Are You a Cosmophobe or Cosmophile?
Yesterday, I posted an article entitled “Cosmophobia: Rejecting the Real in this Most Beautiful Moment.”
You can read it here: Cosmophobia
The universe is astoundingly beautiful—and the images being released from NASA are only the latest, remarkable confirmation. Should we not love the world rather than fear it and what it has given us? What is there to fear?
Of course there are some things to fear, for evil is real even as the cosmos is real. But beauty is real too, as is our intuition of an essential goodness, deep down things.
Christian have confessed an abiding cosmophilia—loving the good world God has made even while being careful to “love not the world” when the “world” means the the sin that has permeated so much of our human affairs and culture. The cosmos is to be loved and admired—it is a harmony we are still learning to hear. But the beauty is marred, diminished, injured. The cosmos to the Christian is our home, is charged with the glory of God, and is yet broken and groaning for redemption. In John’s gospel we read that Christ made the cosmos, and came into the cosmos, and the cosmos did not receive him. Christ declares that he is “not of this cosmos” but that his Father so loved the cosmos that Christ was sent to bring redemption. In fact, John uses the Greek word cosmos in over 10 different ways in his gospel and epistles.
With the release of the images from NASA, this is a time to consider the cosmos in the primordial sense we encounter in Genesis in which the cosmos is declared “good” and humans “very good.”
I hope for a few days we can all rejoice as cosmophiles.