My Top Twelve Books of 2016 - #11: Plowing in Hope

What does Christian engagement in culture look like? You may not be able to put your answer into words, but you answer it every day. Modernists have a view of how Christians should relate to culture. Our problem is that, instead of working hard to develop a biblical view of culture, we’ve absorbed the modernistic one. David Hegeman’s book, Plowing in Hope: Toward a Biblical Theology of Culture, is a great starting point for the Christian struggling with his relationship to culture.

The book is in two parts. Part One, “A Positive Theology of Culture,” begins by describing the earth as originally created. God made the world and everything God made was good. There were no flaws in the created order. However, even after God rested on the seventh day, there

was still work to do. This work God gave to his image-bearers.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.

There were four rivers leading out of Eden. Notice that these rivers are not flowing into Eden. The four rivers led out toward the four corners of the earth. God’s task to man was to fill the earth with God honoring people who make God honoring stuff. This is a big task to give a couple of newlyweds.

So culture making is not just a side-effect of living in a fallen world. There are plenty of good Christian books criticizing non-Christian culture—works by Francis Schaeffer, Nancy Pearcey, and others come to mind—but this kind of work is not enough. The call of the believer is not just to have a clear idea of what’s wrong with a culture that rebels against God. We must build. A strength of this book is that it provides a foundation for doing just that.

Another strength of this book is that its author recognizes that it’s going to take many different kinds of people with many different gifts and passions to take up the cultural mandate. He quotes John Murray to this effect.

The nature of man is richly diversified. There is not only a diversity of basic need but there is also a profuse variety of taste and interest, of aptitude and endowment, of desires to be satisfied and of pleasures to be gratified.

When we consider the manifold ways in which the earth is fashioned and equipped to meet and gratify the diverse nature and endowments of man, we can catch a glimpse of the vastness and variety of the task involved in subduing the earth, a task directed to the end of developing man’s nature, gifts, interests, and powers in engagement with the resources deposited by God in the earth and the sea.

Hegemony elaborates:

When a culture refuses to affirm that God does distribute differing types and degrees of gifts to individuals and fails to allow the gifted to coalesce into an elite group, the inevitable result will be cultural impoverishment. (p. 54)

Amen.

In Part Two, “Culture and Redemption,” Hegeman raises the questions about the nature of the cultural work of non-Christians. Chapter Nine opens this way:

God allows human beings outside His covenant community to prosper in their culturative activities for the ultimate benefit and profit of the Church, His bride. Christians may appropriate some non-Christian objects, forms, and texts for their own culturative end, but they must do so taking extreme care, ever sensitive to the norms and standards provided in Scripture. (p. 79)

If this is true, every piece of art which really is good comes to us directly from the hand of God. Hegeman quotes Augustine to this effect.

Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves but dug out of the mines of God’s providence which are everywhere scattered abroad, and are perversely and unlawfully prostituting to the worship of devils.

He goes on to say that the Christian is called to take that gold and silver and put it to “a Christian use.” If a Christian comes to a people group that worships trees, the Christian should not be afraid to cut down a tree and build a table; one where his family can eat countless meals over which he prays in the name of Jesus. If the people build a golden calf, melt it down and make a wedding band.

So if you’d like a good theological foundation for Christian cultural engagement, this book is a fine place to start.