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 it is their intention 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 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.

The "good news" is  the redemption of call creation and humanity. We were made material beings for the exercise of 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 talk 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 sorely need to get a better grip on the centrality of the creation mandate.

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