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Bible Dictionaries
Worldliness
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or To elucidate the conception of worldliness in the apostolic writings, we must start from the primary truth that the world is God’s world, His by creation and sustenance, by sovereign purpose and control (see artt. Unity and World). There is in those writings no hint of an absolute dualism and, consequently, none of an absolute principle of asceticism. Nothing is unclean of itself (Romans 14:14). Physical acts and enjoyments neither lie apart from the sphere of the moral life (as in the Gnostic conception of τὸ ἀδιαφόρως ζῆν) nor are they a mere clog and hindrance to it; on the contrary, they have an indispensable part in its development, furnishing occasion in the common daily life for the most effective exercise of the moral nature, in diligence (Ephesians 4:28) and self-restraint (1 Corinthians 9:25), in unselfish consideration for others (1 Corinthians 7:3-5; 1 Corinthians 8:13, etc.), and in the sense of grateful dependence on God (Romans 14:6, 1 Corinthians 10:30-31, Ephesians 5:20, 1 Timothy 4:4). Even where St. Paul’s utterances, evoked by special emergencies and motives, might plausibly be construed in an opposite sense, his wider ethical doctrine repudiates such interpretation. If in a special situation he seems to deprecate and even disparage marriage and the family-life (1 Corinthians 7:1; 1 Corinthians 7:7-8; 1 Corinthians 7:28; 1 Corinthians 7:40), he yet shows unrivalled insight into their ideal significance and their value for spiritual education (Ephesians 5:22-33; Ephesians 6:1-9). If he dreads anxious absorption in secular activities as incompatible with single-minded devotion to the Christian’s spiritual calling (1 Corinthians 7:29-31), on the other hand he sees in the earthly calling the sphere within which the spiritual is to be actually accomplished (1 Corinthians 7:20, Ephesians 6:5-9, Colossians 3:22-25; Colossians 4:1) and apart from which it cannot (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, Ephesians 4:28, Titus 3:8). He steadily asserts that the Christian must recognize the structure of society as based upon Divine purpose and take his place therein accordingly. While he is bound to exclude from intimacy those who are unsympathetic with his inner life (1 Corinthians 5:9), he is by no means to hold aloof from ordinary intercourse with all sorts and conditions of men (1 Corinthians 5:10), but here also is to find a field for that exercise of Christian principles and virtues (2 Corinthians 1:12, Colossians 4:5-6) by which he shall shine as a light in the world (Philippians 2:12; cf. 1 Peter 2:15; 1 Peter 3:16). And, though St. Paul waxes indignant at those who sued their fellow-Christians before heathen tribunals (1 Corinthians 6:1 ff.), he strongly maintains the Christian duty of loyal submission to constituted civil authority (Romans 13:1-7, 1 Timothy 2:1-3, Titus 3:1; 1 Peter 2:13-17). In a higher sense than to other men the world belongs to the Christian (1 Corinthians 3:22), as a system of Divinely appointed duties and opportunities, all subservient to the education and development of Christian character-as that apprenticeship in doing the will of God which is most perfectly adapted to his present capabilities and needs (1 Corinthians 7:24). This is not merely an end for which the world may be used, but the end for which it exists. All things are ‘of God,’ but we are ‘unto him’ (1 Corinthians 8:6). It is not as by afterthought or special manipulation that ‘to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to his purpose’ (Romans 8:28; cf. Ephesians 1:4). Christian character is not a by product of the Cosmos, but its purposed, proper, and eternal end.
But the achievement of this end presupposes devotion to it as the absolute good. It implies that the personality thus environed is dominated by an active faith in God and the spiritual life, by an earnest endeavouring after the ‘new man’ both for oneself and for others. When these conditions are absent, when life in the world is not inspired by love to God, to the higher self, and to one’s neighbour as oneself, it inevitably becomes ‘worldly’; and even when these are present, worldliness is a danger still to be guarded against. The terrestrial environment appeals directly not to the spiritual but to the psychical and animal nature, and where, as even in the Christian, life is not entirely emancipated from the bias of sin, whore higher and lower elements mingle and contend, there is necessarily a tendency for the relatively good to displace the absolutely good; and if this tendency is not counteracted and overcome, the uses and enjoyments of the world-innocent in themselves and capable of being elevated to the higher range of values-become the means of chaining life to the lower.
The single passage in the apostolic writings that suggests a psychology of worldliness is 1 John 2:16, where its constituents are given as ‘the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of life.’ Here it is seen that the world exerts its downward pull upon human nature principally in two ways: by the desire (ἐπιθυμία) it excites, and by the false confidence (ἀλαζονεία) it inspires.
(a) First, there is the desire ‘of the flesh’, the appetite for physical gratification. The vulnerability of human nature on this side is strongly accentuated in the apostolic writings. The sensuality of the pagan world is the subject of unsparing indictment (Romans 1:24 ff., 1 Corinthians 6:9-11); but also of degenerate professors of the Christian faith St. Paul writes, even with tears, that their ‘god is their belly’ (Philippians 3:19). The Epistles are full of warning against the tyranny of the senses and their attendant appetites (e.g. Romans 13:13, 1 Corinthians 6:12-13, Galatians 5:19-21, Ephesians 5:18, Colossians 3:5, 1 Thessalonians 4:4-5, 2 Timothy 2:22; 1 Peter 2:11, 2 Peter 2:18). But a subtler appeal is to the desire ‘of the eyes,’ which brings a higher range of material interests into view. The outstanding example is, of course, the lust of possession-covetousness which is ‘idolatry’ (Colossians 3:5), a fruitful source of spiritual disaster (1 Timothy 6:9), a root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), and incompatible with inheritance in the Kingdom of God (Ephesians 5:5). Less widely destructive, yet harmful, are the lust of vain display in apparel and personal adornment (1 Peter 3:3); the lust of idle curiosity, the craving for continual novelty of intellectual sensation (Acts 17:21); the lust of pre-eminence (3 John 1:9) and self-assertion, which produces strife and friction, ambitions and envious rivalry (1 Corinthians 1:10-11; 1 Corinthians 4:6-7, 2 Corinthians 12:20, Galatians 5:20, Philippians 2:3, Jeremiah 3:14; Jeremiah 3:16; Jeremiah 4:1-3).
(b) The second chief element in the worldly temper is what St. John calls ‘the vainglory of life’-the delusive satisfaction, the baseless sense of security (atheistic) or of superiority (egoistic) which the attainment of worldly desire engenders. Confidence in the stability of material conditions and circumstances and the security thence begotten take the place of trust in the living God and ‘the peace that passeth all understanding,’ Men presume upon the prolongation of life, and arrange their future without reference to the Divine will on which moment by moment their being depends (James 4:13-15), and thus more readily come to think of their life-work as the doing of their own will rather than God’s. They make riches (1 Timothy 6:17) their ‘strong tower’; they regard the objects of their secular activities as the things that are solid and abiding (1 Corinthians 7:29-31, 1 John 2:18); and thus throw away immortal powers upon what is fugitive and incidental, blind to the truth that the things which are seen and temporal are, in their proper purpose, only the bough that is meant to bear the fruit of things unseen and eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18). And no less characteristic of the worldly mind are the uneasiness and distress consequent upon the lack of such sense of security: God-forgetting anxiety, painful and harmful as it is futile (Philippians 4:6, 1 Peter 5:7); repining over worldly losses and disappointments, the ‘sorrow of the world’ that ‘worketh death’ (2 Corinthians 7:10), reaching its climax in that sense of instability and vanity in all earthly things which, without its counterpoise of faith in spiritual reality, leads directly to the inverted worldliness of pessimism, and by rebound to cynical hedonism-‘let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die’ (1 Corinthians 15:32).
Again, the ‘vainglory of life’ exhibits a form which is distinctively egotistical. Successful achievement, the possession of external wealth, or still more of personal gifts and qualities which are an object of desire and envy to others, produce a feeling and attitude of arrogant superiority towards one’s fellows, and of self-idolatry in relation to God. The adulation of the populace is fatal to the worldly prince (Acts 12:22-23); the rich are tempted to be ‘highminded’ (1 Timothy 6:17); the consciousness of superior insight, ‘puffeth up’ (1 Corinthians 8:1) those in whom it is not united with love and a sense of love’s responsibilities. Gifts, even of a religious kind (1 Corinthians 1:5; 1 Corinthians 1:7), unless safeguarded by gratitude, become incitements to arrogance (1 Corinthians 4:7-8). And here also, the self-satisfaction which is produced by the sense of possession has its negative counterpart in the no less egotistical discontent and envy which are excited by the consciousness of defect (1 Timothy 6:4, Titus 3:3, 1 John 3:15). Finally, this whole view of life, for which spiritual realities are non-existent, finds expression in the ‘wisdom of this world’ (1 Corinthians 1:20, ‘fleshly wisdom,’ 2 Corinthians 1:12), the wisdom whose furthest horizon is that of the present age (1 Corinthians 2:6), which moves, however skilfully, only on the plane of material things and interests (τὰ ἐπίγεια φρονοῦντες, Philippians 3:19), and which therefore inspires much self-sufficiency in men (1 Corinthians 1:20), to which the Cross of Christ is foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:18) but which is itself foolishness with God (1 Corinthians 3:19).
As to the general conception, it would be a grave mistake to suppose that worldliness is due simply to the quick responsiveness of human nature to its terrestrial environment. Its sensitiveness to material stimulus is one element in the case; but the determining factor is its insensitiveness to the Divine. The problem of worldliness runs back into the wider and deeper problem of sin. Thus the NT writers see in human worldliness the replica of a type of mind previously existing in the spirit-world, and attribute it, in part at least, to this superhuman source. St. James describes its ‘wisdom’ as not only earthly and sensuous, but δαιμονιώδης (James 3:15). St. Paul identifies the ‘wisdom of the present age’ with the wisdom of its spirit-rulers, who in their blindness compassed the crucifixion of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:6; 1 Corinthians 2:8), and ascribes to the ‘god of this aeon’ the incapacity of men to perceive His Divine glory (2 Corinthians 4:4; cf. 1 John 4:3-6). And this ‘spirit of the world’ (1 Corinthians 2:12), blind to the truth of Christ and antagonistic to His cause, has its social embodiment in that section of mankind which in a more special sense is ‘the world’ (see art. World). Hence arises a clear and concrete issue. The sincere Christian cannot love the world (1 John 2:15). It is the home of all opinions, sentiments, and influences which are most inimical to his convictions and aspirations. The programme it lays down for its devotees is wholly incompatible with self-denying love and holy obedience of the followers of Christ (Titus 2:12; 2 Peter 1:4, 1 John 2:15-16). Its friendship is enmity with God (James 4:4).
Worldliness, as depicted in the apostolic writings, is not a natural and naïve materialism; it is the bondage to the material of a being who is essentially spiritual. Made for fellowship in the life that is Divine and eternal, man craves for satisfactions which the natural use and enjoyment of material good cannot yield; and these he therefore seeks in wanton excess and perversions of nature (Romans 1:21-32). The covetousness of those who have enough, the excesses of sensuality, the unappeasable hunger of vanity and ambition, the unceasing pursuit of excitement, envy, jealousy, the gnawing hatred of others’ good-all show how the soul, deprived of its proper nutriment, vainly flies to the world for a substitute.
And as the root of the evil is man’s unresponsiveness to the higher realities, there must the remedy be applied. The apostolic Epistles abound, indeed, in exhortation to the severance of all correspondences with the lower environment that are unnecessary, or are found in experience to be harmful. But always they find the one effectual antidote to worldliness in the quickening of the spiritual life by faith in Christ crucified, risen and victorious, and in the earnest pursuit of positive Christian ideals (Galatians 6:14, Romans 12:1-2; Romans 13:13-14, 1 Corinthians 10:31, Galatians 5:16, Ephesians 5:1-2; Ephesians 5:16, Colossians 3:1-2, 1 Timothy 6:11, 1 John 5:4). ‘This is the victory that hath overcome the world, even our faith’ (1 John 5:4).
Literature.-H. Bisseker, art. ‘Wordliness’ In DCG; A. Ritschl and J. Weiss, art. ‘Welt’ in PRE 3: A. B. D. Alexander, The Ethics of St. Paul, Glasgow, 1910; R. Law, The Tests of Life3, Edinburgh, 1914, pp. 145 ff., 275 ff.; W. Alexander, The Epistles of St. John, London, 1889, pp. 136 ff., 149 ff.; Phillips Brooks, Sermons. do., 1879, p. 353 ff.; J. Foster. Lectures3, do. 1853, vol. i. p. 11 ff.; J. M, Gibbon, Eternal Life, do., 1890, p. 36 ff.; H. P. Liddon, Easter in St. Paul’s, do., 1885, p. 253 ff.; A. Maclaren, After the Resurrection, do., 1902. p. 142 ff., A Year’s Ministry, 1st ser., do., 1884, p. 85 ff.; J. Martineau, Endeavours after the Christian Life6, do., 1876, p. 439 ff.; J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, new ed., do., 1868, i. 215 ff.; F. W. Robertson, Lectures on St. Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians, new ed., do., 1873, p. 127 ff., Sermons, 3rd ser., new ed., do., 1876, p. 15ff., 169 ff.; T. G. Selby, The Unheeding God, do., 1899, p. 182 ff.; W. L. Watkinson, The Blind Spot, do., 1899, pp. 135 ff., 201 ff.
Robert Law.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Worldliness'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/w/worldliness.html. 1906-1918.
