The world as suffering and as entering transformation is crucifixion. At the heart of the world is the continuation and working out of Golgotha. The revolution of peace is the world in the critical process of overcoming its self-resistance to unity through the upward convergence of love, a process animated by the union of God and man.

But the world is creation as well as crucifixion, natural growth as well as divine revolution. Man is born in the cathedral of earth and sky, reaches out to the infinite silence of the universe, and begins to form himself in a rhythm of creation and self-recognition. Man is growing and maturing through time, provoking and provoked by a progressive self-understanding. Today the world as creation is man’s cumulative discovery of himself in time, not at his deepest self-identity—for his deepest manhood is found through his suffering union with God, through crucifixion not creation, or through that unique creation which is crucifixion. But the world as evolving creation is man’s growing discovery of himself as distinct and fully responsible, as that one called from childhood to recognize and affirm the possibilities of a world come of age.

In The Secular City Harvey Cox has effectively described the present point of the world as creation in terms of secularization, of ‘man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time’ (The Secular City, 1965, p. 2). The age of the secular city is a liberation of man from religious world-views whose orientation distracted him from the task of building the earth.