Considering Culture (5)

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

The previous post ended with God’s Mission starting with Abraham. Of course, the culmination comes with Jesus. I’ll assume you know the general plot here, but let’s look at the wider ramifications — Jesus’ life and death does not just impact individuals, but all of creation. God is rescuing the whole thing. To quote Jeremy Begbie again (this time from the essay ‘Created Beauty’)

… in the incarnate Son, crucified, risen and now exaulted, we witness God’s re-creation of the world’s beauty. The one through whom all things are upheld (Heb 1:3), by whom all things are held together (Col 1:17), by whose blood all things are reconciled to God (Col 1:20), is “the firstborn of all creation … the beginning, the firstborn from the dead” (Col 1:15, 18), the one through whom all things will finally be gathered up (Eph 1:10).

Rob Bell puts it like this in Velvet Elvis:

As Paul put it in Colossians, “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” Paul uses another significant word here: reconcile. To make peace where it has been lacking. To bring back together. To mend what is torn and to fix what is broken. And Paul wants us to make sure we grasp that this is a much larger issue than just human souls. He uses the phrase “all things, whether thing on earth or thinsg in heaven” because he wants us to see that this is all of creation. “All things really means “everything” — every bird and tree and mountain and star and every single square inch of physical creation.

In Jesus, God is putting it all back together.

To make the cross of Jesus just about human salvation is to miss that God is interested in the saving of everything. Every star and rock and bird. All things.

Keep this in mind as we recall our starting point: “Creation in the biblical tradition, however, includes human society and culture in all its complexity and fullness…” (Richard Middleton). Consequently, if culture is an integral part of creation, then culture is part of these ‘all things’.

As I said earlier, we find it easy to miss the ‘all things’ in these passages. Partially due to dualism and partially, I guess, due to our (not inappropriate) focus on individual salvation. Tom Wright is useful in this context when he emphasises that our individual salvation should be located in the bigger picture — as a local outworking of the overall rescue plan.

I wonder also if we can look at it the other way — the overall salvation of creation has individual salvation as a key building block. If we are the stewards of creation, then the rescue must start with us and fan out from there. I guess this is something close to Paul’s point in Romans 8, where creation is desribed as waiting for the sons of God to be revealed and looking to join in their freedom.

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(As an aside, we probably should also say something here about Jesus being the ultimate Image of God and consider that in the context of our earlier comments on image: As mankind is made in the image of God, his imaging marks him out as the true human. Consequently he can reconcile to God all that humans are responsible for stewarding.)

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Permalink | January 5th, 2008

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