In thinking about what it means to have a Christian worldview, I long ago realized that we have been living in a world that is disenchanted–stripped of meaning and purpose with little to no room for the supernatural. This outlook is sub-Christian, and in considering what Christian reenchantment would look like, it will be helpful to go back to the very beginning, pre-Fall, to see the way things were supposed to be. And this means taking a good look at Genesis 2, which describes the environment in which God placed Adam and then brought forth Eve. Hidden in plain sight in the description of Eden and its environs is an important insight into God’s purposes for us and how we should live in light of the home in which God started our story.

Let’s start with the region around Eden.

Havilah

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (Genesis 2:10-14)

Notice that the only area that is described is Havilah, where there is gold (and the gold is good), along with onyx stone and bdellium.

Onyx is a stone with bands of color used in the ancient world for cameos, gems, and carved luxury items. But what in the world is bdellium?

Bdellium

The Hebrew word is bedolach. It only appears in the Bible here and in Numbers 11, where manna is described as having the appearance of bedolach. It is further described as being white like hoarfrost, suggesting a pearly, translucent color. As a result, the Jewish Encyclopedia describes it as an unidentified precious stone or crystal.

Most scholars, however, think our translation gets it right, and bedolach is bdellium, an aromatic gum resin used in perfumes and incense, similar to myrrh, though less rare and so less expensive.

For our purposes, it doesn’t matter. The point is that Havilah is filled with beautiful and precious things: gold, incense and perfume, and onyx, all things that bring delight.

The Garden

With this in mind, let’s look at the Garden:

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.… (Genesis 2:8-9)

Notice that the first thing we are told about the Garden is that the trees are pleasing to the eye. Beauty is the primary characteristic of the place where God put Adam.

 The second thing we are told is that the trees produce fruit that is good for food. Eden is located in modern Turkey, whose fruit trees today include apple, apricot, cherry, peach, nectarine, pear, plum, and fig. In a world without refined sugar, these are the sweetest things anyone is likely to find. In other words, the diet in Eden was focused on sweetness and delight.

There’s obviously much more that can be said about Eden, particularly its role as the holy mountain and a temple where God meets His people, along with its connection to the imagery in the Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple. But that has been discussed by others. What I haven’t seen is a focus on delight—God’s delight in the beauty of the world, His delight in sharing that with humanity, the delight He expected us to find here, the delight we would have in taking His good gifts and producing things of beauty from them ourselves.

No wonder He declared the creation very good.                                      

The Importance of Delight

Why is this important?

First, it reminds us that the story of humanity begins with the goodness of creation. I can only speak to the evangelical world and my childhood memories of Catholicism as I understood it, but we often act as if the Gospel starts with sin and ends with salvation. That’s a mistake. It starts with delight and ends with delight. Sin and salvation come in the middle between those.

Second, it reminds us that God wants us to delight in Him and in what He has made. Christianity is sometimes caricatured as a killjoy religion that suppresses us and keeps us from being our true selves—as if our true selves are simply our disordered desires. Yet this is not true: God gives us all things necessary for our delight and tells us what we need to know to enjoy them to the full here and more abundantly in the hereafter. As C.S. Lewis argued in The Weight of Glory:

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Third, rediscovering delight in creation is an important element in Christian reenchantment. We need to recognize the beauty of creation and cultivate it in ways that enhance and promote it rather than destroy it. We need to make our homes, churches, and communities places of beauty and delight. And we need to feast. God’s instruction to Adam that he could eat from any tree in the Garden could be translated “in feasting you will continually feast,” and so we should live lives of celebration before God, enjoying food and drink with thanksgiving to the God who provides us with all things for our delight. And since you really can’t feast alone, we need communities of like-minded people to share in our celebrations.

Reenchantment shouldn’t be a purely intellectual exercise. It involves both body and soul and needs to be lived out in all aspects of our lives. And it needs to be anchored in delight.