Christian Universe

“Christian thought taught that the world was entirely God’s creature, called from nothingness, not out of any need on his part, but by grace; and that the God who is Trinity required nothing to add to his fellowship, bounty, or joy, but created out of love alone. In a sense, God and world were both set free: God was now understood as fully transcendent of—and therefore immanent within—the created order, and the world was now understood entirely as gift. And this necessarily altered the relation between humanity and nature. This world, it was now believed, was neither mere base illusion and ‘dissimilitude,’ nor a quasi-divine dynamo of occult energies, nor a god , nor a prison. As a gratuitous work of transcendent love it was to be received with gratitude, delighted in as an act of divine pleasure, mourned as a victim of human sin, admired as a radiant manifestation of divine glory, recognized as a fellow creature; it might justly be cherished, cultivated, investigated, enjoyed, but not feared, nor rejected as evil or deficient, and certainly not worshipped. In this and other ways the Christian revolution gave Western culture the world simply as world, demystified and so (only seemingly paradoxically) full of innumerable wonders to be explored.” – David Bentley Hart