Christians add artifacts to online folk culture when we debate theology, discuss concerns about our denominations, or share experiences about what it’s like growing up as a child of Korean-born parents. And we engage popular culture when we discuss political opinions, critique movies or music, and explore questions of bioethics.

“When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my pistol,” said the Nazi playwright Hans Johst. I suspect that if our paths had ever crossed, Johst would have shot me on sight. For I am what he would have despised most: a culturist.

I love culture. I love high culture, low culture, and middlebrow culture. I love pop culture, folk culture, and church culture. I love Texas culture, American culture, and the culture of Western civilization. I worry about culture wars and wars on culture. I despise cultural relativism and fret about the decline of culture. I read about the theology of culture and how to transform, redeem, and restore culture. I think about culture. A lot.

One of the areas that I think about most is online media and how Christians can use them to influence the production, consumption, and redemption of culture. The first step in developing a theology of culture is to recognize that our primary responsibility as culturally concerned Christians is not to critique culture (although that is an essential task) or to consume culture (an unavoidable part of being human) but to be creators of culture.

Everyone is familiar with the story in the first chapter of Genesis about how God created man and woman. What we often overlook is the next two things that immediately follow: God blesses mankind—and then puts them to work (Gen. 1:28).

In the Reformed tradition, this command is often referred to as the cultural mandate. As Nancy Pearcey explains in her book, Total Truth:

In Genesis, God gives what we might call the first job description: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” The first phrase, “be fruitful and multiply” means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, “subdue the earth,” means to harness the natural world: plant crops, build bridges, design computers, compose music. This passage is sometimes called the Cultural Mandate because it tells us that our original purpose was to create cultures, build civilizations—nothing less.

Crops, bridges, computers, and music are all examples of cultural artifacts. Artifacts are any man-made things that are created from artifice (human skill). The range of what is classified under this term is almost endless. Artifacts include everything from stone arrowheads to skyscrapers to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Culture, therefore, is simply a collection of various artifacts within a particular grouping of peoples.

In his illuminating book Plowing in Hope, David Bruce Hegeman observes that “culture is the concretization—the rendering in some permanent form—of mankind’s culturative acts.” Unfortunately, the various new media artifacts that we create—blog posts, social networking entries, YouTube videos, etc.—are often treated not as the concretization but rather the emphermeralization of culturative acts.

We now have access to one of the most powerful technologies in the history of mankind. We not only have access to information that was unavailable to Aquinas, Newton, and Einstein, but we possess the ability to communicate instantly with people across the globe. Yet the vast majority of our time is spent reading and writing about ephemera; warm milk has a longer shelf-life than the average blog post.

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