The responsibility of humanity to obey the “cultural mandate” is well-recognized in evangelical discourse as a way of understanding the relationship between Christianity and culture. But perhaps what is less known is the textual origins of this discussion, in the tradition of neo-Calvinism, and the relationship of that mandate to the metaphysical make-up of human beings. This tradition was birthed out of the theological and public labors of Abraham Kuyper (1834–1920) and Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) from within the Dutch Reformed tradition.1 Both theologians sought to retrieve Reformed orthodoxy for the sake of engaging modernity. Drawing from the Scriptures, they sketched a theology that encouraged Christians to work for the common good precisely by standing on their own revelation. Hence, a dialogue on how best to connect the Christian faith with culture and its biblical contours thrived from within this trajectory.

On this topic, they asked questions about the intrinsic connection between humanity’s ontology and their vocation. Humanity’s organic character means that the whole individual is the image of God. But would a single individual suffice to image God? How does our status as image-bearers relate to the cultural mandate that God gives in the garden?

If God is infinite, then only a diversity of finite creatures can truly reflect his glory, and if human beings are God’s image bearers then only a humanity, considered as a corporate entity, can more fully reflect that image. Bavinck describes the dogmatic logic here:

[The Imago Dei] can only be somewhat unfolded in its depth and riches in a humanity counting billions of members. Just as the traces of God [vestigia Dei] are spread over many, many works, in both space and time, so also the image of God can only be displayed in all its dimensions and characteristic features in a humanity whose members exist both successively … and contemporaneously side by side.2

The mandate given to humanity to be fruitful and multiply calls for humanity to spread out across the earth. A proper, God-given dominion is intrinsic to who humans are as image-bearers. As human beings disperse throughout the globe, God’s image is represented throughout as well. As Bavinck has argued, the creation of humanity, then, invokes a telos—a diverse humanity dispersed yet united by a single representative, a federal head in Adam. Further, just as the Trinity comprises an absolute unity-in-diversity, humanity too, will manifest an analogical and organic unity-in-diversity, not only in their individual make up (in body and soul, and original righteousness), but also as a corporate whole.3 I explore this vocation and calling to be “fruitful and multiply” and to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1: 28) from a theological perspective, addressing the relationship between creation and culture, and the cultural mandate after the fall and the gospel. Along the way, I address Klaas Schilder (1890–1952), a second-generation neo-Calvinist, and his objections to “common grace,” as he sought to utilize the cultural mandate precisely as an alternative to that doctrine.

1. “Fruitful and Multiply”: Cultural Mandate and the Image of God

There are two aspects to the cultural mandate in the state of innocence: the task of begetting and the organic multiplication of people and the task of forming a diversity of cultures. Embedded in the creation of humanity therefore is a teleological orientation—humanity was meant to spread and cultivate creation in obedience to their God, and no one community can possibly reflect the richness of the image: “the image of God is much too rich for it to be realized in a single race, ethnic group, or culture.”4

The call of the cultural mandate therefore fittingly corresponds to the proper dominion image bearers of God are supposed to have over creation, and is recognized by more contemporary thinkers as the “vocational” aspect of the image of God. 5 God gave the tasks of work and cultivation before the fall, showing the inherent goodness of human labor in culture-making. To be ‘fruitful and multiply’ refers to the natural multiplication of human beings and the work that cultivates nature for their own good, in accordance with God’s command.

As image-bearers labor in obedience to the mandate, William Edgar aptly describes this work as an exercise of “analogous power” that was given to human beings from God:

Embedded in this human activity is (at least in germ form) the development of agriculture, the arts, economics, family dynamics, and everything that contributes to human flourishing, to the glory of God. This management is of course in imitation of God’s greater stewardship over his creation. The so-called nature psalms attest to the overarching sovereignty of God over his creation, and yet to his delegating analogous power to human beings.6

As Edgar notes, nature psalms like Psalm 104:14–15 situate human work in parallel with and yet dependent on God’s work. God causes the “livestock” and “plants” to grow, so that humanity might make “wine” and “bread” to gladden his heart. To put it in theological terms: God creates ex nihilo while humans create ex naturam. God speaks and nature comes to be, but humanity, in an analogous fashion, creates out of the pre-existing natural material that God creates. Dominion, therefore, refers to this human cultivation of the natural world, going with the grain of God’s design. Human dominion is thus one of stewardship, displaying simultaneously both humanity’s dignity and servitude before God. J. H. Bavinck says it this way:

We, the human race, are predestined to fulfil a distinctive calling in that history; as humanity, we are assigned an exceptional place in the greater context of the kingdom from the very first. We are simultaneously subjects and to some extent co-rulers, viceroys over certain regions. Not everything is subjected to us: we are not given authority over the course of the stars and the planets or the tides of the never-resting seas. But the earth and its plants and animals have been assigned to us, given for us to rule over and to use for God’s service, to fathom and understand creation’s hidden powers, and so to bring to full development the innate possibilities of creation. That is the meaning of the cultural calling allotted to us immediately after creation (Gen. 1:28–29).7

This sense of culture-making as the interplay between nature and human cultivation, as humanity images God analogously, corresponds well with Henry van Til’s classic work on The Calvinistic Conception of Culture. There, he defines culture as the “secondary environment” that humanity builds out of the primary environment of God’s creation: “In this book I use the term [culture] to designate that activity of human, the image-bearer of God, by which he fulfills the creation mandate to cultivate the earth, to have dominion over it and to subdue it. The term is also applied to the result of that activity, namely, the secondary environment which has been superimposed upon nature by man’s creative effort.”8

To cultivate creation well therefore involves discerning God’s design for creation—culture-making can easily deform into hubris and abuse when we determine for ourselves what we ought to make out of the natural world. Herman Bavinck thus warns that any fulfilling of the earthly vocation should be situated within the context of obedience to the word of God. This is signified by the conjunction of the command to be fruitful and multiply with the prohibition against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If the former denotes humanity’s responsibility toward earth, the latter towards heaven—but both together are needed for humanity to accomplish either task well. He argues that these two tasks are really one:

The first task defines his relationship to the earth, the second his relationship to heaven. Adam had to subdue to earth and have dominion over it, and this he must do in a twofold sense: he must cultivate it, open it up, and so cause to come up out of it all the treasures which God has stored there for man’s use; and he must also watch over it, safeguard it, protect it against all evil that may threaten it, must, in short, secure it against the service of corruption in which the whole of creation now groans.

But man can fulfill this calling over against the earth only if he does not break the bond of connection which unites him with heaven, only if he continues to believe God at his word and to obey his commandment. The twofold task is essentially therefore one task. Adam must have dominion over the earth, not by idleness and passivity but through the work of his head and heart and hand.9

To put it another way, cultivating earth is a great good, but without obedience to God’s word, humans would not only abuse their proper viceregency, but they will also lose the highest good, which is God himself. Proper earthly dominion requires and presupposes true religion. Earthly and heavenly vocations comprise a singular holistic calling:

But in order to rule, he must serve; he must serve God who is his Creator and Lawgiver. Work and rest, rule and service, earthly and heavenly vocation, civilization and religion, culture and cultus, these pairs go together from the very beginning. They belong together and together they comprise in one vocation the great and holy and glorious purpose of man. All culture, that is, all work which man undertakes in order to subdue the earth, whether agriculture, stock breeding, commerce, industry, science, or the rest, is all the fulfilment of a single Divine calling. But if man is really to be and remain such he must proceed in dependence on and in obedience to the Word of God. Religion must be the principle which animates the whole of life and which sanctifies it into a service of God.10

If religion should animate humanity’s work, then the dominion that image-bearers have over creation is not merely kingly, but priestly—the cultural mandate is at once also a heavenly mandate, as that vertical relation with God determines how humans represent God on earth. Joshua Farris sums this up well: “As priests of creation, humanity has the function and privilege to assist the creation to realize and evidence its rational order and beauty and thus to express God’s beauty and being back to God.”11 The obedience to the word of God and Adam’s responsibility to convey that word to Eve and his progeny also testifies to humanity’s prophetic role.

2. Cultural Mandate, the Fall, and Common Grace

Despite the fall, humanity continues to cultivate creation organically and by nature, but the true religion that is meant to animate that work is no longer present. To use a neo-Calvinistic distinction, human structures continue to develop but the directions that animate them are no longer for God.12 Because human beings are made in the image of God, fallen image-bearers will continue unwittingly to represent him as they form families, farm and develop technology, raise shelter and inhabit cities, and so on. The fall, however, means that this earthly task is now divorced from the heavenly, and so we misuse and misunderstand our place in the created order, and dwell in cultures that are in principle against God. Further, the created order now resists that work, such that human labor is often difficult, fatiguing, and even seemingly futile, as the book of Ecclesiastes indicates.

The presence and development of culture presupposes that fallen image-bearers continue to retain some relative virtue, as culture-making requires a measure of peace, truth-telling, cooperation, trust, and so on. As such, the production of culture in the postlapsarian order is indicative of the presence of God’s common grace: his delayed judgment of sinners, his commitment to the goodness of creation and human work, and his refusal to give sinners over to their deepest impulses (Rom 1:24, 26, 28), and his gifting of epistemic, moral, and life-giving goods to sinful creatures. Bavinck refers to James 1:17 and describes the gifts of common grace as quite all-encompassing, including all human culture and the stability of the natural world:

For God did not abandon his creation after the entrance of sin, but in Christ redeemed and restored it. He has not only blessed it with special grace, but he has also extended his common grace over the whole of creation’s length and breadth: for the continued existence of the world and man; the glory of God’s name over the whole earth; the revelation of his eternal power and divinity in the works of his hands (Rom. 1:19); the labor of man and the fertility of woman (Gen. 3:19–20); the beginning of culture (Gen. 4:20–22); following the judgment of the flood, the Noahic covenant (Gen. 8:21–22); for the stability of the natural order (Gen. 8:22, Jer. 33:20, 25, etc.); the restoration of the blessing of creation (Gen. 9:1, 7); dominion over the animal world (Gen. 9:2); the prohibition against the murder of man (Gen. 9:5–6); for the spread of humanity over all the earth (Gen. 11:8, Deut. 32:8; Isa. 45:18; Acts 17:26); the fruitfulness of nature with food and the mirth of the heart (Matt. 5:45; Acts 14:16–17); and religion and morality (Rom. 1:19–20; 2:14–15). All these are due to common grace in connection and in service of special grace. In a word, “every good gift and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change (James 1:17).13

After the fall, common grace is the pre-condition for the stability of society, allowing for image-bearers to enjoy peace temporally with varying degrees, for them to perceive the moral order and the character of God that is requisite for that peace, to labor and make families, which form the seeds of culture, and to exercise proper cultivation over nature despite the consequences of the fall.

It helps, therefore, to see the cultural mandate as the objective side that corresponds to the proper dominion given to humanity as constitutive of who it is as an image-bearer. In other words, despite the fall, because human beings remain ontologically image-bearers, they continue to form families, labor, and thus culture. As Augustine argued, unregenerate sinners thus form fallen civilizations which form the earthly manifestation of the city of man, and this is the default situation of every person: “When these two cities began to run their course by a series of deaths and births, the citizen of this world was the first-born, and after him the stranger in this world, the citizen of the city of God, predestinated by grace, elected by grace, by grace a stranger below, and by grace a citizen above.”14 The citizen of the city of God, therefore, who lives her earthly life and labors under the principle of her heavenly citizenship, is made such by grace:

By grace, for so far as regards himself he is sprung from the same mass, all of which is condemned in its origin; but God, like a potter (for this comparison is introduced by the apostle judiciously, and not without thought), of the same lump made one vessel to honor, another to dishonor. But first the vessel to dishonor was made, and after it another to honor. For in each individual, as I have already said, there is first of all that which is reprobate, that from which we must begin, but in which we need not necessarily remain afterwards is that which is well approved, to which we may be advancing attain, and in which, when we have reached it, we may abide. Not indeed, that every wicked man shall be good, but that no one will be good who was not first of all wicked; but the sooner any one becomes a good man, the more speedily does he receive this title, and abolish the old name in the new.15

To put it in more Bavinckian parlance, by common grace, unregenerate culture is sustained, but by special grace, that is, the proclamation of the gospel, the sanctifying work of the Spirit, and the communion of the church, the elect are regenerated unto a new culture, and is thus animated by the vision of the kingdom of God.

3. Common Grace and Cultural Mandate: Complementary or Alternatives?

At this point, we do well to pause and consider a potential objection from a second-generation neo-Calvinist, Klaas Schilder. Schilder is often credited as the author who coined the term “cultural mandate” to refer to Adam’s vocation in the garden.16 Indeed, Schilder describes Adam as an office-bearer, “God’s fellow-worker,” whose cultural labors were so integrated with his worship of God such that it could be “immediately and constantly be called ‘liturgy’, i.e. ministry in and for the kingdom.”17 Like Herman and Johan Bavinck, Schilder also continues the emphasis that humans are to image God by way of making “productive the ‘possibilities’ that were put into the created world and that were later to be discovered by humanity and respected according to their ‘kind’—they would take out of the world all that it has in it.”18 He connects this creational imperative to Jesus’s parable of the talents (Matt 25:14–30), and the responsibility of the laborers to steward them well.

As laborers are called in the covenant of works to fill and multiply, they are advancing creation toward its telos:

When God created the world, this was God’s wise intent. It did not please him to create the world ready-made. He only created it good. The world, then, as it came forth from God’s hands, was a world-in-promise, a world-in-hope; and as long as it was good, this hope could not be called vain…. The world of Paradise was a beginning. And in the beginning was given, in principle, everything that had to be there potentially in order to let it develop into a completed world of perfect order, the polis, the civitas, the “city” (state) of God, as it was paradisally designed and would later be built.”19

This trajectory depicts a consummate world under the Lordship of God, and as such, it would be a mistake to wedge a separation between “culture” and “religion”—the earthly and heavenly, for the liturgical and the “secular” were one task.

The entrance of sin separates the work of culture from religion, and the trajectory of unity-in-diversity that would have characterized culture as humanity multiplies devolves into cacophony, because fallen individuals are motivated not by love of God and neighbor but of self. While culture should preserve a natural multiformity, “Satan makes use of these distinctions to bring about separation.”20 The moral law might restrain human rebellion, but left to themselves sinners would eradicate that law for the sake of autonomy.

Given all of these neo-Calvinistic and positive views on culture, then, it is perhaps surprising to see that Schilder explicitly rejects the doctrine of common grace, especially when one considers that common grace is usually the doctrine that Kuyper and Bavinck point to in order to ground an uncompromisingly theological engagement with culture post-fall.

Schilder objects to common grace for at least three reasons. Firstly, he argues that theologians mistakenly attribute to common grace what should properly be attributed to nature. The restraint of sin, and the enjoyment of culture and life-giving goods are intrinsic to nature and time. If humanity bears the image of God, and they are creatures of time, then they will naturally develop culture and enjoy its fruits:

Consequently, the fact that the gifts of creation blossom and expand is a matter not of grace but of nature. Within things and within people something is in motion. Since they are themselves in a state of becoming, of developing, there is in human beings the passionate urge of those who seek to wrest grain and wine from the developing earth, to be engaged in colere, to till the garden.21

The fall, then, does not mean that humans would cease to form culture—for they are time-bound and naturally culture-makers, and “continuation of time after the Fall.. is not grace.”22 Rather, the fall merely produces cultures that are no longer considered “religious labor,” but as acts “of egoism, of self-preservation, of zest for living … not service to God but self-service.”23

Secondly, Schilder argues that describing the enjoyment of culture post-fall as “grace” is a misnomer, for he argues that the postlapsarian situation could well be described as a period of common judgment—as the grace of regeneration is not poured out without limit. So, if the postlapsarian situation in general is “grace,” then it is as much “judgment”: “Whoever calls the restraining of the curse ‘grace’ should at least call the ‘restraining’ of the blessing ‘judgment.’”24 As such, it is unhelpful to call the universal condition of life after the fall a matter of “grace” or “judgment,” Schilder argues—they are uninformative at best and misleading at worst. It’s better, instead, simply to argue that sinners will continue to build culture, but a culture that is divorced from service of God.

The natural development of culture is thus not a matter of grace or judgment, but is the pre-condition of grace and judgment, the canvas on which the antithesis between regenerate and unregenerate is lived out, as it were. Grace refers to regeneration, and the regenerate will produce religious, God-directed culture. Judgment refers to the ungodly, as those under the curse who create cultures against God. Schilder adjudicates tersely: “there is no universal (or general) grace for all people. Therefore Abraham Kuyper’s construct was erroneous.”25

Finally, in a later chapter, Schilder distinguishes between common grace and the cultural mandate, preferring the latter over the former in order to motivate Christian cultural activity. In his judgment, “common grace” is an “anthropocentric” doctrine, for it focuses on what is permissible for Christians to partake in after the fall, and also on the remnants of goodness after sin.26 Instead, by focusing on a “common command” and a “common mandate,” one takes the point of departure from God, focusing on his intention in creation itself prior to the fall, thus motivating Christian activity without bestowing undue optimism toward non-Christian culture.27 In effect, Schilder is setting up the cultural mandate as an alternative to the doctrine of common grace.28

Schilder’s Christ and Culture is a penetrating biblical theology of culture, but his critique of common grace is unpersuasive, for his three arguments here overlook certain questions that the doctrine of common grace seeks to address. First, though we may grant that sinners will continue to build culture naturally, it is surely a matter of God’s general benevolence that sinners would continue to enjoy the fruits of their labor, will not be successful in their attempts at eradicating the moral law known in their hearts, and will, even in their tendency toward egoist self-preservation, relatively enjoy friendships with their neighbor. So long as this is the time of God’s patience (2 Pet 3:9), which delays the final judgment, and so long as God is not in wrath giving us “over” to our natural desires at every point (Rom 1:24, 26, 28), we are enjoying God’s active benevolence in gifting us with moral, epistemic, and life-giving goods such that a temporal, relative peace can be enjoyed.29 Common grace is thus juxtaposed not against nature but sin: it is that which grounds and accounts for the relative access that sinful humanity has with the true, good, and beautiful. “From the fall onward, human life and humanity itself is not simply grounded in the order of creation…. The fruit of common grace—being allowed to retain something of what we by nature possessed by Adam, is a gift of grace.”30

Second, though I agree that nature and culture form the backdrop for the antithesis, common grace addresses the question of why it is that, despite the antithesis, regenerate and unregenerate alike can still enjoy relative peace with one another. Surely, this is because the regenerate are not as sanctified as they could be (as we imperfectly obey God and still wrestle with the presence of sin), and it is because the unregenerate are not as evil as they could be, and often still exhibit virtue (albeit by borrowed capital, for “the Holy Spirit is the author of life, of every power and virtue”).31 In the last day, the antithesis will be eschatologically realized, such that the elect and non-elect will no longer inhabit the same culture together.32 In other words, while we can concede that nature is the canvas for the antithesis, common grace explains why it is that antithesis often exists merely in principle, and not in practice. Schilder himself articulates these emphases using different terms, as “common temperance,” and sunousia “a being together” that still characterizes elect and non-elect alike in the present redemptive-historical order.33 Hence, though he rejects “common grace” as a term, he still accepts it conceptually.

Far from downplaying the antithesis between belief and unbelief, then, common grace actually presupposes the antithesis, and does not make sense without it. Without the antithesis, common grace is a superfluous doctrine, hanging in the air, as it were. As Kuyper argued, common grace corresponds to the Reformed emphasis on the radical doctrine of sin that Calvinism has taught:

If we see in sin a cause of spiritual and physical weakening, but not a deadly quick-acting poison that if unrestrained immediately leads to spiritual, temporal, and eternal death, then there is certainly no restraining of sin—a conclusion to which Calvin was the first to point, and on which the entire doctrine of common grace is built. This is why the Reformed confession has continuously placed full emphasis on the deadly character of sin and has seriously combated any weakening of the concept of sin.34

Indeed, the doctrine of common grace allows Kuyper to (1) sketch a world-and-life-view that pushes the church outward to participate within every sphere of life (2) without compromising the radical confession that the unregenerate world is totally depraved apart from grace.35 Thus, I suggest that common grace and the cultural mandate ought not to be seen as alternatives but as complementary: common grace is the ground for the possibility of the cultural mandate, and the reason why Christian and non-Christian culture can co-exist relatively before the final judgment. Further, common grace is not anthropocentric, nor does it give undue optimism toward non-Christian culture. Rather, given that common grace presupposes the antithesis and the radical depravity of the sinner, the doctrine highlights that unbelieving cultures always live on borrowed capital, as it is the Spirit of God himself that enables them to enjoy gifts, truth, and goodness—the very Spirit of God that unbelieving cultures deny.

4. The Gospel and the Cultural Mandate

Schilder’s warning recognizes that cultural activity in itself, if divorced from God, is not pleasing to God and thus could not be considered an end in itself. To love the world and worldly culture as an end is to misplace it as an idol. To have the right order of loves means that God must come first. “So this world is nowadays destroyed not by sports, the cinema, etc., but by their being isolated as goods in themselves.”36 Thus, Schilder recognizes that cultural engagement that matters must be mediated and subordinated by the preaching of the Gospel, that is, by the church’s evangelism and her obedience to the great commission. Two points are worth reflecting on here: (a) the centrality of the Gospel as grace restores nature and (b) the resurrection as a witness to the death and restoration of the cosmos, such that the consummation of creation after the fall requires not an incremental and linear advancement toward the eschaton by way of Christian labor, but a judgment and apocalyptic act of God that resurrects and purifies creatures and creation.

First, then, made alive in Jesus through the word of God, sinners are called to put on their new nature, which is patterned after the image of God (Col 3:10; Eph 4:24). In other words, the great commission is the means by which the narrow image of God is restored to humanity, as sinners receive renewed knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. The grace of regeneration that accompanies the preaching of the gospel to sinners reconciles them to God as they place their faith in Jesus Christ. By justification, they can approach God as they are considered righteous, and by the sanctification of the Spirit, they are given the qualities necessary to redirect their culture-making efforts to God, as they, in principle, are now able to accept and act on the moral law.

Before the fall, the multiplying and dispersal of the image of God was a natural process by way of pro-creation and culture-making. After the fall, pro-creation multiplies the image of God in the broad sense, but the preaching of the Gospel is necessary to multiply the image of God in the narrow sense—and that narrow sense is precisely the qualities of right knowledge, righteousness, and holiness necessary for God-glorifying cultures to exist: cultures exhibited by godliness and submission to the kingship of Christ, love of neighbor, and proper cultivation of creation. Indeed, Christ comes as the second Adam so that post-fall humanity could once again “fulfill this original service of God and, by rights as well as in fact, to give back to God his world and his work-community” by appeasing the divine wrath, reconciling God’s people back to God, giving them eternal life, and judge the world such that it would become consummate under his kingship.37 Schilder’s reference to the “work-community” also signals the importance of the institutional church for culture-making, as the church is the mother of all believers and is the means by which the Spirit disciples and nurture God’s children.

Bavinck argues that the second commandment entails a positive imperative to look to Christ and his image bearers, in creation and redemption. Indeed, we ought not raise and venerate images of God, because we are created in his image, and as we imitate the humanity of Christ as the second Adam, we advance in conformity to the image of God:

Therefore, God says: You will find no image of me in any creature; that would dishonor me. But if you want to image, take a look at Adam, at human beings, who are created in my likeness. Above all, look at the Son, the image of the Invisible God, God’s One and Only Firstborn, God’s other I, the expression of his self-sufficiency. Whoever sees him sees the Father. As Christ is, so is God. He is the perfect likeness, the adequate Image. Let us be satisfied with that. God may be venerated with no other image than the Son. Beholding him and venerating him, we are changed into his likeness (2 Cor. 3:18). God wants, as it were, to multiply images of himself, to see nothing but images, likenesses, portraits of himself. Human beings themselves must be god’s image, and not make pieces of wood or stone into God’s image. The new humanity in Christ, from all sides and everyone in their own way, reflects and mirrors God. God is mirrored in us; we are mirrored in God. “When [Christ] appears, we shall be like him [and like the Father] because we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2). God makes images of himself in us. But not we of God. God photographs himself.38

In short: we are not to form images of God because we are the ones who are called to represent God on earth. Without the grace of sanctification which conforms us to Christ, however, that representation is distorted and broken, as we choose to worship idols and tend to resemble and image those idols instead of God. The great commission, therefore, does not negate the cultural mandate, but is rather the necessary means by which we fulfill it. Only as we are transformed by the Gospel could we again image and represent God properly:

the kingdom of heaven, while a pearl of grace price is also a leaven which permeates the whole of the meal; godliness is profitable unto all things…. The gospel gives us a standard by which we can judge phenomena and events; it is an absolute measure which enables us to determine the value of the present life; it is a guide to show us the way in the labyrinth of the present world; it raises us above time and teaches us to view all things from the standpoint of eternity … it is opposed to nothing that is pure and good and lovely. It condemns sin always and everywhere; but it cherishes marriage and family, society and the state, nature and history, science and art.39

Second, however, our culture-making now does not advance the kingdom of God incrementally, as if that kingdom is established by human hands. Rather, because the whole world is living under the curse of God and is tainted by sin, the world needs to be created and consummated anew by God himself. The resurrection sets the pattern for the rest of the world:

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Rom 8:20–21).

As death is the path toward glorified consummation, so would creation be consumed and purified by fire, only to emerge as a new, perfected cosmos (2 Pet 3:11–13). That world is not a replacement of this world but is a consummation, but it’s a consummation by way of divine intervention, death and resurrection, not by way of progressive human advancement or Christian cultural cultivation. Bavinck sums this up well: “The resurrection is the fundamental restoration of all culture.”40

Hence, because divine intervention alone, in the work of final judgment and re-creation, can bring about that new world, Christian culture-making today is not an advancement of the kingdom of God physically and temporally, for the kingdom of God is not of this world, that is, not achieved from the ground-up but from the top-down. As renewed image-bearers cultivate culture and love their neighbors, then, they are merely witnessing to the direction of the next world, and it is a merely veiled witness to a world that does not welcome it. We are promised not linear success but persecution and resistance. The neo-Calvinistic teachings on the cultural mandate that I outlined above thus does not lead to transformationalism with a triumphalist tinge, but rather to a kind of chastened transformational witness, as Christianity leavens families and cultures just as grace restores nature.41 As Kuyper himself argued, it is not as if our cultural efforts will survive the final judgment and be transposed to the new world in a univocal fashion; rather all we can hope for is that they would provide some seed, some faint witness, to the new world order.42

Herman Bavinck reminds Christians that this hope for the final consummation of culture ought not eclipse the Christian’s ultimate hope and desire: to behold God and to dwell in his presence through Jesus Christ. Christ is not a mere restorer of culture, but he is the pinnacle of culture himself, as the federal head of all of renewed humanity, he brings it before the face of God:

He created all things, reconciled all things, and renews all things. Because all things have in him their source, their being, and their unity, he also gathers in one all things under himself as Head, both those which are in heaven and those on earth. He is Prophet and Priest but also King, who does not cease his work until he has delivered the kingdom perfect and complete to God the Father.43

In Bavinck's perspective, Christian cultural labor is thus not a triumphalistic act but a hopeful one. Christian cultural labor is a sign that points to what God alone will bring about in the last day. A chastened transformational witness allows believers to be patient when the world resists that witness, and affords believers with the theological vision necessary to resist despair, persevere, and set their eyes to the coming king.

---

[1] Cory Brock and N. Gray Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2023); Nathaniel Gray Sutanto and Cory Brock, eds., T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism (London: T&T Clark, 2024).

[2] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 577.

[3] See Nathaniel Sutanto, “Herman Bavinck on the Image of God and Original Sin,” IJST 18 (2016): 174–90; Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, “Egocentricity, Organism, and Metaphysics: Sin and Renewal in Bavinck’s Ethics,” Studies in Christian Ethics 34 (2021): 223–40.

[4] Irwyn Ince, The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity, and the Church at Its Best (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 57.

[5] This aspect is recognized well by the vocational perspective on the image of God in contemporary theology. Cf. Lucy Peppiatt, The Imago Dei: Humanity Made in the Image of God (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2022), 27–45.

[6] William Edgar, Created and Creating: A Biblical Theology of Culture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), 168. Bavinck says it this way: “And this dominion of the earth includes not only the most ancient callings of men, such as hunting and fishing, agriculture and stock-raising, but also the trade and commerce, finance and credit, the exploitation of mines and mountains, science and art.” Wonderful Works of God, trans. Henry Zylstra (Glenside, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 2019), 189.

[7] J. H. Bavinck, Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision, trans. Bert Hielema (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 29–30. Emphasis original.

[8] Henry R. van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: P&R Publishing, 1972), 7. Emphasis mine.

[9] Bavinck, Wonderful Works of God, 169. As Francis Turretin tersely puts it, “Man was made by God to acknowledge and worship his Creator and to exercise dominion over the other creatures.” Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 1, First through Tenth Topics, ed. James T. Dennison, trans. George Musgrave Giger (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1992), 468.

[10] Bavinck, Wonderful Works of God, 169.

[11] Joshua Ryan Farris, An Introduction To Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), 196.

[12] See Herman Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation: A New Annotated Edition, eds. Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Academic, 2018), 201; Al Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

[13] Herman Bavinck, Guidebook for the Instruction in the Christian Religion, trans. Cameron Clausing and Gregory Parker Jr. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2022), 25.

[14] Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1993), 15.1.

[15] Augustine, City of God 15.1.

[16] Klaas Schilder, Christ and Culture, trans. Williem Helder and Albert H. Oosterhoff (Hamilton, ON: Lucerna, 2016), 78. Although, as we saw, Herman Bavinck has already spoken of a “mandate” given to Adam in Genesis, to have dominion and to obtain heaven. In another place, Bavinck argued “The Reformation restores to culture its freedom and independence. The right of cultures is expressed in the mandate [in Gen 1:28]…. Culture exists because God bestowed on us the power to exercise rule over the earth.” “The Kingdom of God, the Highest Good,” trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman, The Bavinck Review 2 (2011): 161. For more on Schilder, see Marinus de Jong, “The Church is the Means, the World is the End: The Development of Klaas Schilder’s Thought on the Relationship Between the Church and the World” (PhD thesis, Kampen Theological University, 2019), and Marinus de Jong, "Klaas Schilder" in Nathaniel Gray Sutanto and Cory Brock (eds.), T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2024), 223-35.

[17] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 59–60.

[18] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 68. See also p. 77.

[19] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 74–75.

[20] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 82.

[21] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 89.

[22] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 90.

[23] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 89.

[24] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 88. There is also the important issue of whether, argues Schilder, God can be considered wrathful and gracious simultaneously toward non-elect sinners.

[25] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 92. Hence, Jochem Douma observes that for Schilder “Only when something promotes eternal salvation can we truly speak of grace.” Common Grace in Kuyper, Schilder, and Calvin: Exposition, Composition, and Evaluation, trans. Albert H. Oosterhoff, ed. William Helder (Hamilton, ON: Lucerna 2017), xi.

[26] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 145.

[27] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 145.

[28] In a milder earlier treatment, Schilder posits the alternatives this way: “it is better to choose one’s position, one’s point of view in the discussion [of Christian engagement with culture], not in the idea of common grace, but in the Reformed idea of office.” Klaas Schilder, “Culture and Common Grace,” in The Klaas Schilder Reader: The Essential Theological Writings, ed. George Harinck, Marinus de Jong, and Richard Mouw, trans. Albert Gootjes and Albert Oosterhoff (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2022), 151. Emphasis original.

[29] For more on common grace in Kuyper and Bavinck, see Brock and Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism, ch. 8.

[30] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, vol. 1: Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity, ed. and trans. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 149.

[31] Herman Bavinck, “Common Grace,” trans. Raymond van Leeuwen, CTJ 24 (1989): 41.

[32] In an earlier essay, Schilder noted that he did not reject common grace in itself, but that, on the question of Christian engagement with culture, common grace was the wrong doctrine from which to “take our point of departure.” “Culture and Common Grace,” 152.

[33] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 109–12.

[34] Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World, vol. 1: The Historical Section, eds. Jordan Ballor and Stephen Grabill, trans Nelson D. Kloosterman and Ed M. van der Maas (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2016), 299–300.

[35] This line is drawn from Brock and Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism, 25.

[36] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 119.

[37] Schilder, Christ and Culture, 62.

[38] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, vol. 2: The Duties of the Christian Life, trans. and ed. John Bolt, Jessica Joustra, Nelson D. Kloosterman, Antoine Theron, and Dirk van Keulen (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022), 174–5. Emphasis original. For Bavinck’s Christological doctrine of the beatific vision, see Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, “Herman Bavinck on the Beatific Vision,” IJST (Online First: 2022): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1111/ijst.12610.

[39] Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 211–12.

[40] Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 211.

[41] For the ways in which the entrance of Christianity in the second century leavened Greco-Roman culture, see Larry Hurtado, The Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017).

[42] See Brock and Sutanto, Neo-Calvinism, ch. 6.

[43] Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation, 241. My thanks to Michael Allen, Marinus de Jong, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and engagement with an earlier draft.