WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE WE?

Whether we like it or not, to be human is to live in relationship to and with the world as a whole. It is a given of our existence. How we think about and view the world, then, becomes important for how we will live in it. For a long time, from a spiritual point of view, we have regarded the world as a source of temptation and sorrow, a “vale of tears,” from which we hope to escape at death as purely as we can. Since the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, often the world has been seen as a giant machine that we are challenged to figure out, “to solve,” as it were, and use to our advantage. Our contemporary ecological crisis suggests that we have not used it well.
Does the Bible provide any insight here? For a long time, for a variety of reasons, within biblical studies, the role and meaning of creation was ether ignored or considered (with some hostility) to be a late and pagan borrowing in Israel that was never comfortably integrated into the story of salvation history. Recent revival of interest, however, has shown how inadequate such an approaching creation and our role within it.