[[Sister Laurel, I always thought that spirituality had to do with our spirits and flesh had to do with the material "stuff" of our bodies, but you have turned all of that on its head with the way you talk about Paul's language!! If you are right then where does the practice of dividing people into spirit and flesh come from? And then to hear Paul doing the same thing, I mean where does the idea of spirit as the non-material in us and flesh is the material in us, come from? Were you taught the same division into flesh and spirit as this or were you taught the Pauline sense of these terms? What about our immortal souls, aren't they the spiritual part of us?]]
I think the way you have summarized things is the way most people think of spirit and flesh. It is also a seriously distorted way that we have to get over reading St Paul. If we read his Letters aright, not only with regard to these two terms, but also in regard to his understanding of the change in reality Jesus' death and resurrection bring about, and the way he understands God's project for the future of both heaven and earth together, we will be much farther along. The Scripture scholar and historian doing the most focused work on all of this today is NT Wright, and those interested in this should read his 1) Surprised by Hope, and 2) his new sequel, God's Homecoming, the Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal. I am reading the second volume now, and am really grateful Wright has done this sequel. Similar work has been done by Gerhard Lohfink in, Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life.
The tendency to divide reality into the spiritual as the "more real", and the material as the "less real" (or unreal) and dispensable part of us is Platonic, that is, it comes from Plato's notion of forms or "ideas" as the most real, and it gives us a dualistic notion of the human being. Sometimes people will add the notion that the material of our world is evil and needs to be separated from the spirit or the spiritual. This even more radically dualistic approach is Gnostic. Further, some people think that some have a special kind of knowledge (γνωσις, gnosis) that makes them more spiritual than other folks, or that is the key to salvation. That too is Gnostic and has been with us since the days of the early Church. Finally, the notion that human beings have an immortal soul that will and should one day be separated from the body and exist disembodied in heaven is neither Christian nor Biblical. The eschatology (theology of last things) present in Scripture is vastly different than this.
I was raised mainly in a Christian Science church until Junior High, so I heard this stuff in its purest, contemporary form quite regularly. Christian Science is Platonic through and through, and also profoundly Gnostic (Mary Baker Eddy's "principles" qualify as a form of gnosis, γνωσις, or "knowledge") --- though I doubt any Christian Scientists would admit this. Every Sunday, we recited Mary Baker Eddy's "Scientific Statement of Being" and discussed it and our lives in light of it. We also read Scripture in light of it, which, I didn't realize at the time, ensured we misinterpreted Scripture during each class. The SSB goes like this (and yes, I still know it by heart all these years later), [[There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite mind in its infinite manifestations, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore, man is not material; he is spiritual.]] Emphasis added.
While I had a basic, nagging conviction that "this just can't be right" and looked elsewhere from Junior High School on, I did not have the theological sophistication or categories necessary to understand how un-Christian this "theology" (and Platonism itself) is, nor to truly counter its errors until sometime after graduate school. Yes, I was given the most important pieces necessary for doing so in both my undergraduate and graduate studies, but it all really came together as I spent more time reading Scripture and exegetes who reminded readers of the Pauline meaning of terms like flesh and spirit (ψυχή, psyche) and who also began to take on the theology of a new heaven and new earth. Part of this "coming together" also came through presentations of the Lord's Prayer and the petition that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven (God's domain), and further work of my own on prayer and the will of God always involving God's commitment to be Emmanuel, God With Us. The background to all of this included chronic illness and disability, with their challenge to take my entire self, both physical and spiritual, seriously in spite of limitations and obstacles --- something Platonism (or Christian Science) could never have done.
There were some really pivotal theological lessons throughout my schooling that made Christian Science and its "Scientific Statement of Being" impossible to accept. The first was a lesson on the distinction between Christianity and other religions, where I was taught that Christianity is the only faith that has God coming to us rather than us trying to get back to God!! The corollary to that was a lesson on the historical nature of Christianity and the Christ Event; this lesson reminded me that the Incarnation and any truly sufficient theology of the sacraments support a deeply positive evaluation of materiality, but also underscored that God comes to us in history and transfigures all He touches. Another lesson occurred in a graduate class on grace with Kenan Osborn OFM. Kenan was trying to get across the idea that human beings are not dualistic. We are not platonic soul/body dualisms, but instead embodied spirit (or inspirited bodies); that is, we are unities, he affirmed. During this class, Kenan (a really diminutive man), picked up a chair and clutched it tightly to his side; then he walked up and down several rows of students, repeating, "I don't just HAVE a body, I AM my body!!" (Not that this is ALL we are, but it is an integral part of who we are and how we possess ourselves! In other words, embodiedness is integral to being truly human.) At the time, I didn't really understand the whole lesson he was teaching, but I never forgot the example nor ceased being challenged by it and its urgency for Kenan. Eventually, I came to understand it as I continued to read and do theology.
During ThD work, but especially thereafter, I read more Scriptural exegesis, pointing out God's will to create a new heaven and new earth, and in Christ, as well as in those who are baptised into Christ, God would be Emmanuel in our world. I went back to consider sacramental theology and came to recognize the way God's presence sanctifies even the most fundamental material reality (think sacraments here). It was combined with Christianity's most foundational belief in bodily resurrection (Jesus), with Catholicism's affirmation of bodily assumption (Mary) --- these both imply new forms of embodiedness --- with the affirmation that the intimate, dynamic love that flows between the Father and the Son is present to us in the Holy Spirit and, of course, with the theology of the New Testament that affirms that in Christ, God is in the midst of creating a new heaven and new earth, and science's discovery of our evolutionary universe.
What does all of this mean? Very briefly, it leads to a theology that allows us to take our whole selves and our world entirely seriously because, as it says in Genesis, we are to be stewards of God's good creation. (Think how differently everything would be if we simply lived up to that vocation!) At the same time, this is a reality suffused with the presence and Spirit of God. "Heaven and earth are full of the glory of God!") Spirituality does not allow the denial or denigration of the material, but rather the affirmation of its potential in God. After all, taking the fundamental goodness of creation and the essential embodiedness of the human being is what the Incarnation and affirmation of bodily resurrection demand of us.
This is also what a theology of Sacraments and the sacramental demands of us, including our sense that the Church, flawed as it is in some ways, is "primordial sacrament". The world (God's good creation) is an evolving reality, and the Sacraments point to creation's potential to be transfigured and transformed by the Holy Spirit. Similarly, our belief in Jesus' "Coming Again" makes sense within this theology. Further, escapist mentalities that allow us to disengage with our Church and world as we focus on "getting to heaven" are entirely disallowed. (Also disallowed, then, are ways of seeing the world that allow us to begin wars to try and bring about Armageddon, a rather timely piece of wisdom regarding a particularly bad way of reading Scripture!!)
Whatever you take from this post, I hope you will remember the fact that we are
embodied spirit, and
we neither can nor will remain disembodied. This is one lesson of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. (Following Thomas Aquinas, Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) once wrote that the soul is the form of the body (not the other way around!), and, reflecting on the future fulfillment of all creation, when God will be All in All, opined that even though disembodied at death, our soul or spirit yearns to build a body about itself once again! (
Dogmatic Theology,
Eschatology, vol 9) This is exactly contrary to the way so many have been taught to think of the relationship of soul to body and anticipates some New Testament eschatology. I also hope you will take Fr Kenan Osborne's lesson with the chair clutched to his body and his assertion that, "I do not just HAVE a body, I AM my body," with you.
P.S. I realize I haven't really answered your last question, so I will do that in a separate post as possible. (If I can't do that, I will add a paragraph here later and let you know either way by email. Peace!)
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