Cultural Transformation

Greg Gilbert’s new book What is the Gospel is very good, calling for a clear understanding of the gospel. Such bricks as this are stacked all over the place: “It’s become fashionable lately to present the gospel by saying that Jesus came to save humanity from an innate sense of guilt or meaninglessness or purposelessness or emptiness. Now of course those things really are problems, and many people feel them deeply. But the Bible teaches that humanity’s fundamental problem–the thing from which we need to be saved–is not meaninglessness or disintegration in our lives, or even a debilitating sense of guilt. Those are merely symptoms of a deeper and much more profound problem: our sin. What we must understand is that the predicament we’re in is a predicament of our own making. We have disobeyed God’s word. We have ignored his commands. We have sinned against him” (p. 51).

Gilbert makes helpful distinctions like this, seeing the centrality of faith in Jesus for putting anything and everything right. He comes to the topic of cultural transformation with reservations, some of which I share and others I’d like to challenge. “[Cultural transformation] is a noble goal, and I also think that the effort to resist evil in society, whether personal or systemic, is a biblical one” (p. 107).  What Gilbert objects to is the mandate to “redeem the culture”, “not convinced that Scripture places efforts at cultural transformation in quite the position of priority that many transformationalists call for” (p. 108). He says this is because he doesn’t think the cultural mandate was given to God’s people but to humanity as a whole. The obvious question is “Aren’t God’s people part of humanity, and therefore called to obey the cultural mandate?” Perhaps, but his convictions about the direction of the world trump this obedience: “I also don’t think the general trajectory of human culture, either in Scripture or in history, is in a godward direction; instead, I think the trajectory of human culture on the whole, though not in every particular, is judgment-ward (see Revelation 17-19)” (p. 108). Premillennial eschatology trumps the cultural mandate. Given his assumptions, this is understandable. Why would you polish brass on a sinking ship? Why would God instruct us to steward a world that is going toward demolition and judgment? Now what if evangelicals were consistent with this, which is to say, what if they really believed it? Instead of doing commercials with eco-liberals encouraging us to recycle and be sustainable, why doesn’t Pat Robertson encourage people to do whatever they want with the earth because it’s all going to burn anyway? That would be refreshing.

The fact that God did tell us to steward and take dominion over the world should cause us to reject any doctrines of the last things that makes obedience to this command a waste of time. “So I think the optimism of many transformationalists about the possibility of “changing the world” is misleading and therefore will prove discouraging.” Gilbert admits that it’s possible to be a committed transformationalist and keep the gospel at the center: “After all, it is the forgiven and redeemed people of God whom he would use to accomplish the transformation, and forgiveness and redemption take place place only through the cross.” So what he is really saying is that he doesn’t believe the cross will save enough people to actually have a transforming impact on culture. I share his concern for swapping out the effect for the cause, and I’m wary of all blue-sky johnnies who want resurrection without death. The social gospel is a damnable heresy and not the one Abraham believed when he saw all nations, included in which are cultures, being blessed: “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith” (Gal. 3:8-9). Abraham didn’t see the nations being blessed by trusting in the fact that they somehow would be. He trusted God, and this is what God said He would do through Abraham’s seed. It was God’s idea to bless the nations, and Abraham believed Him.

Cultural transformation is what happens when a lot of people trust in Christ and live like it. This obedience can be overstressed if it is done so in isolation to gospel rather than as the result of it. But when it is connected to it as it ought to be, unbelievers see the work of of Christ in believers lives, the unity and love those believers enjoy, they see the gospel lived out, and by God’s grace they believe. This is true cultural transformation, one that that derives from faith in Christ and spreads that same faith, just as Abraham saw afar off.

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