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