‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’: The Cultural Mandate Is Work for Image-Bearers

The responsibility of humanity to obey the “cultural mandate” is well recognized in evangelical discourse as a way of understanding the relationship between Christianity and culture. But perhaps less known are the textual origins of this discussion, in the tradition of neo-Calvinism, and the relationship of that mandate to the metaphysical makeup of human beings.

There are two aspects to the cultural mandate in the state of innocence: (1) the task of begetting and the organic multiplication of people and (2) the task of forming a diversity of cultures.

Embedded in the creation of humanity, therefore, is a teleological orientation—humanity was meant to spread and cultivate creation in obedience to their God, and no single community can possibly reflect the richness of the image. Irwyn Ince writes, “The image of God is much too rich for it to be realized in a single race, ethnic group, or culture.”

Exercise Dominion

The call of the cultural mandate therefore fittingly corresponds to the proper dominion that image-bearers of God are supposed to have over creation. It’s recognized by more contemporary thinkers as the “vocational” aspect of the image of God.

God gave the tasks of work and cultivation before the fall, showing the inherent goodness of human labor in culture making. To “be fruitful and multiply” refers to the natural multiplication of human beings and the work that cultivates nature for their own good, in accordance with God’s command.

God gave the tasks of work and cultivation before the fall, showing the inherent goodness of human labor in culture making.

William Edgar aptly describes the labor of image-bearers in obedience to the mandate as an exercise of “analogous power” given to human beings from God:

Embedded in this human activity is (at least in germ form) the development of agriculture, the arts, economics, family dynamics, and everything that contributes to human flourishing, to the glory of God. This management is of course in imitation of God’s greater stewardship over his creation. The so-called nature psalms attest to the overarching sovereignty of God over his creation, and yet to his delegating analogous power to human beings.

Psalm 104:14–15 situates human work as in parallel with and yet dependent on God’s work. God causes the livestock and plants to grow so that humanity might make wine and bread to gladden his heart. To put it in theological terms, God creates ex nihilo while humans create ex naturam. God speaks and nature comes to be, but humanity, in an analogous fashion, creates out of the preexisting natural material God creates.

Dominion, therefore, refers to this human cultivation of the natural world, going with the grain of God’s design. Human dominion thus means stewardship, displaying both humanity’s dignity and humanity’s servitude before God. J. H. Bavinck says it this way:

We, the human race, are predestined to fulfil a distinctive calling in that history; as humanity, we are assigned an exceptional place in the greater context of the kingdom from the very first. We are simultaneously subjects and to some extent co-rulers, viceroys over certain regions. Not everything is subjected to us: we are not given authority over the course of the stars and the planets or the tides of the never-resting seas. But the earth and its plants and animals have been assigned to us, given for us to rule over and to use for God’s service, to fathom and understand creation’s hidden powers, and so to bring to full development the innate possibilities of creation. That is the meaning of the cultural calling allotted to us immediately after creation (Gen. 1:28–29).

Make Culture

This sense of culture making as the interplay between nature and human cultivation, as humanity images God analogously, corresponds well with Henry van Til’s classic work The Calvinistic Concept of Culture.

He defines culture as the “secondary environment” that humanity builds out of the primary environment of God’s creation: “In this book I use the term [culture] to designate that activity of human, the image-bearer of God, by which he fulfills the creation mandate to cultivate the earth, to have dominion over it and to subdue it. The term is also applied to the result of that activity, namely, the secondary environment which has been superimposed upon nature by man’s creative effort” (emphasis mine).

Human dominion means stewardship, displaying both humanity’s dignity and humanity’s servitude before God.

To cultivate creation well involves discerning God’s design for creation—culture making can easily deform into hubris and abuse when we determine for ourselves what we ought to make out of the natural world. Herman Bavinck thus warns that any fulfilling of the earthly vocation should be situated within the context of obedience to God’s Word.

This is signified by the conjunction of the command to be fruitful and multiply with the prohibition against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The former denotes humanity’s responsibility toward earth, the latter toward heaven—but both together are needed for humanity to accomplish either task well. Bavinck argues that these two tasks are really one:

The first task defines his relationship to the earth, the second his relationship to heaven. Adam had to subdue the earth and have dominion over it, and this he must do in a twofold sense: he must cultivate it, open it up, and so cause to come up out of it all the treasures which God has stored there for man’s use; and he must also watch over it, safeguard it, protect it against all evil that may threaten it, must, in short, secure it against the service of corruption in which the whole of creation now groans.

But man can fulfill this calling over against the earth only if he does not break the bond of connection which unites him with heaven, only if he continues to believe God at his word and to obey his commandment. The twofold task is essentially therefore one task. Adam must have dominion over the earth, not by idleness and passivity but through the work of his head and heart and hand.

Holistic Calling

Cultivating the earth is a great good, but without obedience to God’s Word, humans would not only abuse their proper vicegerency but lose the highest good, God himself. Proper earthly dominion requires and presupposes true religion. Earthly and heavenly vocations form a singular holistic calling. Bavinck continues,

But in order to rule, he must serve; he must serve God who is his Creator and Lawgiver. Work and rest, rule and service, earthly and heavenly vocation, civilization and religion, culture and cultus, these pairs go together from the very beginning. They belong together and together they comprise in one vocation the great and holy and glorious purpose of man. All culture, that is, all work which man undertakes in order to subdue the earth, whether agriculture, stock breeding, commerce, industry, science, or the rest, is all the fulfilment of a single Divine calling. But if man is really to be and remain such he must proceed in dependence on and in obedience to the Word of God. Religion must be the principle which animates the whole of life and which sanctifies it into a service of God.

If religion should animate humanity’s work, the dominion that image-bearers have over creation isn’t merely kingly but priestly—the cultural mandate is at once a heavenly mandate, as that vertical relation with God determines how humans represent God on earth.

Joshua Farris sums this up well: “As priests of creation, humanity has the function and privilege to assist the creation to realize and evidence its rational order and beauty and thus to express God’s beauty and being back to God.”

The obedience to God’s Word and Adam’s responsibility to convey that Word to Eve and his progeny testify to humanity’s prophetic role.

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