Genesis 1 was where it all began: culture, not nature, was what elohim created in the beginning – or at least that’s the paradoxical conclusion of our exegesis. Traditional interpretations of Genesis 1 reach a dramatically different conclusion, of course. In the beginning God creates nature. Man doesn’t start creating culture until after the Fall, when God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden. That makes culture at best a necessary adaptation to a corrupted world, at worst a direct manifestation of corrupted human nature. Man builds culture to compensate for his separation from God and from paradise: is it any wonder that culture becomes a mechanism of self-sufficiency and a source of pride? The Tower of Babel becomes paradigmatic for this kind of cultural striving:
Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words… And they said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” And Yahweh came down to see the city, and the tower which the sons of men had built. And Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. (Genesis 11:1-8)
Historically Christian theologians have maintained a scrupulous ambivalence regarding human cultural accomplishment. Here’s Augustine in The City of God:
[H]as not the genius of man invented and applied countless astonishing arts, partly the result of necessity, partly the result of exuberant invention, so that this vigor of mind, which is so active in the discovery not merely of superfluous but even of dangerous and destructive things, betokens an inexhaustible wealth in the nature which can invent, learn, or employ such arts? What wonderful – one might say stupefying – advances has human industry made in the arts of weaving and building, of agriculture and navigation! With what endless variety are designs in pottery, painting, and sculpture produced, and with what skill executed! What wonderful spectacles are exhibited in the theatres, which those who have not seen them cannot credit! How skillful the contrivances for catching, killing, or taming wild beasts! And for the injury of men, also, how many kinds of poisons, weapons, engines of destruction, have been invented, while for the preservation or restoration of health the appliances and remedies are infinite! To provoke appetite and please the palate, what a variety of seasonings have been concocted! To express and gain entrance for thoughts, what a multitude and variety of signs there are, among which speaking and writing hold the first place! what ornaments has eloquence at command to delight the mind! what wealth of song is there to captivate the ear! how many musical instruments and strains of harmony have been devised! What skill has been attained in measures and numbers! with what sagacity have the movements and connections of the stars been discovered! Who could tell the thought that has been spent upon nature, even though, despairing of recounting it in detail, he endeavored only to give a general view of it? In fine, even the defence of errors and misapprehensions, which has illustrated the genius of heretics and philosophers, cannot be sufficiently declared. For at present it is the nature of the human mind which adorns this mortal life which we are extolling, and not the faith and the way of truth which lead to immortality.
If human culture is the cause of the earth’s corruption, then what happens when God redeems the world and removes that corruption? Do we look forward to a purified human culture? Jesus contrasted the kingdom of God with “the world,” by which he seemed to implicate the political, economic, and societal endeavors that we think of as human culture. First Israel and then the church foreshadowed the ever-coming kingdom, imperfectly rehearsing the restoration of perfect fellowship among the pure of heart. Either gradually or apocalyptically the world would be overthrown and the kingdom of God established on earth. For high-medieval Europe the kingdom and the world seemed one and the same. The Reformers exposed the worldly corruptions of the church, restoring the separation between the two domains. Despite the cultural upsurge that lifted the Protestant West to world dominance, Reformation theology and practice emphasized neither innovation nor contribution to secular culture. Through sin man lost his innocence, and fallen man has been progressively corrupting the world ever since.
Evangelical Protestantism inherited the Reformation tendency to renounce human innovation and its fruits, the desire to reverse the course of human cultural history. In practice the evangelical church functions as a kind of “alternate reality” operating in parallel with the world. The kingdom comes not by purifying human culture but by replacing it with church culture. For religious liberals the world and the kingdom were gradually and progressively coming back together. Fundamentalists split themselves off again, living in cultural isolation from the world, though later they would begin trying to superimpose their version of the kingdom politically on the world.
What about the post-evangelicals: are they prepared to extend the spirit of renewal to the world outside the church? They may reach out to the world evangelistically; they may protest corruptions and excesses of the world; they may engage the world counterculturally in ecological interventions or performance art installations or aid to the disenfranchised. But the post-evangelical church does not typically envision itself as working toward a reformation of human culture. The post-evangelicals discount the hard-headed empiricism, the individual autonomy and the “cult of progress” that collectively define modernism — a modernism that arguably began with Calvin and the Reformers. Perhaps the most prevalent post-evangelical vision of the future is that God will restore everything – human nature, human society, the natural world, fellowship with God – to its pre-Fall pristine condition. The spirit of renewal means stripping away undesirable cultural accretions that have accumulated over the centuries, thereby restoring the world and mankind to its original virtuous state. Echoes of this sort of restorative theology reverberate through the back-to-nature utopianism of Rousseau and the romantics; it continues to be heard in the postmodern reaction against the technological dystopia of modernity.
If God completed his good Creation long ago, if since then man hasn’t added anything to the Creation, if man has done nothing but detract from the Creation’s original goodness – then what happens after the renewal is accomplished? It’s not clear what a renewed humanity can find to do with itself in a restored paradise.
