If you have ever traveled to a foreign country whose culture is far different from our own, you may have thought that religion played a big part in the country’s culture. One spring my former church had a missionary emphasis week, and we housed one of the missionaries from Japan. This man loved the outdoors, but he refrained himself from venturing too far, and for too long in the beautiful outdoors in America while on furlough here. When I inquired into his reasoning, he informed me that in Japan, one cannot go into any part of the outdoors, on a hike, mountain climbing, etc. without running into pagan idolatry, i.e. some statue of Buddha. The idolatry is everywhere, and it stifles the pleasure from enjoying God’s pristine creation. So while in America, this man kept himself from enjoying too much the great outdoors of America, lest he be tempted not to go back to the field to which God had called him. The culture of Japan, which extended into every corridor of the outdoors, was discouraging to this man because of the perversion of their religion.

We often think that a people’s religion is a part of their culture, but that is wrong thinking. When we think like that, it makes religion a subset, or a particular part of the cultural whole. And while religion and culture are inseparable from each other, religion is not a part of culture, culture is the outward expression of one’s religion.

In fact, man’s service to God, which we call religion, finds expression in cultural activity, and this cultural activity expresses one’s religious faith. The idea that there exists a secular realm separate from the sacred is a false one. Secularism believes there are aspects of life that can be maintained apart from one’s religion, but this false dichotomy cannot be maintained. There is no such thing as neutrality. A man’s religion is the spring head from which all of life, thought, and activity flow.

As Henry VanTill said, “The total character of man’s religion, then determines his cultus [worship] and culture. Thus man’s morality and economics, his jurisprudence and his aesthetics, are all religiously oriented and determined. This is why apostasy produces, not only a false religion, but also a false culture, namely a culture that does not seek God and serve Him as the highest good.” Every culture is animated by religion.

T. S. Eliot once said, “However, bigoted the announcement may sound, the Christian cannot be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organization of society . . . which is not the same thing as a society consisting exclusively of devout Christians.” This is very much the mind of the founding fathers of America. While they were not all Christians, they sought to establish a unified religious social code of behavior and education that was directed by a Christian worldview. In other words, they did not compel people to become Christian, for that work is the work of God, but they did seek to establish the culture of society that was governed by Christian ideals and principles.

Van Til provides an apt summary, “It is folly for God’s people to think that they can live in two separate worlds, one for their religious life and devotional exercises, and the other usurping all other time, energy, money – an area in which the priests of secularism are calling the numbers. One cannot keep on evangelizing the world without interfering with the world’s culture. It devolves upon God’s people, therefore, to contend for such a ‘condition of society which will give the maximum of opportunity for us to lead wholly Christian lives and the maximum of opportunity for others to become Christians.’ To divide life into areas of sacred and secular, letting our devotions take care of the former while becoming secular reformers during the week, is to fail to understand the true end of man.”

God made man a social being. The only time when God looked upon His creative work in those six days and declared that “it was not good” was when man was alone. He then made woman and put the two together to multiply and fill the earth. God’s creation of male and female, as creatures of communion, was in the likeness of God Himself.

God Himself is a social Being. Long before the world ever was, the three Persons of the Trinity enjoyed fellowship One with Another. The Father loved the Son, the Son sang the praises of the Father, and the Spirit enjoyed the communion of the other two. The three persons of the Godhead were in intimate, joyful, communion with each Other. While we see clear evidences of this Trinitarian interaction in redemptive history (e.g. John 5:20; Hebrews 2:12; John 16:13-14), this communion was, and always will be eternally true.

Mankind, being made in the likeness of God, is a social creature. It is against God’s creative purposes and against His “image in man” for man to seclude himself as a hermit away from others. Yet in the post-modern world in which we live today, man often thinks of himself, in Soren Kierkegaard’s words, as “The Individual.” While we may not live in monasteries away from civilization, we have all too much individualism flowing through our veins. Individualism is an old, old, sin. It is really about self-autonomy and independence from all others – including God. This was the first sin in the garden. Man desired to be like God (Genesis 3:5) and acted in an autonomous fashion not considering the divine restraints that God had put on the man. The very root of man’s sinful nature is self-autonomy, and since the falls this is the spirit that prevails. This spirit stands against God’s covenantal framework and yields a degenerate culture (cf. Babel).

I will reiterate Henry Van Til from yesterday’s post, “Culture is a social enterprise; it is not achieved in isolation, but through the interaction and cooperation of men in communion.” For Christian culture to be productive with the gospel in advancing the kingdom, it must be founded on God’s principles of the covenant. Covenantal living is contrary to “The Individual.” Covenantal living is social. It is cultural. It is godly (like God). God is a covenant God, and covenantalism and individualism are antithetical ideas.

Today’s blog was pulled from Henry Van Til’s book The Calvinistic Concept of Culture. It was so good, and fundamental, I thought I would try pass along a summary of some of his thoughts. To be clear, the content is Van Til’s and not mine. I have added a closing comment at the end.

Culture is a social enterprise; it is not achieved in isolation, but through the interaction and cooperation of men in communion. Of course, it is possible for some lone Robinson Crusoe to fashion things and have a form of civilized life, but he was able to set up shop because of his past cultural training and the many cultural objects salvaged from the shipwreck.

Culture, then, takes in the whole man, not merely as an individual, but as member of the human organism, and therefore, in various relationships to other men, and in different institutions that are thus called into existence, the institution of home, of society, with its relationships between employer and employee, capital and labor, commerce and industry, education and science, politics and government.

Culture is human and social, and therefore, as individuals within the cultural stream, we are formed by it. Culture is the secondary environment by which we are formed, and it is inescapable. This is involved in the fact that culture and social existence are inseparable. Culture influences the individual through custom, which is the social aspect of habit. However, no man is totally determined by custom in his culture, since he is himself a moral agent, able to act and to form the culture, to impregnate it with new ideas and ideals, and to reinvigorate its languishing spirit. Furthermore, the variety of cultural patterns is not merely a reflection of the varying times and climes but also of man’s freedom as cultural agent and subject.

Culture is never neutral, but it must be patent to all that culture is concerned with ends. Culture is concerned with the world of values, and all cultures are irreducibly value-oriented. For by culture, we do not merely understand the historical action of man and his moulding power in subduing the earth and bringing it to the fullest fruition, but culture also comes to expression in definite patterns of life which portrays certain ideals.

We may say that apostate culture in all its forms is concerned with the temporal and material realization of values. Man seeks to realize in this world that which is good for himself as a being within time. He transforms nature, he uses animals and cultural objects not merely to satisfy his basic needs, but also to impress his idea and ideals upon matter.

Biblically, however, culture is the fulfillment of purposive moulding of nature in execution of the creative will of God. Man as cultural creature is an analogue of the great Architect and Artist of the universe. Man as creature, therefore, is co-worker with God in bringing creation to its fulfillment. He is not, of course, a collaborator, but neither is he a blind fool. Man is an instrument who is conscious of what he is doing. But due to the fall of man into sin, he is no longer willing to admit the claims of his Creator or to serve God.

Culture is a gift of God to man as well as an obligation. The cultural urge, the will to rule and to have power is increated. This is not demonic, or satanic, but divine in its origin. True, men may misuse and abuse power after the entrance of sin into the world, but to say that all absolute power corrupts absolutely is not wisdom but folly and confusion. For power belongs to man by virtue of his creation as a cultural creature. He was made to function in the realm of power and to develop his power to its highest potency – for God, of course! There’s the rub! Men continually forget the divine original in Paradise and take the condition of Paradise lost for granted as being normative.

It may be observed that when the works of man lose their ultimate goal, they don not lose their cultural character, but they may be designated as apostate culture, since the true direction of man’s labor under the sun has been lost. Through sin man has lost the love and motivation to execute the creative will of God, and therefore, culture has been perverted. Instead of serving God, he now serves himself. Yet God is working, in Christ, to reconcile all things, including culture, to Himself. Culture then, in the words of T.S. Elliot is “lived religion” and this is being restored in Christ.

End of Van Til, now I will add my closing comment. I hope you can see where this is going. This talk on culture puts the entire gospel and Christian life into perspective. It reveals how we are to live all of life to the glory of God – no exceptions. If we understand the dominion mandate, the fall, the antithesis, and the redemptive work of Christ, we should understand that the Church itself becomes a counter-culture to the world’s fallen culture. If the Church is not a culture in antithesis with the world’s where then will be the salt and light. How then we make sense of this will and apply it to our lives will be the topic of future posts.

Part 1
Culture is not a part of one’s religion, as such, but is the very incarnation of one’s religion. It is never an end unto itself, but an expression of one’s faith in God. There are atheistic cultures, and heathen cultures, and Christian cultures. Culture, however, is not neutral. It expresses the values, principles, and way of life in what a people truly believe. So said again, it is a means of expressing one’s religious faith.

Henry VanTil said it this way, “culture is any and all human effort and labor expended upon the cosmos, to unearth its treasures and its riches and bring them into the service of man for the enrichment of human existence to the glory of God. As such it is always a human enterprise.” Remember that culture began as “tending the garden of God,” and spreads its endeavor from there.

Culture is an aspect of man’s dominion mandate as image-bearer of God, and is distinguished from animal instincts and nature. Neither man nor culture evolved, but was God’s design for man whom He created from the beginning. Animal instincts remain unchanged from generation to generation, but man, in making history, develops his work and himself in that work (Van Til). The bee has been stinging its victims in the same way for thousands of years, but a surgeon improves his methods and tools from age to age. Birds build their nest from instinct, but man has developed and changed his building materials and methods from primitive living huts to architectural marvels.

Nature is also different from culture. A river is natural, a canal is cultural. A horse is natural, a Tennessee Walker is cultural. Grapes are natural, wine is cultural. Wheat is natural, bread is cultural. Speech is natural, a Shakespeare drama is cultural. You get the idea by now – culture is a human enterprise that requires ingenuity and work.

Culture is such a part of man’s design and being that God emphasizes it in Psalm 104 in the way He provides sustenance for man in clear distinction from the rest of nature. While the Psalm indicates that God provides food directly for His plants and animals, it states that He provides work for man (from which he gets his sustenance).

“He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth; And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart. . . . Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.” (Psalm 104:14-15, 23).

Wine, oil, and bread are all a part of man’s cultural endeavor made for our enjoyment, and that which requires his work, whereas a cow just walks around chewing his boring ole cud. Our culture also becomes the means by which we live. If a man isn’t willing to work, neither should he eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10). Culture and life are inseparable.