Jesus understood the world as God’s beloved yet wounded creation. He neither rejected the world as evil nor accepted it as it was, but saw it as the place where God’s Kingdom was already breaking in through healing, forgiveness, and renewed relationships. Ordinary life was the arena of God’s presence, and the world was not to be escaped but transformed by love, mercy, and justice.
Christianity inherited this vision and affirmed that the world is created by God and therefore fundamentally good. It also deepened Jesus’ realism by speaking of the world as fallen and marked by sin. Christian theology maintained that the world remains the object of God’s saving love and that God is at work to redeem it, holding together a tension between salvation already begun and its future fulfillment.
At the same time, Christianity often moved away from Jesus’ integrated and hopeful view. In practice, the world was frequently treated as a place of danger or temptation, leading to withdrawal, fear, and sharp sacred–secular divisions that Jesus himself had challenged. Salvation was sometimes reduced to escape from the world rather than participation in its renewal, and apocalyptic pessimism overshadowed Jesus’ confidence in God’s present activity.
Thus, Christianity stands in both continuity and tension with Jesus’ understanding of the world. While it affirms the world as God’s creation and the object of divine love, it has often obscured Jesus’ vision by emphasizing separation and escape over engagement and transformation. Recovering Jesus’ perspective means rediscovering the world as the primary place where God’s renewing work is meant to be lived out.
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