Senior Integration Project: “Enjoying God through Creation”

We spend most of our days not reading the Bible or praying in solitude (necessary practices), but eating a meal, talking with friends, or watching a movie. For my Senior Integration Project, I challenged the idea that to love God more we must love the physical world less. My paper defines the true nature of idolatry and the importance of integrating joy in God with joy in his creation. In what ways do we unnecessarily pit God against the world he made? How are we to enjoy God through our every day activities? To read the whole thing, click here. Below is a little preview.

Saint Isaac of Nineveh was an ascetic monk from the 7^th century. He writes, “No one is able to draw near to God without leaving the world far behind. By leaving the world I do not mean departing from the body but rather leaving bodily affairs behind. For when the heart serves the senses it is distracted from the sweetness which is in God.” Some Christians throughout the ages, like Saint Isaac, have viewed God and his creation as rivals. To love God more, I must love creation less. However, this is a harmful view of God’s world and will leave us spiritually impoverished. Christians should not relate to creation fundamentally as a potential idol, but rather enjoy God through creation. Love for God will cause us to embrace creation rather than distance ourselves from it. By creation I mean everything that is made, all of the physical world, including our own bodies. I will use the words creation, the physical world, and the material world interchangeably.

So let me state the obvious—none of us are ascetic monks like Saint Isaac. We don’t live alone in caves out in the desert. But there is a more subtle kind of asceticism, a less obvious way of rejecting God’s creation that many Christians adopt without realizing it. It’s the idea that I must distance myself from creation, if not physically then at least emotionally, in order to love God. What follows is a sense of guilt from enjoying any created pleasure “too much.” We then constantly compare God and his creation with little room to enjoy creation as a way of enjoying God. There are two problems with this. The first problem is that this subtle asceticism still equates a rejection of sin with a rejection of the material world. 

There is an implicit belief that anything I can idolize is inherently bad. But sin did not make the physical world bad. Our crooked hearts are the issue. Sinful desire drives us to use the world for ungodly purposes. The second problem is that asceticism views the Creator and creation mainly in comparative terms. It is always God vs. my family, God vs. a sunset, God vs. tacos. God and creation are rivals for my affection and I cannot love both. I must choose.