Christ and Culture

"Christ and culture" -- this theme has occupied the minds of many as long as Christianity has had a place in this world. Rather, it did so already many centuries before. For the name "Christ" is nothing but a translation of the word "Messiah." Even during the days of the Old Testament, when the Messiah was still expected, men thought, struggled, and prophesied about as well as rebelled against the "Messiah" (Christ) and "culture." If what we are about to write is true, then this age-old theme will continue to strain the attention in joy as well as in sorrow until the end of time: The complete solution also of this problem will not be reached in the course of time but is reserved for the day that will put an end to time. It will not be obtained in the way of evolution but along that of the catastrophic parousia of Christ Himself. Therefore the great joy and the deep sorrow about the final outcome of the struggle concerning Christ and culture can be expected at the end of the ages. Here one utters two heavily charged words: heaven -- and hell.

The above already makes it clear that the theme which we are broaching here must not be inserted in the list of subjects that the hasty heathen takes into his sphere of interest before and the careful Christian only after the academic discussion thereof. The problem of the relation between Christ and culture immediately concerns the fundamental questions of Christian thought and action. Therefore a Christian must continually contend with it. The one who does not touch it neglects his direct calling. The definition of a Christian's life-task as it is given in Lord's Day 12 of the Heidelberg Catechism and in which a Christian is considered as a prophet, a priest, and a king, is so ample and comprehensive that the matter of the relation between Christ (and the Christian) on the one hand, and cultural life on the other, is under discussion as soon as the question is raised how the pertinent words in this section of the Catechism must be interpreted. For this reason in particular, a confessing Christian is not allowed, before entering into the cultural struggle, to wait quietly (ad calendas graecas) for academic resolutions regarding the cultural problem. Neither has he permission to wait for what is more and more becoming their substitute, the resolutions or conclusions of a conference.

Why is this problem such a difficult one? Many things could be said in explanation. We shall mention a few points only.

a. One of the main reasons is that the opinions so widely diverge. Not only in what we sometimes too abstractly call the world, but also in what -- again we must say, often in too abstract a way -- is called the church, we see the struggle between opinions that are very much each other's opposites. There is nothing unusual in this. Those who really adhere to the authentic philosophy of pure materialism will have a view of culture that completely differs from that of people who think along the lines of metaphysical universalism. Those who think that history is linear set up a construction that is completely different from that of the man who sees history as a cycle. The theist and the pantheist are one another's opponents, also in their conception and appreciation of culture. A Lutheran's evaluation -- if only he is loyal to Martin Luther -- will differ from that of a Calvinist; that of a pessimist is not the same as that of an optimist. A Platonist differs from an Aristotelian, a Spinozist from a Cartesian, a Kantian from a pupil of Fichte. Even among the Romantics, Goethe does not agree with Novalis, nor Schleiermacher with the Schlegel brothers. We did not even mention Bismarck and Rosenberg, Otto and Walt Whitman, or the Buddhist of one sect or another. The differences which divide the philosophers will influence the theologians and the ordinary church members. It is only a dream if someone believes that "the cultural idea" is a sort of master key opening the door to the conference hall that offers a peaceful reception to cultural congresses. It will be war there -- that is to say, it the participants in the conference have their wits about them, which unfortunately is unusual.

b. A second factor, then, is that time and again the problem itself is given new solutions which -- even within the same period -- contradict each other. Or that it takes the shape of theoretical foundations. All this happens in as well as outside the church. Both concepts, "Christianity" as well as "culture," are thus frequently created, fixed, and used in different senses. Consequently the problem of "Christianity and culture" is in the (as we shall see later on: incorrect) opinion of many people -- wittingly or unwittingly -- narrowed down to a problem of "religion and culture," or of "nature" and "grace," which are then repeatedly considered as two separate territories. Indeed, the word "territory" is easy to handle. However, it is mostly used in a too strongly geographical, not to say, mathematical sense. And mathematical concepts (such as e.g. a point, a line, a plane, a "territory") do not find their correlative equivalents in reality. Besides, one may perceive that even then many questions appear one after another.

d. One has only to consider how those who call themselves church, broken adrift from the contents of the Confession of Faith, speak about the Christ. What is Christianity? Who is Jesus Christ? What is the historical position of this Jesus in the world and His significance for historical life? Does He have any influence at all on our historical life with its continuous relations? Is He indeed the incarnate Word of God, or is He (rather: he) no more than one of the many Gestalten of God's Word? Is the Gestalt of the Word of God an adequate revelation of its Gehalt, or is the Gestalt the paradoxical opposite of the Gehalt? Is the historical Jesus of Nazareth the fulfillment of the Old Testament expectation of the Christ (the Messiah), or is the messianic idea not adequately revealed in Him, or perhaps only fragmentarily? What does the name Christ mean? What does God intend with the name Messiah? What does His anointing mean? Does it really include a divine commission ("His being ordained"), and also a real gift ("His being made capable"), or are these two only designated in a symbolic way? Is there a fundamental difference between those "anointed ones" whom we consider as ordinary men and Jesus of Nazareth as One anointed in a completely distinct way? Or is this suggested fundamental difference no more than a fiction only? To what extent can He, as a historical person, act in human life in a critical, that is, judging and absolutely decisive manner? Does He Himself, as Jesus, as a historical person, together with our whole human life, lie under a crisis, that is, under a radical judgment of God that condemns the world as this, as our world, or did He let us hear on earth, in a pure and effective, lively, judging and sifting way, the voice of God as the perfect Judge and perhaps also as our Father, the voice of the supreme and, in fact, unique criticism, repelling or attracting? It is actually something to weep about, but it is a matter of fact that in the circles of what is called Christianity there is much serious dispute about all these questions nowadays. And so we stand there as a concrete or legendary "community" of "Christians"; we all lay claim to this name, and get angry as soon as the one denies it to the other. But in the meantime we are very uncertain about the fundamental questions concerning Jesus and concerning Christ, at least among ourselves. Neither are we sure about each other. Opposing each other we stand with a series of written and especially unwritten Christologies in the midst of a multifarious world which claims that it is continuing to build up its "culture." And although we repeat a thousand times in tense and agitated Christian protest that the culture of this world is not mature and not pure, that it is deceptive, and that the reward of (also cultural) sin is death, the question is urgent and hurts so deeply, especially as question, whether we ourselves are not (at least as a group) completely unauthorized and unable to utter even one single word on this problem, because of our profound differences with regard to the term "Christ" as we find it in the problem of "Christ and cultural life." We are more and more active as a group in international, interdenominational, and interconfessional, ecumenical relations, and in sending out all sorts of messages concerning world life and culture. But it all lacks power, for as a group we no longer know Christ. As long as Jesus Christ, for us as a group, is not the Known One and the Familiar One, we utter nothing but immature statements about the relation between Christ and cultural life. For the first of these two terms is already hazy. And an international, inter-academic, ecumenical haze is the worst of all.

e. Is the situation any better as far as the second term of our problem is concerned, namely, cultural life? What actually is culture? The answers differ. We have already referred to that in a few words. However, it is really oppressing that in spite of this we still present all sorts of nervous, hurriedly fabricated and even, as far as our own point of view is concerned, illegitimate constructions. The worst part is not that the culture-philosophers time and again supply widely divergent answers to the fundamental issues. The worst part is this, that while all sorts of culture-philosophers entrench themselves behind a certain -- as a matter of course, subjectivistic -- theory of value, Christians, even confessional ones, fail to ask themselves more and more if not the first and actually only true value is that of the covenant communion with God, that of the assurance of faith, the value of Christian gratitude, which in a practical syllogism assures faith from the fruits thereof that it is true faith. The worst part is the servility with which Christian confessors, as soon as they touch the problem of culture, timidly look up to the unbelieving culture-philosophers next-door: Would they be so kind as to grant us a nod of approval? The progressive submission of Christian thinkers and theologians to (non-Christian) cultural and other philosophers, is more and more becoming an obstacle to giving a unanimous and unequivocal answer of faith. The youth leaders of today and lecturers of adult education classes, as far as they have a Christian background, realize perfectly well that the drafting of a concept of culture meets multiple and searching questions. At their conferences they toil with the problem of history, that of the individual and society, of the essence of the nations and the distinct races of men, of time and eternity, of physics and metaphysics, religion, morals and natural law, of evolution and creation. But about the fact that we as Christians have to take our starting point in the prejudices of faith, and that we have to accept upon authority, and consequently to act accordingly, that our positive and negative attitudes must merely and solely be a matter of faith, which (as we confess in our Catechism) is a sure knowledge and a firm confidence -- about all this one can hear quite often as long as certain points of systematic theology (ecclesiastical suspensions included) are at stake, but one hardly hears the same things as soon as the sphinx of cultural life comes under discussion. There is much pride in the many words that are spoken on the theme of right action, but in the meantime the speakers do not discern the oppressive fact that this whole ideogram of "culture" and "cultural life" remains very hazy, and that one can work with it only a premature and hypothetical basis. It is an artificial term that many people operate with; however, they do so without being justified philosophically, theologically, and, above all, as far as the concrete service of the living God is concerned.

f. When finally we act as if we really have established a connection between "Christ" and "culture," then the main question is not always put to the fore: What is it actually all about? Are we talking about culture as such (the culture) or only about a certain kind of culture? Is there indeed a permanent culture, which may be known by the peculiar style to which it is faithful, or do we, if we keenly discern things, find only a chaos of cultural tendencies? If it is not culture as such but only a particular form of culture, which is it then? The national culture or just a national one? The or an international culture? The or a temporary one? The or a future one? Is it a (or the) culture which we have created or have to create. Let alone are able to establish -- that is to say, we as Christians? Or is it a sort of ideal culture that we are required to acknowledge or to hope for? Do we as Christians have to act in this world and its culture in the way of reform and revolt? Are we capable of doing this? Or have we perhaps been given only the limited task that we might somehow or other force our way through the rapid currents of this world's multifarious life, and thank God afterwards because the ship of our life just missed being wrecked in the tremendous energy of the breakers? Is there really a positive task for us as Christians? Does "following after Jesus" then really include the tireless actualizing of a God given creative ability unto a peculiar (or distinct) Christian culture with world-conquering tendencies? Can the "following of God" be recognized in certain concrete acts in conformance to the material contents of divine commandments, and also in an accordingly concrete and steady attitude? Or is the following of God a formal concept only: God did indeed create the world, but He also permanently changes it, and once will do so in a catastrophic manner, wherefore only those can follow Him who replace any "yes" spoken to the existing world by "no" and thus consider any attitude as being of the devil, the revolutionary as much as the conservative attitude, and vice versa? Is a Christian's action performed in earnest or just as a game -- by virtue of a fixed ordination that does not permit us anything but the game, and thus makes the game into the only possible "earnest"?

Innumerable are the questions that have not been answered, and, indeed, that have not even been formulated yet. "Jesus Christ" and "cultural life" have alternately been called enemies and friends. Or even complete strangers one to another. The one, with Tolstoy, sacrifices "culture" to (his) "Christianity"; the other, with Nietzsche, abandons Christianity in favour of "culture"; a third one flares up in anger as soon as he hears that Christ and culture are considered to be connected with one another (cf. the contemporary, Barthian inspired, criticism of a so-called neo-Calvinism). The starting point of the first two views -- partly also of the third one -- is an antithetical relation between Jesus Christ and cultural life, real as well as potential. On the other hand there are also those who, eagerly or with the feeling that they, too, are fortunately still allowed to participate, raise the slogan that Jesus Christ and "culture" can certainly be reconciled with one another and that the relation between the two may ultimately be considered an amicable one.

It may be unintentional, but the inevitable result of all this is, of course, that among those who swing back and forth in this manner practice reveals many greatly varying aspects. According to the one there is no higher task for a Christian than timidly to eat under the table "the crumbs which fall from the table" of unbelieving "culture builders," and consequently he defends this timorous eating with the thesis that in cultural affairs God has not imposed teetotalism. He, then, will never get beyond a questionable argumentum e silentio: What he wants has not expressly been forbidden; it is therefore all right. Do not ask him whether this eating of crumbs from the table of others is a meal of faith and love or a gesture of embarrassment, with a corresponding argument of embarrassment providing the necessary rescue. The other, however, jauntily asserts himself in cultural life, puffs up his little Christian person to a certain cultural pride, and keeps himself convinced that it is nothing but an argument of embarrassment when the above-mentioned brother, sighing and apologizing a thousand times for his meals of crumbs, quotes the apostle Paul and says, that one "cannot go out of the world" (I Corinthians 5:10). He in fact brands this argument as inferior. In his opinion it must be replaced by the proud watchword that a Christian has to promote God's honour "in all spheres of life," cultural life included. However, the crucial question, what "cultural life" actually is, and, in close relation with it, what exactly the sphere or territory of cultural life is, most likely remains unanswered for the time being, even by him.

We are fog-bound. Even the followers of Dr. Abraham Kuyper are. For years and years they talked of nothing but "God's honour in all spheres of life." The more scholarly ones among them constantly repeated Kuyper's adage concerning "sphere sovereignty." Every "sphere" of "life" had its own "sovereignty. However; often they do no more than repeat this slogan. No wonder. For Abraham Kuyper himself could not clearly explain what exactly those "sovereigns" in all those "spheres" are. One single Sovereign -- that we can accept and understand But as soon as one starts to speak about "sovereigns" in the plural, each of them in his own sphere, then things become vague. When Kuyper says that God created everything "after its kind," he only repeats a biblical datum. However, it is really a big leap from "law of nature" to "sovereign." It is also a big leap from a creature of God to a product of man. And the same must be said about a third one, the leap which he makes from the respective kinds of creatures to the so-called "spheres" in which they play their role either with or without the help or hindrance of man. Kuyper's metaphorical language is here also a metabasis eis allo genos, a matter of mixing up unequal and heterogeneous quantities.

Actually, as we said, the problem should not be formulated as "Christianity and cultural life" For this formulation would not bring us to the root of the problem. As a matter of fact, by "Christianity" one can understand among other things: (1) the community of Christians (in the proper sense of the word or not, including or not including those who are Christians in name only), and (2) the visible result which it was possible to record in the visible world because of the Christian activities of the community of Christians, or, rather, which was and time and again still is, recorded within the framework of a more or less fixed communis opinio. Of course, the word has many more meanings However, let us leave them for what they are for convenience' sake. For even when we restrict ourselves to the just mentioned two meanings of the word, we have enough problems. As for the first definition, what, for example, does "community" mean? Is it just the simple fact of being together, or the possibility of gathering together for those who call themselves Christians, correctly or incorrectly (sun-ousia)? Or is it a spiritual unity, spiritual in the sense of produced by the Spirit of God? In other words, is it a unity that is in conformity with God's Word (koinonia)? Is this koinonia the result of the efforts of man, some thing that must come into existence by his actions, or is it the product of God's efforts, something that has come into existence and now calls on people to act accordingly by acknowledging the communion which God has made, de jure as well as de facto? Or, as far as the second definition is concerned, is one, for the registration of such a result of Christian communion, dependent on history and tradition, or can every age thrust upon us its own theory concerning this registration and qualification? "Christianity" is a difficult word -- if one wants to go into the matter.

a. This is impossible in the first place because Christianity can never be the standard. Take (in the first of the two above mentioned meanings) Christians together as a community, and then -- if you could, by theoretical abstraction (for you cannot get any further!) -- purge this community of all those who are Christians in name only. Or (according to the second meaning of the word) take Christianity in the sense of the result of the Christian (in your ideas even supposedly catholic) creed in man's and the world's life, and even be as strict here as you can in applying the standard and in bestowing the title of honour "Christian." Whichever way you would take it, in neither of the two cases would you be able to derive from this "Christianity" a standard for dealing with your problem. No Christian can be the standard, neither can a factual datum be. Facts do force our hands, no one can dispose of them, and everyone's actions rest upon the facts. Our hands can easily beat the air, but this does not result in or lead to anything. Only when they are put into the material produced by reality as it has historically developed, they are able to fashion this material. And as for this fashioning of the material (our acting with responsibility), we fully depend on the standards which God has established. The latter do not force our hands, they command us. Only the Word of God, Holy Scripture, is the standard; not the Christian or Christianity, but the speaking Christ Who has been made known to us by revelation, and Who also Himself "explains" God to us, and as the Giver, Keeper, and Interpreter of the Law speaks God's Word to us without any restraint caused by sin or impotence, He Who has been sent to the people on behalf of God. Any historical trend, also any cultural trend or construction, that would be based on Christianity as a datum or even on an ideal Christianity, which is a product of the mind, must necessarily end in sin, violation of the Law, and irreligion; it would be able to establish nothing but a Tower of Babel. For by taking a wrong startingpoint, it has already started to do so. This way also historical materialism and positivism have taken the courage to orate on Christianity and culture. This way (though proceeding from different presuppositions) idealism, too, in more than one form, has done the same thing. This way even Barthianism has sometimes done so, when it said, "Es predigt": there is the fact of "preaching" in Church, which fact is then the startingpoint for further theoretical development. There is a certain quantity called "Christianity". However, this fact is not the foundation of any doctrine, although every doctrine must take into account all facts, also this one. Facts do not form a foundation for doctrine. On the contrary there is already a certain measure of doctrine in any description of a fact (or of what is considered as such). When there is a thunderstorm, this is a fact. But those who believe in Wodan and those who can explain it and have become acquainted with the theory of electrical discharges understand and describe this fact in completely different ways.

There is even more than this. "Christianity," as it takes shape in the midst of the world carries the name of its own choice, and can be registered, is itself always deeply involved in a current cultural process or even in a series of cultural processes. Followers of Hegel, and consequently also Marxists, arid National-Socialists, count Christianity itself among the cultural phenomena: the suppliers of the theories that were chartered by Anton Mussert[1] wanted to entrust the "Department of Culture"[2] with the interests of Christianity (which could be protected only in the European part of the Kingdom of The Netherlands). This already shows how seriously and inevitably "Christianity" itself -- even if it were only to protect its name -- is always involved in the clashing of the cultural trends that are present in every constellation of world life. Besides, it varies according to local, national, anthropological, and even climatological types. In brief, the term "Christianity," taken in this sense, is a sphinx, and nothing else.

b. And to the extent that it is no sphinx but can be allocated in history in a pure or (which is something different again) fixed shape, it has on its part often interfered in the cultural struggle in a high handed and arbitrary way and with many shortcomings and sins. In every subsequent process of formation, deformation, or reformation, it sometimes tried to become a real and direct cultural force (remember the papacy), or lived, either consciously or unconsciously, from certain principles which put on its work programme a clear cultural commission as its essential task. Of course this was wrong. For Christianity is not a matter of culture. Although, on the other hand, culture is certainly something that Christianity is concerned with. But according to the ever-repeated (although not biologically or evolutionistically determined) action of deformation and reformation, historical Christianity has never been able in the course of the ages to lead one specific cultural idea to victory, neither has it ever fully completed any of its mandates regarding cultural life. One will find here the most extreme variations: there is a vast distance between cultural imperialism -- as it was developed by the Church of Rome in certain periods -- and the isolated position, separatism, and asceticism of the "pious" but culture-shy people and congregations that are of the opinion that they represent true Christianity only in this sort of shyness Who would be able to derive a cultural standard from such a "Christianity?" Neither is a majority or a minority decisive in this respect. Justice as well as power, health as well as healing gifts, they can belong to the majority, but also to the minority, even to the smallest minority one could imagine.

That is to say, God described His office and work in its quintessence before His historical appearance under a human shape, and in a particular cultural situation, was even vaguely defined. Remember only the protoevangel in paradise. When after many centuries, during which God, by means of the prophets, had spoken about the coming Christ (Messiah) and given information in advance about His office and work, this Messiah came into the world and was registered as the son of Joseph and Mary and was called "Jesus," then everyone had to learn to consider this Jesus as the fully authorized Christ unless Jesus was to remain a riddle to him with a supposed appeal to his own pretended authority to interpret. A supposed appeal, we said, for the real Jesus is terribly angry with those who refuse to accept the key to the interpretation of His person and work from the hands of God's anointed Prophet and Teacher. He then comes to such a generation -- usually it is a majority -- with visitation or with punishment. Both fall upon His unwilling hearers-interpreters as often as He in the gospels, first of all to His first "contemporaries" but to us, too (who are also the contemporaries of the living Christ, Who governs us from heaven), speaks in parables. Also concerning the subject of serving God in cultural life, He repeatedly speaks in parables to His "contemporaries"[3] of the days of old as well as (via the Bible) of these days, and He reveals the meaning of these parables also in cultural theological respect, to those only who afterwards interrogate Him about all this (today via His Word) in faith. Of what benefit would Jesus be to us if nothing else were to follow, if no second[4] name, no second office-name, the name "Christ," were added to this first one? The gospels do not give a biography of Jesus. Neither do they design their own image of Him. They already tell us that in our thinking we are not to go beyond that which is written (concerning Christ, in the Old Testament) (1 Corinthians 4:6) They do not intend to give a scientific-systematic summary of His life's work from any formal and methodological point of view, not even from any cultural point of view. Any systematic treatise on Jesus' works, teaching, prophesying, building up and breaking down, is lacking in the Scriptures. The Gospel is neither a biography nor a novel. Neither does it describe a cultural phenomenon according to cultural-philosophic or cultural-historical methods, nor does it write Church history after the method of the science of historiography. The Gospel is not even a systematic exposition of the history of salvation. Therefore every effort that wants to learn only from a so-called Life of Jesus what he meant and still means in a particular aspect of human life is doomed to fail. For we have no Life of Jesus. Whoever consciously would like to write it would strain himself in the telling and do injustice to Him. One can and may never separate the gospels -- which describe to us the course that Jesus Christ followed towards and through human life in fulfilling God's counsel and in accordance with God's revealed will to remain Himself in evangelic redemption -- from Old Testament prophecy; nor from the history of salvation and revelation, out of which He came to the fore according to plan -- just as this history itself is of Him and determined by Him; nor from the epistles of Paul and the other authors of the New Testament epistles; nor even from the Apocalypse with which the Bible completes its cycle. This Apocalypse, too, contains a description of history, not only concerning the future, but also concerning the past (Revelation 1:12 e.g.), and even concerning what was contemporary to John, its author (e.g. regarding Rome's emperor-worship as anti-christian moment, chapters 13 and 18). Also this last Bible-book lets us hear the revealed truth regarding the background and constituent elements and trends of any kind of history, cultural history included; e.g. that there is a satanic urge behind the anti-christian beast (Revelation 12), and that any struggle, the cultural one included, is fundamentally the struggle between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent; it is the old serpent that in any new cultural period persecutes the old church as woman and her one Seed and intends to annihilate them.

Actually this is not so strange. No one has ever been great in this world without having to be explained and understood partly on the basis of the time in which he lived, but also partly with reference to his own personality, that which the Father of spirits endowed him with individually and exclusively. However, as far as Jesus is concerned, it is actually still different. As we have already said, in His works he is never understood in isolation from, but definitely also not on the basis of the time which He spent here on earth among men. He is known also by means of, but not on the basis of, His days. For He dominates, directs, and governs all ages. For Him the "fulness" of time does not mean a casual occasion or, as something quite fortuitous, the fertile soil into which He, "finding" the field, could sow whatever He wanted, but it was His time, the "kairos" -- taken by Him, as created for His sake -- in the "chronos" extending according to God's plan. Neither can He be explained on the basis of the cultural history of "the nations" nor on the basis of Israel's history of salvation, for of both these "histories" (which are fundamentally one and of one territory) He is the foundation, the Worker, and the "Firstling," the beginning, the principle, the aim, and also the new startingpoint. The study of Hellenism cannot explain Him, even though it will be essential for the distinctive interpretation of His words and works (and vice versa) Neither does the knowledge of Judaism "explain" Him, although -- provided that it produces good results -- it sharpens every interpreter's pencil The "faithful Witness" Who speaks continuously, but Who only as far as unbelief is concerned sometimes speaks in riddles, is Himself not a sphinx. Oh no, He never is. But a "Jesus concept," formed in innumerable variations by people who do not know Him as the Christ, and an image of "Jesus" arbitrarily designed -- this is what time and again vexes its designers and worshippers with the quiet and mocking smile of a sphinx. The latter is again and again placed near the great caravan-routes of mankind. However, who decides which is the most important and the central one of these routes if the Bible is not permitted to decide? This sphinx can be seen standing in the midst of time. But who will put an end to the discussions -- which are being revived also in this century -- about the real nature of "die Mitte der Zeit"? This sphinx, which since the beginning of this era no eye has seen nor ear heard but the contours of which time and again loom up in the hearts of many people, is passed by many centuries. But it is silent, completely silent -- unless "Christ" has been found in "Jesus" throughout the Scriptures. For Jesus Christ used to speak and He is still speaking: He is "present" with His Godhead, majesty, grace, and Spirit, speaking in His Word. Until the moment that one listens to Him, one can only compose fiction about this sphinx but not prophesy concerning it. Jesus must be put in His own light. Rather, He has to present Himself to us in His own light. But in this presenting and explaining Himself in His own light, Jesus is already doing the work of Christ. It is precisely in this work that He is the Christ, God's Prophet, Priest, and King The light which does indeed shine in Jesus, shines in Him because He is the Christ, the Servant of the LORD. He does not allow us to isolate "Jesus" from "Christ" -- not even in the academy, since it is not permitted "in life ".

No. it cannot be otherwise. And in the inevitability of this oppressive phenomenon His greatness is revealed and His judgment executed For therein we find a proof in the negative of the horrible seriousness which is evident in the sanctions of His positive commandment that we are never to "see" Him as "Jesus" but always fully to "hear" Him as "Jesus Christ ". For otherwise these "sanctions" come into force. The history of the "Jesus paragraphs" in cultural historical works is so confusing that they make us think of a cultural-historical judgment: "Because they seeing see not: and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand" (Matthew 13:13). Any arbitrariness in constructing a "Jesus image" receives its own reward: it has to share the field with a multiplicity of the most individualistic views. We have already pointed out some of the bad harvests produced by this noxious soil. However, remember that it is of "Jesus" that one wants to speak; then the harvest becomes even more audacious and depressing. The Marxist places "Jesus" in cultural history as the great revolutionary. Ernst Haeckel utters his oracles on Jesus as despiser of culture. Constantine the Great saw in Him the most successful propagandist of a most Christian cultural struggle. Oswald Spengler places Him -- Jesus! -- among the historical pseudomorphoses of Arabic culture. Chamberlain sees in Him the founder of a moral culture. Hegel connected to "Jesus" a sort of cultural pantheism -- this was done by him who apart from this was yet so wise as to remember that no one can isolate himself here from the trinitarian motifs of the early Christian way of representing things. Many people, for whom the sun rose only at Stockholm or Lambeth, where they wanted to formulate the "third confession" -- where is it now? -- saw in "Jesus" the great formulator of direct "messages" to the cultural world on the so-called topical cultural questions, although it must be said that the direct character of their messages" can be obtained only at the cost of a fundamental vagueness. Again other convention delegates present themselves as inspired apostles or as inspiring mahatmas and they, too, render "Jesus" a small place among the "wise" who have left behind a sufficient number of enigmatic sayings to provide a lasting connection between "East" and "West". That way the traditional "Teacher" of the West is transformed in this encounter into an equally traditional "Patriarch" from the East. The Western world always had its "Teachers" speak, while the East prefers to hear (!) its "patriarchs" keep silent. The former express their conceptual learning in their lines of writing, while the latter between their few lines make us guess at their strictly paradoxical thoughts, deriding any conceptual "clarity'', which is then regarded as but a lack of clarity. This way "Jesus" as yet becomes a cultural factor, not so much because of what the theologians have heard Him say, but because of the fact that the theosophists heard Him keep silent: the "sphinx" is here no accident but the only suitable figure. And hardly have these people been together in conference, leaving behind a "message" also concerning Jesus, or, look: ascetics, mystics, sectarians of another kind, consider "Jesus" as entirely indifferent to culture. He only speaks of God, they say, and to the soul, and "the heart," but for the rough and tough life of the big world, He does not, in their opinion, want to utter a single word apart from that of permanent separation: Go out from Babylon, separate yourselves! Theologians belonging to the school of modern Religionsgeschichte put "Jesus" in one line with Mohammed, Zarathustra, and other "founders of religion" and do not wish to hear of a factual distinction between true and false (pseudo-)religion; at best they will consider a distinction between degrees of divinatory capacity. And several chiliastic sects, which all through the centuries have nibbled not only at scholastic hierarchical but also at living, reformationally sound Christianity, consider "Jesus", strictly speaking, as the grim prophet of their own cultural egotism and separatism; abruptly they dare to establish a private community that, in a life withdrawn from the suction of the world, is looking for the borderline which once will separate the world and the Church forever.

Also the "church" itself is at fault here. Even she often neglected to see in "Jesus" and in all He did and did not do the "Christ" of God. She is guilty in so far as she allowed theologians to lift the four gospels out of the whole of the list of Bible books and to abandon the totality of biblical teachings if only they could distil from the gospel data an "objective" "Jesus" image. As long as one restricts one's attention to "Jesus," one may at best perhaps be able to say what "Jesus" has not done with respect to the cultural question; however, one will not arrive at a positive answer. For in order to he able to give a positive answer we must, apart from the name "Jesus" (His first name-of-office), take into account the (second) name "Christ." Those who only reckon with the "Jesus" of historiography, neglecting the prophecy that comes to us in the name "Christ," do not get any further than small wares: an exemplary interpretation of text fragments, a parallel, a comparison, a parable. Such mere pedlary sometimes awakens feelings of pity when with the help of some small details of the gospel story it distils certain contributions to a doctrine concerning "Jesus as cultural theoretician." The gold, incense, and myrrh of the Nativity story then sometimes have to serve as proof that He does like riches and wealth. We are often referred to the fact that He let Himself be served by the money of some rich persons, e.g. the wife of Chusas, king Herod's steward, as a detail intended to teach us that Christ instructs "the Church" to make a rule, if possible, of what was once for Israel an emergency measure and a retaliatory measure sanctioned by special decree: spoiling "the Egyptians ". The costly ointment with which He let Himself be anointed in the presence of Simon, His host for the moment, His entering into the house of rich Scribes to eat with them, even the garment that was gambled away by soldiers at the foot of Calvary's cross and which was "without seam, woven from the top throughout," they all serve as illustrations in object-lessons about such problems as "Jesus and good taste," "Jesus and riches," "Jesus and culture." We shall refrain from mentioning more.

And if one does not want to hear any questions but only assertions, well, here they are. He withdrew partners from a flourishing fishing business, James and John. He made, no, not some masked culture types but unmasked fishermen, even from Galilee, follow Him, the Nazarene. One of them speaks his own dialect when he timidly slips into the court-room where the great court-case of the world is decided. He heals lepers, although sporadically; however, He does not establish leper houses. He opens the eyes of the blind -- again, sporadically -- but He leaves others in their blindness; at any rate, He does not establish an organization for the support of the blind. For such a miracle He once uses mud. Although He is offered a royal crown, He does not accept it. He makes His entry into the capital while sitting on the young of an ass. He deals carefully with servants, and when one of His disciples injures the ear of a certain slave called Malchus, He heals the man; but it is in vain that one looks for the beginning of an Association for the Abolition of Slavery. He looks those who have been possessed by demons deep into the eyes and leads them to the light; however, He never built a clinic, and did not make any preparations for that -- at least, not in any direct sense. And the authors called by Him later on issue books, gospels, that show a complete lack of any artistic style and that are written in the common language of the people. Again we ask: Does one make any progress by trying to define and solve the problem with the help of this sort of details? Can one in this way even contribute to its solution?

When the Rabbi of Nazareth was here on earth, Judaism -- just to mention one thing -- was of almost no significance at all as far as the plastic arts were concerned. The background of this frequently observed phenomenon could not have been entirely praiseworthy in His opinion. For more than once it is evident that He was a seer and a prophet. The seer knows what is in man. and the prophet time and again brings it into relation with the rules given in the Scriptures. Therefore His keen eye and His prophetic insight made it clear to Him -- more than it would be possible with us -- that this deficiency was -- at any rate, was also -- the result of a wrong interpretation of the second commandment which the Father of Jesus Christ had given in the Law of the Ten Commandments to His people Israel and to all the nations. We would be utterly wrong if we were to apply Christ's complaint and accusation that the Jewish leaders had made God's commandment null and void by their human ordinances only to those few ethical maxims concerning which the average reader of a Church magazine asks the editor of the question column for clarification: Are we allowed to eat blood sausage, to ride our bikes on Sunday, to marry our cousin, and things like that. The unproductiveness which, with respect to the plastic arts, distinguished the Jews from almost all the civilized nations of those days and later, must, in as far as a wrong interpretation of the second commandment was involved, have seemed a gap to the true and Spirit-filled Law interpreter and as such must have hurt Him. One can express this opinion without prejudging the question whether the plastic arts are included by Christ among the concrete assignments which he gives to His soldiers on their pilgrimage of the "last days." For suppose that He with respect to the plastic arts does not unconditionally wish to give His people a mandate; still He can never take under His protection a sort of negativistic and ascetic ethics as far as it originates in a wrong interpretation of the Law of God and intends to be a God pleasing document of this wrong interpretation. This is the more likely because the tabernacle as well as the temple made use of the services of men who were proficient in the plastic arts, even (think of Bezaleel and Aholiab, who are given a prominent place in Dr. Abraham Kuyper's concept of common grace) by divine appointment. Nevertheless, "Jesus" has not given any direct instructions regarding, say, a theory of art, which, in whatever way one may wish to answer the question that was asked above, would at any rate have been fitting there. When one thinks of the man Jesus as the chief Prophet and Teacher, also for the artist, of Him Who lived always in the presence of God without sin, then His "attitude" in this respect will be the more "disappointing," at least for those who would like to hear from the mouth of "Jesus" a more or less developed system of cultural ethics or aesthetics. Even the (developed) prolegomena are lacking in "His" teachings. He did not teach His "own" ideas: He was not a lecturer but a Prophet. How often did He not say: "It is written"? Speaking this way He does not take His place behind a lectern to teach a system that carries His own name, but He takes His place among all the prophets; and even when He shows Himself to be more than these, as their "fulfilment," He can never be separated from them. This is most "disappointing"; this "Jesus" considers it an honour that no lectures on His "own" rules are to be expected from Him. He came, as He says, not to destroy the God-given "Law" (torah) but to fulfil it. "To fulfil" is not the same as "to destroy" (by means of His "own" system), and also not the same as "to add unto".

Quite easily one could encourage the notion that there was, after all, some reason for such during the period which He spent here below among men. We have here in mind the increasing hellenization of Israel's life in those days. Also the arts were greatly influenced by Hellenism. For example. music. Just as for the "sacred" cult-activities the Hebrew language obstinately maintained itself while Greek made itself felt in matters of culture, so Jewish music continued to be binding for the liturgist for use in the temple cult, but outside it the "free" Hellenistic music fought against the Israelite style for predominance in profane cultural use. Architecture showed the influence of several cultural phases but in particular of the Hellenistic one and more and more lacked a character of its own. The public games, the governmental machinery, military service, fashion to some extent, they all were more or less patterned after foreign models. This, again must have hurt from all sides the mind of the man Jesus. a mind sharpened with precision by the knives of the Law of God. A lack of style and in particular a loss of style must have wounded Him, Who as a man happens to he God's second and supreme composition without flaw. It must always have struck Him. To Him as Bible reader, by day and by night a (not only ahnend but) Self-conscious Prophe, the levelling, the internationalization, the quasi-ecumenically interested denaturalization of (also) the cultural life of His people -- a denaturalization which in fact prostituted itself to all the "gentiles" -- must have been to Him a pressing reason for anxiety. For partly this was one of the consequences of the dispersion of Abraham's children among the nations. And was this dispersion not called God's judgment? It showed the vestiges, the traces or remnants, of the mastery of foreign powers that had successively overrun, the people of "Jesus." In this dispersion He saw the results of Israel's sin; and only in the second place He saw in it a preparation for His own mission. Israel's dependence on other countries was to him a matter of punishment. In it He distinguished sin, loss, weakness, worldliness. And is not sin the most severe punishment of sin? This is how already the prophet Zephaniah had seen things. For this prophet, too, had fulminated against a raving about, e.g. foreign fashions or against a copying of foreign customs ("leaping on the threshold" Zephaniah 1:8 9). During King Josiah's reformation he had joined the battle against the sin of ogling demagogues and fulminated against "acting the Assyrian way" just as still today among us the "stalwart" Calvinist, at least in theory, discerns a bad odour in the fashion of Paris, and the puritan is on the alert against any possible infiltration by a cultural "fifth column." For the company of exotic drill-sergeants deserves no gentler name. The one prophet fulminates against populations the youth of which speaks "half in the speech of Ashdod" (Nehemiah 13:24); the other calls for the days when there will no longer be a "Canaanite" (such a huckster) pottering about in the temple of Yahweh. Philistine influences are broken by the one reformer in the south, Syrian ones by the other in the north. The importing of foreign religions, at least their "forms" (as if these could be abstracted from their contents) for the sake of business relations and cultural contacts, is plainly called "going awhoring'' by a third one. All the prophets know quite well that Israel is first of all "the Church'' and only then "a nation." It is a nation only because it is the Church. And behold after so many centuries there is now "Jesus," standing in the midst of His people realizing He is the precursor-successor of Zephaniah and of all the reformers temple-purgers, and prophets and still He does not produce for His "contemporaries" a detailed and fashionable system of hodogetics regarding "fashions" or their opposite; neither does He in a direct way lecture on style and cultural forms. But He preaches, leads, prays, holding His Bible in His hand and His fishermen by His hand. Even in the matter of the marriage problem He refuses to choose between the two theories presented to Him regarding the right of divorce (the doctrine of Hillel over against that of Shammai, Matthew 19). He never looked at a woman. What is all this? Is this negativism? Or asceticism? Is this a matter of surrendering riches of life which can surely be considered wealth? Is it a hankering after a dome des invalides? Please stop asking questions. Rather realize that with our questions-with-no-answers we are sent from pillar to post as long as the full biblical light concerning the Christ has not dawned upon the doings of Jesus.

For in this combination of the two names the key to its solution has been given us. Jesus: the essence of His office (to save pleromatically). The Christ: the legitimacy of His office (He has been "ordained" of God definitively) and also the guarantee of His office (He was anointed "with the Spirit" not with some ointment only, and consequently: He always attains what He definitively wants to attain in pleromatic respect). Those two names which have been combined this way once only, exclusively, in this one Person-having-two-distinct natures, create style in what seems to be stylelessness, and a chord out of the single tones. Now that in the light of the Scriptures we have seen these two names combined in Him, we hold the clue and are able to read the music of "the life of Jesus": Ein wohltemperiertes Klavier. Rather, not "a" but "the" Well-Tempered Clavichord. For now the office of this Man of God requires our attention. And from the fulfilling of the office which He holds when awake and when asleep, in going and in sitting down, in speaking and in keeping silent, the preaching of the counsel of God concerning Jesus Christ comes to us.

In the above we have time and again emphasized the fact that Jesus Christ cannot be known without the Scriptures -- which He Himself used to quote in order to prove His identity. We had to put our finger at this detail because otherwise we would still not arrive where we would like to be. There have been hundreds of "Jesuses" (Joshuas). They are still there, in the ghettos and in the market places. Strictly speaking, there have also been millions of "christs" (anointed ones) and they are still there, in catacombs and fortunately also on the city squares. However, as for the son of Mary and Joseph (as was supposed), the fact that He would deserve to be called Jesus (Joshua) truly and exhaustively and that in Him the divine appointment would be definitive and His being enabled to fulfill His task adequate, this we do not know from the sound of the names, neither do we read this in His parousia, His appearance, but we hear this from the Scriptures.

And now that we know all this, we see that, although His office never separates the Christ of the Scriptures from the people and in so far does not isolate or abstract Him from them, nevertheless His unique and exhaustive, definitive, and pleromatic anointing, and this connected with His unique Person (constituted of two distinct natures), made Him as the second Adam and as a Mediator entirely different in all His work from anyone else. His work, since it was and is the work belonging to His office, is seeking us all. But because it was and is His work, it always defines Him in His unique service to God. One cannot copy Him without underrating Him. There are thousands of soldiers, but there is only one generalissimo. Whoever wants to have this one generalissimo imitated, paralyzes the whole army. The generalissimo is closely connected with them all, and he decides for everyone what the regulation uniform will be, but he himself is "non-regulation." However, the law of the country has been written into his heart. Law and uniform are two different things.

This office put Him among men, as One Who was never authorized to isolate Himself but Who yet was completely lonely in the idion of His "experience" (His peculiar experience). For "experience" means: to experience that the Word which God spoke concerning us comes true. Well, then, a very peculiar Word was spoken regarding Him, a Word relevant to His unique situation. Only by enduring this loneliness He could presently praise God and cause Him to be praised by a great multitude. This office engulfed Him, even bodily. It totally obligated Him. It so completely dominated His spiritual and bodily life that all His flesh and blood devoted itself fully to the one great battle that He would wage in righteousness and strength before God (enopion Theou, coram Deo). Who does not immediately feel that with this everything has in principle been said about Jesus' status as an unmarried Person? Who does not feel that He would even have been unable to "heal" marriage, also as a cultural monument, if He, as the Servant of the LORD, had not taken upon Himself His yoke, without co- or adoption of "the children given to Him" according to the law of flesh and blood? "Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same" (Hebrews 2:14). For He is not ashamed to call Himself the Brother of us all." This is His office, however, He would have been ashamed indeed to call Himself the (physical) Father of some of us. FOR THIS IS NOT HIS OFFICE. His unmarried state is not a pattern for us, nor a humiliatingly "high" ideal for the man who has not the charisma of abstinence. His office is so different.

One who has seen this office will presently know what to think about all those other details which we have mentioned above as being all riddles. The gold of the Magi from the East, e.g., and their gifts of incense and myrrh had only to serve the Great Commission. The costly ointment, the woven garment, the fine table in the house of prominent people -- they all had to serve the fulfilling of His office. To be sure, He had no place to lay down His head, but this was no proof of contempt of culture, neither was it a silent protest against dwelling in ceiled houses "as such," for the prophets did not curse the dwelling in ceiled houses but only the sin of those who were dwelling in them and at the same time neglected the temple. No, was a cause of necessary sorrow in His struggle to give us real culture, among other things: in this battle His God never lets Him go "on leave". He selected His fishermen, people of all kinds, not as if, sociologically speaking, only the poor and unpretentious in the cultural world could please Him (besides they were not so "poor" those Galileans), but because He had to work also among the people of Galilee: and further, He did not chose fishermen only or Galileans exclusively. Did He take them from among the poor? The one says He did, the other remembers just in time that some of them left behind a business: they were, in this case, no poor devils who squinted with envy at the golden ornaments of the ladies of Jerusalem, but determined heroes who had given up the "gold mine" of their business: the prophecy concerning the Messiah had caused their heart to burn within them. Christ selected those people for the apostolate because He wanted them to preach that the gold may again adorn the chair of the prominent ones if this chair has been built not on the foundation of what makes one great among men, but of that which is right before God. In this selection of apostles, then, He was on His way to the hour of revelation when He would cast down all the cultural philosophers with that fine and decisive word of revelation: the "fine linen" of the most beautiful city "is the righteousness of the saints" (Revelation 19:8). The establishing of leper houses will surely follow if only first of all justice and the concept of the office which forbids euthanasia, are again acknowledged in accordance with the written law of God. Even the Law of Moses already knew all about social service -- the isolation of lepers included. However, Moses considered this as a matter of theocratic service in and to the Church, on covenant territory. Thus Christ does not give leper houses but He gives them back, even when the covenant territory is no longer geographically the same as under Moses, but can presently be distinguished in local Churches. He wants to have a royal crown. but only when the crown of thorns has obtained it. He transforms His fishermen into preachers. and His preachers into organizers of, e.g., a movement for the abolition of slavery, but first the world must be told that the most serious and most painful and most humiliating slavery is that of sin, and the basis of this essential slavery must be taken out of the life of the world by His humbling Himself unto death, His having become a slave (Philippians 2). He, them knows with the certainty and practicality of a seer the times and hours of His office. For this reason He, for example, sometimes on purpose leaves some sick people in their sickness.

Yes, indeed, He wants to be understood as the Christ of the Scriptures, also in order to be able to give us insight into His positive attitude towards the problems which we touched on under number 10, above. He shall speak either directly or indirectly, and fundamentally, about architecture, the plastic arts, music, fashions, about the struggle between the tendency to level the cultural development of a nation and the urge to maintain its specific character. However, He shall do so only as Christ, as the One Who as the uncreate, eternal Logos, even before the birth of "Jesus," dominated the history and culture of all the nations, and Who on the feast of Pentecost entered into His working period of "a thousand years" from Ascension Day and Pentecost until His second coming. In this final period of the everlasting, now incarnate Word of God, He shall complete and perfect His work as the Christ -- in every respect, also in that of the questions and struggles regarding the "cultures" of the past, the present, and the future; and, moreover, also by establishing a Christian culture in the midst of the world.

This appointment of adam (man) to such a responsible office determines his whole course of action in all his relationships. It even determines his qualities. For God created him just as He wanted him to be. And God wanted him to be a purposeful office-bearer. From this point of view the concept of the "naive" primitive man disappears completely. Man is given the title of "God's fellow-worker."[5] He is given His own work in such a wide cosmic context that in the original world of paradisal purity this work can immediately and always be called "liturgy"; that is, service in and to the Kingdom. To which Kingdom? To the one of which God is King; that is, the Kingdom of heaven, the subjects of which have been distributed over two sections of the cosmos: one "upper" section and one "lower" section. If this is the image of the first Adam, then the Christ can justly bear the name of the second Adam only if He, too -- as man -- falls within and wants to fall within the framework of these categories of office. For it is precisely as the second Adam that the Christ as office-bearer in the middle of history must revert to its beginning and to the then given principles. By fulfilling His office -- which is fundamentally the same as that of all men -- before God's countenance, He takes upon Himself the great reformational task of returning to the ABC[6] of world and life order. To serve God, in concrete life, to obey God in any function, to fulfill God's expressed will with all that is in us and to do so in the midst of and in organic relation and communion with all that is around us -- this is the ABC. Here the problem of culture, and also its definition, has been stated in principle.

But when after having provisionally looked for a resting point for our thoughts, we take up the thread again, then we see Christ in His office standing in the midst of world history. It is in such a way that the concept of the "midst of history" (Tillich et al.) is developed in accordance with the Scriptures. It is no "category," on the same level with the "border concept" of a so-called a historical "beginning" or with that of an equally a-historical "eschaton" -- again taken as a "border concept" -- but it is a result of a real measuring and dividing of time into real periods of time. There is indeed a historical beginning; then it was that man was created and that he fell into sin. There will also be an end: when everyone will receive the things done "in his body" (by him in his temporal existence here below) (II Corinthians 5-10). So the "middle" of history is the period in which Christ comes to redeem this end from the curse of being exclusively determined by the fall and rupture that took place so shortly after the beginning.

In the first place He comes to reconcile God and to still His wrath. He does this in perfect alliance with God Himself, Who is the subject of the "katallage" (reconciliation): "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself" (II Corinthians 5:19). "In Christ" He was the only Author of this katallage. For the eternally burning hatred Of God against all sin cannot keep its postulates in harmony with those of His eternally flaming mercy unless during time (in the so-called middle of history) God's punishing as well as His demanding justice is satisfied. The punishing justice requires the complete condemnation of the guilty one: the demanding justice still desires the rendering of an inviolate obedience "in the body" (that is, during a man's lifetime). Therefore the Christ stands surety with respect to this twofold justice. And He indeed fulfills the pledge. This way He within time brings about the judicial verdict that was known and demanded by God's wrath as well as by His love: with the ransom of His blood He purchases the right of the renewal of what is now called God's "new" mankind. It is now called His redeemed Christian congregation which through Him and together with Him is heir to eternal life.

However, since for Him and for all people this eternal life -- like eternal death -- began and shall begin already here, in this cultural world," He does yet a second thing. All life and death is now given to Him to be administered by Him, because they remain determined in their everlasting character by the judicially-constituent ransom of Himself in the "middle of history". This way He administers eternal death as Christ's sentence-of-condemnation to those who have alienated themselves in their historical existence from His judicial verdict ("whereunto also they were appointed," l Peter 2:8). Consequently through His Holy Spirit (Who actively propels the "middle of history" towards the "end"), He is coming to do two things. On the one hand, He will, in the cultural world, cause the grapes of the earth to ripen in order to be trodden in the winepress of the administration of God's anger. On the other hand He comes, through the same Holy Spirit "in" Whom He Himself "completes" the "thousands years" of His own dominion of peace, to equip the work and-office community of God which He Himself purchased for the work and service of God in order that all its living members may enter into the city of perfect glory.

Since cultural achievements are among man's mandates, and since no one can act in such a way that his actions have no cultural significance, Christ, the sinless One, is the only One Who in an entirely pure manner has acted and is still acting upon cultural life. That is to say, He is the only One among men-after-the-Fall. Who can comprehend the fullness of the thoughts, also the cultural thoughts, that are included in the dogma of the Church that sees and preaches Christ as Man-without-sin? As the sinless One He responds, in words and deeds, in a way that is always entirely to the point in every situation into which the Spirit thrusts Him in order that He should prove Himself to be the second Adam, even in a world that in cultural respect is far removed from that of the first Adam. What is a more direct cultural act than to react to cultural situations and complications fully and purely, and fundamentally, and according to the original rule? And in all this He is not just "a" man, but the Son of man That is to say: He is more than a bright spot or a ray of light for a world that, also in cultural respect, is heading for the abyss; He is the Sun of righteousness, also in this respect. "Sun" does not only mean a source of light but also a source of energy. As the Logos-Mediator-Surety He is the hypostasis, the solid foundation, the original ground, the fulfiller, redeemer, and renewer of culture -- a cultural sign which shall therefore be spoken against.

In this administration of His own office, and in the formation of those who are anointed together with Him ("Christians") there comes about nothing less than a divine action (an action proceeding from the Father, the Son, and the Spirit) to conquer the world for God, by the Christ of God. "The earth is the LORD's, and the fullness thereof" (Psalm 24:1). This conquest is a reconquest: the property is, as far as it has been destined from eternity, brought back to and restored in its proper relation to the Owner. Christ connects the beginnings of the world with the end, the earliest history with that of the last days, the first things with the eschata, alpha with omega, the ABC of God's efficacious legislative Word of the beginning with the XYZ of His once again efficacious evangelical Word at the end of time. For God's legislative speaking in the beginning of the world -- to undefiled Adam -- was a matter of speaking in and on the basis of the covenant: a matter of ordering the mutual relation between God and man, in promise and in demand. This covenant together with its ordinances had then to govern the world from the beginning to the end. And now that after the breaking of the covenant by the first Adam, the second Adam goes in the way of the covenant again, and restores the same now the end will still be there as yet in peace, but this is the pax Christi -- otherwise there is no peace at all. This way Christ brings all that is in the world to its consummation: that which is secular and that which is ecclesiastical, the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, the power of angels and the brute force of demons. He went before us and then, together with us back to the origins ofGod's creation: He there read from the Law tables the work rules which God in the beginning had imposed upon the man of God that in the history of the created world any labourer created by God had to trace in himself all the "talents" which God had distributed to His labourers in the morning of creation and learn to use them in such a way that finally, by making productive the "possibilities" which had been put into the creation and afterwards had to be discovered and respected according to their kind" man would exploit all its potentials. All the talents which the Master had given to His servants were to have gained in the end, in the evening, as many as were distributed in the morning. And all the possibilities hidden in the cosmos had to be traced discovered, made to function according to the revealed law, and rendered subservient to the edification of the whole of Cod's creation according to the order of the respective creatures that had been established from the beginning. If the personal man assisted in this respect by the other personal office bearer created by God the angel -- were to fulfill his 'munus' (office) this way, then, to use an expression taken from the Belgic Confession of Faith, any non-personal creature and also man -- and angel -- himself, would fulfill again his officium (office or service) (Article 12). This is, if one wants to put it that way, the Theocratic arrangement of all things.

For here alone we come to the possibility of working out the above-given, still only provisional, concept of culture. For culture is a word that can be found on the first page of the Bible: "Dress the garden, replenish the earth, be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 215; 128). These first Bible-pages, they are the pages of "the ABC". They contain these three brief commandments in the description of the phase of the so-called "covenant of works". They already fit in the virgin world which has not yet been completed; that is which is still in the process of being developed -- according to the plan of creation -- in order to reach the end the teleiosis, the entering into the state of being fullgrown. Therefore this first page of the Bible, replete as it is with covenant regulations, is directly of cultural interest. For the Creator Himself is culturally interested. "Culture", after all, is a word that has been derived from the Latin verb colere. Colere means "to cultivate" "to care for". The farmer who plows his held is engaged in this colere. There is a field, which is a promise. And there is seed, which is also a promise. But there is also a farmer, which means: "a commandment with a promise". As a creature of God he has been put in a cosmic unity together with the field and the seed. He himself is also a "field" of the everlasting Spirit, and at the same time he is seed. He, too, is in his entire bodily existence a creature of God's hand, his "conscience", his consciousness, included. As a creature of God he, too, is included when the Belgic Confession of Faith states that all creatures are as so many characters in a most elegant book (Article 2). But God placed him as a personal creature not only in but also over all other created life. That is to say, man is, with his conscience, not only a character in the book of creation but also a reader of this "book": he must read and understand also himself as a character, although never isolating himself from other creatures. Deum scire cupio, et animam: I desire to know God and the soul. This well known saying means, as far as this "soul," known through God, is concerned, that it -- or let us say: the conscience, conscious life -- is a character in but also a reader of God's book. So man as a personal-spiritual being, as a called labourer of God, and as the crowned vice regent, by the finding and sowing of all seed is to take from the field what is in it. It is agri-culture.

However, in order to fulfill this task, as a lord of this field, and also, though as a personal being, to confess that he (he consciously) is one with this field, under God, he must undertake self-cultivation. This self-cultivation immediately finds its limits here. It may not be or even be called "personalism." As soon as the "person" is considered as "divine," or (which is fundamentally the same thing) as an end in itself, as a reader who no longer wants to be a character in the book of God, he has fallen to the share of idolatry, the idolatry of "person cultivation". He then forgets that in "the book" of creation God's name is to be read, and that the God Who may be known from this book as the Creator and Recreator is transcendent, to an infinite degree qualitatively distinct from all creatures. Self-cultivation, self-development, this positive (!) askesis, that is, the training of the creaturely aspect in us, in order that what is human and creaturely may find its officium herein that man as a creature may see his munus and fulfill it -- this is good and even commanded. His hand shall sow and deposit the seed in the field of the world. He shall be the medium by which, in faith and faithfulness to the promises which God spoke to His fellow workers, the silent promises that God put in to His creatures, each in its own context, shall find their appropriate fulfillment. In such a self-development, such a self cultivation, he prepares himself for the growing task, and he lets his God take pleasure also in himself as active field.

This is how God immediately spoke in the sanctions of His "covenant of works," and in so doing He put the whole world, man in particular, under high pressure, under "tension." For man, called as a fellow-worker of (and also under) God, the world was not a world of the "omega" but of the "alpha." The paradisal world was a beginning. And in this beginning was given, in principle. everything that had to be there potentially to let it grow out to a completed world of perfect order, the polis, the civitas, the "city" (state) of God, paradisally designed and presently built. If one day it is to be full grown, it needs a historical process of many centuries. We are indeed in an "interim": but it lies not between a primitive and an eschatological "history," both of which would be a-historical, but between the "first" and the "last" things, which are as historical as the things in "the middle of history". Otherwise it would be nonsense to speak of a "middle." The paradisal reality, then, is definitely not a so-called "higher" reality: neither is Adam. It is only a virginal reality: but for the rest it is, very concretely, included in time, sober, real, historical: there is flesh in it and blood, just as there are soul and spirit. And Spirit.

And now, in this sober, flat reality of historical paradisal life, God announced that He would work evolution on the foundation of creation. This evolution, according to the nature of created life cannot take place without the energy which flows out from God, not even for one moment. But, according to God's own commanding Word, which creates order and allots to everything is own place, it should not happen, not even for one single moment, without man as man of God acting therein as God's fellow worker. "You are labourers together with God" (I Corinthians 3:9): this is not a posthumous quietive that was proclaimed by Paul for a seceded Church somewhere in an isolated corner. No, this is a matter of leading back in an imperative way to the "first principles of the world. "This is not only a suitable text for a minister's inaugural sermon but it is also the day-text for any cultural worker, for the professor as well as the street-sweeper, for the kitchen-worker and for the composer of a Moonlight Sonata.

Therefore the first commandment with a rich promise reads: "Dress the garden." No castles in the air are promised in these words: neither do they suggest a so called "higher reality." Dress the garden -- here first of all the spade, a cultural instrument, and later on rubber boots, are not put into our hands, but man's created spirit has to invent them according to time and place and to design and adapt them to the dressing hand and the foot that breaks up and tramples down the soil. For the hand and the spirit, they work together: man has to "dress." Dress the garden -- here no introspective moralizing sermons are delivered, but here there is a concrete work- and life-commandment, a highly-spiritual and, consequently, everyday commandment. Biblical interim ethics can only operate with a lex that can be grasped. A "commandment" that one cannot lay hold of, a Word of God that one cannot work with, would not enable it to fulfill its pedagogic calling of prescription. For the garden may be called "paradise," and our lyrical rhetoric unfortunately may have changed it as if by magic into an isolated, solidly fenced in spot, where zephyrs blow and which, its seems, only a popularly misunderstood romanticism can write about. But actually it is something completely different. The garden is the beginning of adama, of the inhabited world. Hence it is also the beginning of the cultural world. The garden lies open. Therefore we earlier spoke about the beautiful garden but one without a gate called "The Beautiful." All that which issues from the world issues from there, including that which issues from cultural life and all its processes. For CULTURE becomes HERE,

In this definition the fundamental moments of the biblical creation story have, in our opinion, been rendered. Dress the garden: the concrete cultural mandate to exploit the world's potentials. Be fruitful and multiply: a growing sum total of human beings to be subjected to the cultural mandate, the obligation to engage in culture, time and again in every temporal phase and in all provinces of geographic space. Subdue the earth. and have dominion: the cultural man as a product of God's creation work, facing his own position: that of God's vice-regent. Man created in God's own image: cultural work must be spontaneous (man's qualities have been created in him in view of his munus): it is a matter of serving God as a representative of His supreme authority and consequently a matter of discovering God and causing Him to be found in the discovering of the future. God speaks unto man and with him, because of his appointment as the chosen representative of God's dominion over all other creatures: and within the communion of the covenant that God made with him. God speaks unto him and with him about the rest of the cosmos in spite of the fact that he himself is part thereof -- which means that self-distinction is thus awakened in him, and that self-cultivation, self-development is made clear to him as his duty, not as an end in itself but as a matter of mandate. And finally, he is given a moral commandment together with all that belongs to him he is in his cultural labour subject to his Creator: in the determining of his own goals with regard to created things he is bound to what he has heard from God's mouth by Word-revelation concerning God's own purpose with respect to the cosmos. He is summoned to kneel down, now and presently, before his Maker in and together with a cosmos prepared by his own hand under God's providence, culturally engaged as he is in view of his own, but especially of God's sabbath into which he. man has to enter.

Under the influence of thinking that has been corrupted by sin and is hostile to God, in a world that disrupts all relationships, culture is usually separated from "religion", or at least sharply distinguished from it. But from the beginning it was not so (Matthew 19:8) For religion is not a province of life, not a separate function of or for the "heart," not an isolated activity of a devout conventicle of people during certain elevated fragments of man's lifetime. No, religion, or rather the service of God, is to be distinguished from religiosity. Schleiermacher, the pantheistic philosopher-in-the-guise-of-a-theologian of Romanticism, wrote a book entitled On Religion. However, he dealt only with religiosity and at bottom -- by virtue of his pantheism -- this religiosity was self-worship, in so far as "God" and "universe" are intertwined in his thinking. He of necessity had to reject as moralism any action having an objective. "Religion" was to him neither a matter of "doing" nor of "knowing." In our interpretation it is no mere "doing" either. It is service: however, not that of an all-nature particle oscillating together with the universe, a particle called homunculus, but the service of the man who loves his Father, knows Him as being above the world, believes Him in the world, and wants to turn again to Him with the world in order that he may consciously -- not by deriving all sorts of "formulas" from the "universe" but by listening to commandments of instruction from the mouth of his Father-Legislator -- formulate his maxims in the believing "knowledge" of the Church and so fulfill the will of his Father. For this reason cultural work is in paradise service of God. There one cultivates everything, the ground on which one walks and the heart in its full depth, plants as well as the meditative spirit. There one washes his undefiled hands as well as his soul in righteousness -- the one thing cannot be separated from the other.

Then there was disintegration. His life crumbled. The same happened to the world: the whole of it and its respective parts did no longer work towards each other .The human mind, confused, erring, sinful, conceited, itself disintegrated in principle, began to practice disintegration, that is to abstract to tear asunder, to set apart and separate. Man ceased to think in a general and widely cosmic way, keeping the parts'' in a proper relation to "the whole" and putting all this under God's feet, but he changed his "catholicizing" interest to a "specializing" that is detailing interest. Details, which one can become enamoured of, were severed from the "whole" in which one must love God. He stopped his ears to the truth revealed to him in God's Law and confirmed by the tragic failures of his existence, the truth that he, once he had fallen into sin, could or would no longer survey any single theme in the great context of the whole of God's compositions, let alone that he could or would work it out in his own.

Sin worked still further destruction. For the process of disintegration cannot stop. Not only the abstracting severance of the whole into "parts", "spheres", "sectors", "territories ", "groups with common interests", is by itself the result of sin, but even within these "spheres," " territories," "communities" themselves (existing as a result of abstraction) the factor of dissolution becomes further active to increase the effect of the de-catholicizing principle, For while God lets the distinctions which He has put into His creation combine unto and in a "pluriform"[7] unity Satan makes use of these distinctions to separate things. God binds the respective races together and shows in their coalescence mankind's "pluriformity". Satan makes them principles of division and so forces a racial struggle. It goes the same way as far as the different classes, sexes, characters, nationalities, and trade organizations are concerned. To use Pauline imagery again: eye cultivates eye, ear cultivates ear, hand cultivates hand, foot cultivates foot, and this rage of specialization eats its way so deeply that the question whether these respective parts of the body need each other is reserved only for the moments when the world has a hangover, for example in what is called a postwar mentality. Even in these moments, asking the question is no more than a token vote. Personal aptitude is deformed into one-sidedness. One "type" will presently be the opposite of the other, of which it originally was to be only a complement. Everywhere differences become antitheses. Culture as the systematic endeavour of the developing sum-total of human beings towards the acquisition of the aggregate of labour, is hereby already formally dissolving itself. For by acting this way people attack the system: the confusion of tongues is a matter of punishment, but it is then promptly presented as a good thing. This formal dissolution is the fruit of a material falling away from God. Faith in His covenant word was forsaken. The idea of man's office was thereby abandoned. Earnestness gave way to play and to play-culture (sport-infatuation, four columns of sport reviews to half a column of Church news; big capitals for the winner of a match but not a single letter for the cause of spiritual struggle even in "Christian" newspapers). The hope, which in the regeneration of all things sees every part again in its proper place in the whole, has been forsaken; every day the world becomes more nervous and "culture" more and more a casemate business: everyone creeps into his own casemate at the command of "his" trade organization. Love for God, Who must be shown in His full glory in that which is His own, yields and gives way to infatuation with a creature that has broken away from its Maker. There is no unity any more. It is no longer even sought, because unity is found only through God, and God is considered an enemy. No longer the original style of the "commandment of life" (in paradise) is followed. And the reason which is given -- if a reason is still given -- is this: Well, we are in the desert now, and there one cannot do much with paradisal commandments. But this argument betrays the hypocrisy of those who use it: the law of life is held in contempt because God, Who by and in His Law gave life, is Himself denied. On his part, man broken away from God no longer has a cultural style that is determined by the moral law. Only in so far as God (as He presently will appear to be doing), for His own sake, yet keeps the created world within the natural context of the cosmos, man will feel himself to be bound by this fixed arrangement of God, also in his cultural achievements. Even though the moral law of God no longer determines man's cultural style, the natural law continues to bind the producer of culture with strong bonds. In the meantime the bonds of this natural coercion differ from the cords of God's love. The strong grip of God's natural ordinances enclasps God's friend as well as His enemy. But as far as this enemy is concerned, if it were up to him he would in his battle against the moral law try to avail himself of that which is natural and functions as such. If only he could, he would precisely in his immoral culture like to attain the proper "style" of Satan, who also has been unable to destroy the fundamental structure of God's original creation, but who yet desires to corrupt morally, with all his strength the world given by God. There have already been some "cultural styles" of "Satanism".

This has indeed repeatedly been claimed. Taking the point of view of experience and at the same time making a "guided" effort to take biblical data into account, one then reasoned as follows: Because of the dreadful character of sin and guilt we, men, would have deserved to descend into hell immediately after the Fall. Such a descent, cutting off all development would have served us right. Yet we see before our eyes that the world has continued to exist after the Fall for thousands of years and that the potentialities given in the cosmos are being developed as yet. Is this not "grace"? The answer is then implied: It is indeed grace; it is God's goodness which He does not owe to us. True, this grace does not redeem unto eternal salvation. Therefore it is called "common". Yet, it is indeed "grace." lt gives us the benefit of the restraining of sin. If sin were not restrained it would break out in the most flagrant, directly satanic outpouring of wickedness. However, God stems this wickedness by the "common" operation of His Spirit, even by the common "testimony" of the Spirit, which testimony provides man with certainty, the immediate assuredness concerning some clusters of central truths, this assuredness being pre-reflexive. In this way there falls upon the desert of this world the continually self-renewing dew of common grace, which makes life yet tolerable and even -- by virtue of the "progressive" operation which is peculiar to it -- creates oases in the midst of the desert cultural oases also.

Certainly there is a withholding (II Thessalonians 2 6). However, withholding is a feature peculiar to time. Where nothing is "withheld", there is a possessio[8] tota simul (a possession of life so that one always has the fullness of this possession simultaneously in his hands in full measure) OR a privatio tota simul (a matter of having been robbed a deprivation and then again in such a way that the fullness of this depravation is there totally at every "moment" in full measure). That is to say: wherever there is no withholding there is no temporal existence any longer; there "eternity" is found. For even in paradise there was a "withholding." If the Spirit of God had been given to Adam without a withholding, then he would have been excluded from the possibility of falling into sin. "Development" -- or otherwise "corruption" -- is a feature peculiar to time. Development and corruption belong to time. The state of being developed and being corrupted (both pleromatically, according to the subject's nature and capacity) belong to eternity. Consequently the fact that the gifts of creation show development is not grace but nature. There is a stirring "within them" within things, within people. It is something "in" man: the boisterous urge of one who, since he is himself "developing", seeks to wrest corn and wine from the "developing" earth; that is the urge to "colere," to cultivate the garden. However that which before the Fall was a religious work of love directed towards God as the Covenant God becomes after the Fall a deed of selfishness of self-preservation of zest for living (a la Pallieter[9]), not service to God but self-service. One so often hears about "nature" that one is left with the impression this is dead capital lying there to be used or not to be used by man (and the world). Then one jumps to the conclusion: this world of man deserved to die, namely, to die an eternal death, which as such takes away from all its objects the possibility of any use of capital; yet man is able to "use" "nature," that is, to cause this dead capital still to yield interest; ergo, this is "grace."

Christ and Culture

Copyright© G van Rongen and W. Helder, 1977

A note on the text

Preface

Christ and Culture

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