Tag Archives: Spirituality

The Imprisoned Mind and the Disengaged Self: How Personal Identity Was Separated from the Created Order

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Today’s post is the third in our series examining how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of intelligent people. In previous posts, we examined the differences between pre-modern and the modern ways of experiencing the created order. Before the modern scientific revolution, people experienced the appearances as revelatory of the inner reality of things; they used such concepts as substance, essence, soul, beauty, goodness, purpose, and meaning to designate real qualities of things that could be known by contemplating the appearances. Galileo and other early modern scientists drove a wedge between the appearances and the inner reality of things. Things may appear meaningful, good, beautiful, hot, cold, sweet, loud, etc., but these qualities exist only in the human psyche as caused by—but in no way resembling— material impacts on the senses. The only knowable aspects of the reality of things are those that are mathematically measurable. In other words, the only truths our minds can know about things in themselves are mathematical expressions and equations. All else is mere appearance.

As I read the history of modern philosophy—not being an expert but a well-read non-expert—the new empirical/mathematical/mechanical science set new standards for what counts as genuine knowledge of nature. Indeed, it set a new bar for what it means to know anything. In this way, the scientific revolution set the agenda for all areas of study—political philosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, theology, history, biblical studies, etc. Every area of study measured itself by the gold standard of mathematics. Because mathematics can be applied to the mechanical aspects of nature there is a tendency to reduce nature to material atoms (or quanta) organized and interacting in a mechanical way.

We see here two of the central challenges the new science posed to philosophy in the seventeenth century: (1) It must develop a new epistemology for the empirical age—what does it mean to know and how can we attain knowledge within the limits of empiricism? (2) It must work out the implications of the new science for all areas of study. For this series, I am interested in philosophical anthropology and theology. How shall we understand the nature and operations of the human mind, if we assume that the entire world outside our minds—including our bodies—is a material machine with which we make contact only through sense perception and can know truly only in mathematical categories?

John Locke and The Imprisoned Mind

Though he wrote at the end of the seventeenth century and many thinkers had already worked on the two challenges mentioned above, John Locke’s book Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1698) proved a watershed in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Many leading European philosophers for the next century—until Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—wrote either in support or in opposition to Locke.

I will again quote Locke’s statement about the distinction between primary and secondary qualities:

“These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colors, sounds, tastes, etc. These I call secondary qualities” (John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1698, II. 8).

Locke’s self-appointed task is to explain how the human mind gains understanding of the external world, given the new science. From where do the mind’s ideas come? Locke rejected the traditional belief that the human mind comes into being furnished with ideas that refer to the external world, morality, and God. Locke asserts, instead, that the mind begins as an empty slate, ready to receive sense impressions from the empirical world through its mechanical causality.

If the mind is an empty slate, as Locke contends, how does it receive, interpret, and organize ideas into the vast system of concepts, categories, memories, and laws that constitute our mental life? What are the native powers of the mind. As far as I can tell—as a well-read non-expert—we are endowed at birth with the passive power of sense perception, an active power of reason, and an instinctive drive toward pleasure and away from pain. The external world possesses primary qualities (powers) that strike our perceptive organs and cause the mind to form simple ideas. For Locke, an “idea” is any intelligible object within the mind. As a reasoning power the mind associates compatible simple ideas to form more complex ideas and so builds up our conceptual world. Notice that it is not already existing ideas, forms, and essences that are communicated from external things by means of the senses to the mind. Locke is agnostic about the existence of such things. External things contact the senses only as mechanical/material impacts. In a way Locke never explains, the mind receives these physical impacts and the physical changes they make to our sense organs as intelligible ideas.

Locke’s Disengagement of the Self from Its Body and Soul

As I said above, Locke is agnostic if not skeptical about the existence of forms, substances, and essences. In any case, we cannot attain scientific knowledge of them. We gain all knowledge from the senses as I described above. Locke applies the same empirical limits to the human person. Our knowledge of ourselves and our minds must also come—at least indirectly—from the senses and the ideas impressed on our minds through them. What is a person, and what is personal identity? How do you know that you are the same person you were five years ago? Previous thinkers argued that persistence of personhood (or continuity of personal identity) presupposes the existence of the immaterial, substantial soul. But Locke contends that we cannot experience the substantial, immaterial soul so as to be able to use it as a guarantee of persistent identity.  Hence Locke disengaged the two and made personhood a matter of continuity of consciousness, which we can experience as an activity of mind in awareness of its ideas as its own. I am the same person because I am conscious of being the same self. Consciousness, not substance, constitutes the self. Consciousness (the self) is not a substance. To illustrate, he imagines the same self (a person) inhabiting different bodies and different souls at different times and finds no contradiction. On Locke’s premises one can imagine a person, that is, a consciousness of being oneself, inhabiting a male body/soul at one time and a female body/soul at another—though to my knowledge Locke did not conduct this thought experiment.

Takeaways

1. John Locke applied the methods and assumptions of the new mechanical/empirical science to the human mind and its workings. He rejects the belief that the human mind possesses inborn ideas, forms, or any information in common with the external world or that it receives such information from outside the mind by way of our senses. Our minds construct the world we know out of simple ideas created by mechanical impacts on our sense organs. Creation is thus silenced.

2. It would be too much to say that John Locke invented the modern self. But he disengaged the personal identity (the self) from both body and soul. The self or person refers not to the human as a biological being or to the soul understood as a metaphysical substance or form but to our consciousness of being the same self through time.

3. Locke’s view of personal identity is not exactly the same as such modern concepts as intersectionality or gender identity. However, these modern views presuppose something like Locke’s disengagement of the self from the human body and soul. Perhaps the modern assertion “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” could not have occurred to Locke as a possible combination of ideas because of the biological meaning of the word “woman.” On a biological level male and female are incompatible. However, if by “woman” one means “consciousness of possessing qualities usually associated with persons inhabiting female bodies” Locke’s definition of person/self would seem to allow its possibility. Possessing a male or female body could not be taken as a revelation of one’s created identity. Indeed, I am not sure Locke’s view of the person could accommodate the concept of a given or created identity communicated to us, for example, by means of the appearance of the human body or its reproductive function.

Next Time: Background to the progressive/liberal view of the authority of Scripture for Christian faith and life.

Galileo, What Hast Thou Wrought?

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Today we continue our study of how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of intelligent people. The previous essay explained why no one before 1500 could have comprehended the modern dichotomy between the external appearances of such things as the male and female bodies and their internal reality. At the conclusion of that essay, I promised that in the next part “we will see how the architects of the scientific revolution—Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, et al.—destroyed confidence in the reality of forms and souls and replaced them with atoms, space, and machines. The appearances no longer reveal the reality of things. Creation is emptied of spiritual reality, meaning, purpose, moral law, and beauty, all of which are transferred to the inner subjective world of the human mind.” We begin that saga with Galileo Galilei.

Galileo Versus Aristotle

Students of nature before Galileo assumed that the way things appear to us reveals something about their inner reality and that the inner reality of things manifests itself truly in their external appearances. The meaning, purpose, beauty, moral law, and value we experience in our minds also exists in nature. The goal of Aristotelian science was understanding how all these qualities are embedded in the natures of the things themselves. However, by the time Galileo (1564-1642) came to maturity in the early seventeenth century, such thinkers as Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) were already complaining that the doctrine of forms contributed nothing to our empirical understanding of things. Mysterious forms, whether they are real or not, cannot be clearly thought and have no value for making predictions, discovering laws, and creating technology. And for reasons I do not understand, achieving these goals had become the driving force of the emerging scientific revolution.

Galileo and the Mathematization of Nature

Galileo believed that applying mathematics to nature was the only way to achieve his practical goals. Numbers and mathematical operations are clear and simple, and when we see the value of a mathematical expression or equation, we become certain of its truth. To understand nature, argued Galileo, we should set aside questions about its mysterious inner nature, the ways it appears to us, and the way it makes us feel; these are irrelevant to achieving the goals of the new science. We will then be free to work out the mathematical laws of nature’s movements and transformations. At last, we can understand nature as clearly as we understand mathematics!

Unforeseen and Unintended Consequences

To modern ears, Galileo’s philosophy of science and his revisions to the scientific method sound familiar and innocent. Whatever Galileo’s intentions, however, his innovations produced a profound moral and religious revolution. For by limiting science to knowledge that can be expressed in mathematics, Galileo, Descartes, et al, broke decisively (1) with the traditional belief that things reveal their inner reality in their outward appearances, and (2) with the corresponding belief that the inner worlds of things in nature are intelligible and mindlike in a way similar to the inner world of the human mind.

The Distinction Between Primary and Secondary Qualities

Perhaps Galileo and other pioneers of the scientific revolution could have narrowed science to what can be understood in mathematical terms without postulating an alternative to Aristotle’s intelligible forms as the cause of the way things appear to us. But they did not exercise such restraint. Instead, they replaced Aristotle’s inner forms and souls with imperceptible material atoms or corpuscles, which possess only mathematically measurable properties: shape, movement, mass, velocity, etc. In ways Galileo and Descartes cannot explain, these material particles cause us to experience the world in a human way. By distinguishing primary qualities (material, mechanical, and mathematical) from secondary qualities (psychological, organic, and qualitative), they drove a wedge between the way human beings experience the world and the world as it is apart from human perception. The only bridge between the two is mathematics. Listen to Galileo, Descartes, and Locke drive this point home:

“To excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow or rapid movements. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds. The latter, I believe, are nothing more than names when separated from living beings, just as tickling and titillation are nothing but names in the absence of such things as noses and armpits” (The Assayer, 1623).

“The properties in external objects to which we apply terms light, color, smell, taste, sound, heat and cold—as well as other tactile qualities…are so far as we can see, simply various dispositions in the shapes, sizes, positions, and movements of their parts which make them able to set up various kinds of motions in our nerves which are required to produce all the various sensations in the soul” (Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy, 1644; Quoted in Cottingham, A Descartes Dictionary, p. 149).

“These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colors, sounds, tastes, etc. These I call secondary qualities”(John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1698, II. 8)

Oh Galileo! What Hast Thou Wrought?

Galileo convinced the world that the variety and obscurity of the natural order could be reduced to the clarity and certainty of simple mathematical equations. Modern advances in understanding the mathematical laws of nature and the explosion of technological innovation rely on this supposition. But at what cost?  God’s glorious creation has fallen silent, emptied of spiritual reality, meaning, depth, mystery, purpose, moral law, and beauty, all of which have been transferred to the inner subjective world of the human mind. But how can we continue believing in the reality of meaning, depth, mystery, purpose, moral law, and beauty, if we think of them as existing only in the human psyche? They seem to be hanging in midair with no confirmation in common experience or foundation in an enduring reality.

Aristotle and all the ancients believed in the likeness and harmony between the human world and the natural world. This belief seemed reasonable, obvious even, because humans are part of the natural world. Galileo, Descartes and others split them apart, dividing the qualities we experience into the objective (real) and subjective (psychological) spheres. Human beings became islands of mind in a sea of mindless matter. It was inevitable that this division would become intolerable…that the human mind and soul would be reunited to nature by reducing them to something simpler. Sooner or later some thinker would do to the human soul what Galileo had done to the solar system.

And that “someone” was John Locke.

Unanswered Questions

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Two recent experiences provoked me to reflect on the disparity between what I want to know and how much I actually know. To live at peace with this disparity, I’ve had to develop strategies for dealing with my ignorance without falling into skepticism or dogmatism. I share three of those lessons below.

Two Humbling Experiences

First. My newspaper never arrives before I finish breakfast! For this reason, I keep my Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church on the dining table. This amazing resource contains 1798 double-column pages and many thousands of entries of relevance to church history. It begins with “Aaron” the brother of Moses and ends with “Zwingli” the Swiss reformer. I learn something new, interesting, and useful every morning. But I am also stung with something I’d rather not think about. Almost every time I read from that huge book I am reminded of my ignorance and my insignificance: the millions of lives lived, experiences had, institutions founded, and systems created.

Second. Recently, a long-time friend with whom I have not spoken in years called to catch up. During the course of our conversation, he asked what I thought of the state of the church in the United States. Perhaps he thought that because I’ve taught theology for 35 years to thousands of students from two generations I would have a grasp on what things had been, how they have changed, and where they stand. After a few lame attempts to say something intelligent, I think I said, “I really don’t know.”

You must understand that I’ve always had a passion to know, to understand my world, the flow of human history and my place in it. As a young person I had questions to which I needed answers. How can you act intelligently in a world you do not understand? So, I read and read. I read the Bible, theology, the history of nations, church history, and philosophy. Hundreds of books and tens of thousands of pages! I found satisfactory answers to some of my questions. But many more remain, and new ones arise almost every day.

The first lesson: know your ignorance. Perhaps I should say “feel” your ignorance, because you cannot know the extent of what you do not know. Speak and act with humility and caution.

Big Picture Theories

Of course, there is no shortage of big picture theories. Theories of society and politics, metaphysical theories, theories of human nature, climate futurology, economic theories, and theological visions. Comprehensive theories give us an illusory feeling of omniscience, of knowing the essential truth of all things. Perhaps that is why we like them. But there is no consensus about which theories are true. For abstract theories paint only the vaguest general outlines of their subject matter. They cannot be verified, for they do not create transparent understanding of why things in all their intricate interrelations are exactly as they are.

Our minds long for simplicity and clarity. Simplicity allows us to see the whole thing at one instant, and clarity gives us confidence that we see things as they truly are. Mathematical knowledge is the paradigm case of simplicity and clarity. Physics is the most mathematical of the natural sciences. But what you gain in certainty and clarity of knowledge you lose in descriptive power. For there is more to nature than quantity, much more! Knowing the basic physical/mathematical laws of matter does not give you the power to describe the actual state of the vast array of different kinds of things we experience in the universe. Such non-mathematical theories as we find in psychology, sociology, economics, and politics must be abstract, simple, and general for us to understand them. Like theories in physics, theories that deal with human behavior, insofar as they are abstract, simple, general, offer little help in understanding why things are the way they are in all their actuality.

The Second lesson: The wise person will avoid mistaking theory for actuality or the model for the thing. Theory never exhaustively explains actuality. Let the model direct your attention to the thing.

First-Hand Experience

We all know the limits of first-hand experience. No individual human being’s experience extends to every place and time. The very purpose of education is to make available to each individual the experiences and insights of countless other individuals from other places and times. It is the distinctive glory of humanity that we are not limited in knowledge and wisdom to our natural instincts or to what we can learn from our own experiences. Still, each individual must integrate information received from diverse sources into a unified whole centered in themselves. We are limited to the information we receive and to our powers of integration; we cannot leap outside of ourselves to get a God’s-eye point of view. Nor can we know how well our limited vision of things corresponds to a universal consciousness.

Though we must acknowledge the limits of our knowledge, few of us can believe that one individual’s vision of the world bears no resemblance to those of other individuals or to that of a universal consciousness. For this belief would render futile all attempts to learn from each other, to understand each other, or to achieve consensus. And why strive for a common vision apart from the conviction that this common vision bears some resemblance to reality? For then we would be limited to exploring the internal powers and possible objects of the human mind without reference to the way things truly are.

Now let’s revisit my two humbling experiences mentioned above. Admittedly, I cannot come to know and understand the experiences, thoughts and deeds of every human being who has ever lived. However, if I assume that all human beings possess the same powers, possibilities and weaknesses, I can learn more and more about my own humanity by studying the history of the human spirit in the lives of past individuals. (Reading entries from the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church makes sense after all!) Making the same assumption—that all human beings possess the same powers, possibilities and weaknesses—and thinking in the reverse direction, I can learn better to understand the experiences of other people by examining carefully my own first-hand experiences.

As I stumbled to answer my friend’s question about the state of the church in the United States, I ended up saying something like this: “I can’t speak from extensive, detailed knowledge of the big picture, but I can tell you how it looks from where I stand.” This humble and cautious approach seemed to satisfy my friend. He could compare his limited perspective with my limited perspective in a process that promised to clarify and supplement his understanding. Combined together many limited perspectives may move us all closer to the goal of comprehensive understanding.

The Third Lesson: Avoid both arrogance and despair (or dogmatism and skepticism) in your quest for true understanding. Listen carefully and dialogue respectfully to all voices and allow them to clarify and purify your first-hand understanding of the matter at issue.

Craving Obscurity in a Celebrity Obsessed Culture

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Everyone wants to be known and loved, and no one wishes to live and die in obscurity. The “good morning” we receive from a passing hiker, a conversation with a good friend, or the most intimate expressions of love…we need acknowledgement, affirmation and love from others. How else could we feel confident in our own worth and sure of our significance and place in this world? Apart from a sense of belonging we lose our love of life and energy for work. Clearly, desire to know and be known is part of our created nature. But like all other aspects of our created nature this desire can be misdirected and abused.

Jesus warns of the dangers of seeking applause from the public:

Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets. (Lk 6:26)

But I want to be well thought of, and I like it when everyone speaks well of me! It feels good. And it feels good because it makes me think well of myself. However, Jesus reminds us that other people are in no position and have no authority to pronounce us worthy of praise. Quite the opposite, the world rarely finds truth praiseworthy, but it loves beautiful lies.

Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ warns against inordinately seeking knowledge lest we look down on others for knowing less or become obsessed with seeking praise for our intellectual accomplishments. He advises seeking something else:

If you wish to learn and appreciate something worthwhile, then love to be unknown and considered as nothing (1.2).

In another translation the words “love to be unknown” are rendered “crave obscurity.” Those words cut me to the heart. I don’t “crave obscurity,” and I don’t “love to be unknown.” I fear it. Living in obscurity seems like not existing at all, and dying unknown and unremembered seems like being erased from existence or worse, never having existed. And yet the words “crave obscurity” haunt me because of the falsehood they expose and truth to which they bear witness. Thomas à Kempis is not urging us to “love to be unknown” in the absolute sense. Nor does Jesus allow us to dismiss all knowledge of ourselves that comes from outside ourselves. This is not possible. Instead, both urge us to learn to be satisfied with knowing and being known by God. To know God is to know truth, and to be known by God is to be known truly. If I know the One who knows me truly, I am in touch with truth about myself. And knowing the truth about myself frees me from the endless quest to make myself pleasing to others.

Now I want to apply the principle of “crave obscurity” to the church. Just as individuals need to learn to be satisfied with knowing and being known by God, so does the church. Just as desire for recognition, legitimation, acknowledgement, influence and honor blinds and corrupts individuals, so do such desires blind and corrupt churches. One could write a history of the church from the First Century to today by tracing the church’s efforts to become accepted, honored, respected, visible and influential in the political and social orders of the world.

As soon as a few believers begin meeting in homes or a local rented hall, they begin to dream of “greater” things: greater visibility, greater numbers, greater influence, a bigger staff, a bigger meeting venue, and a larger budget. Their obscurity to the world troubles them. They feel incomplete and insignificant. They crave the things that have come to be associated in the public mind with the legitimacy and permanency of institutions: legal incorporation, property ownership, wealth, visibility in public space and employees.

My question today is this: what would the church look like if it “loved to be unknown and considered as nothing”? What if it “craved obscurity”? What if it put all its energy into a quest to know and be known by God? What if it became invisible to the world? Would it lose anything essential to its existence? Or, would the truth set the church free, free to be the church in truth.

Two Orientations: Body, Soul and Sex (#1)

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[Programming Note: This post begins a new series on Soul, Body and Sex. But it continues the subject of the previous seven-part series on Faith and the Contemporary Moral Crisis. I recommend reading those essays as a foundation for this series.]

Where are we?

In previous posts I’ve tried to get to the roots of the moral crisis that engulfs contemporary culture. At the origin of this crisis stands the abandonment of the long-accepted notion that human beings acquire experiential knowledge of the good as communities and transmit it through tradition. Simultaneously, modern culture adopted a romantic notion of the good as a feeling of well-being and an individualist view of how we come to know the good.

Given its subjective view of the good, modern culture can no longer make sense of the right as a moral rule that conforms to the moral law. Hence the “right” becomes a private assertion of “what is right for me” or it is identified with legislated human law made through the political process. The simmering crisis becomes open conflict when society’s subjective views of the good and right become concrete disagreement about specific moral behaviors. These disagreements can be settled only by coercion in one of its modern forms: protest and intimidation or legislated human law.

Thoughtful (and faithful) Christians find themselves under fire because they submit themselves to the authority of Jesus Christ and the Scriptures and retain the traditional view of the good and the right. When Christians oppose the dominant culture’s subjective view of the good and the right they appear backward, oppressive, insensitive, cruel and downright hateful. Indeed, they appear as enemies of humanity worthy of marginalization, legal proscription and even persecution.

Two Orientations

We are now at the point in our discussion of the moral crisis where we need to speak about specific behaviors. And I might as well begin with the body and sex. In the contemporary controversy over the use of our bodies we see most vividly the clash of two irreconcilable moral visions. Though the particulars differ, the clash is not new. The New Testament is replete with warnings about this collision of worlds: two opposing kingdoms (Col 1:3), life and death (Col 2:3), visible and the invisible (2Cor 4:18), the way of the Spirit and the way of the flesh (Gal 5:13-26) and many others. One of the clearest contrasts is found in Colossians 3:1-14. Paul contrasts two ways of living as opposition between two orientations: to things above or to earthly things:

“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3 For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

5 Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. 6 Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. 7 You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8 But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11 Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.

12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13 Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”

The New Testament clearly views the moral life as an aspect of a comprehensive and internally consistent way of life, at once religious, spiritual and moral. Its specific moral rules are not isolated and arbitrary. The moral prohibitions in Colossians 3:5-11, quoted above, are interrelated. All of them are integral to the “earthly nature.” The list in verse 5 centers on misuse of the natural urges of physical body: “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed.” The list in verse 8 has to do with misuse of our need for acceptance and fellowship from others: “anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language.” And the physical dimension cannot be separated from the social. We use our bodies to communicate with others and our physical urges almost always involve interaction with others.

The Body

The New Testament affirms the created goodness of the body. But the goodness of the body lies in the possibility for the body’s proper use. The body is not absolutely good, so that whatever we do with it is also good. It can be misused and misdirected. Those whose minds, hearts and wills are set “on things above” want to use their bodies for the Lord while those whose minds, hearts and wills are set “on things on the earth” view their bodies as instruments for their own pleasure and power. Those who direct their minds toward Christ desire to learn the purpose for which God created their bodies and the rules for their proper use. To those whose minds are set on earthly things, the Bible’s moral rules for the proper use of the body seem strange and unnatural.

The Bible speaks of human beings as body and soul. We are physical and mental. We possess freedom at some levels of our being, but at other levels the automatic processes of nature operate apart from our choice or awareness. The Bible is not concerned with the philosophical problem of the composition of human beings, with debates about the nature of the soul and the relationship between soul and body. It is concerned with the orientation of the whole human being toward or away from God. But the Bible acknowledges what we all know from experience: there is a hierarchical order in the relationship between body and soul. The mind is the ruling aspect and the body needs to be ruled and guided. Our minds enable us to gain wisdom to discern the good and right. The body apart from the mind possesses no conscious knowledge of the good and right. It works more or less automatically and instinctually.

Now consider the two orientations of Colossians 3:1-14 again in light of our created nature as body and soul. Paul speaks of the two ways of living, two possible orientations to God of our whole persons. As whole persons we are body and soul, and the body must be guided by the soul. (Note: the soul is more than the mind, but it includes the mind.) But the mind must be illuminated by moral and spiritual truth from above in order to guide the body to its proper end, which is to serve God. Paul urges us to set our minds and hearts on “things above”. Unless the mind is set on “things above” it cannot lead the body to do good and right. When the mind forsakes “things above”, the body–through its automatic and instinctual urges–begins to dominate the mind and the mind becomes a mere instrument we use to seek out ways to please the body. It thinks only about “earthly things”. Instead of rising higher to become more and more like God, human beings fall to earth to become merely smart animals. Dangerous ones too!

To be continued…

Future questions: what is the body for? Do I have a right to use my body as I like? Does mutual consent make what I do with another human being good and right?

Think With Me About “The Happy Life” (Part Three)

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You now have—and always have had— everything you need for happiness. Christian faith is belief that God is, was and always will be alive, that God is, was and always will be the source of life for all living things. Faith is conviction that God is the giver of every good thing we now have or can hope to have. Faith clings to God as the ever-present, always-attentive sustainer of our lives, as the unchanging beginning of temporal movement, as the end toward which all things strive. Faith understands God as the eternal unity that embraces all creation and every moment, every feeling and thought, every act and all our sufferings into a meaningful whole. It looks to God as that transcendent still point that imparts peace to our fragmented and chaotic lives.

You now have—and always have had— everything you need for happiness. Christian faith does not view God as an anonymous, purely transcendent Good; it sees the character and plan of this transcendent Good in the face of Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, the transcendent source, the centering still point, the eternal unity has united creation to himself in the most intimate way possible. The human being, Jesus of Nazareth—and in him human nature and all creation—has been so united to God that human nature partakes in divine qualities without ceasing to be human; indeed, it becomes truly and fully human for the first time. In Jesus Christ, creation has reached its glorious fulfillment and God has achieved his eternal purpose. In faith, Christians look to Jesus Christ as the trustworthy basis of hope that we too will share in the glory of God.

You now have—and always have had— everything you need for happiness. Augustine said truly, “The happy life is joy based on truth.” But everyone knows the difference between holding a statement to be true and experiencing the reality that makes the statement true. Only in living by faith, that is, by acting on faith, facing suffering in faith and even suffering for faith, may we experience the truth on which joy is based. When all other supports have failed, all other helpers have fled and the last human hope has faded into darkness, we find that God is there. God is there, has been there and will always be there. When God is all you’ve got you realize that God is all you’ve ever had.

You now have—and always have had— everything you need for happiness. But how can we keep this realization alive? We are forgetful creatures, creatures of habit; and most of our habits pull us into the mesmerizing flow of ordinary life. The sights and sounds, the worries and responsibilities, and the desires and ambitions of life in the world distract us from our true joy. Because we are forgetful, habit-forming, and distractible beings our strategy for maintaining awareness must counteract these tendencies. We need to form habits and practices that remind us that we now have—and always have had— everything we need for happiness.

I would like to suggest some ways we can keep vividly aware that we now have—and always have had— everything we need for happiness. These are suggestions only, designed to provoke thought; you may find other ways: (1) Since you will not always be consciously focused on God, surround yourself with reminders, with symbols and words. You might place the words I have been repeating in this essay (You now have—and always have had— everything you need for happiness.) where you are sure to see them every day. Make connections between everyday activities and the memory of God. Gregory of Nazianzus (4th century) said, “It is more important that we should remember God than that we should breathe; indeed, if one may say so, we should do nothing besides” (Or. 27.4). What if every time we noticed our breathing we remembered that God alone breathes into us the breath of life? (2) Make the unbreakable habit of meeting frequently with fellow believers to remind each other of who we are, on whom we depend and in whom we find our joy. Remember in the Lord’s Supper the body and blood of the Lord. Remember your baptism.

(3) In your solitude, practice stripping away every finite good and every temporal joy. Be alone, be still and let it wash over you that you exist and are alive through no effort of your own. We are so busy in our striving to get ahead, make a living, make the grade or gain approval, that we become anxious and unhappy. We begin mistakenly to think that our existence and meaning and value depend on us; and, despairing of our strength to carry such a burden, we add unhappiness to our load, making it even heavier. Stop. Ask yourself this: what if I were dying alone in a ditch in a thunderstorm? In what could I find comfort and hope and joy?  In God alone. Even there you would have what you have always had: You now have—and always have had— everything you need for happiness.

If we know this and can keep constantly aware of it, we can return to ordinary life with a new freedom and joy. We can enjoy and use the good things of this beautiful world as they were meant to be enjoyed and used. We can take joy in them as divine gifts that evoke gratitude and remind us of the goodness and joy of God. In these gifts we enjoy the Giver. If we know that God alone is our joy, we will be freed to use the good things of creation properly, that is, to sustain our lives and to share with others the bounty of creation so that they too may rejoice in God and that we may enjoy their joy in God. The circle of joy begun by the Creator spirals upward forever!

Remember! Burn it into your memory. Never forget it:

You now have—and always have had— everything you need for happiness.

Creation–Can You Hear it Sing?

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Lately, I have been thinking about the idea of divine creation. For centuries Christians—and most Jews and Muslims too—have asserted “creation from nothing” (creatio ex nihilo). The central point of this idea is that God required no building material out of which to make the universe. For, if God had needed anything other than God’s own power and will to create, we could not think of God as the absolute Lord of creation—a really scary thought! To accomplish this task God would require help from something else. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle understood that beings in the world are ever changing, coming into existence and going out of existence. But they also knew that something had to be eternal or nothing would exist, which would be inconceivable…because if nothing existed there would be no mind to conceive and no concepts to think. For them it was axiomatic that the eternal and unchanging world of intelligible forms and ideas exists necessarily. It deserves to be called divine precisely because it is self-sufficient and necessary. Aristotle was so clear that true being is eternal and unchanging that he declared that “from nothing, nothing comes into existence” (ex nihilio, nihil fit). Hence even matter is eternal and does not come into existence or go out of existence. It is always there to be shaped like the potter’s clay into different beings.

The Christian teaching of “creation from nothing” does not directly contradict Aristotle because it does not say that creation sprang into existence from nothing; existing things come from God and God is eternal. So Christian teaching agrees with Aristotle that “from nothing, nothing comes into existence.” Since God is eternal, there never was a time when there was absolutely nothing. But matter is not divine or eternal or necessary. Christianity asserts only one eternal being, God.

The idea of “creation from nothing” has profound implications in many areas of thought and life. I will mention only one. Everything, everyone, and every event that was, is and will be depends totally on God, and God alone, for its fundamental existence. Taking this truth seriously could change your life. Learn this skill: when you feel yourself relying on, serving, worshiping, working for, overvaluing, fearing or desiring anything in creation let it immediately trigger the realization that that creature also depends absolutely on God. Now let that thing direct you to its God and yours. God is the source of every good thing and the answer to every threat found in creatures, no matter how beautiful, powerful or good. If you learn this practice you might find yourself becoming a more thoughtful person, more aware of God than before. And in a world as beautiful and dangerous as ours that’s got to be a good thing.

I have found the works David Burrell, Robert Sokolowski, Michael Dodds, and Thomas Weinandy very helpful on the topic of creation.

rch