In the first part of this series I discussed my desire to take some time in this Pentecost season to give extended reflection to the person and work of the Holy Spirit. In this post, I would like to back track a little and simply give some general thoughts on the path I would like to follow as well as some of my reasons for desiring to do so.

Our goal here is to establish some lines of thought developing a spirituality, an understanding of the life of faith, that corresponds to the central event of Christian faith: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Some spiritualities begin with the cross. This is not a problem in itself. It can be however when this focus on the cross makes the center of the spirituality the “mortification of the flesh” or of “desire” and takes a morbid and masochistic downward spiral. Some spiritualities focus on the position of enmity between the believer and the world. This can lead to the “do not taste,” “do not touch” mentalities where being “spiritual” was equated with not going to movies, not playing cards, not dancing, not smoking and not drinking. For others, the center of spirituality is the “spirit realm” in contrast to the “natural realm.” Here “spirituality” means participating in a prescribed set of activities (prayer, fasting, reading the Bible, etc.) with the goal of transporting one into the “spiritual” realm and detaching one from the “natural realm.”

The difficulty with all of these spiritualities is that they introduce a split (dualism) between the believer and those things which are foundational to our lives: the earth, our emotions, our bodies, and our relationships. Without these dimensions, we would not have possessed existence at all, yet it seems alluring to us that there is a superior mode of existence without them. These spiritualites also create a further split between those who are in “full-time Christian ministry” and are able to devote themselves to these “spiritual” activities and those who are not. Hence the overwhelming majority of what the overwhelming majority of Christians do day-to-day is condemned as patently “unspiritual.”

Unfortunately, much of Christian spirituality throughout history and to the present day has reflected a Gnostic disembodied spirituality rather than the full-blooded earthiness belonging to the Jewish roots of our faith. The splits described earlier are largely related to the influence of what is called Gnosticism. Gnosticism has been the primary heresy that Christianity has had to battle throughout its entire history, though you will almost never hear about it today. Yet do not be lulled to sleep! Gnosticism is make an aggressive comeback in its explicit forms and its implicit forms have never really been eradicated from the Church. It’s basic teaching is that the material world is evil and that the spiritual world is good. The Gnostics sought to arrive at a place of enlightened knowledge which enabled them to escape from this world and the evils of the body. Hence the Scriptures repeatedly need to assert not simply Christ’s divinity, but his humanity (1 John 4) and not the existence of an after-life, but an embodied eternal life (1 Cor. 15).

Only in its Gnostic transmutations is Christianity an “other-worldly” religion. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Holy Spirit is the power that brings forth all created things (Genesis 1; Psalm 104.29). In the New Testament, the Spirit is the Spirit of the resurrection (Romans 8.11) and thus is the power that brings permanent life and vitality to the created order.

The spirituality of the Bible has its feet firmly planted on the ground and does not seek to escape this world for a superior one. The Christian hope has ever and always been the resurrection of the body and the new creation of all things. In such we are not awaited to slip off into the bliss of a disembodied heaven, free from the entanglements of physicality. Rather, we long for the power of heaven to come to earth and renew its life.

Frank Lake, in his massive work Clinical Theology confirms this while describing the problem of the schizoid condition. The schizoid condition is not the same as schizophrenia but refers to an individual “characterized by (1) an enduring and maladjusted pattern of behavior manifesting avoidance of close relations with others, (2) inability to express hostility and aggressive feelings directly, (3) thinking unduly directed towards oneself and the inner personal view of the situation, at the expense of the information actually available from the external world, (4) a shut-in, seclusive, withdrawn, introverted personality. Many of these traits can seem to parallel an introspective condition.

Concerning the schizoid condition, he says: “When schizoid theologians write theology largely by introspection, they distort it in a Gnostic direction…He has no primitive memory of a secure cosmos centered in a source-person who comes in answer to his need…His spirit truly exists at depth in a godless chaos. Natural mysticism and religion can offer him no credible external objects, and his dread of trusting the ‘out there’ makes him very suspicious and a little contemptuous of those who naturally think of God in these terms. He can only hope to sink down into a sub-personal ground of being below the chaos.”

The spirituality of the Bible, the spirituality of creation and new creation, the spirituality of resurrection, does not split life in two, thus quenching its vitality. It does not force a believer to split off from the earth, the body, emotions, relationships or affairs in the external world. Indeed, as Jesus is the resurrected one, his lordship is unrestricted and extends into all areas of life. Hence the spirituality of the resurrection can be found in politics, ecology, economics, human services, manual labor, education, medicine, the arts and every area of culture, civilization and society.

Rather than confirming a schizoid position of fear, the Holy Spirit fosters a courageous openness to the world, a graceful acceptance of the body, an honest expression of emotion and an active engagement in relationship. It forms in us the vitality and hope necessary to arise out of our apathy in which we had grown so accustomed to what was unmistakably “unspiritual” – in that it promoted and enforced death, destruction, division, hatred and injustice.

The spirituality of the resurrection does not remove us from this uncomfortable position of awakened conflict with the death-drives of our age but is itself the unrest that is in motion towards the new creation of all things. This spirituality is itself the awakened groan which fills the entire creation, until it is “set free from its bondage to decay into the freedom of the glory of the children of God…And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.” (Romans 8.22-24)

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“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.  2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus the Messiah has come in the flesh is from God;  3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the anti-messiah, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.” 1 John 4:1-3

These words from the apostle John are very strange to us. He seems to be establishing a litmus test to aid in discernment of whether or not something was of God. If evangelical Christians were in charge of writing this section of John we would probably have written that every spirit that does not confess that Jesus is divine is not from God. Something is Christian if it maintains Jesus’ status as fully God. Though true, this is not what John is emphasizing in this passage. In our zeal to defend the divinity of Jesus, which we should, at times we have lost sight of the significance of Jesus’ humanity. To John, the spirit that does not confess Jesus as fully human is not from God and is indeed the spirit of anti-messiah. This type of speech makes no sense for modern Christians who have too neatly split their constitution into a body and a soul, the soul being that which is obviously more important. I’ve spoken to many people who simply cannot identify with their bodies and insist that the “I,” “me,” or “self” is the soul living “inside” the body. Once establishing this type of strict dualism one is only a small step from denigrating the role of the body to an extreme. If the soul is the real me, if I am in essence a spirit-being, then my body is simply a shell that in actuality hinders the life of my soul. Salvation then becomes freedom from bodily, physical existence – a freedom from the earth to heaven. This type of logic is what John calls the “spirit of anti-messiah” and is commonly associated with the heresy called gnosticism. Biblical Christianity always asserts that “I” am the cojoining of body and soul. My body is not a possession of mine as if it were external to me. I do not “have” a body, I am a body.

Antichrist is a commonly misunderstood term. Modern use of the prefix “anti” means “opposed to” or “against.” However, this is not what the prefix meant in first century Koine Greek. Rather it means more along the lines of “instead of.” It implies not the idea of fierce opposition but substitution. The spirit of antichrist is not necessarily vociferously against Jesus but attempts to furnish a replacement Messiah. The Jesus without his physical body is not the Messiah. Even common language can be confusing. The term “incarnation” literally means in-fleshed. This can give the impression that Jesus is the “soul” and he went into a body.

This is not what the Bible says however. John 1:14 tells us that “the Word became flesh.” Jesus did enter a human, he became a human. He did not get a body, he became a body. A cursory reading of Colossians 2:9 could also be easily distorted: “For in Him (Jesus) all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form.” The fullness of deity does not dwell in a body, but in bodily form, in other words the fulness of deity exists as a body. Again in Philippians 2, Paul says Jesus was “made in human likeness.” Jesus became something rather than merely indwelling a body. This is also affirmed by the historic creeds of the church. The Nicene creed proclaims that “by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became human.” Note the wording carefully: Jesus himself, not simply his body was born of the Virgin Mary. He himself became human.

The spirit of antichrist is that which does not confess (or denies) that Jesus has indeed come as a full human being. As George McDonald has said, in doing so Jesus has “forever hallowed the flesh.” The Athanasian creed (ca. 5th century) confesses that by the incarnation humanity was taken up into God’s own God-hood. In other words, the human body itself has been given an indescribable dignity beyond recognition. One would think that creation in the image of God was enough to afford respect to humanity, but furthermore has God glorified us in taking our own form into the divine fellowship of the Trinity. The spirit of antichrist seeks to replace this view of Jesus and its requisite view of humanity and the human body. The spirit of antichrist sees the human body as something so full of indignity that the divine cannot possibly take it on. Full blown forms will assert Jesus’ body to be an illusion while more insipid forms will see the body as simply a shell for the soul of divinity. The Spirit of God brings a radically different message of a God who does not scorn the flesh but draws near in the fullest manner possible, being made like us in every way (Hebrews 2:17) and thus declaring that human flesh is indeed worthy of partaking of the divine.

The implications of this are tremendous, and to them I will turn in a later post…

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