The Old Testament illustrates that Israel is — and has been since Abraham received the covenant establishing it — a culture, a social matrix of transmitted values, behaviors, beliefs, and institutions. In certain times and under certain conditions, Israel has also been a religion and a nation, but even when it was only one or neither of those, and through all the dispersions of the Jewish people, Israel has always been a culture.

Over the millennia, some of the Jewish people became atheists, agnostics, or secular humanists, but Jewish culture survived and continues to endure. Though life in Jesus is much more than culture and religion, the church has tried to instill a similar sense of culture and the place religion plays in it.

Further consideration of the Old Testament leads readers to conclude that Jewish culture was important to God. He purposely established it, and intended its continuation for his purposes of having a testimony among the nations of the world, and, pre-eminently, as a vehicle or medium through which to give the world his Son, its Savior.

His covenants were everlasting, and their lasting depended on their being handed down through a stable social milieu, a culture.

Culture Matters

As Jesus said, God, who created Adam from the dust, could have raised up descendants of Abraham from the stones (Matthew 3:9, Luke 3:8); he could have sent his son into any society and historical setting, but he did not. He sent him to these people, this time, this place. Culture mattered, as the recitation of Joseph's genealogy in Luke's and Matthew's Gospels, along with Matthew's constant citation of Old Testament prophecies to Israel, underscores. This culture was not just accidental, but the result of a mandate God gave to Israel's ancestors, as recorded in Genesis 1:26–28.

Some find fault with the fourth century developments in the Roman Empire — Constantine's conversion and his participation in the church, and his attempt to accommodate Jesus' teachings to secular government. Culture is messy, and many people think religion should not be messy, so they try to divorce religion from culture and keep religion internal. Or, as the radical Anabaptists (the Amish) do, they keep religion within the extended family and their likeminded neighbors, and allow only as much interaction with “the world” as is necessary for survival.

But such separatists are not the only Christians who eschew participation in the larger culture. Many others reject the dominion role described in Genesis 1:26–28 (“and let them have dominion … over all the earth”) and which is confirmed by example through Israel throughout the Old Testament and in the testimony of the Fathers of the Church in its first three centuries.

The Christian Empire

The Roman Empire continued in the east for more than a millennium after Constantine, mindful of its Christian mandate. Sometimes that “Christian mind” was stronger, at other times weaker, but it was never absent. In 1453, its last bastion of the Roman Empire fell to the Muslim Ottomans after centuries of being threatened and whittled down from its original domain of Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Northern Africa to a territorial remnant around Constantinople.

This culturally Christian empire had extended its influence into the Balkans and Russia through missionary outreach, and the Russian empire that eventually emerged proudly proclaimed itself the Christian successor of Constantine's Rome. But Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, taking clues from the church in Rome and European xenophobia about Byzantium, dismissed the Eastern Empire as a thousand years of decline, a notion that still influences European attitudes toward followers of Jesus taking leadership in human cultures.