Cultural Mandate - Principled Pluralism

Principled Pluralism

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.