Cultural mandate

The cultural mandate or creation mandate is the divine injunction found in Genesis , in which God (YHWH), after having created the world and all in it, ascribes to humankind the tasks of filling, subduing, and ruling over the earth.

The text of Genesis 1:28, as specified in the King James translation, states: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The cultural mandate is a mandate common to all humanity rather than limited to religious peoples, and thereby does not necessarily envision the legislation of such religious ordinances as Sabbath attendance or blue laws, but rather, presumes the idea of public law from the perspective of common grace. Those who advocate it have typically assumed that there are principles established by God which underlie all human society, that apply to all people and not only Christians, but which Christians are to apply in the modern context within a biblical framework. Within that framework, contemporary society is subjected to a Christian analysis under the assumption of Christian faith that all created things, including all men and their institutions, are subject as servants to the same God, although not all have Christian faith. The cultural mandate further assumes that Christian justice demands that the lives of non-Christians must be watched over and their welfare protected, regardless of unbelief, because every person is made in the image of God.

While the cultural mandate looks to the Bible as its guide to gain insight into the general principles of social structure and public justice, most proponents of this view do not typically appeal to Scripture for authority in public discourse, but accept that the pluralistic modern State has developed according to the providence of God, and would argue according to this given state of affairs as interpreted by biblical reasoning. Within the Christian community itself, preliminary work is required to explain exactly how Christian faith applies in its own terms, and to develop the terms by which this Christian understanding may be communicated to a diverse culture. For example, the public agenda for the criminalization of murder would not usually begin and end with the Bible, but might take the form of arguing that murder violates what society calls a "self-evident right to life" that all men deserve, and murder contradicts the widely accepted pragmatic consideration that it is in one's own interest not to harm one another or society - for, although such moral reasoning comes short of a Christian rationale, it may be deemed compatible in practical terms with Christian aims. The neo-Calvinist approach is sometimes called "principled pluralism", because it seeks to find biblical principles of justice that apply without preference for one professed faith over another, in a diverse society.

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