Humanity in the Becoming of Worlds: 3 Theological Placements

Where myth situates humanity within a cosmos of living relation, theology reconfigures that cosmos into a structure of order, decree, and transcendence. The divine is no longer diffuse across mountain, river, and ancestor — it is centralised, elevated, and projected as the ultimate source of law and truth.

In theological construals, the cosmos is stabilised by a transcendent guarantor. Creation is not an ongoing weave of relation but a singular act of origination. Order is no longer negotiated ritually but commanded by divine fiat. Human possibility is framed through obedience, covenant, and moral alignment with an overarching will.

This restructuring has consequences. The human is raised into unique dignity — created “in the image of God” — yet simultaneously subjected to divine authority. Possibility becomes bound to categories of salvation, sin, and destiny. Cosmic becoming is filtered through theological horizons of origin and end, providence and judgment.

What was once entanglement with an animate cosmos becomes relation to a transcendent deity who sustains the world from beyond. The theological cosmos is thus a symbolic placement of possibility that secures stability and order, but at the cost of severing immediacy: the river is no longer itself divine, but a sign of divine creation.

Theological placements shift human possibility into a cosmic drama of obedience and salvation. They sacralise permanence and authority, displacing the perspectival play of relation with the demand for alignment under a single, eternal source.