ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Christianity envisions God as a distant being who completely transcends the world who subsists in some other dimension, or resides perhaps in a faraway place called "heaven". The major problems of public policy today are increasingly connected to environmental issues. The great Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky expresses how alien this conception had become to the traditional, Orthodox view the view of ancient Christian spirituality and theology: "The Eastern tradition knows nothing of pure nature' to which grace is added as a supernatural gift. The world understood as creation always points beyond itself, if only we have eyes to see. Or so it has seemed to the tradition of ancient Christianity. The triadic relationship is elusive for the modern mindset, yet it may be the most important element of the traditional Christian understanding of creation for us to retrieve and understand.
