Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

by Russell D. Moore

Implicit in Jesus’ preaching in the synagogue was the message he would preach everywhere else later, to seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness. Kingdom first does not mean kingdom only. Since the kingdom is a kingdom of justice and righteousness, seeking the kingdom means that we come to know what to care about in the first place.

God is teaching us, as he taught our Lord, to learn in little things how to be in charge of great things (Luke 2; Matt. 25:14–23). Our lives now are an internship for the eschaton.

Seeing our lives now, and the universe around us, as precursors to the life to come, we’re freed from the ingratitude that turns away from God’s good gifts, from the apathy that ignores those God hears. We pour ourselves into loving, serving, and working because these things are seeds of the tasks God has for us in the next phase. We don’t invest any of those things with infinite meaning.

The goal of the kingdom is the merger of heaven and earth—when the dwelling place of God transforms creation, and the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.

The kingdom to come includes not just worship but righteousness (ethics), communion (society), authority (politics), and “the glory and honor of the nations” (culture).

If we do not have a vision before us of where we are headed, we will assume that the status quo is normal, and that we and our cultures and our societies are “only human,” without ever realizing that we have never seen normal humanity, in our lives.

As the rightful king, Jesus reestablished human rule over the angelic and natural orders by living out the destiny our fallen ancestors forfeited. He was a wise ruler with dominion over his own appetites, with a will, affections, and conscience directed by his Father, and by the Word of his God. All this was true because he was free from the one power the evil spirits have over every other human: accusation. “The ruler of this world is coming,” Jesus said. “He has no claim on me” (John 14:30).

The perils of getting this tension wrong are quite real. Those who mistakenly bring the kingdom too near (already) fall for utopianism, unrealistic expectations, politicized gospels, or, worst of all, the persecution of those who don’t yet believe or who don’t see things the same way. Those who keep the kingdom too distant (not yet) fall for prophecy chart fixations or cultural apathy or failed attempts to withdraw from society. In his resurrection, Jesus has been granted authority over everything (Matt. 28:18). He is the rightful heir and ruler of the cosmos. But Jesus does not yet rule everything.

By faith, we see his authority, crowned with power and glory (Heb. 2:9), but, by sight, all we can perceive is a bedeviled cosmos, chaotic to the core (1 John 5:19; Eph. 2:2; 2 Cor. 4:4; Rev. 12:7–17).

So if Jesus does not yet rule the world, where does he rule? He rules, in the present age, over his church (Eph. 1:22–23). The church is a signpost of God’s coming kingdom (Eph. 3:10), a preview to the watching world of what the reign of God in Christ is to look like, a colony of the kingdom coming.

A kingdom vision is necessary, first of all, to show us what matters. The kingdom future shows us the meaning of everything else.

Seeking first the kingdom does not dampen our concern for justice and righteousness in the social and political arenas, but heightens it. The goal of history is not, after all, escape to heaven, but the merger of heaven and earth—when the dwelling place of God transforms the material creation (Rev. 21:1–4).

God’s purpose is to conform us into the image of Christ. So, like him, we do not arrive fully formed. Jesus, in his humanity, “learned obedience from what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8). If God is working all things together for my good, then nothing in my life is a “waste of time.”

The kingdom of God, both now and in the age to come, is ultimately about what Paul called being “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3–4). We find our life and mission in Jesus’ own rather than fitting him into the kingdom we design for ourselves. We pour ourselves into loving, serving, and working because these things are seeds of the tasks God has for us in the next phase.

Our mission is defined in terms of a gospel appeal to reconciliation, now, not the subjugation of our foes. That’s why Jesus read the portion of the scroll about the year of God’s favor, but did not read the words immediately following, about the “day of vengeance of our God” (Isa. 61:2).

We lose sight both of the fact that all of human history—from Eden onward—is a war zone, and that God’s kingdom triumph is proven not by our electoral success or our cultural influence—as important as that is in being obediently “salt” and “light” in our culture. Our triumph is proven in the resurrection of the world’s rightful ruler.

The kingdom is cosmic, but the kingdom is personal too. It’s so personal that when Jesus revealed himself on the road to Damascus to Saul of Tarsus, he was still tied up with his hometown. Saul said, “Who are you, Lord?” And the voice within the light answered, “I am Jesus of Nazareth” (Acts 22:8).

The question was never whether God would keep his promise to Israel, but rather who was in Israel in the first place. John preached exactly what the Old Testament itself had warned: Israel is a vine planted by God, and the branches that do not bear fruit are pruned off (Matt. 3:10).

That’s the mystery of a church made up of every tribe, tongue, nation, and language. Christ, and Christ alone, is the heir of God’s inheritance, all of it. Those joined to Christ are now part of him, and thus joint-heirs with him of everything (Rom. 8:12–17; Gal. 4:1–7). “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ,” Paul wrote.

But when you read the Bible as it was intended to be read you see that the exclusivity of covenant with Israel was to bless every nation (Gen. 12:2; Zech. 8:13). And, as we have already seen, the nation of Israel’s covenant with God is fulfilled, not by a geopolitical treaty, but in a Person, Jesus Christ. At the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, a new era of the covenant between God and his people came into being. Believers from every tribe, tongue, and nation would be called sons of God.

God names his people, and then makes the name true.

We are, the Bible tells us, “aliens and strangers ” as it relates to the world (1 Pet. 2:9–11 nasb) but not as it relates to the City of God, the commonwealth of Israel, now situated in heaven (Eph. 2:13).

This means seeing the church as itself a culture, a culture being conformed to the future. The church is not merely a voluntary society of those who share the same theology, or who want to pool their resources for a common mission. The church is an act of war.

“Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11).

Jesus told us that the kingdom is present where he is, and he promised to be present with his church, no matter how struggling or how small (Matt. 18:15–20). The church gathered is not merely a matter of fueling the people for a week of individual devotion.

In our life together, then, God is forming a culture, by training us for our future responsibilities as joint-heirs with Christ. The king grants to his administration-in-waiting spiritual gifts, used now within the church, magnified later in the kingdom (Eph. 4:7–13; 1 Cor. 12:4–10).

God’s wisdom and God’s power are personal; in fact, they are a Person: Jesus of Nazareth (1 Cor. 1:24), which is a stumbling block that crosses the cultural boundaries of Jew and Greek (1 Cor. 1:23).

The most important cultural task we have is to crucify our incipient Darwinism, in which the leaders on the inside of the kingdom colony are the same as they would be on the outside, even if there were no God in the universe. The first step to cultural influence is not to contextualize to the present, but to contextualize to the future, and the future is awfully strange, even to us.

The key here is the distinction, offered by Søren Kierkegaard, of the genius and the apostle.25 The genius commands attention because of his influence or his brilliance. The apostle prompts attention because he is sent, with a message that bears, on its own terms, authority.

Perhaps the best way to gain influence is to lose it. The cultural mandate of Genesis (1:28) is still in effect and applies to all. We need Christians as “salt” and “light” in every aspect of art and craftsmanship and politics and thought leadership, not just in those thought to be “churchly” or “Christian.” But the cultural mandate was rooted in a garden temple-sanctuary, in communion with God. That temple exists now within the Body of Christ, the church. For Christians, our consciences and thought patterns are formed together, by life together in the community of the kingdom. Our moral intuitions then ought to be formed by churches that reflect the priorities and the makeup of the kingdom of Christ.

The most dangerous aspects of the culture around us are not those that are the most heated “culture war” flashpoints of the moment. The more perilous questions are those we don’t debate at all, because we don’t think to challenge them.

but whatever the doctrine of election means, we can be sure of this: God’s election in Scripture is meant to make people more, not less, secure in God’s faithfulness.

The culture of the kingdom is not a projection of our lives now onto eternity, but instead the reverse: a vision of a new creation that breaks us and prepares us for our inheritance by patterning us, now, after the life of creation’s heir: Jesus himself.

That’s why the first step to a kingdom-focused cultural engagement is the recovery of a church that practices church discipline. The apostle Paul wrote, “For what have I do to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?”

We are to hold accountable those on the inside, and speak to those on the outside with persuasion and mission.

The salt must be savory or else it is of no use to the world (Matt. 5:13). And the light from the church is anchored to a lampstand within the churches (Rev. 1:20). The internal doctrinal and moral ordering of the church is a matter of mission. Without it, the presence of Christ is gone, the lampstand removed (Rev. 2:5), and with it the light that shines out into the world. A church that loses its distinctiveness is a church that has nothing distinctive with which to engage the culture.

We should not seek an angry, quarrelsome cultural presence, but neither should we seek to engage the culture with the sort of gospel that the culture would want, if they, or we, were making it up. Too many attempts at reconciling Christianity and the outside culture have to do with being seen as “relevant” by the culture on its own terms. We will never be able to do that. Culture is a rolling stone, and it waits for no band of Christians seeking to imitate it or exegete it.

If we are followers of Christ, we go where he takes us, and that will lead us into some controversy, controversy that rises first from our own idol-protecting hearts.

The future of Christian social witness cannot assume the gospel, but must articulate it explicitly and coherently, not simply as the tagline at the end of our activism but as the ground and underpinning of it.

There is the first mistake of those who talk as though personal evangelism and public justice are contradictory concerns, or at least that one is part of the mission of the church and the other is a sideline matter.

The truth is, the call to repentance is a necessary word in order to interrupt our headlong rush toward the way that seems right in our own eyes, a way that leads to death.

The word of God exposes the conscience in order to drive it to the goodness of the good news, even at those points where the conscience argues that the word of God ought not to have jurisdiction.

The command to love God and neighbor speaks not only to the exposing of sin, but also to what it means to please God in expressing such love.

The biblical definition of love for oneself is not experiencing affectionate feelings but active care. As the apostle Paul put it, “For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourished it and cherishes it” (Eph. 5:29). We do not love ourselves merely in “spiritual ways” but holistically. And we do not merely love ourselves in “material” ways.

Paul told the church at Galatia that our active love of neighbor starts within the church but does not stop there: “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:10).

Having defined “neighbor” and “love,” Jesus then answered the implicit question behind the others, “What is our mission?” The answer to the question of who was the neighbor to the vulnerable man was obvious: “the one who showed him mercy.” Jesus’ response was, “You go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:37). The mission of Christ does not start with the giving of the Great Commission or with the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost. This is instead when the church is joined to a preexisting mission.

But the gospel speaks to the question of honoring life, and obedience to Jesus means turning from practices that are unjust and oppressive and murderous, even when those practices are embedded in culture and recognized by law.

We act in the framework of the gospel—never apart from it—both in verbal proclamation and in active demonstration. We do not shrug our shoulders and conclude that half a gospel is better than none.

The gospel of historic Christianity is cosmic. In Christ, God reconciles “to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). The gospel is also social, reconciling people with one another, and motivating them to care for human flourishing and human suffering. But the gospel of Jesus Christ is, first of all, personal. We love our fellow human beings, and serve them in their suffering, precisely because we believe that God loves not just “humanity” but individual humans, that Jesus died for persons, that God’s wrath is propitiated against persons, and that persons will be raised, individually and collectively, body and soul, on the last day, either to everlasting life or to everlasting condemnation.

Our mission is rooted in a gospel that tells us honestly of the bad news of our sin and the good news of God’s grace. Our mission reconciles sinners to God, but also reconciles person to person, community to community, humanity to nature.