G-Money (can I call you that?  It's better than "G-G," don't you think?),

If your's are just the beginning of thoughts, then I'm painfully embarrassed to contribute this low-level groan of an "articulation."  I wish I could begin to think this way.  So, here is a gutteral response.  Help me out here.

How would you respond to what I think I see as two motions in Scripture?

1.  The Scripture pushes the church and Christians away from adopting human culture and tradition.

I think I very much share with you the Bible's pessimism and steady decline where human culture is concerned.  In addition to the passages you mentioned, it seems to me inside the church a cultural skepticism is evident in Col. 2:16-17, 20-23 and Gal.4:8-11 (where Paul even classes the Law as "weak and miserable principles" of the old life).  In Col. 2 he instructs the church to leave the elementary or basic principles of this world and seems to class both Jewish and pagan religio-cultic ritual together as undesirable.  Earlier in Col. 2:8 he waxes poetic against philosophy that depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world.  As far as high culture (philosophy) and religious culture, the Scripture pushes us away from those things to something different.

2.  The Scripture "backgrounds" human culture inside the church in favor of greater unity in Christ. 

We can see that in a number of places, perhaps most clearly in Romans 14:1-15:13.  Jew and Gentile differ in their cultural preferences in disputable matters like preference for meat/vegetables (14:2-3) and sacred/regular days (14:5-6).  All these are lifted as examples and pushed to the background in favor of unity in Christ and an end to judging one another in such matters.  It seems that the passages consistently contrast all that we think of as human culture (by which I mean the patterns of thought, belief, and behavior, not primarily the implements of culture--instruments, etc.) with Christ himself and what it means to be in Christ.

Which leads me to ask: Is not Christ in some sense creating a distinctive culture within the church?  What is the alternative to being pushed away from fallen cultural ways of being and backgrounding cultural heritages inside the church?

Maybe I'm asking a different question than your post raises.  I'm talking out loud here.  Your post raises the question of the Christian's or church's response/responsibility to transform culture or fulfill a cultural mandate.  Can we satisfactorily answer that question before we first answer what the church herself is to be culturally?  What are we transforming things to?  And how does that goal look like/dislike the church herself?  In fact, help me with how the passages in Genesis translate into a "cultural mandate"?