The Sacred and the Mundane

Seeing the World Through New Eyes

When I first decided to become a Christian, I had no faith in God. My “conversion” was purely intellectual. I had no faith, and, as a lifelong atheist/naturalist, I didn’t even know what faith actually meant. I have vivid memories of reciting the Jesus prayer over and over, almost agonizing at the fact that I knew I didn’t really believe I was doing anything more than repeating words in solitude. Thankfully, God did not remain distant for very long, and when he eventually revealed Himself, I saw the world through new eyes.

James. B Jordan is a little-known Reformed Biblical scholar who coined the phrase “through new eyes” to refer to the attitude of one who sees the world from a Christian and, by implication, Biblical perspective. Last year, I read his book Through New Eyes and it blew me away. It was like nothing I had ever read before. However, it was not Jordan himself who had the biggest impact on me, but one of his biggest fans, my friend Seraphim Hamilton.

Before discovering Seraphim's collection of (endearingly) rambly, wholly captivating, and absolutely brilliant YouTube videos in 2020, I was a Christian in name only. I did not truly believe because I did not yet have the ability to see. Just as Seraphim opened my eyes to the truly beautiful, inexhaustibly rich, and infinitely complex (and yet, not confusing or unnerving) picture of the world the Bible presents (which I now firmly believe is simply reality as such), Jordan did the same thing for him many years prior.

Jordan is such a unique thinker because he does not simply discuss highbrow theological doctrine, nor does he engage in the (mostly) futile debates of modern Biblical scholarship, but he gets into the “nitty gritty” and demonstrates how God wants us to view the world. He explains what the Bible says about trees, rocks, hair, and other “mundane” things people today consider to have no theological significance. Modern people (and, regrettably, even most modern Christians) tend to make a strict distinction between the sacred and the mundane, if not reducing all of reality to the latter. And while there is certainly a sense in which there is such a distinction (after all, we believe in sacraments), we must remember King David's words: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”¹ All of creation reveals God, and the sin of secularism is, in essence, the de-sacralization of the world.

Orthodox Christianity considers salvation to be not only an individual reality but a cosmic one as well. All of creation is meant to become a sacrament, that is, the dwelling place of God. Union with God is the telos of every created being. If this were not the case, then God’s inevitable redemption and reclaiming of the fallen world and His intimate union with us could only be a terrifying fate. If creation were not made in God’s image (and only fully “itself” in union with Him), He would be irreconcilably other than us, an external imposition who disrupts the comfort of familiarity, a foreign intruder akin to an entity from an H.P Lovecraft novel. But, if we know that all of creation is patterned after the eternal divine ideas (as Maximus the Confessor so brilliantly taught), then God’s dwelling within us is the most natural and wonderful destiny imaginable. It is the very meaning of life.

Jordan shows, almost in an empirical way, how creation is meant to be united with God by demonstrating how supposedly “mundane” things reveal His glory. A tree is not “just a tree” but “a common picture of a ladder to heaven, with the glory canopy at the top.”² The same sort of symbolism can be demonstrated (in a substantive and non-arbitrary way) with rocks, gold, birds, planets, hair, hands, and any one of God’s creations, provided one has the Bible as one’s point of reference. It just takes a little work to find the meaning God has hidden in the world. But this work is expected of us as Christians, who are the royal people of God: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” ³

I was recently hanging out with a friend, and we were trying to decide what to have for dinner. At some point, we ended up talking about cooking. My friend is quite knowledgeable about culinary matters, and he mentioned that salt is used to flavour dishes because it dries water out of food and allows added flavours to penetrate more deeply. I was struck by how naturally this mundane fact explains Christ’s enigmatic statement that his followers are the “salt of the earth.” Christians are the salt of the earth because we are the ones who “dry out” the finite water that leads to thirst, allowing the water of eternal life to penetrate the depths of creation. I would have never had this insight if I did not, at least partially, see the world through Biblical eyes.

The symbolic worldview of James Jordan resonates deeply with our communal ontology. The most fundamental axiom of communal logic is that things are not just “themselves” (understood in the abstract, tautological, and self-relational sense), but that inherent to the very self-identity of any given thing is its union with and “pointing to” that which lies beyond it. Everything and every person–whether they like it or not–reveals God in some way.

One of the central goals of telosbound is participating in the re-enchantment of the world through recovering the Biblical/Christian understanding of reality as an infinitely rich network of symbols pointing towards the Triune communion. Possessing this understanding, even if only partially, strengthens one’s faith unimaginably. Truly, it cannot be imagined–it can only be known if it is seen.

1. Psalm 91:1.

2. James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes.

3. Proverbs 25:2.