(2) Reality Is Flawed

A Christian worldview holds that reality, as we experience it, is flawed. Experience for us is inexorably timed, and with the passage of time comes change, unpredictable, often unpreventable, and frequently for the worse. Whether in the outer world of matter or the inner world of mind, we find ourselves faced with possibilities and actualities that we fear but cannot avoid. Food doesn’t nourish for long, and bathing doesn’t cleanse for long.
As the hymn-writer puts it, "Change and decay in all around I see," and ultimate threat, which has brought many thoughtful twentieth century thinkers to the brink of despair, is that of unavoidable death. Modern science, which has done so much to bring the physical world into predictability and under control, has at the same time escalated the threat to human life, as in the instance of nuclear war or accident, and remains utterly powerless in the face of the final enemy, death.
It may seem pointless to stress the flawedness of reality as an element in a Christian worldview until it is remembered that, in the Christian perspective, both the individual and the race must say, " It might have been otherwise, and for the fact that it wasn’t, I am responsible." Man is not a mere pawn who may legitimately blame his genes, his environment, his neighbor, or God for his actions and the guilt they bring upon him. One of the strangest aspects of modern theories about man, particularly theories of learning, is their usual silence on human flawedness and responsibility.
The Christian mind sees the flawedness of the environment and its human masters not as an evolutionary and amoral accident which is being overcome by inevitable humanness, but as consequence of conscious, historical wrong human choice made at the beginning of the race’s history. It distinguishes between the immaturity which is a part of growth and the imperfection which embodies deliberate resistance to the two great Biblical laws of love to God and love to neighbor. The flaw in creation (whether material or immaterial) is the result of the fall of man and has been placed there by God as a reminder that all is not as it should be in man’s relation to God and so to his environment, and himself.

(3) Reality Is Redeemed In Christ

A third powerful element in the Christian mind-set is the Biblical assertion that Christ has redeemed all things (Colossians 1:20). The whole drama of Biblical revelation comes to its focal point in the sacrificial and redemptive death of Christ, the incarnate Son of God, just outside Jerusalem early in the first century AD Explicitly, implicitly, and repeatedly, the Bible insists that the cross was a cosmic battleground where the future of the entire creation was involved. On the basis of what happened there and in his subsequent resurrection, Christ claimed that all authority now belongs to Him (Matthew 28:18). Colossians 2:14-15 indicates that on the cross Christ triumphed over all the dark powers that hold sway in the creation. Revelation 5:5 asserts that the whole course of history lies in the hands of Christ, the Lion of Judah, who was slain as a Lamb.
The Biblical picture of redemption is creation-wide. The New Testament, uninhibited by modern man’s reduction of reality to physics and chemistry, portrays the consequence of Christ’s redemptive work in terms of a community of people, united in the Holy Spirit, upon whose ultimate liberation depends the renovation of the entire physical world (Ephesians 1:20-23 and Romans 8:18-23). All this sounds a bit spooky in the light of modern man’s fixation on the physical aspect of reality, but the Bible never suggests that the Christian mind and the secular mind operate in the same frequencies (cf. Romans 12:1-2). We have only succeeded in riding both horses because we have imagined that the Christian minds deals with "spiritual" things and the secular mind with "natural" ones. The distinction is a totally unbiblical one.

(4) God Is For Real

A fourth aspect of the content of a Christian Mind is the awesome reality of God. It is particularly worthy of mention because modern man has been so thoroughly conditioned to discount it. Lewis says, " . . . you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years." (see footnote 1) And Howard suggests that "The secularization of life urged on us by science and commerce and modernity generally is surely one of the bleakest myths ever to settle down over men’s imagination." (see footnote 2) We look down with amused superiority at benighted native peoples or at ancients like the Greeks and pity them for their entanglement in myths which connected the gods with natural phenomena, never thinking that we are ourselves the victims of a far more dreadful mythology – one which holds there are no gods at all. It would be better for us to remove the beam from our own eye before we attempt to extract the mote from theirs.
God, in the Christian mind, is, as Schaefer puts it, there and not silent. He is alive, personal, powerful, and active. He is beyond comprehension but not beyond contact. His order of being is different from ours and from that of all creation, so there is no definition that can contain Him and no imagination that can exhaust Him. Yet he can be known by man, and in that knowledge lies the secret of life for men (John 17:3; Matthew 4:4). He alone is outside the entire creation, for He is the self-existent one, the "I Am," whose sovereign command creates and upholds all reality. At the same time, He is active within the creation, having actually entered it personally in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God.
God’s entrance into created reality deserves enlargement. Christians not only see God as having entered history at one specific moment in the conception and birth of Jesus of Nazareth and as having actually inhabited our world for a periods of some thirty-three years. They also see Him as bearing witness to Himself continually in the heart of every human being (Romans 1:20) although that witness is usually unrecognized, and they see Him as sovereignly in control of history at every moment. An interesting illustration of His activity is found in Barrett. Discussing the rival schools of intuitionists and formalists in mathematics, he says, " . . . in this century a kind of civil war has bee raging among mathematicians over the foundations of their subject; and the outcome of the conflict has yet to be decided. Disagreement has in fact been so violent that at one point, after a mathematical congress early in the century, Poincare’, the great French mathematician, exclaimed: "Men do not understand each other, they do not speak the same language.’ " (see footnote 3) The Tower of Babel story in the Bible is one which God repeats as long as men attempt to erect without Him a structure which will let them reach heaven. A similar phenomenon can be discerned in almost every scholarly discipline. Barrett concludes the paragraph with the penetrating observation that, "There is no such thing a pure technique that isolates itself completely from the insight which decides what that technique is about and what it is for. Technique has no meaning apart from some informing vision." This brings us to another side of the Christian mind.

(5) Creation Is Revelatory Of God

Modern people view the creation in a variety of ways, but very rarely in the right way. Two of the most common approaches are greed and fear. A world that has put the economic aspect at the top tends to see things primarily in terms of their financial value, especially if the view can bring them within his power sphere. "I wish I owned that," is a very common reaction to our perception of the world around us. Another is, "Look out, it may hurt you." This fear is a common reaction to a threatening environment; in modern times it often takes the form of an excessive preoccupation with the problems of security, whether through padlocks or insurance premiums.
Neither perspective reflects a Biblical one. The Scriptures repeatedly insist that the point to the creation is that it reflects or reveals God. That is its principle purpose; that’s what it is all about. "O Jehovah, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth, who has set they glory upon the heavens!" (Psalm 8:1) The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge . . ." (Psalm 19:1-2) "Holy, holy, holy is Jehovah of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory." (Isaiah 6:3) " . . . the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity." (Romans 1:20) Perhaps the most poignantly powerful and persuasive of all the passages in Scripture on this subject is the closing portion of Job, where God talks to Job. He never mentions anything we would ordinarily call "spiritual." He talks of the sea, the weather, and the water springs. He discussed at length the animals – their birth, feeding, and power. When he is through, Job says, "I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee: Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." (Job 42:5-6) Old Testament saints understood this, and they grew as they saw God in His creation and responded to Him. New Testament saints did the same, with the added step of seeing the love of God incarnate before their eyes in the Person of Christ. Seeing God in Him, they grew in new and special ways. Today, bedazzled by an "enlightenment" that claims to see through all phenomena in terms of physics and chemistry, we have grown blind to the real meaning of the creation.
One instance among many which might be cited must suffice to illustrate the revelatory quality of created reality. In his book, The Supper of the Lamb, Capon deals with an onion in an unusual way. He asks that you take a medium-size dry onion and carefully remove only the outer layer of onion paper that surrounds it. Then he continues:

" . . . Accordingly, when you have removed all the paper, turn the fragments inside up on the board. They are elegant company. For with their understated display of wealth, they bring you to one of the oldest and most secret things of the world: the sight of what no one but you has ever seen. This quiet gold, and the subtly flattened sheen of greenish yellow white onion that now stands exposed, is virgin land. Like the incredible fit of twin almonds in a shell, they are present themselves to you as the animals to Adam: as nameless till seen by man, to be met, known, and christened into the city of being. They come as deputies of all the hiddenness of the world, of all the silent competencies endlessly at work deep down things. And they come to you – to you as their priest and voice, for oblation by your heart’s astonishment at their great glory." (see footnote 4)

Naming the animals, like the Tower of Babel, is not something that happened only in remote antiquity. It is something we are called to do every day, and not only with animals. Our chief business in the world – or a basic element in it – is to see what God is saying in his creation and to express it in language and life. And so Capon can say, near the end of the chapter on the onion, "The heaviest weight in the shoulders of the earth is still the age-old idolatry by which man has cheated himself of both the Creator and creation." (see footnote 5) The quality of reflecting God is the principal ingredient of creation.

Editor: Al Greene

Alta Vista College

Footnotes:

1. C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory. Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1966, p. 5.
2. Thomas Howard, The Splendor in the Ordinary. Wheaton, Illinois, Tyndale House Publishers, 1976, p. 13.
3. William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique. New York, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1979, p. 88.
4. R.F. Capon, "The Supper of the Lamb." New York, Pocket Books, 1970, p. 12.
5. "ibid," p. 18.