Considered from the point of view of the fallen world, from the perspective of sin, the Way of the Cross is Salvation. But considered from God's ultimate point of view, the Way of the Cross is THE CULTURAL ACTION PAR EXCELLENCE. As the life of perfect obedience to the whole of God's Law, it entails perfect obedience also to the Cultural Mandate of which it must be an exemplary display. Any dualism posed between Salvation and the dynamics of Creation is consequently absolutely unwarranted and un-Biblical and is rooted in sin.

As Law, Cultural Mandate is related to Gospel as Law is to Gospel. We are no longer subject to Law but under Grace. ( I Cor. 9: 19-23). We can no more perform the requirements of the Cultural Mandate of ourselves than we can depend on ourselves for Salvation. By Grace is the Cultural Mandate effected through the living faith which issues in works. Calvary is therefore no mere parenthesis in world history, for it is here that Jesus has wrought the whole of the the mandate we failed in our first parents. God does not call us to be colonizers of an Old Order which is predestined to pass away but to be the harbingers of the Renewed Creation of which the Scriptures are the Canon. As travellers and sojourners in a foreign land we only scry intimations of the glory that is yet to be through the windows of the Bible and the Divine Liturgy, through certain experiences of "suspension of the viator status" thus authorized. Our present knowledge is only in part.

The original Cultural Mandate was substantially repeated to Noah but under changed conditions. Subjugation of the earth is no longer mentioned -- a significant omission? The task is still required in Ecclesiastes 1:13 but it is now a "sad task", a "heavy burden", which, in the context of Ecclesiastes and the Bible as a whole (See Acts 17: 24-28), is inseparable from the Way of the Cross, which of course was its central motive even before the Fall. Jesus repeated the Cultural Mandate in His summary of the Law as love of God and neighbour as oneself, and in his Love commandment, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel." To the Way of the Cross in Spirit-deepened faith, He made available by anticipation miraculous powers which have only become available piecemeal (if at all) to the slowly-developing art of secular Science historically based on a restrictive hierarchy of rudimentary and elementary principles led by faith in (that light-bearer personification of) self-deified Human Reason. Jesus generated food, controlled the weather, healed the sick, and raised the dead. Having trampled down death by death He appeared to Mary like the first Adam, in cultural context -- as a Gardener in a Garden. In Him the whole creation is transfigured into the Age to Come. In Him as Incarnate Word the whole creation finds both its beginning and fulfillment.

We should therefore understand that Jesus intended infinitely more of His missionaries than mere transgression of terrestrial geographic limits in the narrow sense. For there are as many "worlds" in our world -- universes of discourse -- principalities and power-structures -- as there are Uncreated Energies and Law-words proceeding from the mouth of God. Through the tracing of communication webs, sociologists of science, for example, can identify many transnational "invisible colleges" and communities. Ghetto communities operating under the aegis of all manner of spirits abound on planet earth. Clearly, standard Christian missionary principles must be fully operative here in a cultural endeavour that has not separated itself from the Gospel of Salvation. The "religio-spiritual" needs of the world do not exist in isolation from the "physical" and "cultural" needs. The drive to establish indigenous Christian communities ("sphere sovereignty", cultural plurality) is inherent in the Cultural Mandate, demanding the highest competence on the part of missionaries in the specialized areas to which God has called them. The Hebrew political scientist and seer, Daniel, who became chief scientist of Babylon, and his culturally-competent friends, are type-models here. And the ultimate aim cannot be to colonize an old order of the world which is passing away. For behold, the New has come and is coming in Christ.

Reformational Christians must ever beware of any tendency to let the Cultural Mandate take off on a life of its own apart from Christ. Such a tendency is a real risk in the line of Dutch Covenant Theology pervasively influenced by the more rationalistic and dualistic mutual or bilateral covenant of Zwingli and Bullinger and less influenced by the UNILATERAL THEOLOGY OF TESTAMENT of Calvin.(1) The danger here is that the "Covenant" virtually becomes the real mediator between God and man, while the Sovereign Lord is subordinated to the role of a mere "covenant agent", a mere legitimator and facilitator of a Cultural Mandate conceived in the image of the prevailing cultural spheres, preoccupations, and mores set as primary goals by secular Western culture.(2) Lost is the full evangelical Gospel message that the work of Christ in Salvation is the work of the world, that the life of Christ is the Life of the world in the Holy Trinity, that the the Way of the Cross and the missionary mandate of Matthew is the restoration of the Cultural Mandate revealed in Genesis.

As we have already observed and must emphasize again, it is as Lord and Saviour, to the Way of the Cross in Spirit-deepened faith, that Jesus has made available by anticipation of the World to Come miraculous powers which have only become available piecemeal if at all to the slowly-developing secular science mind-set. Not only so, but this restoration of the miraculous in the Cultural Mandate is understood in the genuine Reformational tradition, both in the Western and in the Eastern Church as at least a return to what was simply "normal" for Adam and Eve before the Fall, and more. In no way can this Cultural Mandate be reduced to merely the typical preoccupations and directions of secular Western culture. "Now we do not see all things, without exception, under man's control as yet, but we see Jesus already crowned with glory and honor in order to bring many sons into that glory of power and dominion to reign with Him over all the works of God's hands. . .

"Cf. Hebr. 2: 8-10; note the emphasis on Christ's humanity here:,, Jesus." The remarkable and appealing thing about the miracles Christ performed on earth was not that he therewith demonstrated what God can do, but what man can do, thanks to God, when he lives in full communion with Him. Christ demonstrated His Lordship over creation as ,,the new man from heaven" (cf. I Cor. 15: 20 ff.) when he cured the sick, raised the dead, and averted catastrophies. Cf. Matth. 9 :8:,,When the crowds saw what had happened they were filled with awe and praised God for giving such power to men." Cf. also the selfsame miracles performed by his apostles after the day of Pentecost. They constituted promising and to human responsibility appealing signs that man may and can in the course of history, as he fulfils his cultural mandate, regain the kind of control over the works of God's hands that will enable him to make all things new, to work out his own salvation and that of the world, if he applies all his God-given resources and potentials in the way of Christ and in the power of His Spirit." (3) As Dooyeweerd puts it, the human free [trans]formative will (i.e., the historical willing of power, mastery, free [trans]formative control) is "a subjective moment on the law-side of [the historical and post-historical] law-spheres themselves" and of the pre-logical aspects at least in "the disclosure of their normative anticipatory spheres." (4)

This was also the view of the friend and co-worker of Dooyeweerd, the Reformational Biologist, Dr. Johann Heinrich ("Harry") Diemer, who died in 1945 at the age of 40 shortly after his release from a Nazi concentration camp: "All the signs and wonders that Jesus performs are perfectly natural for him. He does them in the power of his divine nature as Creator, Providential Guide, and Re-creator of the cosmos. However, his human nature cannot be separated from his divine nature. It is a fulness of created powers and abilities that manifest themselves as signs and wonders through the work of the Spirit. Christ's nature -- man and God in one -- is the root from which all his miraculous deeds come. . . Whenever the original law of Christ is restored, we see miraculous potentialities emerge as the elements are withdrawn from the destructive power and influence of sin and are led anew in their proper courses. . . It is not only Jesus who could perform miracles while he was on earth; all those bound to him by true faith can perform them too. Christ has chosen his own since the time of Paradise to do great things in his name, the signs and wonders that will break the power of Satan. In reality it is always Christ who by his Word and Spirit performs these signs and wonders: conversions, cures, rescues, raising the dead, control of the elements, and so on. . ." (5)

WONDERWORKING POWER

"We, too, can say that in a sense a miracle is a return to the pre-fallen state of the world. In our world of human knowledge and of human limitations, miracles seem strange. What would have been natural before the fall is now unnatural; what was commonplace, is now a miracle which offends our intellect.

"A miracle then is a momentary revelation of what the world should be like, the way God planned it; what it once was like and what it will be like when Christ comes in Power and Glory at the end of time. It is a moment and event which is "back in tune" with God as it should have been all along. All life as we know it is an "exile from God." A miracle is momentarily coming back home. It is a moment in which life "arrives."

"If a miracle then is a revelation of Divine Mystery and a restoration of things as they should be, we can see that "miracles" can be as much a matter of the beholder as a matter of fact. An event which could be explained in terms of accidental coincidence by one person, can be a miracle for someone aware of the mystery of things. A miracle of healing can be explained by a scientist in accordance with certain biological or neurological laws, and the explanation may be excellent and accurate. But the mystery of the miracle is still there, the mystery of why the process of healing began, what power started it.

"Or take the following story:

"Sitting one day at the gate of his native city, a rabbi saw a man approach and rest himself on a ledge which jutted out from the city wall over a deep ravine. The man was weary with travel and fell asleep. The rabbi saw a snake crawling toward the man, and it had almost reached him when suddenly a branch from a tree fell on the snake and killed it. The man startled by the noise, woke up, saw the snake, and jumped back. Just then the ledge on which he had been sleeping, broke off and fell into the ravine far below. The rabbi then approached the man and asked him, "Tell me, why is it that God saw fit to perform two miracles for you, one after another? What have you done?"

(Adapted from Zohar, The Book of Splendor. Selected and edited by G. G. Scholem. Shocken Books, New York, 1949, p. 51.)

"One can say that this was a coincidence. One can also say that it is a miracle. It is a question of how one understands the mystery of life and God. Why should coincidence happen at all? Why should it happen to me? At this time and at this place? There is a mystery in the event and this mystery is related to God."

(From pages 52-53 of George Koulomzin, Faith and Science, Orthodox Christian Education Commission.)

References and Further Reading

1. J. Wayne Baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition, Athens, Ohio University Press, 1980, pp. xxi - xxii, xxiii - xxiv.

2. (i) John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England Puritanism and the Bible, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, pages 151, 129, 130, 131.

(ii) ed. Richard Reinitz, Tensions in American Puritanism, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1970.

(iii) "For Christians, the coming of the substance made shadows out of a rich array of Old Testament events, persons, and ideas, among them covenant. Figuram res exterminat; the reality brings the image to an end." (Delbert R. Hillers, Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969, p.188 [with Latin phrase from The Liturgical Poetry of Adam of St. Victor, ed. Wrangham (London, 1881), I: 60; quoted in Don Cameron Allen, Image and Meaning, new enl. ed. (Baltimore, 1968), p.142]). The covenant idea must be retained as an integral part of created meaning always pointing to Christ Who is the New Covenant.

3. J. C. de Moor, Towards a Biblically Theo-logical Method A Structural Analysis and a Further Elaboration of Dr. G. C. Berkouwer's Hermeneutic-Dogmatic Method, Kampen: Uitgeversmaatschappij J. H. Kok, 1980, p.360.

4. H. Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, Volume II (1955), pp.238, 239.

5. Johann H. Diemer, Nature and Miracle, Toronto: Wedge Publishing Foundation, 1977 [trans. Wilma Bouma], p.25.

Early 1980's, 2005

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Index