Worldliness
- Michael Haldas
- Aug 19
- 5 min read
“Our present-day culture is often torn between the attraction of an imaginary future in which science and such overcome all illness and disease, and our remembered instinct to love what is “natural,” as we have growing evidence that the artificiality of our modern lives makes us sick. We will doubtless continue the dance that moves between the two….We Christians have sometimes lost our otherworldly focus. But without this dimension…we will see our society descend into a kind of civil war. When “the salt has lost its flavor,”…love, may be terribly absent.” (Father Stephen Freeman, Timothy G. Patitsas)
“The modern industrial man is not unaware that something is seriously at fault in the general conduct of human living. He seeks the true religious basis to life often without realizing it. But the tenor of his life and the build-up of his imagination construct a barrier that is almost impervious to the preaching of the life of Christ…The modern Christian, however closely he adheres to the one true Church, lives this modern mechanical life; he shares the same common imagination; he is in the world, and to a certain extent he cannot avoid being of it also.” (Ben Reinhard)
“Everyone knows the slogan: “You only live once—take all you can from life.” Its “progressive” spirit is in the air, unobtrusively present in advertising, boldly proclaimed by management consultants from on high, winking at us from posters and whispering in our ear in difficult moments of self-determination. It claims to be a “wise guideline in life”, a “universal credo”, promising us fullness of being and even happiness. And many of people strive to live accordingly, “to the fullest”. But underneath the shiny wrapper of this popular motto lies a tangle of dangerous half–truths and outright lies, cunningly exploiting human weaknesses and leading us not to prosperity, but to spiritual and physical exhaustion, and in fact—to moral and actual death.” (Hieromonk Roman Kropotov)
“I think that we in the modern world increasingly struggle to hear the voice of God, and sometimes we forget to even desire it because our minds and ears are so crammed with the voices online of the internet, headlines, social media, and news feeds. Our attention is drawn constantly to the addictive scroll of a feed or screen, our minds trained to skim information, restless for the next tidbit, incapable of rest or depth. Our devices are with us at all times so that whether we walk, rest, grieve, work, or sleep, we never need to be silent.” (Sarah Clarkson)
“St. Gregory [of Nyssa] basically embraces the Neoplatonist idea of essentialism – that there exists in God’s mind a perfect form (essence) of each thing that exists. For Gregory, this means each thing that exists has its basis in this ideal. The ideal is the only reality, all forms of expression of the ideal are thus something less than real as it is a step removed from the essence which is the reality found in God. Not only is each thing a version of the ideal, it must be measured against the ideal to see how far off perfection it is. In a certain sense as things become merely matter, they lose their connection to or grounding in the spiritual reality. For Gregory this is important because it means that everything in creation has a spiritual foundation and is united to God. Only when we experience the world as merely empirical are we experiencing nothing more than matter. This is experiencing the world in a reduced (fallen) state. For Gregory this would mean that science as we know it today is restricting its study only to the fallen world, but not to the world as God intended it and created it. Modern science can never help us experience the cosmos as God intended it.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)
“At various times, drinking, card-playing, dancing, and even movies were viewed as “worldly.” If you stayed away from these things, you thought that you were not “of the world.” But that is superficial thinking. What is “worldly” is whatever accepts the perceptions, presuppositions, and prescriptions of the world. It is a mindset that is tied to this earth and the pleasures, pastimes, and pursuits that the world offers. Teaching that proposes that we can understand ourselves and our purpose in life without reference to God and His will is “worldly.” Preaching that promotes striving after success according to what this world has to offer is also “of the world.” The apostle points out that whoever is eager to hear this kind of teaching and preaching is not “of God.” (Fr. Basil)
“I find it difficult to make a sharp distinction between what is “worldly” and what is “religious.” The terms seem to me to be highly artificial. Though they told me as a child that certain things were “special,” that notion came from living among people with a different cast of mind. Gradually the distinction came to lose its meaning, since everything became “special” in its own way. Every aspect of life, every problem and experience is directly connected with God.” (Father Alexander Men, Father Michael Plekon)
“The question posed by the Pharisees and Herodians appears to concern Caesar and taxation, but its purpose is to force the Lord Jesus to choose between loyalty to God and obedience to worldly government. Christ, in turn, exposes the deep error involved in making God an alternative to Caesar. Such gross oversimplification distorts theology into manageable human concepts – an impossible task.” (Dynamis 2/3/2020)
“The final thing that we have to keep in mind is that there is no balance. “Balance” is much too self-conscious. How would we even know what is more or less important, what has more or less weight? Balance assumes that there is some ideal correct way to live in this world. But each person and each context of life in this world is so different that every person continually has to struggle to find his or her way. Rather than looking for an elusive balance, I think a more helpful way to live as a sojourner in this world is to avoid extremes. That is, I may never find real balance in life, but I can avoid extremes, extremes to the left or to the right. Even the scripture tells us that we can be too righteous (Ecclesiastes 7:16). And I think we all know that we can be too worldly.” (Fr. Michael Gillis)
“Especially in Christendom…there was a unique tension between “self-transcendence” — a “turning of life towards something beyond ordinary human flourishing” — and the this-worldly concerns of human flourishing and creaturely existence. We might redescribe this as a tension between what “eternity” required and what the mundane vagaries of domestic life demanded. It was assumed that human life found its ultimate meaning and telos in a transcendent eternity and that the demands of securing such an ultimate life required a certain ascetic relation to the pleasures and demands of mundane, domestic life.” (Charles Taylor, James K.A. Smith)
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