Humanity in Culture

The Doctrine of Humanity in Culture — A Position Paper

Bruce Mitchell

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A Brief Statement

I hold that man and woman, made in the image of God, are the crown of His creation, and that every question of human life in culture — of gender and sexuality, marriage and family, work, society, and justice — must be answered from that starting point and along a single biblical line: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. What God made, He made good; what the fall corrupted, it did not abolish; what Christ redeems, He restores; and what He will consummate at His coming, He even now renews in His people. To read the culture rightly, I must read it by this fourfold light.

I therefore hold God’s creational design to be good, wise, and normative — not a cage but a gift — and I hold it without apology in an age that has set itself against much of it. Yet I hold it as one sinner among sinners, and I would speak of it only as my Lord did, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14): firm where Scripture is clear, humble where it is not, and compassionate always. The gospel both judges our culture and offers to redeem it; and the church’s task is neither to bless the world as it is nor to flee it, but to live within it as faithful sojourners and witnesses, until the King returns to make all things new.

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A Detailed Exposition

The Image of God: The Foundation

Everything I will say of human life in culture rests on the doctrine of the image of God (imago Dei), which I have treated more fully in my paper on Anthropology. God made man “in His own image … male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). From this, two truths follow that govern all the rest. First, every human being — of every age, sex, race, and condition, from the womb to the grave — bears God’s image and possesses an equal and inviolable dignity that no culture confers and none may revoke. Second, that image, though defaced by the fall, is not erased; fallen man is glorious still, and tragic, and the object of redeeming love.¹ This gives me the lens through which I read every cultural question: the fourfold biblical story of creation (God’s good design), fall (its corruption, in us and in our cultures), redemption (its restoration in Christ), and consummation (its perfection at His return). Where the culture preserves something of the created good, I can affirm it by common grace; where it reflects the fall, I must name it; and in all things I labor in the hope of redemption and the certainty of consummation.²

Male and Female: The Goodness of Created Gender

God made humanity in two sexes — “male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27; 5:2) — and called the whole “very good.” I hold, therefore, that maleness and femaleness are not accidents of biology to be overridden, nor social roles to be reassigned at will, but a good and God-given dimension of what it is to be human, written into the body itself. The body is not a cage from which the true self must be liberated, nor a canvas upon which the will may paint whatever it wishes; it is a gift, and it speaks. To be given a male or a female body is to be told something true by our Maker about who we are.³ I say this knowing that some experience a deep and painful incongruence between their sense of self and their bodies, and I would not add a feather’s weight to that suffering. Gender dysphoria is real anguish, and the person who bears it is to be met with tenderness, patience, and love, never contempt. But love does not lie. I cannot tell a hurting person that the body God gave is a mistake, nor that peace is to be found in remaking it against its created grain; I believe the deeper healing lies in receiving the self God has made. Here, as everywhere, I would distinguish sharply between the person, whom I am bound to love, and the ideology — the claim that the sexed body is meaningless and the self-defining will supreme — which I am bound to resist as a falsehood about God’s world.⁴

Sexuality: The Gift and Its Boundaries

Sexuality is God’s good gift, and like every good gift it is given with a design and a boundary. God made us sexual beings and pronounced it good; He also reserved the sexual union for one place — the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, where two become “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Within that covenant, sex is to be honored and enjoyed; outside it, whether before marriage or beside it, it falls short of God’s design.⁵ This means I hold, with the whole historic church, that sexual intimacy belongs to marriage alone, and that homosexual practice — along with every other sexual expression outside the man-woman covenant — is contrary to the Creator’s intent (Romans 1:26–27; 1 Corinthians 6:9–11). I am well aware how unwelcome this word is, and I will not soften what God has said; but neither will I forget how the apostle finished that hard sentence — “and such were some of you. But you were washed … sanctified … justified” (1 Corinthians 6:11). There is the gospel: not condemnation, but cleansing and a new identity. To the believer who experiences same-sex attraction, I would say what I would say to every unmarried saint, myself included, in my own single years: the call is to chastity, and it is costly, and it is not a punishment but a path of discipleship walked by many faithful Christians who find in Christ a fullness the world cannot give. Our identity is not in our desires, fallen or otherwise, but in Christ, who bids us all take up the cross and follow.⁶

Marriage: The Covenant of Man and Woman

Marriage is the first institution God ordained, given at creation before the fall and before the state or the church: “a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). It is a covenant — not merely a contract — between one man and one woman, intended for life, exclusive and faithful, and it is meant to display nothing less than the love of Christ for His church (Ephesians 5:22–33). Within it, I hold the complementarity I have described in my paper on Ecclesiology: husband and wife equal in dignity and worth, distinct in calling, the husband summoned to a sacrificial, self-giving headship that looks like Christ laying down His life, and the wife to a glad respect — a mutual love that has nothing to do with domination and everything to do with self-gift. Marriage is not a sacrament that conveys grace (see my paper on Sacramentology), but it is a holy covenant, and a great mystery.⁷

Because it is a covenant, divorce is a grievous breaking, and God says plainly that He hates its treachery (Malachi 2:16); it is never to be entered lightly, nor used as an escape from the ordinary hardness of two sinners learning to love. And yet I do not hold marriage to be absolutely indissoluble in a fallen world. Scripture itself permits divorce where the covenant has been gravely violated — in cases of sexual immorality (Matthew 19:9) and of desertion (1 Corinthians 7:15) — and I believe the principle of desertion rightly extends to the destruction wrought by abuse, whether physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual; for the abuser has already broken the covenant and abandoned its protections, and the vulnerable are to be sheltered, not sacrificed to a cruelty God never commanded. In such cases, divorce is permitted, and so is remarriage. I say further, and I say it deliberately: divorce and remarriage are not the unforgivable sin. All sin may be forgiven at the cross, and to treat this sin as a uniquely shameful stain — to brand the divorced and remarried as second-class Christians — is to bind a burden Scripture does not bind, and to wound the very people Christ would heal. The church is therefore to approach each broken marriage with humility, compassion, and careful discernment, slow to pronounce upon situations it does not fully know, quick to receive the wounded, and always remembering that it is a fellowship of forgiven sinners and not a tribunal of the innocent.⁸

Family and the Household

From marriage God brings the family, and children are His gift: “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord” (Psalm 127:3). The family is the first society and the first school of discipleship, where faith is meant to be handed down — “you shall teach them diligently to your children” (Deuteronomy 6:7) — and fathers are charged to bring up their children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4), not provoking them to anger. Children, in turn, are to honor father and mother, the one command with a promise (Exodus 20:12; Ephesians 6:2–3), and grown children to care for aging parents, for to fail one’s household is to deny the faith (1 Timothy 5:8).⁹ I would say two things in our moment. First, the family is under great pressure, and the church must strengthen and defend it, for as the family goes, so largely goes the society. But second, the family is not to be idolized. Our Lord Himself set natural kinship below the kingdom (Matthew 12:48–50), and the believer’s deepest and most enduring family is the household of God, the church, into which the single, the widowed, the orphaned, and the childless are fully and gladly received. The Christian home is a great good; it is not the gospel, and it is not heaven.

Work and Vocation

Work, too, is a creation ordinance and a dignity, not a result of the fall. Before sin entered, God placed the man in the garden “to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15), and gave to humanity the mandate to fill the earth, to subdue and steward it (Genesis 1:28). Work is therefore good in itself: a participation in the Creator’s own labor and a means of loving our neighbor by serving his needs. The fall did not abolish work but cursed it with toil, frustration, and thorns (Genesis 3:17–19); yet in Christ, even our labor is redeemed and dignified, for “whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23).¹⁰ From this, I draw that there is no sacred-secular divide in honest labor: the believer who keeps books, lays bricks, raises children, or preaches sermons may do all alike as worship and calling. I would honor work against the idleness Scripture rebukes (2 Thessalonians 3:10), and I would guard it against the idolatry of our age, which makes a god of career and an identity of achievement; for work is meant to be framed by rest — the creational rhythm of labor and Sabbath that confesses we are creatures and not the Creator, and that our worth rests not in our usefulness but in God’s regard.

Society, Government, and the Christian as Sojourner

In society at large, I hold that civil government is ordained by God for the good of man — to restrain evil, to praise good, and to administer justice (Romans 13:1–7; 1 Peter 2:13–14) — and that the Christian owes it honor, taxes, and obedience, save where it commands what God forbids or forbids what God commands, in which case “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). I hold that the church and the state are distinct, each with its own sphere, and I prize the liberty of conscience that lets the church be the church and bids the state not usurp the throne of God.¹¹ As to the Christian’s posture toward the wider culture, my eschatology shapes it (see my papers on Eschatology and Dispensationalism). I do not expect the church to Christianize the social order or to usher in the kingdom by law or by influence; that kingdom will come with the King, and not before. Yet this is no warrant for withdrawal or despair. We are citizens of heaven and sojourners here (Philippians 3:20; 1 Peter 2:11), called to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13–16), to seek the welfare of the city of our exile (Jeremiah 29:7), and to do good to everyone as we have opportunity (Galatians 6:10). I would steer between the two errors of the hour — the utopianism that thinks we can build heaven on earth, and the fearful retreat that abandons the earth to ruin — and live instead as a faithful presence: engaged, hopeful, unsurprised by hostility, and unshaken, because our hope is fixed not on the rescue of the culture but on the return of the Lord.¹²

Justice: Biblical and Counterfeit

No theme is more urgent or more contested in our moment than justice, and here I must be careful to affirm what God affirms and to refuse what He does not. The God of the Bible loves justice (Psalm 33:5); He requires that His people “do justice, and … love kindness, and … walk humbly” with Him (Micah 6:8); He commands care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the sojourning stranger (Isaiah 1:17; Zechariah 7:9–10), defense of the weak and the unborn and the aged who bear His image (Proverbs 31:8–9; and see my paper on Anthropology on life from conception), honest weights and impartial courts that “shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great” (Leviticus 19:15), and the brotherhood of every people, for He “made from one man every nation” (Acts 17:26) and gathers from every tribe and tongue one redeemed people (Galatians 3:28; Revelation 7:9). To this biblical justice I am wholeheartedly committed; a faith that ignores the oppressed is no living faith.¹³ But I must distinguish this biblical justice from much that now travels under the name of “social justice,” and here I differ, firmly and yet without rancor, with the critical and identity-based ideologies of our day. They often perceive real wrongs, and for that perception, I am grateful, but they are built upon a rival worldview that I cannot accept. Where Scripture grounds dignity in the image of God borne by every individual, these systems tend to reduce persons to their groups and to read all of life as a contest of power; where Scripture defines justice as conformity to God’s righteous and impartial standard, they often redefine it as equality of outcome or the inversion of hierarchies; where Scripture calls every man a sinner needing the same grace, they locate guilt and innocence in group identity; and where the gospel offers forgiveness, reconciliation, and a new humanity in Christ, they can offer only a permanent grievance with no cross to end it. In this form, “social justice” becomes a counterfeit gospel — a religion of liberation without the Liberator. I would therefore take up every genuine injustice it names, and answer it not with the world’s ideology but with the deeper and truer justice of God, and with the only power that has ever actually reconciled enemies: the blood of the cross.¹⁴

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Practical Implications

Ministry Emphasis: Truth and Grace in a Confused Age

First, I would have the church be a people of truth and grace, after the pattern of our Lord, who was “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14) — and full of both at once, not trading one for the other. The cruelty that wields the truth as a club drives wounded people from Christ; the cowardice that surrenders the truth to seem kind abandons them to their ruin. I want neither. I want a church bold enough to say what God has said and tender enough to weep with those it says it to.

Second, and close to my heart, I would have the church be a refuge for the broken and not a courtroom — a place where the divorced, the same-sex attracted, the abused, the ashamed, and the failing find not a ranking of their sins but the welcome of a fellow sinner’s embrace. We do not grade transgressions, parading some and pardoning others; we are all of us saved by the same grace, on the same terms, at the same cross. I would labor to tear down the false and cruel tier of “second-class Christians,” and to press upon every wounded believer the truth that there is no sin the blood of Christ cannot cover, and no penitent soul beneath His welcome.

Third, I would send God’s people into the culture as salt and light — to defend the weak and the unborn, to do justice and love mercy, to work well and love their neighbors — without the panic of those who think the world’s fate rests on our victories, or the apathy of those who think it does not matter. We are not building the kingdom; we are bearing witness to the King who will. That frees us to labor without despair and to lose without bitterness.

Finally, I would remind us that most faithfulness is hidden and ordinary — marriages kept through long years, children raised in the fear of God, daily work done with integrity, neighbors quietly loved — and that such ordinary faithfulness adorns the gospel more than any grand crusade. The age is confused, and often hostile, but I am not afraid for the church or for the world; the One who made man in His image will not abandon the work of His hands, and the King is coming who will at last set every crooked thing straight. Until then, we live as those who are His.

We owe every image-bearer both the truth that wounds our pride and the grace that heals our shame — for Christ came full of both, and so must His church.

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Biblical, Exegetical, Theological, and Historical Notes

1. Humanity is created in the image of God (imago Dei; Hebrew tselem, צלם, and demut, דמות; Genesis 1:26–27; 5:1; 9:6). The image grounds the equal and inalienable dignity of every human being regardless of age, sex, race, ability, or usefulness, and it is retained though defaced after the fall (Genesis 9:6; James 3:9). See my paper on Anthropology for a fuller treatment.
2. I read cultural questions through the fourfold biblical story: creation (God’s original and good design), fall (the pervasive corruption of that design, Romans 8:20–22), redemption (its restoration in Christ, 2 Corinthians 5:17), and consummation (its perfection at Christ’s return, Revelation 21:5). Common grace (Matthew 5:45) explains the genuine goods that persist in fallen cultures; total depravity explains their distortions. This grid guards against both naive optimism and cynical despair about any human culture.
3. Scripture presents the sexual binary as a feature of the good creation: “male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27; 5:2; Matthew 19:4). The sexed body is not incidental to personhood but a meaningful gift, so that a person’s biological sex is normative for identity. This stands against the modern ideology that severs “gender” from bodily sex and makes the self-defining will sovereign over the body — an outworking of the expressive individualism analyzed by Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. On the body’s testimony, see also Nancy Pearcey, Love Thy Body.
4. Gender dysphoria — a distressing incongruence between one’s felt sense and one’s bodily sex — is real suffering and calls for compassion, patience, and careful pastoral care, never contempt. Yet compassion does not require affirming that the body is a mistake; I hold that wholeness is found in receiving, not repudiating, the self God has given. Throughout, I distinguish the person (to be loved) from the ideology (to be resisted) — the same distinction that governs the discussion of sexuality below.
5. Sexual intimacy is God’s good gift, designed for the one-flesh covenant of a man and a woman (Genesis 2:24; Hebrews 13:4; 1 Corinthians 7:2–5). All sexual expression outside that covenant — premarital, extramarital, or same-sex — falls short of the design (1 Thessalonians 4:3–5). Marriage, not lifelong abstinence as such, is the only God-given context for sexual union.
6. The historic and, I believe, plain biblical position is that homosexual practice is contrary to God’s creational design (Genesis 19; Leviticus 18:22; Romans 1:26–27; 1 Corinthians 6:9–11; 1 Timothy 1:10). The very text that names it also names hope: “and such were some of you. But you were washed” (1 Corinthians 6:11). The call to those who experience same-sex attraction is the call to chastity laid on all the unmarried — costly but not cruel, and walked faithfully by many. Identity is found in Christ, not in desire. For a pastoral, biblical treatment, see Christopher Yuan, Holy Sexuality and the Gospel, and Kevin DeYoung, What Does the Bible Really Teach about Homosexuality?
7. Marriage is a creation ordinance (Genesis 2:18–24), a covenant between one man and one woman (Malachi 2:14), instituted before fall, church, or state, and an image of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:22–33). I affirm complementarity — equal worth, distinct callings, sacrificial headship, and glad respect — as set out in my paper on Ecclesiology, and I deny that marriage is a sacrament conveying grace (see my paper on Sacramentology), holding it rather a holy covenant. See Andreas Köstenberger and David Jones, God, Marriage, and Family.
8. Marriage is intended for life, and God hates the treachery of divorce (Malachi 2:16); it is never to be entered lightly. Yet Scripture permits divorce where the covenant is gravely broken: for sexual immorality (Matthew 19:9) and for desertion (1 Corinthians 7:15). I hold that the principle of desertion extends to abuse — physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual — by which the abuser has already shattered the covenant and forfeited its protections, so that the vulnerable may be sheltered and freed; in such cases remarriage is permitted. Divorce and remarriage are not an unforgivable or uniquely shameful sin; all sin is forgiven at the cross, and to brand the divorced and remarried as second-class Christians binds a burden Scripture does not. The church should respond with humility, compassion, and careful discernment, slow to judge situations it cannot fully know, and quick to receive the wounded.
9. Children are a heritage from the Lord (Psalm 127:3–5); parents, and fathers especially, are to nurture them in the faith (Deuteronomy 6:4–9; Ephesians 6:4; Proverbs 22:6), and children to honor parents (Exodus 20:12; Ephesians 6:1–3) and care for them in age (1 Timothy 5:8). Yet natural family is relativized by the kingdom (Matthew 12:46–50; Luke 14:26), and the believer’s ultimate family is the church (Mark 10:29–30; Ephesians 2:19), which fully embraces the single, widowed, and childless.
10. Work is a pre-fall creation ordinance (Genesis 2:15) and part of the cultural mandate (Genesis 1:28), good and dignified in itself. The fall added toil and frustration (Genesis 3:17–19) but did not nullify work’s goodness; in Christ, it is to be done “as for the Lord” (Colossians 3:23; Ephesians 6:5–8), abolishing any sacred-secular hierarchy of callings. Scripture rebukes idleness (2 Thessalonians 3:10–12) and frames labor by Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:8–11). See Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor.
11. Civil authority is ordained by God to restrain evil and uphold good and justice (Romans 13:1–7; 1 Peter 2:13–14), and is owed honor, taxes, and obedience — with the limit that when human authority commands sin or forbids obedience to God, “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29; Daniel 3; 6). Church and state occupy distinct spheres; liberty of conscience in matters of faith is to be prized and protected.
12. My premillennial eschatology (see my papers on Eschatology and Dispensationalism) shapes a sojourner’s posture toward culture: the kingdom comes with the returning King, not by the church’s gradual Christianizing of society. This excludes a triumphalist or utopian program. But it equally excludes withdrawal, for believers are salt and light (Matthew 5:13–16), to seek the welfare of the city (Jeremiah 29:7) and do good to all (Galatians 6:10) as citizens of heaven and strangers on earth (Philippians 3:20; 1 Peter 2:11). On the broader question, see H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, and D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited.
13. Justice is dear to God’s heart and bound up with His own righteousness; the Hebrew pair mishpat (משפט, judgment/justice) and tsedaqah (צדקה, righteousness) recur together (e.g., Genesis 18:19; Amos 5:24; Micah 6:8). Biblical justice embraces care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger (Isaiah 1:17; Zechariah 7:9–10; James 1:27), defense of the vulnerable including the unborn and the aged (Proverbs 31:8–9; Psalm 139:13–16), impartiality that favors neither poor nor great (Leviticus 19:15; Deuteronomy 16:19), honest dealing (Proverbs 11:1), and the God-given unity of all peoples (Acts 17:26; Galatians 3:28; Revelation 7:9). See Timothy Keller, Generous Justice.
14. I distinguish this biblical justice from contemporary critical and identity-based ideologies (often labeled “social justice”), which frequently perceive real wrongs but rest on an incompatible worldview: reducing persons to group identities rather than to image-bearing individuals; reading reality chiefly as a power-struggle; redefining justice as equality of outcome or the inversion of hierarchy rather than impartial righteousness; assigning guilt and innocence by group; and offering grievance without the forgiveness, reconciliation, and new humanity found only in Christ. So construed, it functions as a rival gospel — liberation without the Liberator. I would affirm every genuine injustice it identifies while rejecting its framework, answering instead with God’s justice and the reconciling power of the cross (Ephesians 2:14–16). For a measured Christian assessment, see Thaddeus Williams, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth.

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Select Bibliography

Carson, D. A. Christ and Culture Revisited. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

DeYoung, Kevin. What Does the Bible Really Teach about Homosexuality? Wheaton: Crossway.

Keller, Timothy. Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work. New York: Dutton.

Keller, Timothy. Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Dutton.

Köstenberger, Andreas J., and David W. Jones. God, Marriage, and Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation. Wheaton: Crossway.

Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper & Row.

Pearcey, Nancy R. Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. Grand Rapids: Baker.

Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Wheaton: Crossway.

Williams, Thaddeus J. Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

Yuan, Christopher. Holy Sexuality and the Gospel: Sex, Desire, and Relationships Shaped by God’s Grand Story. Colorado Springs: Multnomah.