What Is the World?

What is the world? What is the physical world, really?

Normally today, our answer would be some sort of chemical or physical description, and it would probably be reductive. We give the common example when we ask, “What are the fundamental particles?” We do not know that completely yet, but let us pretend it is some sort of subatomic particle, a very small thing. We say, “Well, the world is made of that stuff.” Then that stuff combines together and makes higher-level stuff, and that is supposedly what the world is.

Is that actually what the world is? Is that our highest understanding of it?

The Nature of a Gift

Let me give you an example. Let us say it is your birthday, and I go to your house and give you a gift. You unwrap it and receive it. Later, let us say you come home and are talking to someone else, and your friend points to that item and asks, “Hey, what is that?”

What would be the best, most accurate response—the response with the most understanding of that thing? It certainly would not be giving a chemical and physical description of its component parts. What is funny is that doing so could actually indicate your lack of understanding. The proper understanding is, “Oh, that was a gift from that person.” When you understand that it is a gift, and that it is a gift from a specific person, you have the deepest understanding of that physical thing.

You can start moving up in the world and ask that question about the different things around you, but you can also ask that about the universe itself. That does not seem to be an inappropriate question. What, then, is the answer to that question?

When you understand that the world is a gift—and I am not saying that metaphorically—you have reached a much deeper, more accurate understanding of what the world actually is.

The Givenness of the World

Now, for a little backstory: in twentieth-century philosophy, there arose a movement called phenomenology. The phenomena is how stuff simply appears to you. You look around, you see these books over here, and that is the phenomena. This group arose because they thought the normal tradition of philosophy was ignoring how things just appear, how they look in the world, and how you experience them. They believed there was an important structure there, with important things to learn, rather than merely following what much of the philosophical tradition had done with debates about substance and properties. Those thinkers were trying to get beneath the surface and were sort of ignoring the surface.

These phenomenologists came along, and one of the things that phenomenologists—specifically Christian phenomenologists—have discussed is the phenomena, the structure, and the reality of a gift. In the broadest sense, we wake up, we are given a body, we are given DNA, and we are given a family. The givenness of the world is a fundamental feature of reality.

We know this from the Bible, too. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Then he makes little copies of himself, gives us jobs to do, and we are supposed to reflect what God does with us. He gives us the world, and he gives us authority over the animals. To understand the world means for us to understand it as a gift.

Ascending the Hierarchy of Understanding

This tells us something interesting about understanding—about the nature of understanding and what we are supposed to do to understand something. Greater understanding happens when you ascend: properly connecting things like motivation and action, properly categorizing things and comporting yourself to them, and locating things in their proper place within the web of existence.

Fundamentally, we live in a world of persons. That is one of the most fundamental philosophical and theological questions: Do we fundamentally live in a world of non-personal things, or personal things? As a Christian, you believe that fundamentally we live in a world of persons. Once you understand the web of persons and how objects fit in as gifts and exchanges, you have fundamentally moved up in your hierarchy of understanding.

It is important to understand the physical structure of things. But if you stop there, you could have not only a small understanding, but actually a lack of understanding. When things get out of proportion, that can be just as much of an error.

Think about what Jesus says: you tithe dill, mint, and cumin, but you neglect the weightier matters of the law. Your hierarchy is off-balance, and so you become corrupt and need to rebalance. If you are understanding the whole world simply in terms of its physical composition, you have not even begun to understand the world.

In our popular culture, that reductionism is a common presupposition: “If I really want to understand the world, I learn science.” It is not that science is unimportant; it is simply subordinate to higher forms of understanding that you should be pursuing as you ascend into higher levels of comprehension of objects in the world.

Images That Reveal Reality

I always talk about this in the book of Revelation when I am teaching it, because you get all these amazing images of dragons and similar figures. People sometimes think, “Oh, these are just nice, pretty metaphors to help us understand like children.”

I say, “No, that is not what is going on.” Sometimes these images are a far more accurate description of someone than if you were to give a physical description.

For instance, if you were to say, “Explain Adolf Hitler to me,” and you gave me a whole panoply of his physical properties, that would not begin to help me understand him. But if instead you were to use the image, “Oh, this is a monster,” you possess a greater understanding of that reality through that image than through any list of physical properties you could provide.

Just as with that negative example, you can have positive examples, too: like the truth that the world is a gift.

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