The Meanings of the “World”

In the New Testament, the term world (Gk. kosmos) has three basic meanings: (1) the earth, the created order; (2) the nations, the human community; (3) the ways of fallen humanity, alienated from God and his truth. It is this third sense of the term that I have suggested is largely equivalent to "modernity" in contemporary Western culture. It is worthy of note that this sense of the term as it appears in the New Testament signifies not a sociological reality but a theological reality. This may explain why worldliness is so frequently being missed, or misjudged, in the evangelical church today: it takes theological sense, theological judgment to recognize it, and that is precisely what has disappeared from the church.

This "world," then, is the way in which our collective life in society (and the culture that goes with it) is organized around the self in substitution for God. It is life characterized by self-righteousness, selfcenteredness, self-satisfaction, self-aggrandizement, and self-promotion, with a corresponding distaste for the self-denial proper to union with Christ. As comfortable as this self-centered reordering of moral and spiritual reality may seem, however, it is inevitably attended by "worldly grief" (2 Cor. 7:10), because, having displaced God from the center of our personal universe, we have made it impossible to care for ourselves as we should. The triumph of the self is always Pyrrhic; it amounts to a paradoxical abandonment of the true self, a ruin that begins to cast its shadows over the human spirit long before the day in which God's judgment is heard.

There is a clear line, then, between those who belong to Christ and those who do not, a line separating two very different ways of viewing self and world. If we stay with John, we can easily see how sharply he differentiates these two spiritual realms. "Those who belong to the church have been born of God (1 John 3:1-3); those who belong to the world have not (1 John 4:4-6). The church belongs to Christ (1 John 3:7-10); the world belongs to Satan (1 John 5:19), its "prince" (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11). All that is of Christ endures forever; all that is of the world is transient, fading (1 John 2:17), and under God's judgment (1 John 4:17). Love for God, therefore, is utterly incompatible with love of the world (1 John 2:15).

Bultmann has suggested that John shaped this antithesis between the character of God and the nature of life in four ways, contrasting light and darkness, truth and falsehood, freedom and bondage, and life and death.(' These categories are not mutually exclusive, of course; in fact, they overlap in significant ways.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.