One of the most interesting women in English letters is a lady who never lived at all, although she ought to have. I'm thinking now of G.K. Chesterton's familiar fictional landlady who asked every prospective tenant first what his philosophy was. Before she asked the man who wanted to rent a room for his references. That is before she found out what others thought of him. Before she asked the man about his financial condition. That is before she found out what she thought of him. This discerning female asked him about how he looked at the world.

Now, anyone who has ever approached one of that dowdy and delightful breed the landlady will know that anything that comes before character and solvency in her eyes is important indeed. And that's exactly what old Chesterton was trying to get across. That a man's philosophy, his way of looking at the world, is so much the most important and practical thing about him that anybody who would do business with that man ought to investigate those ideas first of all. Because it is a truth with the status of truism by now, that our fundamental attitudes toward the world do so determine our thoughts and actions, that anyone who really wants to know us would do well to dig down to those fundamental attitudes at the outset.

The story is told over and over again as we read the records of men's thinking and believing, and then study the evidences of their actions. To this day, a man's basic slant on the world is the most important and practical thing about him, and whether he knows it or not, the Christian is no exception to this rule. For our faith, too, involves a certain outlook upon life and the world. Our faith gives us a certain slant on all that goes on around us, and just as for everyone else, this point of view on the world sets the direction of our lives and the course of our culture. But now here's the rub. Many of us are not altogether sure what that all important outlook is, what our slant is, what the Christian point of view on the world is. Do we as Christians affirm the world, or do we deny the world? Do we hate the world, or do we love the world?

There are examples aplenty in church history of both attitudes. Some of our ancestors so loving the world that Christianity became indistinguishable from the world. Others so hating the world that they took to mutilating that part of the world closest at hand, namely their own living bodies. And between those first culture vultures and those second blessing butchers, every shade of opinion has been illustrated in our history. So we're left with the question, who was right? How does the Christian look at the world? This is a question on whose answer now hangs the Christian's character and behavior and ultimately the shape of his society.

In this connection, and while pondering this whole problem, a while back, I was struck by a phrase from the collected poetry of the late and much lamented Robert Frost. In one of Robert Frost's poems written for his own epitaph. As a matter of fact, the New England artist referred to his life's work as having been a lover's quarrel with the world. If I'm not very much mistaken, that phrase is striking to the Christian because it sums up and states precisely and memorably, what is the truly Christian attitude toward the world.

The Christian, his whole life long, is engaged in a lover's quarrel with the world. Surely, the quarrel part is clear to us all. Just because we believe in God as he is known in Jesus Christ, just because we are Christians, we cannot be satisfied with the world as it is. The quarrel of the Christian with the world is plain enough. There are things wrong with the world that we cannot but notice and criticize and combat and that's a quarrel. What is it that we see wrong with the world and the men who are in it, including beginning with ourselves? Why, what else but the world's nonchalance toward God and the flouting of his will?

Our quarrel is with men who put themselves at the center of things and prefer their own purposes over God's men in rebellion and open revolution against their Creator and their Lord. The Christian's quarrel is with all of that in the world and everything that it leads to. Our quarrel is with the world in which we live with its overcharges of empty stimuli and its perpetual miscarriage of technique, its materialistic repletion, its costly rituals of conspicuous waste, its highly organized purposelessness.

Our quarrel is with the remedies that a frantic world invents and tries and esthetics may temporarily blot out the terrors of this state, chloral and whisky, sexual dilation and speed may ease the tensions, but in the end, such fleeting graces can only add to the enfeeblement, and we know it. Certainly if the Christian faith involves a man in a lover's quarrel with the world, the quarrel part is plain. We have a world full of things to resist and combat. The truth is that we quarrel because God quarrels. The very things we have to resist are the things that God has resisted. The very trends and tendencies in the world which we must combat are those which God combats. That's what the life and death of Christ tell us. That's what the cross of Christ cries out to us that God has a grievance with the world that there's something wrong in the world, which must be set right, that God has a quarrel with the world.

But now the cross has something else to say to us too. God's quarrel with the world is not the whole story about God's relations with the world, nor is it the whole story of our basic attitude toward the world. For the cross also says that God loves the very world with which he quarrels. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting life. That's the good news. That's the gospel of the cross, that God loves us even when we earn his anger. For God so loved the world. He doesn't just combat the world. He loves it. His quarrel with the world is not destructive of the world. It's not a grudge fight in which communion is broken and friendship is lost. For God sent not his Son into the world, to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. You see, God's is a lover's quarrel with the world, and I don't see how our basic slant can be other than just such a lover's quarrel with the world.

As it happens however, Christians are constantly tempted to leave the love out of their disagreement with the world ever and ever again. We're so carried away by our polemic against this unconcerned, nonchalant, faithless world that we overlook the fact that we as subjects of Our Lord must love the world that he loved enough to save. Sometimes we lash out so largely against the sin in the world that we actually come near hating the world in such moments. And there are such moments in every hour of the church's history. In such moments, we do well to recall that God is not only the Redeemer of the world. That is that God is not only so dissatisfied with the world as it is that he has to redeem it, do something about it, but that God is also the creator of the world. And the world which God created is not such that we must hate it, must turn our backs on it, must flee from it, to have fellowship with Him.

Beware lest you get so spiritual as to lose contact with your world and your time. Don't try so hard to be pure spirit. Don't try to go God one better. That way lies the insubstantial transparency that God sees right through. God didn't come to save spirits, but the world. You don't have to be ghostly to be godly. Beware lest your theology get too limited to include the world and all of its concerns. Beware lest your piety get too drab and narrow to take in all the glowing, growing, exciting, proliferating culture of the world. Beware any attitude that comes within shouting distance of that whining old hymn, Earth is but a desert where Heaven is my home. Renunciation of the world is for Jainists and Buddhists, maybe, but it isn't for the Protestant Christian, however, wholly the movies or television are always making it look. A more genuinely Christian attitude toward the world, sings out from a much older hymn, fair are the meadows fairer still the woodland robed in the blooming garb of spring.

The old reformers sang that way. No men ever had a bitter, sharper quarrel with the world than they did, and yet they sang of fair meadows and woodlands and spring and sunshine and moonlight and the starry host, and they harked back when they did to another who spoke softly of the flowers of the field that he loved and threw him to his father, who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. None of these was hostile to the world against which he stood, each loved the world with which he quarreled, and so must every Christian, having met our God in Jesus Christ, having heard our God in Jesus Christ, our eyes and ears are open now to what the world offers of communion with God.

Now mind you, we do not worship the world as if it were God, as if God were capsulized in some part of the earth, not at all. Where we meet God, as he is, where we see him. For whom he is, is in Jesus Christ, and there only. It seems to me, I can't say it often enough, or put it strongly enough, we're to love the world, and that means to love life and to love the body too. We've had too much of this crabbed negativism, this nicey nicey neutrality, this creeping caution when it comes to the Christian and his life and his flesh. Of course, we're supposed to love life, love it and love it like no pagan ever dared love it. We may criticize life as it is, but even as it is, we dare not condemn it. Indeed, though we are dissatisfied with it as it is, we Christians love life enough to want it forever. What else does that jealously guarded doctrine of eternal life mean? Except that the church has always held life dear and precious and beloved enough to want it forever. And just so it is with our bodies. We may be dissatisfied with our own all too human flesh. Each of us may wish that his own body were somehow in better balance. But even so, we do not denounce the body and its claims, though we must curb it and control it on occasion, for its own good. We do this, I hope, as an affectionate teacher, guides a charge he loves, and not as a slashing psychopath domineers the being he hates, which has been too often, the spirit of, as we say, Christian discipline. Though we criticize the body as it is, we love it enough too, so that we affirm it with our faith in a resurrection of the body. We love it enough so that we want some kind of a body always and forever.

So goes the Christian's whole attitude toward the world. It entails criticism, but without renunciation, the dissatisfaction we have is always within affirmation, our judgments ought always to be in love for following God, the Christian loves the world with which he quarrels. We go forth assuring our fellows that this is our Father's world, that we are to live in it and love it and use it, that we're to grasp all of its possibilities joyously and develop them with everything we have in us and rejoice in God's creation and in ours, that we are to enjoy all of this as it is and then leave in it a little more justice, a little more truth, a little more beauty than would have been there had we not loved the world enough to quarrel with it for what it is not but could be.

We go forth not to summon God's children from the world, but to sing out to them that in and with the world, they can be restored to him whose lovers quarrel with the world is the history of the world. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. Now unto Him who is able to keep us from falling and to present us faultless before the presence of his glory, with exceeding joy to the only wise God, our Savior be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and forever.