Theopedia

Worldliness

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

— 1 John 2:15

Definition

Worldliness is the sin of loving, trusting, or being conformed to the present fallen order (its values, pursuits, and possessions) in place of, or ahead of, love for God (Rom. 12:2; 1 John 2:15-16). It is not the lawful use or enjoyment of the created world, which Scripture permits, but the heart’s inordinate attachment to it: desiring earthly things more than heavenly ones, or loving them enough to set God aside. The Reformed tradition has treated it as a species of covetousness, which the tenth commandment forbids as “inordinate motions and affections” toward what is not one’s own.

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 confesses the Decalogue, given at Sinai “in ten commandments, and written in two tables,” as a “perfect rule of righteousness” that continues to bind believers after the fall, the first table concerning duty to God and the second duty to neighbor.1 Its wording here closely follows the wider Reformed confessional family’s, and the confession states the law at this general level rather than expounding each commandment individually.

That family’s Westminster Larger Catechism gives the fuller exposition the confession itself does not, naming the sin the tenth commandment forbids:

“Discontentment with our own estate; envying and grieving at the good of our neighbor, together with all inordinate motions and affections to anything that is his.”2

The corresponding duty required is “such a full contentment with our own condition, and such a charitable frame of the whole soul toward our neighbor, as that all our inward motions and affections touching him, tend unto, and further all that good which is his.”2

Biblical Basis

Scripture forbids loving the world in place of God: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world” (1 John 2:15-16, KJV). James states the same antithesis as a matter of spiritual unfaithfulness: “know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (James 4:4, KJV). Paul frames the positive counterpart as non-conformity, urging believers not to be “conformed to this world” but “transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom. 12:2).

Gill reads the “lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life” as the apostle’s own summary of the internal, heart-level desires that make up this class of sin, and treats covetousness itself, elsewhere in the same chapter, as a form of idolatry: a sin against the first table of the law, alongside atheism and blasphemy, rather than merely a wrong done to one’s neighbor.3 Mastricht draws the same connection from the doctrine of God rather than the Decalogue: an “inordinate love of creatures,” he writes, amounts to supposing “there is something present in the creatures that is not in God, for which reason covetousness is called idolatry (Eph. 5:5).”4

Historical Development

The Reformed catechetical tradition’s treatment of worldliness grew out of exposition of the Decalogue’s tenth commandment. The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647) fixed the confessional family’s classic statement of its duties and sins, described above.2

Petrus van Mastricht, writing later in the same century, located the sin within the doctrine of God rather than the law: inordinate love of creatures is one of several ways God’s all-sufficiency is practically denied, alongside vain confidence in creatures and an impiety that looks to “worldly things, wealth, honors, pleasures” for a satisfaction only God can supply.4

Thomas Watson’s A Body of Practical Divinity (1692) devotes two full sermons to the tenth commandment, defining covetousness as an “inordinate Love of the World” under which “the World is the Idol,” listing six marks by which a person may be known to be given to it (constant thoughts, effort, speech, and willingness to trade Christ for earthly gain, among others), and prescribing remedies including faith, “judicious consideration” of how poor earthly things actually are, coveting spiritual things more, and prayer for “an Heavenly Mind.”5

John Gill’s A Body of Doctrinal Divinity (1769) then folds the doctrine into systematic theology proper, classifying covetousness among sins against the first table of the law on the ground that it is itself idolatry.3

Opposing Views

Rome’s moral theology has historically answered the danger of worldliness with what Bavinck calls a “double morality”: a distinction between the law’s “precepts,” binding on all Christians alike, and “evangelical counsels” such as voluntary poverty and celibacy, not required of every believer but undertaken by those who wish to merit a higher standing, producing a small ecclesiola of especially holy Christians set apart within the broader church.6 The Reformed confessions reject this two-tier structure: the Larger Catechism’s duty of “full contentment” and “charitable” affection is required of every believer alike, not reserved as a counsel of perfection for an ascetic elite, and the danger of worldliness is met by ordinary sanctification rather than by formal renunciation of property or marriage.2

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t forbidding love of the world mean Christians should own nothing and desire nothing? Watson opens his exposition of the tenth commandment by conceding that it is “lawful to use the World,” and even to desire enough of it to escape “the Temptation of Poverty” or to “Honour God with Works of Mercy” (citing Prov. 30:8 and Prov. 3:9); the danger he identifies is not possession but attachment, “when the World gets into the Heart.”5 Calvin draws the same line from 1 Timothy: Scripture charges the rich “not [to] be highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy” (1 Tim. 6:17). Wealth itself is not condemned in that charge, only pride and misplaced trust.7

Isn’t coveting just a matter of unjust acquisition, something the eighth commandment against theft already covers? Watson insists the tenth commandment reaches further than the others in the second table, since “the Laws of Men take hold of the Actions, but the Law of God goes further, it forbids not only the Actions, but the Affections.”8 Worldliness, on this reading, is a sin of the heart’s desire, condemned by God’s law even where no theft, fraud, or outward wrong has occurred.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 2. ↩

  2. The Westminster Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 147-148. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 3, chap. 12, “Of Actual Sins and Transgressions.” ↩ ↩2

  4. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 21, “The All-Sufficiency or Perfection of God,” 504. ↩ ↩2

  5. Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), Sermon 81, 382-383. ↩ ↩2

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩

  7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), book 3, chap. 18, quoting 1 Timothy 6:17 in his argument that works, even when rewarded, remain God’s free gift rather than grounds of merit. ↩

  8. Watson, Sermon 82, 385-387. ↩