One Greek word for the world God loved and the order that hates whoever is not of it. The word does not tell them apart. A reader has to, and the ground on which she does it decides whose order the word is naming.
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Kosmos means order before it means world: a thing arranged, set in array, put right. The same word means ornament. The universe was called a kosmos because it was taken to be an arrangement, and what is arranged has been arranged by something.
The Gospel of John uses the one word both ways. God so loved the kosmos (3:16). If the kosmos hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you (15:18). Now shall the prince of this kosmos be cast out (12:31). My kingdom is not of this kosmos (18:36).
The creation that is loved and the order that hates are named by the same word in the same book, and nothing in the word separates them.
[See THE PREFIX DECIDES · THE SWEPT HOUSE]
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THE ORDER AND THE ORNAMENT
The second sense does not go away when the first is in use. In 1 Peter the women are told that their kosmos should not be the outward kind, the plaited hair and the gold and the clothing (3:3). The word for the world-order is the word for arrangement put onto a surface, and the letter applies it to her.
An order that is also an ornament is an arrangement laid over what it arranges, and the question it cannot answer from inside is who did the laying.
[See COVERTURE · WOMEN'S BODIES AS TERRITORY]
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WINK'S READING
Walter Wink read the hostile uses as naming what he called the Domination System: not the physical world, and not creation, but the interlocking order of rule that presents itself as how things are. On that reading the prince of this kosmos is the spirit of the order, and the whole world lieth in wickedness (1 John 5:19), where the Greek en tō ponērō can as well be read in the evil one, describes a captured order, not a wicked earth.
The reading is right where the text is hostile, and it cannot be extended to where the text is not. The kosmos God loved in 3:16 is not the Domination System, and a reading that makes every kosmos into empire has lost the sentence the Gospel is built on.
The same word names what is loved and what is refused, and the refusal is of the order laid over, never of what it was laid over.
[See DELIVER US FROM EVIL · THE CONFIGURATION]
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THE SPELLING DOES NOT HELP
English readers sometimes try to separate the two by spelling: Kosmos for the empire, cosmos for the creation. The Greek has one word. The spelling is a Latin transliteration and a Greek one of the same thing, and assigning them different referents is a distinction the language never made.
Nor does every warning about the world use this word. Be not conformed to this world (Romans 12:2) is aiōn, the age, the present age of the world, and the empire reading has its own word there without needing to borrow this one.
A distinction the language does not make has to be made by a reader, and a reader who makes it owes the ground; a spelling is not a ground.
[See THE TRANSLATION CORRUPTIONS · THE LEXICAL TRESPASS]
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WHICH ONE IS MEANT
Where nothing in a word distinguishes two things, the language has declined to decide and the reader decides instead. The test is the one the prefix gives when there is no prefix: look at what the order is doing.
Where the kosmos is the creation in which the creature resides, it is loved, and she is of it. Where the kosmos is an order laid over her, adorning, governing, requiring conformity, hating whoever is not of it, it is the order the Gospel will not be of. The word does not change between them; what changes is whether the order is the dwelling or is standing on it.
[See THE PRIOR RESIDENT · OCCUPATION]
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She was told the world is to be renounced. The Gospel told her the world is loved.
Both used the same word, and only one of them was describing the order that told her so.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
