Joseph Mattera: God, Politics and the Kingdom of God by JOSEPH MATTERA for Charisma News
Whether Christian or non-Christian, any group that has an unbalanced concentration of power (e.g. the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, or certain points of corruption in Western European history that compromised the Roman Catholic church, such as the Inquisition) will eventually be decentralized by God so that proper checks and balances can prosper both the civil liberties of people and the aforementioned jurisdictions.
As far as I am concerned, the key verse in the entire Bible that explains the mission of the church is Genesis 1:28:
“God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'”
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Many theologians have called this passage the cultural mandate because this original covenant with Adam, the federal head of the human race, gives the human race the responsibility of stewarding the earth, which involves managing every aspect of life and society. After the fall, God recapitulated this same command by giving it to Noah in Genesis 9:1-2:
“Then God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Every beast of the earth and every bird of the sky and all that moves on the earth and all the fish of the sea will fear you and be terrified of you. They are given into your hand.'”
This proves that the cultural mandate was still in effect after the fall. Furthermore, Mathew 28:18-20 has been called by some theologians the Second Commission instead of the Great Commission because Jesus as the Second or Last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45) gave the godly seed (the church) another form of the cultural mandate when He told the church to disciple the nations.
Discipling whole nations must include applying the commandments of God to all of practical life: politics, business, art, science, history, education, sociology and so forth. Thus, it is a recapitulation of what God told the first Adam in Genesis 1:28.
When someone wonders whether or not the church should be involved in politics, they are missing the bigger picture of the cultural mandate, in which the church is called to be the center of all of culture by influencing every discipline and jurisdiction with the biblical worldview.
