Church and culture were both designed to be communities of selfless love. Even today, each one helps the other advance toward that goal. As in Genesis 3, church and culture are still able to help each other solely because God intervenes. This intervention, which Jesus as king now continues each day, is the essence of His kingdom rule. The people in the church have some ability to be a community of selfless love because of Jesus’ intervention in their hearts, regenerating them and giving them the desire to obey Him.

This post is about church and culture and how they interact.

Typically, that would mean I’m obligated to cite Richard Niebuhr’s 1951 book Christ and Culture. Or at least one of the more recent works that modify Niebuhr’s five categories of Christian cultural engagement, such as Tim Keller’s Center Church or D.A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited.

Instead, I’m going to start with the Amazon box on your front porch.

We can best understand God’s original design for the realms of church and culture as a virtuous cycle. And one of the most famous examples of the virtuous cycle in action is online retailer Amazon.

A virtuous cycle is, as they teach it in business schools, a chain of events that causes the chain of events to occur again with more power and speed. Business author Jim Collins in his book Good to Great visualized this concept as “the flywheel,” a mechanical piece in certain engines that, as it rotates, picks up speed and disperses greater power.

Amazon’s flywheel declares that the company’s success starts with great customer experience. A great customer experience attracts more customers. More customers attract more third-party sellers. Third-party sellers drive more product selection. And more selection ultimately lowers the cost of products and innovation. More choices, lower prices and more innovation will create an even better customer experience, which will attract even more customers and more sellers.

The cycle has kept going round and round like that, generating annual revenue for Amazon of $386 billion. That’s bigger than the entire economy of even some wealthy countries, like Norway.

So what does this have to do with church and culture?

Something like the virtuous cycle was in effect when God created men and women. God created humans “in His image.” As I’ve written before, God is a community of selfless love, so He created men and women to reflect His image by also creating communities of selfless love.

These communities of selfless love are culture. These communities are designed to be created, expanded and replicated via the cultural work of marriage, procreation and family life. Yet these communities are also designed to have a spiritual impact—as they grow they add more and more people who know God and praise Him. Knowing and praising God are spiritual activities, and we now call the groups of people that do them “churches” or simply “the church.” As more people know God, who is the source of all selfless love, He inspires and enables them to engage in the cultural work of creating even more communities of selfless love. And the virtuous cycle turns round and round.

If we look closely at Genesis Chapter 2, we can see some distinction between the realms we now label culture and church (or, if you prefer, between the material realm and the spiritual realm). We can also see how they worked together as a virtuous cycle. Gen. 2:15 says, “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” That is, God created culture (a garden) and gave the man a job in the cultural realm (to work it and keep it). Just imagine Adam’s day-to-day life digging in the dirt—it seems about as material as you can get. Then Gen. 2:16-17 shifts to a spiritual command from God: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’”

It is implied that the man heard God and obeyed, for the next passage (vv. 18-20) isn’t about the man eating the forbidden fruit or arguing with God about his commands, but it shows God and the man working together on the man’s cultural job—bringing order to the material realm by naming all the animals.

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