Seeing the World as Good
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
Western Christians have, by and large, subscribed to what is called a gnostic worldview, which is the idea that there is some mystical, spiritual knowledge that is above and beyond that of the material world. This is an inherently dualistic worldview that pits that which is material and tangible with that which is immaterial and spiritual. Gnosticism was an Ancient Greek worldview, initiated by the philosopher Plato and developed by later Greek philosophers. It was a dominant philosophy at the time of Jesus, and you might even notice that it sounds surprisingly like Western Christianity.
It isn’t, of course, Christianity.
But perhaps I should not say “of course,” as if it is a given to you. It may not be and I do not wish to condescend. Instead, I wish to point out that the ideas which we have presumed are foundational to our modern Christian faith are not at all Christian. They are quite secular, influenced more by these Greek philosophers than they are by Jesus.
Jesus, on the other hand, subscribed to a wholly Jewish perspective. The Jews, as with most Middle Eastern cultures, held to a holistic worldview: the earthly and the spiritual could not be separated, for they are all created by God and God is present in all.
Western Christians might rear back and say that this sounds terribly pantheist, meaning the largely-Eastern perspective that God is one with the Universe, divinely present in even the smallest blade of grass. The Western corrective stance, then, is dualism.
But neither of these philosophies are what the Jews professed, nor did Jesus. Instead, they acknowledged one God above all and that the spiritual and material realms coincided. God is not the Universe (he created it), but he is in the Universe, living and breathing within it, interacting with his creation in the breath of the wind and the laughter of the aged and children. He created all, and thus his fingerprint is stamped on each part of creation.
It is, as he declared on the sixth day of creation, very good.
Christians in the medieval Roman Catholic Church and following the Protestant Reformation spent an inordinate amount of time meditating on the fallen sinfulness of humanity. The medieval Church’s obsession with sin led to its meditations on the Passion and sufferings of Christ, its doctrines of purgatory and penance, and practices of confession. If you’ve ever read any of the medieval mystics, you’ll quickly find that they have a fascination with the depth of their dark sinfulness and Christ’s suffering on their behalf. It seems as though they, too, wished to suffer as Christ did, going so far as to deprive themselves of sleep, food, and comfort to identify with Christ’s human sufferings.
During the Reformation, theologians such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli argued that sins are not atoned for by acts of penance or confession, but by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. The onus to bridge the gap between our sins and God, they said, was on Christ, not on us; he paid for our sins by his blood, thus, we must pledge our allegiance to him, not to the Church, and must accept his forgiveness, not that of the priest’s.
But what they did not do was reform the prevalent theology of gnostic dualism, which insisted on human, earthly sinfulness and divine, spiritual holiness.
Instead, they imputed it onto a spiritualism that insisted on bare church architecture (in the case of the Puritans) and removal of church from state (in the case of the Anabaptists). The holy, they taught, could only be attained by depriving oneself of the beauty of art, architecture, music, and frivolity of any kind, holding onto only Jesus and Scripture for our sanctification. It’s a monasticism of a different type, one that has led to fundamentalism and legalism on all fronts as various denominations jostled one another for the honour of being the most holy, right, and perfect church with the most holy interpretation of its Scriptures.
I realize that I speak from a perspective that has been tainted by fundamentalism. I grew up thinking that the Mennonite church was the only right and true church. I now attend a Baptist church, which, when I was a teenager attending university for the first time, my parents deemed appropriate because “it’s the closest thing to being Mennonite.”
There were many rules for what was and was not appropriate for a Christian to partake in during my childhood, not least of which was being unable to play with a deck of cards (because we all know that decks of playing cards lead to gambling!) or showing one’s belly when swimming (“thou shalt not cause a brother to stumble,” applicable only to the girls, of course).
I grew up thinking that the world was “bad.” Art was bad—sensual, provocative, evil. Music was bad—demonic, drug-induced, evil. Women wearing pants at church were bad—usurping, feminist, evil. Not to mention alcohol, reading secular books, watching Harry Potter, or going into a casino. Bad, bad, bad, bad.
Forgive me for berating the point.
It’s only that I’ve since discovered how very good the world is, that God always intended his creation to be very good, that yes, humans have royally messed it up and caused it to be broken in so many ways, but the so-called Christian fixation on the evils of the world is not inspired by the words and actions of Jesus.
Not once does Jesus condemn the practices of “the world,” that is, the timeless human expressions of emotions in art, music, and human sexuality, nor the appropriation of humans in prostitution, drug dealing, or slavery (just to name a bare few). No, Jesus’ only words of condemnation were for the Pharisees and teachers of the law, who wished to keep the gates of religion closed on those whom they deemed worthless. Jesus, on the other hand, considered no one worthless—not the prostitute, tax collector, drug dealer, or slave trader.
It’s not that human appropriation doesn’t matter to him; rather, his message was one of welcome for those who had been abused and appropriated and condemnation to those who had turned a blind eye.
The old phrase, “Hate the sin, not the sinner” comes to mind. I hate that phrase. It’s not possible to do that, I don’t think. Sure, we hate the sin of brokenness and violation, but too often, the “sins” are applied to the person rather than to the underlying principalities and powers. We hate prostitution, gambling, drug dealing, drunkenness, and sensuality of provocative art, but more often than not, we can’t actually separate the sin from the person perpetuating it, and if we cannot separate them, then I fear that we hate the sinner, too. Either that, or we are so afraid of how we might be changed by these interactions that we stay as far away from them as possible. Furthermore, if we go about labeling others as “sinners,” we only see them as their label, not as a person created in the image of God in their own right, thus giving ourselves permission to keep ourselves apart.
We hate the sin and we are all sinners, but first we were created good. Our foremost identity is not as a sinner, though certainly we live in broken lives in a broken world. But that is just the point—the sin is deeper than the human condition; it is perpetuated by powers and principalities far beyond our control. It is these powers that Jesus nailed decisively to the cross. They hold no more power; they have been defeated by Jesus’ submission to their control.
Thus, we are no longer sinners. We are returned to our good creation state by the outpouring of Jesus’ love on the cross. It is not that Jesus stood between a wrathful God and his pitiful creation. No, Jesus died and rose in victory over that which would defeat us all, and thus we have hope. The world is good; art, beauty, music, dance, and all that which humans have created are but the smallest expression of God’s creative power, working in the world for good.
I’ve heard it said that a culture without art has lost its humanity (don’t ask me where I’ve heard it, it’s probably an amalgamation of various things I read once somewhere). Art expresses human emotion in all its wild, wide ranges. Human bodies, in dance and song, express what it is to struggle and be human in this broken, being-redeemed world. We love our God with our hearts, souls, bodies, and minds; not one of these is elevated above the other, though God knows we’ve done so for far too long.
Jesus did not come to save our souls; he came to reconcile our entire personhood, indeed, his entire creation, to himself—at one with God once more as we were once in the garden.
We live in a good world. A world being redeemed, being made whole, by the Church which he has sent to the very corners of the world. What would happen if Christians (especially Western, dualistic-minded ones) supported the good things in the world instead of condemning them? What if we saw them as the work and power of the Spirit moving within our world to bring his kingdom in all its goodness on earth as it is in heaven?
Imagine that: a good world. The best one, really. The one in which we live right here and now and which we simultaneously anticipate coming in full one day. Imagine living with this kind of hope; what purpose we have as people who have been made for such a very good life!
Photo by Karthik Sridasyam on Unsplash
