the world, you can know that you are looking at the silent voice of worship and sacredness.  The values of the people are intertwined in the tapestry of the culture.  And so we talk about the "youth culture", the "rock culture", the "Hindu culture", the "Japanese culture" and what we really mean this is that we can identify some values of the people group by looking at their cultural expressions.  People have gods, and their commitment to them writes the cultural language of the land.  This is the essence of the making of culture.

Creating culture is what man was placed on the earth to do. Man has been uniquely given by God the cultural mandate of tending,ruling, and cultivating the earth.  Of course, this commandment was given to men by the Living God who expected man to make the earth of place of the glory and worship of Him.  Man was not meant to fill the world with idolatry, and in so doing, cause his own destruction.  No, man was given the unique privilege of taking an entire planet and transforming it into a habitation of fellowship with the Living God. Since the coming of Christ to redeem fallen man, this mandate has been given the new meaning of bringing allthings under the subjection of Jesus.  Jon Kennedy says that,

"The Bible teaches that man is responsible for culture, for bringing all of creation into subjection to Jesus Christ, through His power in us (Gen.1:28,29, 9:2,3, Ps.8, Heb.2:5-8, Col.1).  The family, idle time, and the educational portion of one's life, political responsibility, the church worship community, and vocation are all spoken as areas in which God is sovereign and His sons are to serve Him.  The Bible, contrary to much church teaching, never suggests that the religious establishment is to stand as sovereign or mediator over these areas, but rather the church is just one of the areas of life to be subjected to God's dominion.  The Bible acts as a lamp showing the direction in which man is to walk in each of these areas, but is not intended as a textbook on any of them.  Writing the textbooks is part of man's cultivating, or cultural task."(Jon Kennedy, ”The Reformation of Journalism)

Human culture was originally designed to express the beauty and reality of God in all His facets and splendor.  This would be seen in every single area of life, and it was man that was to do the composing.  When man fell into sin, the power to achieve this purpose was lost.  In Christ, it has been restored.  The call of the gospel is the bringing of the ”culture of a kingdo" back into the world to transform and to improve it.  In other words, it is to disciple nations and to culturally enrich them.  This is done through serving people and nations in the loving power of the Holy Spirit.

This leads to another critical point:  All cultures are not relative or equal.  In our day and age there is a trend to egalitarianism in culture.  Some are saying that all cultures are neutral, and should be appreciated as they are, or that no cultures are more righteous than other cultures in outlook and expression. But this is no more true than to say that all roads lead to heaven. They don't. There is such a thing as truth.  There is the true God and there are false gods that are enshrined through human culture. Thus all cultures are not equal in their manifestation of truth. We are to appreciate secondary aspects of culture,  but as to the central elements that make up a culture , we cannot take the position that all gods or all concepts of God are equal. 

Scott Peck, a psychologist with a great respect and appreciation for diversities in culture relates this:"The key to community is the acceptance in fact, the celebration of our individual and cultural differences. Such acceptance and celebration is the key to world peace. This does not mean, however, that as we struggle toward world community we need to consider all individuals or cultures and societies equally good or mature.  To do so would be to fall prey once again to a complex variation that says, "We are all different or all the same or equal in our differences."  It is simply not true.  The reality is that just as some individuals have become much more mature than others, some cultures are more or less flawed than others."

Because the world as a whole does not believe in absolute truth, nor believes in the True and Living God, it has been able toconvince the church that all culture is equal and relative as a means of justifying its position.  If there is no Loving and Righteous Creator of the Universe, then humanism is right:  All cultures are relative.  We should never tamper with them or believe that they are in need of change.  But this concept of openness (to other cultures and ideas), as Allan Bloom so strikingly points out,is really the doctrine of the ”total closedness to truth.  If everything is relative, then there is no such thing as better, right, truthful, or to use Scott Peck's word, mature.  This is how Dr.Bloom states it:

"Openness to closedness is what we teach.  It is important toemphasize that the lesson that students are drawing from their studies is simply untrue.  History and the study of cultures do not teach or prove that values or cultures are relative. . . To say that it does so prove is as absurd as to say that the diversity of points of view expressed in a college bull session proves there is no truth."
 
No, some cultures are more righteous, or more mature than others are because their values are focused on the true and living God.  Their God is the True God, so their culture, or expressions of worship, are more closely aligned with the truth.  This cultural garment of righteousness is never perfect among a people or a nation any more than perfection is seen in any human individual. There is also much room for diversity in Christian expressions in the same way that there are many differing points of theology within the Christian world view.

Jesus Christ came as a servant to change people and hence transform whole cultures.  His salvation is a comprehensive salvation, only limited by the sin and unbelief of mortal men.  In bringing His Lordship into the sphere of the nations on earth, there will inevitably be a transformation and enrichment of all human cultures where the gospel is preached and lived out in the power of the Holy Spirit.

In the work of bringing the gospel to bear in the nations of the world, an important differentiation needs to be made between the primary expressions of culture in a given society and its secondary forms.  The primary expressions of a culture always center around the god or essential values (which is ultimately the same thing) of the people.  These aspects of culture must be lovingly challenged and transformed into the values and worship of the Living Christ.  There can be no cultural relativism here.  One cannot become a Christian without exchanging his gods and the central cultural forms that go with them for a new God and Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.  The idols must go, and all their primary cultural expressions. 

This will not always be a sudden or instant transformation, but it must be viewed as essential component of both individual and cultural sanctification.  In the work of salvation, a person enters into a righteous kingdom where love and light reigns, and that kingdom has the power and, yes, the duty to transform all the expressions of his life and world.  A sinful culture based on false gods must be exchanged for a godly culture based on the truth of Jesus Christ.  Without this commitment, the individual or group will still remain a slave to idolatry.  This is the curse of missionary liberalism.  It does not set the people free from the cultural bondage of sin.

 On the other hand, there are many secondary aspects of culture (relating to dress, custom, art, color, music, mannerisms, relationships etc.) that do not directly or indirectly pay homage to another god or system in contradiction to the Bible.  In fact, many cultures around the world have righteous expressions in their traditions that actually model the truths of Scripture in an unconscious way.  Don Richardson refers to this as the "witness that God has left in every culture of His reality and greatness. This theme is well expounded on in his book, ”Eternity In Their Hearts, and also demonstrated in the personal experiences of the Richardsons as recorded in their first book, Peace Child, which was written about their work among the Sawi tribe of Irian Jaya (Indonesia).These aspects are not meant to be trampled over in insensitivity or with legalistic force.  Doing so is the opposite extreme of missionary imperialism.

The true task of reaching whole nations and peoples is to thoroughly transform the primary foundations of culture,while at the same time thoroughly preserving and uplifting the secondary aspects of individual expression.  The bad is to be done away with as much as possible, and the good images of the Creator are to be retained.  There is godly and unique beauty in all cultures in the world.  There is also idolatry and wickedness that is interwoven into the fabric of all nations.
    
 The wise and successful follower of Christ will learn to discern the difference between the two.  That is not easy, but Christ and His Word can show us the way.