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God’s Commitment To The Material Universe

God’s Commitment To The Material Universe

Last updated on: January 2, 2025 at 3:10 am by Henry Karlson

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God’s Commitment To The Material Universe 2025-01-02T03:10:52-05:00 Henry Karlson

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Christianity teaches us that the world (that is, universe) we live in is good because it was created by God, and God is good. The world might be defiled and covered up by our sin, making it difficult for us to see its goodness, but its inherent goodness remains, however difficult it might be for us to find it (just like a gold statue completely covered by trash might lead people to think the statue is worthless). Eschatologically, God will cleanse the world from all that defiles it, allowing its goodness and beauty to be properly perceived. All that God created, matter and spirit alike, form one integral whole, but the defilement of sin has disrupted that unity, causing creation to divide itself up and fight against itself. In the eschaton, the integral unity of creation will be restored, with the various constituents of creation harmoniously interacting with each other, allowing them to properly complement each other as they find themselves sharing their unique characteristics and qualities with each other. This is one of the consequences of the resurrection of the dead; when Christianity teaches this, it points out that our material bodies are, in and themselves, good, not something to be rejected, but rather, something to be embraced as they will be a part of us when we find ourselves in the kingdom of God.

In the incarnation, God works not only to cleanse the world from the filth of sin, but to help it heal from all the harm it has suffered as a result of such sin. In the eschaton, we will find God will restore all things, regenerating them to what they were like before sin infected them, so that they will be free to participate in eternity, in the divine life itself, each thing in its own particular fashion

The Incarnation is the creation of the new universe; and it is this creation which is continued in present history and takes place in Baptism. It is truly a new creation, “regeneration” according to the word used in the Gospel of St. John (III,5). And St. Paul calls the newly baptized a “new creature” (II Cor. 5, 17), and this re-creation is accomplished in the baptism waters (John III, 5). The analogy of the primordial waters with the waters of Baptism is, then, an aspect, which is fundamentally biblical, of the parallelism between the first and the second creation.[1]

Through the cosmic fall, through our own communal sin, we have lost the proper balance between our spiritual and material makeup; indeed, most of us have lost sight of our spiritual aspect so that we find it difficult to believe in it (leaving us to be completely caught up in the material world and all that is found in it). This is one of the reasons for the incarnation, to help redirect us so that our spiritual senses can be restored to us. God does this by first addressing us in and through the material world, by taking on flesh, giving us the means we need to act and react with God in a form which we can perceive; then, through such interactions, we will find ourselves changing, and slowly able to perceive more and more of the truth, more and more of the world around us, so that we become familiar with our spiritual reality, which is needed if we are to properly balance the material and spiritual components of our being:

For this purpose [the Lord] set his flesh before them, to turn their every thought away from human matters and attach it to his flesh, which was saying wondrous things and performing wondrous deeds. Thus he would turn [their] attention from flesh to spirit, because God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.[2]

We are not spiritual beings imprisoned in the flesh. Our goal is not to overcome the flesh, casting it aside for eternity. The flesh, to be sure, is to be deified, and so, in a way, “spiritualized,” to take on qualities of the spirit which it does not yet have, but even as it is spiritualized, it will remain essentially what it is, and what it is will be a part of us in all eternity. It is good, and we must make sure we do not deny its goodness, because if we did, we would end up impugning the goodness of God, the one who created material reality (which, to be sure, we find happens with the Gnostics, who denied the goodness of material creations). Even its impulses, its desires, are good; the problem is not the desires, but knowing how to balance them, how to make sure we engage them properly. This is why Christianity historically rejects the teachings of Gnosticism, for Gnosticism, in its many forms, denigrates the goodness of the world, the goodness of the body, and sees it all as a prison which we must seek to escape:

Because embodied human existence is akin to a prison, Gnosticism is fundamentally a gospel of personal escape rather than of social amelioration. Love, in the first of pity for other trapped spirits, has a place, but it is always on the verge of losing any real object. [3]

Christianity does not teach a heaven without the earth, but rather, Christianity teaches the unity of the two, with the earth finding its proper place in the kingdom of God. Christians who find themselves being participants in the body of Christ, that is, those who have been incorporated into the God-man are meant to let the God-man live in and through themselves so that the God-man will continue to work in and with the world until the end of time: “The Incarnation of Christ accomplishes the unification of divine and creaturely life, of man’s deification, which is precisely the power of the heavenly Church manifested in the earthly Church.”[4]

This is why it is wrong to see Christianity as a religion of escape, a religion encouraging us to flee from the world, ignoring what happens in history. It is very much the opposite. It is about integrating the world, all of creation, with the kingdom of God, to make the two one. Gnosticism, that pseudo-Christianity which seems to continue inspiring all kinds of falsehoods in every generation, would have Christians reject the fruit of the incarnation, deny the goodness of creation, deny the goodness of the body, and deny the goodness of history itself. This is why it tells us that our ultimate goal should be to escape from the world, to escape from history, knowing that there is nothing good in the material universe which we should seek to preserve. By telling us this, Gnosticism seeks to completely cut off the eschaton from the world:

Whether or not one things of this as the difference between Plato and Moses, the salient point is clear: the Gnostic eschaton is severed from the visible world of creation. There is no inherent end (telos) of the tangible universe that is realised in an afterlife, no damaged promise that is healed even in this life. The Gnostic initiate is not concerned to save the world but to be saved from it. [5]

Christianity teaches God became human, took on and assumed a body, showing us that creation is not only good, but something which God loves, and through that love, has made a place for it in the kingdom of God. It shows us that in the God-man, Jesus, the Divine Logos, the First and the Last, the Archon and the Eschaton, had become immanent with creation itself. Christians must live their lives out in response to the immanent eschaton, in response to their union with it. God came to save the world; we are to share in that saving work. We are not to seek to abandon it, but to make it better, not, of course by force or domination, but by grace, knowing that by doing so, our life and place in history is important.

[1] Jean Daniélou, SJ, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 72.

[2] St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons for the Summer Season. Trans. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and James Jarzembowski (Kalamazoo, MI.: Cistercian Publicans, 1991), 39 [The Lord’s Ascension: Sermon Three].

[3] Timothy P. Jackson, “The gospels and Christian ethics” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics. Ed. Robin Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 48.

[4] Sergius Bulgakov, Bride of the Lamb. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 257.

[5] Timothy P. Jackson, “The gospels and Christian ethics,” 60.

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