The Christian faith rests on literal, historical events, the most important of which are the Incarnation and the Resurrection. Both events involve one central feature, the physical body of Jesus Christ. Both were acts of God, rooted in history and witnessed by many of Jesus’ contemporaries.
But these two anchor points for the Christian faith have been hotly disputed throughout the centuries since their occurrence. In the earliest days of the Church, they were disputed by some Gentiles who came to a kind of belief in Jesus but refused to believe that He was fully human. They were known as Docetists, and they believed an early form of what would later become full-blown Gnosticism.
They believed anything material was automatically and completely evil. Conversely, they believed that only spiritual things were good. Your body? Evil. Your soul? Good. This physical world? Bad. The spiritual world with angels and all that? Good.
The apostle Paul firmly rejected this heresy. For example, he told a young protégé, “They [the Gnostics] forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim 4.3-5, Col 2.8-23).
But none of the writers of the New Testament spoke against this heresy more clearly or loudly than the apostle John. He countered the argument that Jesus wasn’t fully divine until the Spirit entered Him by saying, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (Jn 1.14). He countered the argument that Jesus only appeared to be human by saying that anyone who denied that Jesus Christ came in an actual body was so opposed to God as to become Antichrist (1 Jn 4.1-3).
We believe, along with Christians throughout history, that God created a physical world. Jesus lived in a physical body. Neither this physical world nor our physical bodies hinder us from being in a relationship with God. He created them, validated them and seeks to redeem them. Our problem is sin, not physical matter. It is sin we are called to avoid, not stuff.
You can’t avoid stuff, you are stuff. You must not fall for either extreme of neglecting or indulging your physical body in order to elevate your spiritual self. It doesn’t make you a more spiritually mature person to ignore the basics of hygiene and health. Jesus came to share in our physical birth so that we, through our identification with Him in His physical death, can be assured of our sharing in His physical resurrection.
These physical events have led us to spiritual life.
The way the early Christian writers responded to the heresy of Gnosticism lets us know that when it comes to your spiritual life, well, there’s really no such thing as a “spiritual” life — there’s just life, and it’s all spiritual.
Prayer
God of all creation, even though creation has been subjected to the futility of the curse, it is still Yours, and You will redeem nature when You reveal the children of God in the redemption of our bodies. The material world is still good, because it comes from Your hand, and You have made us to be incarnate beings. And when the Word became flesh, He dwelled in our midst and identified Himself with the human condition, except for our sin. This incomprehensible identification with us in His incarnation, death and physical resurrection is the glorious foundation for our hope. By becoming one of us, He could take our sins upon Himself on the cross. And through His bodily resurrection from the dead, He made it possible for us to be resurrected as well. Thanks be to God for this wondrous gift.
In Jesus’s name, Amen
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