Loving the World: Rightly or Wrongly

Loving the world but not the things of the world.

Are christians to love the world or hate it? Are we to cherish or despise it? Are we to view it with indifference, detachment, and even contempt? Or are we to view it with reverence, joy, and concern? In order to live as obedient disciples of Jesus Christ, are we to be world-affirming or world-denying? Can we become holy while we are active and busy in the affairs of this world? Or is holiness impossible without a radical otherworldliness, an otherworldliness that motivates us to turn our backs resolutely on this world? What, then, ought to be a Christian’s relationship to the world? Ought it to be appreciative involvement or ought it to be condemnatory separation? Should our relationship be positive or negative—or maybe neutral?

That’s our perplexity. What ought to be a Christian’s relationship to the world in all its God-created wonder and fallen sinfulness? As we ponder this, perhaps we can gain clarifying insight by looking back on the experiences and examples of our Christian forebears. The value of history is that it can prevent us—though there is no guarantee it will—from repeating yesterday’s mistakes today. Let us look back, therefore, all the way to the church’s earliest years when devout believers were attempting to flesh out some of those New Testament texts with which we still wrestle today.

One such text is Colossians 3:1–3: “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” How do you flesh out a text like that? Another such text is Galatians 5:24: “They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.” How do you flesh out a text like that?

In the earliest Christian centuries, deeply committed believers tried to make those texts operative in their lives. They aspired to a discipleship of total obedience. Woefully deficient hermeneutically, they were admirable in their misguided fanaticism, for they decided that the New Testament requires a ruthless self-denial, life-denial, and world-denial. Holiness, they argued, is impossible without a complete renunciation of all worldly comforts and pleasures; and to them apparently anything was worldly if it failed to make the body miserable. (Some Christians, one suspects, are still of that conviction.) Consequently, a host of early disciples became hermits, forsaking the world literally.

Those early Christians with their commendable zeal for holiness and their deficient understanding of biblical interpretation wrote a sad though admittedly heroic chapter in church history, a chapter that shows the excesses and extremes to which a warped spirituality can go with this self-denial, life-denial, and world-denial. And this denial was carried out, ironically, in the name of the God who, according to 1 Timothy 6:17, gives us richly all things to enjoy.

Another sad chapter in church history was written by the monks and nuns of the Middle Ages—not by all of them, to be sure, but by many who were fugitives from the world. Trying to be holy, they, like the hermits of the earlier centuries, renounced normal needs and affections, inflicting pain on their bodies in the hope of purifying their souls.

But having recalled some of these grosser medieval excesses, let us consider another chapter in church history, one much closer to our own time, and one that continues to affect American evangelicalism. Consider our forbears in nineteenth-century England, the sons and daughters of the Wesley revival of the eighteenth century. Many of them were remarkable Christians indeed: remarkable for their piety, remarkable for their social and political impact, remarkable for their seriousness, their decorum, their nitpicking spirituality.

For instance, most of them were rigid Sabbatarians. God would be highly displeased, they felt, if anything enjoyable was done on Sunday. Thus, in a typical evangelical home the Lord’s Day was celebrated with the prohibition of all activities except solemn church going and edifying reading. Toys and games were locked away. No hot food was served; well, there might be an egg for breakfast. Even letter writing was forbidden.

Evangelical legalism extended far beyond strict sabbath keeping, however. It included lengthy lists of dos and far longer lists of don’ts, which reduced the Good News of liberating grace to a stifling code of conduct. In its worst forms, evangelical legalism, whether in the British Isles or elsewhere, was a first cousin of the hair-splitting Pharisaism Jesus fought against in his day.

This legalistic negativism, all of us are aware, has persisted until the present day, creating among conscientious Biblicists a guilty confusion about worldiness and a distorted concept of holiness. Repeatedly we who are evangelicals quote Romans 12:2 in paraphrase, “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its mold.” We insist, and we insist rightly, that we ought to be different from unregenerate society. But we proceed to define worldliness as Paul emphatically teaches us it ought not to be defined. We define it as a matter of externalities—what a believer eats and drinks and wears, whether a believer keeps Sunday as we do. Then we judge the holiness of a fellow believer by his conformity to the code of conduct we have drawn up. We define worldliness as if Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, had never written Colossians 2:16 together with verses 20 through 22.

“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days … Wherefore, if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men?”

Whatever else Paul may be saying to the Colossians and to us, he is saying that worldliness is a legalistic preoccupation with eating and drinking and sabbath keeping. He is saying that worldliness is a legalistic preoccupation with externalities, a legalistic preoccupation with conformity to a man-made code of don’ts. Thus in the light of this passage, we may find ourselves under obligation to reformulate our view of worldiness. If we are to be obedient Biblicists, we may find it necessary to slough off the lingering influence of legalistic traditionalism in order to bring our doctrine and practice into a closer alignment with the Word of God.

While we are pondering our view of worldliness, suppose we take into account another pertinent passage. In 1 John 2:16–17 the apostle breaks down worldliness into three components: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.”

What is worldliness, then, as John here analyzes it? Is it a matter of legalism or externalism or negativism? Is it a matter of conformity to any man-made code of conduct? Not in the least! Worldliness is the lust of the flesh—sensualism. Worldliness is the lust of the eyes—materialism, a covetous itching to own what we see. Worldliness is the pride of life—egotism, the desire to push ourselves up even at the cost of pushing someone else down. Probe with me these three components of worldliness.

Sensualism, first, is anything that selfishly gratifies our senses. There is nothing wrong, to be sure, with a legitimate satisfaction of our needs or even a rightful titillation of our bodies. But when we selfishly glut our senses, then we are sliding into worldliness. When unbridled flesh takes over and appetite becomes animal-like self-indulgence, then we are worldly. In that sense, we can fault some great Christians of the recent past, some whose shoelaces we would have been unworthy to tie. Sadly overweight, they simply overate. They allowed appetite to become excessive, and to that degree and in that way they were worldly. But, focusing on ourselves, we need to ask whether, in the deeper meaning of John’s phrase, “the lust of the flesh,” we are worldly? Am I? Are you?

What is the lust of the eyes, that second component of worldliness as the apostle analyzes it? It is the selfish desire that arises when we see things we really do not need but want. It is the selfish desire that arises when we look, lick our lips, and long to possess. It is the selfish desire to get, to own, to have for ourselves. It is covetousness, acquisitiveness, and greediness. It is more food than we need in a world where millions of people are hungry. It is new and nicer homes we really do not need in a world where millions of people are without decent shelter. It is bigger, more elegant, air-conditioned churches—even glass cathedrals—that we really do not need for the worship of our carpenter-Savior in a world where millions of people have never yet heard the gospel. In this deeper meaning of John’s phrase, “the lust of the eyes,” am I worldly? Are you?

The third component of worldliness, as John analyzes it, is the pride of life. This is egotism, the self-centered hankering to inflate our own little reputations. Whatever we do, no matter how helpful it may be, if we do it to enhance our sense of superiority and feeling of importance, that is the pride of life. It may be a noble deed, but if it is done to have people notice and flatter us, that is the pride of life. It may even be a spiritual act, but if it is done to have the ecclesiastical spotlight shining on ourselves, that is the pride of life. If we pray in order to call attention to our spirituality, that is the pride of life. If we give in order to be applauded for our stewardship, that is the pride of life. If we witness in order to be praised for our evangelistic zeal, that is the pride of life. So in that deeper meaning of John’s phrase, “the pride of life,” am I worldly? Are you?

You see, worldliness is not essentially a matter of externalities and negatives. It is rather essentially a matter of motives and attitudes and values. We need to examine ourselves, then, asking whether our motivation is honestly to glorify God, sharing his grace and truth with a lost world, or whether our deepest motivation is to please men as we conform to evangelical traditions that have a very debatable biblical sanction.

We need to ask ourselves whether our attitudes, our deep-down attitudes, are honestly attitudes of love for God and love for the ungodly world God loves, or whether they are attitudes of coldness towards God and harsh, judgmental, uncaring indifference toward the unreached masses of humanity. Is it possible that deep inside we are not worried about what God thinks of us as long as we can kid our fellow Christians into thinking we are spiritual? We need to ask ourselves whether our values, our deep inner values, are honestly the values of the New Testament, or whether they are the values of American society—money, cars, clothes, comfort, security, success. Or are we indifferent deep-down to earthly riches and concerned about God’s concerns?

We need to ask ourselves whether as Christians who preach nonconformity to the world we may be blind to our own subtle worldliness, our sensualism, materialism, and egotism. We need to ask ourselves whether our churches, despite their codes of externalities and negatives, are worldly. We need to ask ourselves whether our relationship to the world is like that of our Lord Jesus Christ. How different he was from the worldly people of first-century Palestine—and twentieth-century America! Not that he was otherworldly, detached from the world. He was in the world, immersed in it for some 30 years, yet he was not of the world, never a captive of its motives, attitudes, and values.

How different Jesus was! Different because he was totally God-centered and completely self-forgetting; different because of his intense and steadfast fellowship with his father; different because he came into the world not to be served but to serve. He was, as we read in Hebrews, “holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners,” but he loved the world, taking delight in the beauty of flowers, the gracefulness of flying birds, the joyful innocence of “Children’s faces looking up—holding wonder like a cup.”

He was holy, yet he loved the world. Think of his unwearying compassion expressed so concisely in Peter’s words, “He went about doing good” (Acts 10:38). Jesus was holy, yet he loved the world. Think of his courage in confronting and challenging evil. He was holy, yet he loved the world. Think of his refusal to be bound by legalistic taboos about Sabbath keeping. He was holy, yet he loved the world. Think of his willingness to share in weddings and feasts and to be labeled the friend of publicans and prostitutes. Jesus was holy, yet he loved the world. Think of the humility that prompted him to wash the feet of his disciples. Jesus was holy, yet he loved the world. Think of his optimistic faith in the divine redeemability of such social scum as thieves and robbers. He was holy, yet he loved the world with a love that cost him misunderstanding, hate, loneliness, and an agonizing death on a Roman cross.

If we evangelicals in the twentieth century are to be anything like Jesus, then our otherworldliness must be just as worldly as that of Jesus, who did not love the sinful structures and self-centered values of the world-system, but who did indeed love lost mankind in all of its pain and frustration and need. If we are to be holy as Jesus was holy, our lifestyle must be that of holy worldliness and worldly holiness, the lifestyle Charles Wesley celebrates:

Not in the tombs we pine to dwell,

Not in the dark monastic cell

By vows and grates confined.

Freely to all ourselves we give,

Constrained by Jesus’ love we live

The servants of mankind.

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

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