In his book Engaging God's World, Cornelius Plantinga discusses the cultural implications of the Dominion Mandate (Gen. 1:26-28).

God's good creation includes not only earth and its creatures, but also an array of cultural gifts, such as marriage, family, art, language, commerce, and (even in an ideal world) government. The fall into sin has corrupted these gifts but hasn't unlicensed them. The same goes for the cultural initiatives we discover in Genesis 4, that is, urban development, tent-making, musicianship, and metal-working. All of these unfold the built-in potential of God's creation. All reflect the ingenuity of God's human creatures--itself a superb example of likeness to God. After the building trades had been corrupted for millennia (having been used to build Babel and Babylon, for example) Jesus adopted one of them as his own [as a carpenter]. Cities themselves are God's idea. Good urban landscape management is a godly occupation. After centuries of urban crime and decay, the destination of redeemed people is not a return ticket to the garden of Eden, but entry into "the holy city, the new Jerusalem." Because "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," all the centuries of human obedience to the cultural mandate will have produced some treasure by the end--trash, too, but also treasure. If this is the "fullness" that belongs to God, then we may think of the holy city as the garden of Eden plus the fullness of the centuries.

To image God, then, human beings are charged not only with care for earth and animals ("subduing" what's already there) but also with developing certain cultural possibilities ("filling out" what is only potentially there). To unfold such possibilities--for example, to speak languages, build tools and dies, enter contracts, organize dance troupes--is to act in character for human beings designed by God. That is, to act in this way is to exhibit some of God's own creativity and dominion in a characteristically human way.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

We human beings have been created "in the image of God." This famous phrase appears first in the account of creation in Genesis 1, clearly at its climax. The account tells us of rhythmic busts of work in which God creates vegetation, birds, fish, and livestock "according to their kinds." Then, in describing the event of the sixth day, the account shifts into a majestic first-person plural, a cohortative. "Let us create," says God. The narrative signals us that something weighty is about to be created--something created not according to its kind, but almost according to God's kind. It's not as if God procreates as the birds and fish do. And yet at the end of the [creation] week God does create entities that are impressively like himself, a pair of persons who can live in society and who can use their gift to cause others to flourish.

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion. . . . " So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; mail and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves upon the earth."

This is the place in the story where activist Christians take a cue to go to work. There's so much to do in the world--so much caretaking and earthkeeping, so much filling and multiplying, so much culture to create. And . . . we'll have occasion to think of wonderful ways for human beings to fill the earth with the fruit of their creativity--wonderful ways to get busy.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Living and Learning

At the center of the universe, self-giving love is the dynamic currency of the trinitarian life of God. The persons within God exalt each other, commune with each other, defer to one another. Each person, so to speak, makes room for the other two. I know it sounds a little strange, but we might almost say that the persons within God show each other divine hospitality. After all, John's Gospel tells us that the Father is "in" the Son and that the Son is "in" the Father, and that each loves and glorifies the other. The fathers of the Greek church called this interchange the mystery of perichoresis and added in the Holy Spirit--the Spirit of both the Father and the Son. When early Greek Christians spoke of perichoresis in God, they meant that each divine person harbors the others at the center of his being. In a constant movement of overture and acceptance, each person envelops and encircles the others.

Supposing that hospitality means to make room for others and then to help them flourish in the room you have made, I think we could say that hospitality thrives within the triune life of God and then spreads wonderfully to the creatures of God. The one who spreads it is a mediator, a person who "works in the middle." We ordinarily think of Jesus Christ as the mediator of salvation, but I think we can see now that those mysterious places in the New Testament that speak of creation happening "through Christ" reveal that the agent of redemption is also the agent of creation. Christ is the person designated to work in the middle both times.

The Scriptures do not explain how Christ mediates at Creation, or exactly why, but they do give us hints. They say, for example, that Christ is not only the Son of God but also the "wisdom of God" and the "word of God." These metaphors suggest that the work of Jesus Christ represents the intelligence and expressiveness of the triune God. According to God's intelligence, the way to thrive is to help others to thrive; the way to flourish is to cause others to flourish; the way to fulfill yourself is to spend yourself. Jesus himself tried to get this lesson across to his disciples by washing their feet, hoping to ignite a little of the Trinitarian life in them. The idea is that if--in a band of disciples, in a family, in a college--people encourage each other, pour out interest and goodwill upon each other, favor each other with blessings customized to fit the other person's need, what transpires is a lovely burst of shalom.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning and Living

Christians take a very big view of redemption because they take a very big view of fallenness. If all has been created good and all has been corrupted, then all must be redeemed. God isn't content to save souls; God wants to save bodies too. God isn't content to save human beings in their individual activities; God wants to save social systems and economic structures too. If the management/labor structure contains built-in antagonism, then it needs to be redeemed. If the health care delivery system reaches only the well-to-do, then it needs to be reformed. The same goes for hostile relationships of race, gender, or class. . . .

Everything corrupt needs to be redeemed, and that includes the whole natural world, which both sings and groans. The whole natural world, in all its glory and pain, needs the redemption that will bring shalom. The world isn't divided into a sacred realm and a secular realm, with redemptive activity confined to the sacred zone. The whole world belongs to God, the whole world has fallen, and so the whole world needs to be redeemed--every last person, place, organization, and program; all "rocks and trees and skies and seas"; in fact, "every square inch," as Abraham Kuyper said. The whole creation is "a theater for the mighty works of God," first in creation and then in re-creation.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living 

There's so much to do in the world--so much caretaking and earthkeeping, so much filling and multiplying, so much culture to create....

But the creation story doesn't end with a work order. The first account of creation stops after a seventh day. God speaks six times on six days and then stops. God rests. But each of these days also has a night. And God rests then too! God doesn't talk all the time. God doesn't work all the time. In fact, Genesis doesn't even start with a  word. Genesis starts with the formlessness of the earth and with the Spirit of God brooding over the face of the deep. Then God speaks. You might almost say that at last God speaks. "Let there be light," says God. According to Genesis, God broke the cosmic silence with a creative word. Since then, the alternating silence and speech and silence is the rhythm of God, as old and deep in the nature of things as creation itself.

The idea right from the start is that there is a time to speak and a time to be silent, each in turn. There is a time to work and a time to rest from work, each in turn. We forget this because we live in a wired world where computers don't need to rest. But humans do. To say so, God in Genesis 1 does a remarkable thing. He creates human beings on the sixth day and then gives them the next day off. It's time for God's sabbath, which means it's also time for a human sabbath. Exodus 31:17 says that on the seventh day God rested and was refreshed. as if even God needs a break from time to time.

Perhaps we can't read that verse literally. But we can hear in it a life-giving word: our work is important, but not indispensable. Our work is important, but so is rest from work. Work is very good, but so is contemplation after work is over. And so Christians across the ages have made space in their lives to honor God's Sabbath--a space for worship, for refreshment, for the silence that comes from the very rhythm of God.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living, pp. 29-30

Everybody knows there is something about human life that is out of line or out of whack. We can be happy at times but not totally fulfilled. Even when we have happiness, we fear we'll lose it. Worse, every day brings us fresh news of old evils -- of nature ravaged, of God blasphemed, of people cheated, battered, terrorized. Every day brings us news of people whose misery is almost impossible to fathom.

For centuries, philosophers, theologians, novelists, and artists have described the human predicament and then prescribed a cure, or at least a salve. ... That is, they've offered a prognosis. Hope is the reach of our hearts for the cure. It's the reach of our hearts toward what we think will fulfill us, secure us, save us--and not just us, but also the whole world. To be a Christian is to participate in this very common human enterprise of diagnosis, prescription, and prognosis, but to do so from inside a Christian view of the world, a view that has been constructed from Scripture and that centers on Jesus Christ the Savior, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

The biblical prophets dreamed of a new age in which the wilderness would bloom and the mountains would drip with wine. They dreamed of a time when people would convert weapons of war into tools of harvest, of a time when a child could romp with a lion. In this coming time, God would rejoice in his creation all over again. People could work in peace and work to fruitful effect, secure in the knowledge that no one would plunder their houses and vineyards. God's servants would minister justice in the earth, and all the earth would be full of the knowledge of the Lord.

This webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets called shalom. We call it "peace," but it means far more than just peace of mind or cease-fire between enemies. ... In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight--a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, all under the arch of God's love. Shalom, in other words, is the way things are supposed to be.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living