A Christian Worldview

The nature of God: one of the most significant statements about God is that he is love. God is love. The idea of love in the secular world has of course been associated with some sort of emotional romanticism, but nevertheless, we have to pursue the truth of God as love. God’s love has held true throughout the Bible, in his personality and in history. God is love because he is a Person who has been constantly in loving relationship, first within the Trinity, secondly with the world and man. He is the epitome of agape love. Through that love he made all of the good things of the earth and desires the good for us in all things, using both hardship and our success to benefit us and further his Kingdom. His position of ultimate love is the one we seek in our relationships, what we see through the beauty of creation, the unity we seek to find in spirituality, and the perfect form that creates the vision of justice.

The Fall: A descent from the glory and clear vision of God that we once possessed as human beings, a time we can’t even remember. This loss of vision is what one of the key elements of the Fall. Humanity loses its sight of God, and therefore, visibility of our guidance and foundation. To put it in the terms of Wright’s book, namely the four echoes of God, the effect it had on us, humanity, was first to lose sight of our deep spirituality, a realm beyond our physicality, misunderstanding it and in some cases completely denying it. Secondly, we lose the vision of what relationships should be and is made to be. This directly affects justice. Justice is never simply an objective goal, it is a rightness in relationship, a harmony and coherence. All that is mentioned is not simply horizontal, such as with our fellow humans, but also below with the Earth and creation, and upwards, to God the Father. The aspect of beauty calls our souls back to a “better place,” like lost memories twitching in an amnesiac’s brain.

The role of God’s kingdom is a renewal, a rebirth of our vision, like a new lens being put over our eyes in order to put all the images in their right place and shape. The trick of course is that we are in the middle of this renewal. We are nowhere close to our final transformation. The Kingdom of God goes beyond repairing our vision. The Kingdom frees us to follow the powerful master that will see it through to its ultimate redemption. We don’t simply see things rightly, we belong to the one who will actually make it right. Through the leading of scripture and prayer, we are slowly (painfully it seems) relearning what it means to be human. It opens up our ability for compassion, mercy, and reconciliation through forgiveness. The very definition of this new sort of vision and power is Jesus Christ, who demonstrated the new humanity through his own life. The Kingdom is made of people who have been redeemed. The people of the Kingdom are not gatekeepers or guardians to the Kingdom. Entrance is gained at the core of each person’s heart, the people of God simply give evidence of such an entryway and act as signposts to it.

In the present state of human history, the process of our redemption is still in the works. The strokes of the brush are still coming down on the canvas. The ending masterpiece will mean that we become who we should be, the four echoes of God become visible to our very waking eyes: a tangible reality. The end, in my mind, is nothing like the “pie in the sky” view that discards our physicality. This is actually something I am still getting my mind around, the fact that the new heaven and earth won’t be a world of shadows or wispy clouds, but something as concrete as this keyboard beneath my fingers. We have fleeting glances at what the final Kingdom will look like, but in the end, our imagination is the best way to enter in, because the possibilities of complete redemption are so wonderful and magnificent we barely grasp them with the best of what we have to offer so far. The revelation of John surely attests to this fact, touching our wildest dreams. All I know: I can’t wait for it to come!!