Goodbye, Old Chains
Escaping from Enslavement to a Dead Worldview Through the Re-Enchantment of Creation
“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked him.
The blind man said, “Lord, that I may see.” —Mark 10:51
We all look at the world like atheists. Whether we profess belief in God or not, in the Western world today, we all tend to see the world in the same way.
Not until this year did I realize that I saw the world in the same way as the atheist does. I looked at creation as if this world was a machine designed by a distant God, a machine which he set up at the beginning of time and then stepped back from to let it run. In other words, God’s role in creating the world was merely to “knock down the first domino” and then to let them fall as they may, though he could of course miraculously intervene in his domino world if he was so pleased to step in down the line. This is a view of God as a distant “watch-maker” who makes a world, “winds it up,” and lets it run. The only difference between my view and the atheist’s view of the world was that I thought there was a God who designed everything, and the atheist thought it all just randomly came about through chance. But we both saw it as a machine.
This view of the world is deadening, demoralizing, and entirely lacking wonder. When we look at creation—at the world of nature—whether trees, or the sun, or stars, whatever it may be that we are looking at, we tend to look at the thing as if it were a cold, lifeless machine.
Take the stars, for example: when we look up at the night sky, the typical view—the way that we “see” or interpret what we’re looking at, automatically, without thinking about it—is that the stars and planets move through the sky in mechanical motions, endlessly stuck in their fixed orbits, blindly obeying “laws of nature” which govern their movements with a lifeless, mathematical rigor. The stars and planets are basically seen as a giant machine in the sky that has been set up, either by random forces of evolution or by God (or some strange combination of the two), to run without end. The motions of the stars are repetitive motions of a cold machine. There’s no life in it.
This is the way that we tend to see everything in creation, in the world of nature, and I think this view of things is deeply wrong. I think it is a soul-sucking view, full of despair, and blind to truth and beauty. And it is no different from the way an atheist sees the world.
The thing is, a genuinely Christian view of the world is not merely the same view as the atheist’s with the addition of God as designer of the machine. The Christian view of the world does not merely add something to the atheist’s view which he is missing: the genuinely Christian view of the world is entirely different from the atheist’s view. In other words, the Christian view does not just fill in a gap in the atheist’s view, or “complete the picture.” It is actually a completely different picture. When the Christian and the atheist look out at the world around them, they should see things radically differently.
If this is not the case—if the Christian sees the world in the same way as the atheist, sees the world as a machine, the only difference being that it is a machine designed by God—here is the issue with that: God is not a machine-maker, a watch-maker, or a first-domino-knocker-downer. God did not create a machine, and he is not at all distant from his creation.1 No, it is humans who make machines and then project this image of machine creation onto God. Our God did not create this world as a cold, lifeless machine—that is the furthest thing from what this world is. He created a home for Man, a home full of life and beauty and wonder. It is not that God first decided to create the world—as a sort of plaything or experiment or piece of mere artwork—and then decided, as though by a second thought, an after-thought, to create human beings as creatures in his world. It is rather that God first decided to create Man, he fell in love with human beings—with each and every one of us as he thought of us from all eternity—and then he desired to make a beautiful home for us to live in. That is what this world is. It is a home, hand-crafted and lovingly made by a God who gives it to us as a gift, a gift given anew at each and every moment of our lives.
Let’s go back to the example of the motions of the stars in the sky. If we ask, ‘what makes the stars move?’ The atheistic, machine-world answer is that they are bound by laws of nature to lifelessly move in repetitive, mechanical motions. That’s all there is to it. Case closed. But for the Christian, I think the answer to the question should be different, because I think the reality of the stars’ movements is different.
Perhaps God is not a machine-maker, but an artist. If that is so, then examples of the artist’s relationship to his artistic creations can give us insight into God’s relationship with his own Creation. Take painting, for example. What if it is the case that God is painting the sky anew each night? If so, then saying that the painting comes about only through the movements of a paint-soaked brush on a canvas, without any reference to the painter holding the brush, would be something like the equivalent of the atheist saying that the stars move only because of mechanical laws of nature which they obey. Explaining the creation of the painting in terms of the instrument and materials used to create it—the brush, paint, and canvas—without mention of the painter, would of course be a ridiculous explanation. But I think that is not so different from explaining the movement of the stars in terms of mechanical laws of nature without any reference to God, because it explains the reality only in terms of the instruments and materials involved in it. The question is, whose hands are those instruments in?
But we need to go just one step further. If I explain the creation of a painting by saying that a painter made paint-soaked brush strokes on a canvas, I have given you a fuller picture of the event. But it is a picture only in terms of how the thing was created. I have told you absolutely nothing about why the painting was made. The same thing could be said for the stars. If I say that God moves the stars, that is true, and I think it is a much more true explanation than the atheist’s, but I have not told you why he moves the stars. If I ask, ‘why do the stars move?’ the atheist does not have the slightest explanation for it. If he responds by talking about gravity and laws of nature, he is giving me an attempted explanation (and a vastly incomplete one—an ultimately nonsensical explanation) for how the stars move, not why. He can say nothing about why. The best he can say, and what atheists do in fact say, is that there is no why.
But the why is so important. If a woman receives a delivery of roses on St. Valentine’s day, in all likelihood she will be less interested in how the roses got to her2 than in why they were sent to her. How they got to her ultimately doesn’t even make sense unless there is a reason why they were sent to her in the first place. She will think of who and what is behind the whole thing—the man who sent them to her and the love which animated his sending of the flowers—which is the only way of seeing the full picture of the event.
Maybe it is supposed to be that way when we look up at the stars, too. Maybe each night they are a new gift from God to us, given out of the great love he has for us. But how easily we can forget about the giver behind the gift!
Along the same lines, let’s briefly think about the movement of the sun. The usual way that we view the event of the sunrise each morning is that it happens because of a mechanical necessity in our machine world running without end. But it is not so. There is no machine world. If the sun rises each day, maybe it is not because it has to do so by a mechanical necessity, but because it is the natural light of the home God has made for us, and he makes it rise each day as he gifts us anew with our home. His love for us is seen in every sunrise, because it is his love for us which actually makes the sun to rise, and if this goes on day in and day out, it is not because the world runs with a lifeless, mechanical repetition, but because God is full of life and never tires of loving us anew in each sunrise. The radical love Christ showed for us on the Cross is the same love behind every sunrise and sunset.
Here is another example. Each night the sun goes down, the moon comes up and the stars come out, not because of any mechanical necessity, as if these things were indifferent to us or happened without us in mind. Rather, the night is the perfectly tailored environment for us to get some sleep, and God our Father makes it to be night anew every 24 hours that he might put us to bed. Night was made for us, and that is why we find the white noise of the crickets and the night lights that are the moon and the stars so fitting for sleep.
So, if the sun rises each day and the moon and stars rise each night, and there is an obvious repetition of these things, but the repetition is not the lifeless repetition of a machine running, then how can we see this repetition in its true light? Perhaps it is a rhythmical repetition, like the rhythm of a poem or a song. God spoke creation into being, but maybe it is not that he only spoke it into being once back in the beginning of time when he created the world—maybe it is that God is continuously speaking creation into being, and he speaks it into being in the rhythmic form of a poem. He sings it into being and the repetitions of the sun and moon and stars we see are the rhythmical repetitions of an ongoing song. An exceedingly beautiful song.
A last example: trees actually breathe, both through their roots and through their leaves. Not only do they breathe, they also sweat when it is hot, they can smell things in the air, they can feel, they can hear, and they talk to each other—both above ground, and below ground through their roots. When scientists write about these things, they will put “breathe” in scare quotes, or they will write that trees “sweat,” or they “talk.” (Probably they will not even say “talk,” but will instead say that trees “communicate” or “send messages” to each other, because, to scientists, “communicate” and “send messages” are terms that are more machine-like in what they describe).
They put these things in scare quotes because they view trees as products of a machine world, so to them “breathing” and “sweating” and “talking” can only be metaphors for what trees are doing: trees do something like breathing and something like talking, but these things to scientists are only figures of speech, because trees to them are only lifeless machines. But that is absurd! Trees are quite obviously full of life, so why do we talk about them and see them as if they were basically dead? They really do breathe, and they do talk to each other! It is just that the idea of breathing and talking trees does not fit so well into a machine-world. And that is quite right: breathing and talking trees do not at all belong to a machine world. But this world is not a machine world. Perhaps it is more like a fairy tale world, a living home made for us living beings, for that seems to be the sort of world that breathing and talking trees would inhabit.
With this in mind, we can understand why it is that we can enjoy so much a walk through the woods. When we walk through the woods, we find it delightful, because it was made for us—for me and for you. It is a gift made with us in mind, a gift perfectly tailored for us, and given to us out of great love. This world is a home, designed and hand-made by a God who had us in mind in building it.
The machine view of the world is deadening to the soul. But I think a genuinely Christian view of the world—the view I have tried to paint here—has exactly the opposite effect on the soul. I think it makes you feel alive. It sets the blood coursing through the veins and awakens the soul to beauty, setting us free in wonder. And I think that testifies to the truth of it, because truth is not cold or lifeless—truth sets the heart on fire.
A Christian view of the world liberates us to see this world as the gift that it is, a gift not just created by God once back in time, but a gift continuously and poetically spoken into being by our Father, given to his children anew every day and at each moment of our lives. It is a childlike view of the world, and our Lord has told us, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
The idea that God is “outside of the world,” a phrase that I have repeated countless times in my life, is not a traditionally Christian view. It is actually a product of the Deists of the Enlightenment—those who believed that God was a distant watch-maker.
the explanation of which could be that her husband or boyfriend ordered flowers online through a flower-delivery company, the company received the online order, processed it, sent out a delivery man with the flowers in his delivery van, the delivery man drove to the woman’s house, and then he brought the flowers her husband or boyfriend ordered to her door step. A rather boring way to look at the whole thing.