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Best of It: The Story and the Mission (Part 5)

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The last half of Chapter Six in John Stackhouse's Making the Best of It is titled "Mission: The Four Commandments." Stackhouse identifies two sets of commandments.

  • Creation Commandments: The cultural mandate and the great commandments.
  • Redemption Commandments: The new commandment and the Great Commission.

Today we start with the first of the Creation Commandments, the Cultural Mandate.

Creation Commandments

The Cultural Mandate

The early chapters of Genesis are clear: we were created to bring all the earth under cultivation and to exercise dominion over it. We are "… to make a garden of the whole planet as "little lords," as deputies of God, doing his kind of work and in obedience to his commandments." (206) Stackhouse sees three implications here.

1. First, caring for the earth and making the best of it is our primary duty under God. (206)

As I've noted, Stackhouse is going to explore other commandments, but he emphasizes that, "…whatever we are to be and to do, in the Bible's account we literally are gardeners first." (206)

2.  … all of our fellow human beings share the dignity and responsibility of this commandment. (207)

Those who obey the creation mandate end up blessing humanity whether they intend to do so or not. However, work that is not contributing to the welfare of the earth and bringing a measure of shalom is not in accord with the mandate. Positive good is mandated, not merely harmlessness. Stackhouse goes on to make a very important qualification:

There is a danger here, to be sure, of seeing this matter through too narrow a sense of shalom and therefore too narrow a sense of what can count as worthy work, art, and so on. Advertising, cosmetics, and fashion, for example, are pursuits that are easily written off by Christians (and others) for their obvious excesses and evils, while we usually fail to credit their virtues: that advertising can help us make good decisions amid the welter of choice we must make in a wealthy society; that cosmetics can beautify the body in the same way in which we ingenuously beautify our homes or churches; and that fashion can reflect both our creativity and our limitations, as we cannot and do not think of design possibilities all at once, but formulate, elaborate, and enjoy them only seriatim. Yet a properly broad understanding of shalom can then help us condemn harmful advertising, vain cosmetics, and stupid fashion, even as it helps us sort through other issues in culture: what is worth doing, and what should be discarded as in fact vain/worthless/empty, let alone positively evil? (208-209)

3. Third, we must not let ourselves be driven to bad consciences, let alone self-loathing, by ecological extremists who are so unhappy about how we have harmed the earth they condemn human dominion, if not humanity itself, as a curse. (209)

God made us to bless the earth by exercising dominion. God did not want us to leave as few footprints as possible, leaving the earth alone as much as we can. He commanded us instead to spread out, over the whole globe, and bring it all under our influence, to subdue it for his own good, and make it even more fruitful, beautiful, and sustainable, under God's guidance and power he invested in it. We dare not be cowed into relinquishing this role out of shame that we have performed it badly heretofore. We must take it up afresh, do the best we can, and look forward to the shalom that our administration will bring, in concert with Christ's rule, in the world to come. (209)

I think this emphasis on the creation mandate is absolutely crucial. The Great Commission (which we will come to shortly) is critical, but it is penultimate and temporary compared to the creation mandate. When the new creation is consummated, the Great Commission expires. If the Great Commission is our ultimate purpose, we cease to have a reason for existence when the new creation is consummated.

The "good news" is the redemption of all creation and humanity. We were made material beings to exercise dominion in a material world. If humanity is to be redeemed, then redemption our creation mandate is central. Ontologically we are dominion-exercising beings, and, unlike the Great Commission, the creation mandate extends into the new creation.

Some of our churches are now talking about the creation mandate and a "sustainable" world, but far too often, the rhetoric belies an anti-technology, anti-market, even anti-human, natural romanticism. On the other extreme is a tendency to see our daily work lives purely as contexts for personal evangelism and the practice of personal piety. We need to grasp the centrality of the creation mandate better.

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Comments

3 responses to “Best of It: The Story and the Mission (Part 5)”

  1. Travis Greene Avatar
    Travis Greene

    “The Great Commission (which we will come to shortly) is critical, but compared to the creation mandate it is penultimate and temporary. When the new creation is consummated, the Great Commission expires. If the Great Commission is our ultimate purpose, then when the new creation is consummated we cease to have reason for existence.”
    I agree, this is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you’re left wondering, as I did growing up in evangelical churches, what the heck is the point of everything in the first place? If the plan was to have us end up in heaven, just hanging out with nothing to do (because, of course, everything is perfect and therefore nothing needs to be done), why didn’t God just start with that? Why give us bodies at all, if our ultimate fate is “spiritual”?
    But of course, the problem with the “traditional view”, besides being philosophically unsatisfying, is that it isn’t what the Bible teaches at all. Why else would the NT talk about us ruling with Christ? Even in the final vision in Revelation, there still seems to be plenty of work to do.
    Re: sustainability, I think one of the best ways to pursue that is a return to more traditional farming practices. We need to read Wendell Berry, not the “life after humans” crazies.

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  2. Bob Avatar
    Bob

    This is a very readable book on Ethics compared to Bonheoffer’s Ethics, Moral Vision of the New Testament and Christ and Culture. I’m surprised no one has made any comments on Amazon.
    I’m still not convinced that this book needed the first two parts. This third section could stand on its own very well. This was one of the best chapters in the whole book. The cultural mandate that has been presented in this book has freed me from many years of distorted liberal and conservative Christianity. I liked how John presented the Great Commission and Culture mandate in a way that makes sense. I can take pride in the fact I’m making a difference in the Kingdom by working a “secular” job.

    Reply
  3. Michael W. Kruse Avatar
    Michael W. Kruse

    Travis
    I think this lack of understanding but the creation mandate also needlessly robs many Christians of the joy of knowing how fully they are participating in God’s mission. That is a travesty.
    I’m not an expert on agricultural production, but it seems that many developed nations have gone through a process of small-scale production to more industrial models, and now there is the ability to return back to some of the simpler methods because the markets and infrastructure have created a highly integrated network that allows for truly productive smaller scale farming.
    Some emerging nations have too many people devoted to agriculture on plots that are too small. I suspect some degree of consolidation and introduction of more productive methods is needed. All that is to say that I think different places may need differ prescriptions right now, but our ultimate question has be how to feed the world without the bear subsistence farming or the excesses of destruction from industrial farming methods.
    Bob
    Thanks for your testimony. I had not realized that there were no customer reviews at Amazon. I’ll have to fix that. If so inspired maybe you could add a blurb.
    I agree the back half of the book could be its own volume and it is just packed with meaty stuff. One of the things I appreciate the most is how Stackhouse essentially demonstrates that there really are no secular jobs. What an incredible thing it is to one day discover the real significance of our daily work.

    Reply

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