Being Spirit, being spiritual, part I
An Excerpt from my book *God the Spirit*, on an anti-gnostic spirituality
Gentle reader,
Today, I’m excited to share the first half of a chapter from my short book God the Spirit. Next time, I’ll share the second half of the chapter.
The process of writing this book drew me nearer to the Spirit and began, for me, a new season in my spiritual life, in which I have been far more conscious of my dependence on the Spirit and far more confident in the Spirit’s power than I was before. I hope you find the chapter helps you, too, to draw near to the Holy Spirit.
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From chapter 3, “Being Spirit, being spiritual” in God the Spirit: Introducing Pneumatology in Wesleyan and Ecumenical Perspective by Beth Felker Jones. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com. All rights reserved.
God created human beings with bodies. Our embodiment is not an accident or a problem. It is God’s good intention for us that we should be the sorts of creatures we are, creatures who are both physical and spiritual, creatures for whom the bodily life is the life in which we do what we were made to do. We relate to God as embodied creatures, and God saves us as such. At the same time, God made us spiritual creatures. The language we use for this reality is trickier, in some ways, than language about bodies. Bodies, in their materiality, are solid facts we can name. Our spirituality is more difficult to describe, but most Christians speak of the human soul when trying to describe the fact that God made us as spiritual creatures, creatures who reflect his image and are able to have genuine relationships with him.
As spiritual-physical creatures, embodied souls or ensouled bodies, we are sometimes surprised to find ourselves in relationship with a God who is so very different from us. God is not just more than us or bigger than us. God is different from us in quality or kind. God is God, and we are not. The affirmation that God is Spirit points to the essential difference between God and us. We have ways to acknowledge the holy mystery and majesty of God’s otherness. We use reverent language like “holy mystery and majesty” and technical terms such as immutability, simplicity, transcendence, and ineffability. The basic terms spirit and spiritual are probably the most common words Christians use to point to the wondrous difference between God and us. John Wesley, in a sermon on the unity of the divine being, highlights just this point:
“This God is a spirit; not having such a body, such parts, or passions as men have. It was the opinion both of the ancient Jews and the ancient Christians that he alone is a pure spirit, totally separate from all matter.”1
Paul evokes the same feeling with his “the Lord is Spirit,” and he also points to the marvelous relationship that we have with the transcendent, holy God who is Spirit, a relationship in which we are drawn into God’s own freedom and are freed from sin, fear, and death.
Augustine’s Quandary
The young Augustine of Hippo, who would become one of the most influential Christian thinkers of all time, struggled with the idea of God’s spiritual nature. This intellectual difficulty was an obstacle to his full embrace of the Christian faith. Looking back over his life in his autobiographical Confessions, he recalls that it once seemed monstrous, to him, to imagine that God could be everywhere. This was because, as a physical creature, he could only imagine physical things. He could only imagine that God must be a bit like us, and he kept supposing that God must be some kind of strange diffuse substance, spread over everything.2 This false god would be bigger than us, yes, but would not be different from us in kind. Looking back, Augustine recalls how he did not know “that God is spirit, not a being with limbs stretching far and wide, and having a certain size.”3 Here, interaction with the Christian teacher Ambrose and with Platonic philosophy finally helped him imagine spiritual reality, to accept in some way the mysterious difference between God and us. Augustine recounts:
“Although I had not even a faint or shadowy notion of what a spiritual substance could be like, I was filled with joy, albeit a shamefaced joy, at the discovery that what I had barked against for so many years was not the Catholic faith but the figments of a carnal imagination. . . .
O God, most high, most deep, and yet nearer than all else, most hidden yet intimately present, you are not framed of greater and lesser limbs; you are everywhere, whole and entire in every place, but confined to none. In no sense is our bodily form to be attributed to you, yet you have made us in your own image. . . . I rejoiced to find that . . . that Church within which I had been signed with Christ’s name in my infancy, did not entertain infantile nonsense or include in her sound teaching any belief that would seem to confine you, the creator of all things, in any place however vast and spacious, in any place that would hem you in on every side after the manner of human bodies.”4
All of this suggests that the word spirit, even without the capital letter we use for the Third Person of the Trinity, can be confusing. Various uses of the word spiritual only add to the problem. In contemporary life, the language of “spirituality” is employed in incredibly diffuse, obtuse, and generic ways. Some are drawn to “gnostic” ideas that would find spirituality in escape from the body. Others want to be “spiritual but not religious.” Eclectic “spiritualties” abound, and these may draw on old pagan traditions and “new age” claims, freely mix Eastern and Western traditions, or plunder bits from several different religions. All of these trends are problematic for Christian faith. All work against the sweet testimony of the Holy Spirit, both in Scripture and in Christian life, a testimony that is concrete, specific, and that matters to us as embodied creatures in distinctly Christian ways. Here, we will look briefly at several ways in which the idea and practice of spirituality goes wrong in our world, and we will consider correctives that come from the doctrine of pneumatology.
Gnostic “Spirituality”
Gnostic pseudo-spirituality has a long history as a distortion of Christian faith. The word Gnostic comes from the Greek gnosis, meaning “knowledge,” and ancient Gnostics claimed to have access to special, secret knowledge that was the key to salvation.5 Gnostic sects, representing a varied mix of groups active during the first centuries of the church, shared in common a belief that spirituality is opposed to physicality. Gnosticism contained a harsh dualism, an assumption that all that exists must be divided into two categories: good and bad, light and dark, spiritual and physical. This meant that anything associated with physicality or with bodies was seen, in Gnostic systems, as antithetical to spirituality. Bodies were believed to be unimportant for the spiritual life, and bodies could become prisons to be escaped or so trivial that matters of bodily life—sexuality or food, for example—were irrelevant to morality.
Augustine spent some time as a follower of a Gnostic group called the Manichaeans; they operated out of the Gnostic dualism that pitted materiality against spirituality, and, in their system, disdain for bodies translated into “spiritual” practices meant to free the spiritual from the world of supposedly crass materiality.6 This meant that Manichaeans tried not to conceive children lest more bits of spiritual light be trapped in the bodies of screaming human infants, and so the group practiced contraception. The older Augustine, looking back, insisted against Manichaean teaching that married sexuality is good and that babies—and their bodies—are good. (For Augustine, this meant rejecting birth control, and his position continues to underlie Catholic teaching on this matter today. Most Protestant traditions would agree with Augustine that sexuality and babies are good, but affirm that the goodness of sex and babies can be upheld alongside the wise use of contraception.) The Manichaeans also engaged in rigorous ascetic practices meant to subdue the body and its evils.
The Christian Augustine recalled his affiliation with the Manichaeans with disgust. He had come to see bodies as good, created by God and intended for redemption in the resurrection. This affirmation of the goodness of bodies and materiality is reflected in the consistent witness of Scripture and the great consensus of Christian teaching. Because God is the creator of all things, material and spiritual, all those created things are good. Because God has redemptive intentions for all of creation, material and spiritual, Christians believe in hope that all will be redeemed in the new creation.
Yüen dynasty Manichaean diagram of the Universe, public domain, via Wikimedia commons
This does not mean that we never have problems with our bodies or with the material world. Bodies are certainly created good, but they, like all of creation, are groaning under the condition of sin. The mature Augustine taught that our problem is not that we have bodies;7 rather, our problem is sin. Certainly bodies are fallen, and we face that reality in very tangible ways when we deal with cancer or injury or, in Augustine’s case, lust. Again, though, the problem is not that we have bodies but that we, body and soul, are sinners in a sinful world. This is not meant to imply that cancer, bodily injury, or even lust is the punishment for the personal, individual sin of the one whose body is affected. The fallen state of the world is both individual and communal, and all of us, both in innocence and guilt, feel the effects of sin in both body and soul. Certainly bodies are fallen, but the spiritual aspects of human existence are fallen as well. Body and soul, though, we have hope in Christ: hope that God—who made us spiritual creatures able to be in personal relationship with him—will sanctify us, body and soul.
Gnostic spiritualities, which are not confined to the ancient world and continue to pop up in the contemporary church, tell the lie that the body is opposed to the spiritual life. They tell the lie that truly spiritual people disdain or try to escape from the bodily life; or they tell the opposite lie that it does not matter what spiritual people do with their bodies. Against this, the truth of Scripture testifies that
All things, material and spiritual, heaven and earth, body and soul, are good because created by a good God.
God created human beings as embodied creatures, both spiritual and physical, and God loves us as such.
All of those things named in point one are subject to sin. The spiritual aspect of human life is no less fallen than is the physical.
Jesus Christ, who is truly God, is the example of the spiritual life, and he came to dwell among us in this world, body and soul, in the incarnation.
God’s redemptive work in human lives is for every aspect of those lives, both spiritual and physical, and God works, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to transform us, body and soul, into the loving image of Christ.
Final redemption includes bodies and souls. We hope for the final resurrection, in which we, like the risen Christ on Easter, will be transformed, body and soul.
The spiritual life is the life of body and soul under the direction of the Holy Spirit. Christian spirituality is physical and spiritual, embodied and ensouled, contemplative and active, messy and transformative.
Human spirituality, under the tender guidance of the Holy Spirit, is something altogether different from the Gnostic lie. It embraces the goods of this life even while recognizing the terrible struggles we face under the condition of sin. It has nothing all to do with a rejection of bodies. It has everything to do with the Holy Spirit, who is God, the Lord, the giver of life. Gustavo Gutiérrez, known as the father of liberation theology, puts it beautifully:
“Spirituality, in the strict and profound sense of the word, is the dominion of the Spirit. . . . A spirituality is a concrete manner, inspired by the Spirit, of living the Gospel; it is a definite way of living ‘before the Lord,’ in solidarity with all human beings, ‘with the Lord,’ and before human beings. It arises from an intense spiritual experience, which is later explicated and witnessed to.”8
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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This post contains associate links. You can order a copy of God the Spirit here.
