Bonaventura Peeters the Elder (Flemish, 1614-1652):
'Seascape with Sailors Sheltering from a Rainstorm' (1640s)
“HOW IS IT THAT THE WORLD
CAN SEEM SO EMPTY?”
by Herman Dooyeweerd
Eternity illumines even the seemingly trivial
“In the Biblical attitude of everyday experience, the transcendent, religious dimension of its horizon is opened. The light of eternity radiates through all the temporal dimensions of this horizon and even illuminates seemingly trivial things and events in our sinful world. [...] This should not be misunderstood. It would be an illusion to suppose that a true Christian always displays the Biblical attitude in his daily experience. Far from it. Because they are not exempt from the solidarity of the fall into sin, all Christians know the emptiness of an experience of the temporal world which seems to be shut up in itself. They know the impersonal attitude of [Heidegger’s] ‘Man’ in the routine of common life, and the dread of nothingness, the meaningless, if one tries to find oneself again in a so-called existential isolation. They are acquainted with all this from personal experience, though they do not understand the philosophical analysis of this state of spiritual uprooting in Humanistic existentialism. But Christians whose hearts are opened to the Divine Word-revelation know that in this apostate experiential attitude they do not experience temporal things and events as they really are. i.e. as MEANING pointing beyond and above itself to the true religious [ie ultimate] Centre of Meaning and to the true Origin.” The Christian as a stranger in this world
“Although the fallen earthly cosmos is only a sad shadow of God's original creation, and although the Christian can only consider himself or herself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, yet he or she cannot recognize the true creaturely ground of meaning in the apostate root of this cosmos, but only in the new root, Christ. Any other view would inevitably result in elevating sin to the rank of an independent counter-power opposed to the creative power of God. And this would result in avoidance of the world, an unbiblical flight from the world. We have nothing to avoid in the world but sin. The battle that the Christian wages in God's power in this temporal life against the Kingdom of darkness, is a joyful struggle, not only for our own salvation, but for God's creation as a whole, which we do not hate, but love for Christ's sake. We must not hate anything in the world but sin.”The apostate world cannot maintain any meaning as its own property in opposition to Christ. Common Grace.
“Nothing in our apostate world can get lost in Christ. There is not any part of space, there is no temporal life, no temporal movement or temporal energy, no temporal power, wisdom, beauty, love, faith or justice, which sinful reality can maintain as a kind of property of its own apart from Christ. Whoever relinquishes the 'world' taken in the sense of sin, of the 'flesh' in its Scriptural meaning, does not really lose anything of the creaturely meaning, but on the contrary gets a share in the fulness of meaning of Christ, in Whom God will give us everything. It is all due to God's common grace in Christ that there are still means left in the temporal world to resist the destructive force of the elements that have got loose; that there are still means to combat disease, to check psychiatric maladies, to practise logical thinking, to save cultural development from going down into savage barbarism, to develop language, to preserve the possibility of social interaction, to withstand injustice, and so on. All these things are the fruits of Christ's work, even before His appearance on the earth. From the very beginning God has viewed His fallen creation in the light of the Redeemer.”
(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Vol 3, pp 29, 30)
