By Brian Brown
Christians need to relearn how to love the world.
In churchy settings, we often act like we’re not supposed to. Verses from St. Paul warning about the “flesh” and the “world” echo in our minds. Most Protestant churches teach, or at least imply, that things of this world (at best) don’t matter. Human bodies, physical stuff . . . distractions and idol factories, all of it, and isn’t it going to burn anyway? Fix your eyes on the things that endure, right? Spiritual things?
None of us actually lives this way, of course. We’ve got favorite foods, songs, movies, places, objects in our homes. We cry when we break Mom’s favorite dish. We feel crestfallen when the Christmas decorations get put away. We work hard at vocations or hobbies that make us feel alive that we’re pretty sure aren’t “spiritual” at all. We spend an awful lot of time with people we like without badgering them about getting into heaven. In fact, when a lot of the things we care most about don’t seem to have a place in the churchy order of things, we’ve got a nagging sense that either we’re not holy enough, or something else is wrong.
And it is. Let’s look at how.
First off, a little mythbusting: whenever the Bible talks about “flesh” or “world” in a negative light, it doesn’t mean literal matter. It’s talking about ordering your life so that you love the wrong things, or the right things wrongly—rebelling against God. 1 John 2:15-17 is a warning against idolatry, not a call to become a Buddhist.
So if God is in his proper place at the top and we want to put everything else in our lives in submission to Him, how do we love it better?
There are three layers to loving the world well: the intrinsic, the symbolic, and the sacramental. (Yep, big words, hang in there.)
#1: Loving it like it is from God
As C.S. Lewis put it, “There’s no use trying to be more spiritual than God. He likes matter. He invented it.”[EN1] Everything God has made is good—not because it’s spiritually useful, but intrinsically good. Like it says in the first chapter of Genesis over and over and over, if you recall. (We all know this instinctively; you’re really off the deep end if you look at a rose or the ocean and think, “Well that’s useless for getting me into heaven!”)
The devil isn’t some evil twin of God who can ruin that, even with our participation; he’s just a creature. The Fall does have an impact on the world, but the worst it can do is take a good thing and ruin its health—not its nature. If we take a good gift from God and refuse to respond in wonder and gratitude, that is the sin response, not the thing itself.
We need to relearn how to truly look at things; to become students of all good things. Repent for all the wasted time that has not been spent singing praises to God for them. And begin to love them and care for them as God does.
(Where to start? Read Robert Farrar Capon’s essay on an onion. Then go find one and get started.)
#2: Loving it like it is of God
Once we’ve started truly seeing the world, then we’re ready to go one layer deeper. Because there is a reason it’s all so beautiful: both collectively and individually, God’s creation reflects His nature. It tells us about Him. “The heavens declare the glory of God” isn’t a throwaway line, it’s a plea to look closer! (Read the rest of Psalm 19 and you’ll see what I mean; it’s full of messianic imagery and you’ll never look at the sun the same away again.)
We live in a world whose biological patterns are full of microcosms of God’s nature and God’s kingdom, and many of them are referenced in Scripture incessantly. Seeds die to be resurrected as flowers and trees; humans are incomplete outside community (echoing the Trinity), wheat and vines appear in Scripture over and over until they meet their climax in the Lord’s Supper, and so on. It’s as if the whole world is calling to us, “Come and see! Come and see!” and God Himself expects us to be reading His Word with the eyes of someone who has paid attention to it . . .and yet we sit gloomily at home, and wish that the world were more magical . . . you know, like in the great stories.
Not good enough. To love the world well is to go on a quest, expecting to encounter the triune God at every turn—and developing the eyes to see Him better and better.
(Where to start? Check out Jonathan Pageau’s Symbolic World project on YouTube, or Gerald McDermott’s book, Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality.)
#3: Loving it like it is for God
Now we’re ready for the last and best layer. The world isn’t just stuff, totally separated from the reality of God—it’s bursting at the seams with the life of heaven. Why did a God who loves us, a God who is spirit, make us out of stuff, and put us in a world of stuff? Not to separate us from Him—to bring us closer to Him. God doesn’t just want us to know about Him; He wants us to know Him.
We’re so used to thinking about that whole endeavor in purely spiritual terms, that (to paraphrase Alexander Schmemann) we’ve forgotten that we worship a God who gave us hunger . . and food. Tiredness . . . and sleep. Breath . . . and oxygen.[2] His very body, become stuff and broken for us…and membership in it. Through the Holy Spirit, we can learn to encounter the world, and our actions in it, as living, breathing communion with Him.
We’re supposed to. Our job, the reason we’re on the planet, is to be a part of the body of Christ, the priest of a great thanksgiving, offering the world to God, and being transformed in the process. That requires a great deal of surrender of our own autonomy, and it requires effort (including probably mastering new skills). But it’s why we’re here.
(Where to start? I wrote my book with Jane Scharl, Why We Create, to answer that question. It’s a quick read.)
Conclusion
The crazy thing? Historically speaking, none of this is theologically controversial. Pick any tradition that goes back as far as the early days after the Reformation, and you’ll find its leaders talking about the world this way. Seriously—pick up Calvin, Cranmer, Luther, the early Puritans and Baptists, or literally any theologian in the first 1,500 years of the Church. But we’ve forgotten. And like Narnia in Prince Caspian, we need to begin to awaken.
The reason you connect with the idea of magical worlds like Narnia and Middle Earth is because your soul knows that they are more like reality than the materialist fog of the world as you know it. To love the world well, to develop a Christian imagination, is to learn to live like people who’ve been through the wardrobe; people of heaven.
We’re not here to live more or less the same lives as our neighbors, just slightly better behaved; acting like the material world and its delights and demands are all there is. But neither are we to live like apprentice ghosts, longing for the day when we’ll be fully disembodied (it’s not happening). We’re here to love the world for every layer of what God made it to be—and to become fully human in the process. Doing this doesn’t make us love God less. It trains us to love Him better. And it might just change the world.
Brian Brown is the founder and executive director of the Anselm Society, a Colorado-based organization dedicated to a renaissance of the Christian imagination. His writing, teaching, and podcasting focuses on equipping Christians to see, live, and work like people of heaven. You can find more of his work here.
[1] “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952, reprint: San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001), 64.
[2] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 17.