A reader St. Willie asks a question regarding the transcript of my recent sermon.

I have read the text of the sermon of which, I guess, you prepared and delivered.
Do you think that your sermon was prepared under the inspiration of God?
I do think so.
What, if you disagree, is the difference between inspiration of your sermon and Scripture?

I’m glad the sermon packed a spiritual punch for you.  I was just trying to share the Gospel  in a way that is more faithful to the key ideas in Scripture.  But before I wrote it, I hoped and prayed that the Spirit would lead me to effectively present his word and his will to my audience.  And at times (as in this exchange) I have felt that I was writing God’s truth better than I could have without God’s help.  So does that make it inspired?

“Inspired” is a word that means guided or breathed-through by the Holy Spirit.  An inspired text or speech is one in which God is speaking, not just a human being.  Not that it ceases to be a human product; it still comes from the personality of the human author, which is being used as an instrument for communicating his message.

Now, obviously, there is a sense in which God does everything all the time, and that the wicked and the righteous alike are his instruments.  Yes, but this does not mean that the words we say to our neighbor are always graced by his presence, that they are the words which he would say.

Inspiration [in-spirit-ation] does not imply that the words are simply dictated to the human author.  (Although dictation can happen.  Some biblical texts, such as parts of the Old Testament prophets, seem to have been dictated with the direct voice of God, but other parts are clearly in the writer’s own voice, and this does not make one text more “inspired” than the other.  Similarly, inspiration may be consciously known by the author, or it may be unconscious.)  God is speaking through an instrument, but that instrument is not a mere pen but rather a whole human life and personality as gathered into a particular moment of communication.  This makes sense because the true Word of God is Jesus, God come in the flesh, and so true prophecy will testify to him: “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rev. 19:10).

Now, Christians are to be like Jesus in that we are filled with the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity; the difference being of course that he was filled “without measure” whereas we Christians each have our own “spiritual gifts” or charisms which we exercise as part of the body of Christ:

Now concerning what comes from the Spirit: brothers, I do not want you to be unaware.  You know that when you were pagans, you used to be led off to the idols that could not speak. Therefore I am informing you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus is cursed,” and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.

Now there are different gifts, but the same Spirit.   There are different ministries, but the same Lord.  And there are different activities, but the same God activates each gift in each person.  A demonstration of the Spirit is given to each person to produce what is beneficial:

to one is given a message of wisdom through the Spirit,
to another, a message of knowledge by the same Spirit,
 to another, faith by the same Spirit,
to another, gifts of healing by the one Spirit,
 to another, the performing of miracles,
to another, prophecy,
to another, distinguishing between spirits,
to another, different kinds of languages,
to another, interpretation of languages.

But one and the same Spirit is active in all these, distributing to each person as He wills. (1 Cor 12:1-11)

This is a major difference between the Old and New Covenants: in the Old only some very special people like prophets and kings were filled with the Spirit, but in the New the Spirit of God is poured out on the entire people of God.  Today is the feast of Pentecost where we celebrate this very fact.

Thus each individual Christian has the Holy Spirit inside of them, and is, to a greater or lesser extent, inspired by the Holy Spirit in their words and actions.  (When I say individual, of course I don’t mean individual as opposed to the community of believers, for the Spirit of Jesus is present in a new way when two or three are gathered in his name.  But it would be quite heretical to say that the Spirit is only in the Church as an institution, and not in the particular individuals which compose it!)

OK, but this raises a potential objection: how does this compare to the Inspiration of the Scriptures?  Because the language we use to describe that is very similar:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.  (2 Tim 3:16-17)

We see here that all parts of Scripture are (a) inspired by God, and (b) useful for the Christian life.  For this reason it is backed by the authority of God, and is (one of the) instruments which he uses to perfect us into the image of Christ, who is the ultimate Word of God.

(Note that this passage does not say anything about inerrancy, which I do not think is the most useful word to apply to the Scriptures.  I believe that all Scripture communicates some truth God wished them to say, and of course these truths are reliable and accurate when we have understood them properly, but I do not think it follows that the Bible is free from e.g. contradictions concerning historical trivia, or that passages like Genesis 1-11 must be taken to teach scientific truth.  Conversely, if I write 2+2 = 4 on a napkin, that napkin is inerrant, since it contains no falsehoods, but that does not make it inspired by the Holy Spirit.  Also, the word “inerrancy” isn’t very useful for describing passages which don’t contain factual statements, e.g. commandments or complaints or questions and so on.  I would rather stick closer to the language that Scripture uses about itself.)

Now pretty much all Christians believe that the canon of Scripture is closed, meaning that no new books are to be added.  In addition to the Old Testament books (about which there is disagreement among Christians concerning the exact scope of the canon), there are 27 New Testament books written by the apostles and their close companions, and nobody seems to expect any more to be added.  Except for some nutty groups like Mormons whose theology is way out of the mainstream.

Some Protestants (called cessationists), usually from Reformed traditions, believe that the overtly supernatural gifts of the Spirit (such as miracles, prophecy, and speaking in tongues) were only for the first generation of Christians and ceased with the death of the apostles.  But I cannot find anything in the text of the New Testament which suggests or implies that prophecy will cease.  Quite the contrary, the New Testament seems to treat prophecy as a normal part of the Christian communal life.  Now of course the NT was written during the time of the NT, but it was written to provide guidance for all believers through the centuries.  To postulate what would amount to a new dispensation (i.e. a period of time in which God interacts with people in a different way) but with absolutely no Scripture written to guide us during that new time period, seems absurd.

The main proof-text on the other side is 1 Cor 13, where St. Paul talks about the end of prophecy:

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.  For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.  When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  (1 Cor 13:8-11)

But this is obviously referring to the Second Coming, not to the closure of Scripture, for St. Paul goes on to say that

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.  (1 Cor 13:12)

However valuable it might be that we have all books of the Bible instead of some books of the Bible (back when the Apostles were still alive), it is clear that it does not amount to the radical change of seeing God face to face, “for nobody can see God’s face and live”.  So that moment when we all see him directly is yet to come.  Since that’s the best proof-text they have, I think it’s fair to say that there’s no good evidence in Scripture for the position.

(There are also some passages about prophecy ending in the Old Testament, but these presumably allude to the end of the period of Old Testament prophecy.  Also they do not generally seem to treat the end of prophecy as though it were a good thing.)

Experience suggests that, although prophecy is indeed rarer in later generations than during the time of the Apostles (being less necessary), it has never entirely ceased.  Indeed, as a result of the Pentecostal movement in the 20th century, those claiming to exercise this gift are more common now than ever.  And I myself have (very rarely!) been given a specific message by God for a church or another person.  That is prophecy, by definition.

What’s really going on here, is that cessationists are privileging a theory about Scripture (that because it is closed, no future prophecy can occur) over the teaching found in Scripture (that the living God speaks to his people).  That’s not a good way to do interpretation.

So if prophecy is still around, why don’t we go around adding new Scriptures to the Bible?

Well, first, because most of what we do and say is merely partially inspired by the Holy Spirit, with an admixture of our own earthly opinions and wrongheaded ideas.  Whereas Scripture is totally inspired by God.  Even if e.g. some of St. Paul’s crankishness or St. David’s curses got into the final product, we still confess that even those parts are sanctified and hallowed by their role in God’s plan.  They are intimately connected to the message conveyed by Scripture, so that they are still “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”.  Humility suggests that for most of us, our offering to the Church is not so thoroughly worked-over by the Spirit as what we know we experience when reading the Scriptures:

 Let the [false] prophet who has a dream recount the dream, but let the one who has my word speak it faithfully. For what has straw to do with grain?” declares the Lord.   “Is not my word like fire,” declares the Lord, “and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces? (Jeremiah 23:28-29)

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.  (Hebrews 4:12)

I see the Holy Spirit working powerfully in the writings of e.g. Sts. Lewis or Chesterton, but that does not mean that their every opinion should be enshrined as the very word of God; that would be terrible!  And I see that Plato anticipated many aspects of Christian truth, surely due to divine guidance, but that does not make his random opinions authoritative.  These writings are partially inspired, not completely inspired.

But this distinction is not sufficient as it stands.  Suppose God were to speak to me tomorrow in a voice clearly his, telling me to be a missionary to Zimbobia, or whatever.  If I wrote it down while adding nothing of my own, or adding things of my own only as appropriate while drunk on the love of God, it is clear that the end product would be totally inspired.

But it does not follow that we ought to print it in the back of our Bibles.  That is, I think, because there is a second criterion besides inspiration.   An act of communication is defined not only by its author but also by its intended recipient.  The books of the Bible are in the Bible because they are universal, that is given to the entire Church for purposes of being its foundational literature.  In short, they are not just complete in their inspiration, but also complete in their intended audience.  They are for everyone because they are our primary literature about the primary revelation of God, namely the preparation of Israel for Christ, his advent here on earth, and the resulting New Covenant, which is “the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all” (Jude 1:3).

While other Christians might be incidentally benefited by the words calling me to Zimbobia, to require everyone to accept and read it would be more likely to lead to division rather than unity.  It is not a text which was read aloud in the churches, and which organically grew up alongside of God’s people in order to constitute its identity.

For this reason, we accept into Scripture only the writings of the Old Testament prophets (and the histories and writings which put them into context) and the New Testament Apostles who witnessed Jesus’ Resurrection.  Any additional prophecy is to be tested by the words of the Bible, and rejected if it conflicts with it.

But as I said, there is no explicit promise of God in the New Testament that no new books of the Bible will be inspired.  Some think that the Apocalypse of St. John contains such a statement:

I testify to everyone who hears the prophetic words of this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book.   And if anyone takes away from the words of this prophetic book, God will take away his share of the tree of life and the holy city, written in this book. (Rev 22:18-19)

However, at the time that Revelation was written it was a separate book in a separate scroll from the rest of the Bible.  It was centuries before the binding technology existed to put the entire Bible into a single codex.  So this passage probably refers to adding new material to the Book of Revelation, not the rest of the Bible.  It is also very similar to passages in the Old Testament:

Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of the LORD your God that I give you.  (Deut 4:2)

Every word of God is tested; He is a shield to those who take refuge in Him.  Do not add to His words Or He will reprove you, and you will be proved a liar. (Prov. 30:5-6)

but these were clearly not the final books of the Bible.  So while these words could potentially mean not to treat human traditions as being on par with divine revelation, they do not imply that there will be no new divine revelation.

However, it is very hard for me to believe that any new spiritual events could be sufficiently earthshaking to justify the publication of an additional portion of the Bible.  What could God possibly do that would be comparable in drama to the revelation already given?  (The Second Coming would be important enough, but presumably seeing Christ face-to-face will obviate the need for any written Scriptures.)

I can only think of one thing which is (a) promised in both Testaments of our current Scriptures, and (b) as important and universal as some events in the Old Testament and Acts (if not the Gospels).  And that is if the Jews converted as a group to Christianity.  As St. Paul says:

But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their full inclusion bring!   I am talking to you Gentiles.  Inasmuch as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I take pride in my ministry  in the hope that I may somehow arouse my own people to envy and save some of them.  For if their rejection brought reconciliation to the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?…

I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in,  and in this way all Israel will be saved.
(Romans 11:12-15, 25-26)

So, if a prophet like Elijah or St. John the Baptist were to arise in modern day Israel, and if by his ministry the Jews as a group believed in Jesus and were saved, then I speculate that the writings (or youtube videos?) of that prophet might well be worthy of inclusion among our Scriptures, being clearly endorsed by God.  But that is for those who live at that time to worry about!  If indeed the world lasts long enough afterwards for it to matter…

The first two posts in this series were on the topics of Creation and Original Sin.

[This post gives the text of a sermon preached on Easter Sunday 2014, New Life Church of the Nazarene, Cupertino.  I tried to keep it short because it was being translated into Chinese.  I began with the following Scripture reading from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, 15:1-33]:

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand.  By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you.  Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.  After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.  But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect.  No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.  Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?  If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.  And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.  More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead.  But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised.  For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either.  And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.  Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.  If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.  For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.  For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.  But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.  Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power.  For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.  The last enemy to be destroyed is death.  For he “has put everything under his feet.” Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ.  When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.

Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead?  If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them?  And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour?  I die every day—yes, just as surely as I boast about you in Christ Jesus our Lord.  If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus with no more than human hopes, what have I gained?  If the dead are not raised,

“Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” [Isaiah 22:15]

Do not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.” [This quotation is from “Thais”, a Greek play by Menander, now lost except for fragments.]

Come back to your senses as you ought, and stop sinning; for there are some who are ignorant of God—I say this to your shame.

Rejoice! Christ is risen!

I want to speak today about the Resurrection of Christ’s body, and what it means for our own physical bodies.

After he suffered and died on the Cross, and his body was laid in the tomb, God raised Jesus up from the dead, and he appeared to his disciples.  He was not a ghost; he had a real, physical body which could be seen and touched, and he could be recognized as being the same person (although sometimes it took his disciples a little while to realize who it was).  But there were also some important differences: he was given glory and power and immortality, and he was able to appear and disappear at will, and to ascend up into Heaven to be with the Father.

Now why is this important for you?  The reason is that the Resurrection of the Body isn’t just for Jesus!  When Jesus died and rose again, he also gave to everyone else the ability to experience his death and resurrection.

In the future, when Christ comes back, God will raise from the dead every single person who has ever died.  Men and women and children, tall people and short people, fat people and skinny people, people from every country and religion, righteous people and wicked people, all of them will come out of their graves!  Everyone who has ever lived will be resurrected from the dead, like Jesus was.

Good news for the sick and the disabled!  God will heal you from all your diseases.

God created the physical world and he created our bodies as well as our minds.  Our bodies are an important part of who we are.  That’s why God wants us to have bodies for all eternity.

If God loves our bodies, we should love our own bodies. We need to treat our body with respect and care, because at the Resurrection it will be remade into the glory of Christ.  A lot of people don’t like their bodies and they do everything they can to change them. But the good news is that God created our bodies and thinks we are beautiful… It’s not a sin to make some small changes to our body be healthy and look good, but we should do it out of love and not because we dislike ourselves.

Every part of our body was created to be good.  The physical emotions that come from our body, including feelings like anger and anxiety and sexual desire, were created by God for a good reason.  They were twisted by the Fall, but their purpose is good.

Jesus felt all of these emotions, but he lived a perfect life without sin.  He sometimes felt sad or angry or afraid or depressed, and he didn’t sin because he had perfect love for God.  (He chose not to get married for the sake of the Kingdom of God, but of course we know that it isn’t a sin for Christians to get married.)

Now I will say something which may seem to contradict what I said before.  But it is very important!

Because of respect for our bodies, we have to resist all of the evil impulses that come to us from our bodies.  Our bodily desires were created good, but they were corrupted because we inherit a fallen and sinful nature—this is what Paul means, when he says that in Adam, we all die.

For example most people struggle with some kind of sexual perversion, something which is forbidden by the Bible, or anything else which you know isn’t right.  Or perhaps you have an eating disorder, or a bad temper, or you’re very lazy.  You’re jealous when you see other people being happy, or you think it’s funny when bad things happen to them.

But I don’t need to tell you what things you struggle with.  You already know.

Partly these things come from making bad choices, but sometimes these sinful desires just come from our physical flesh. Our brain tells us that certain things will make us happy, and we have to do these things or else it feels like dying.

People are always saying, “I can’t obey the Bible in some area of my life, because this is part of who I am. I didn’t choose to be this way, and I can’t change myself.”  It’s true you can’t change yourself.  But the Holy Spirit can change our hearts so that we want to serve Jesus and do his will.

Paul says that the Christian life is about dying and being raised from the dead.  That’s why we get baptized, to say “I will die alongside Christ because I believe that those who are born of the Spirit of God will come back to life again.”  The blood of Christ has the power to heal us from all sin and transgression.  Some parts of our body will be healed in this life, other things will have to wait for the next life.

“I die every day,” Paul says in the passage we just read.  In other places he says that “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” [2. Cor 4:10], and that “those who are in Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its desires and passions.” [Gal. 5:24].

It’s not just Paul; Jesus says the same thing: “If anyone wants to come after me, he must deny himself, pick up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” [Matt. 16:24-25].

So you must treat your body with respect because it is good, but you must also allow the fleshly desires coming from your body to be killed, if you want to be saved.

I’m not talking about giving up just one or two things.  Nor do I mean treating your body harshly all the time, or never taking pleasure in life.  Not at all.  What I’m talking about is giving your whole self to God, and letting him decide what stays and what goes.  You can submit to death with joy and patience and hope, if you believe that the same God who raised Christ from the dead will raise you from the dead as well.

Even if it feels like you are giving up an important part of your identity, we have to trust him that he knows who we really are.  When you finally become the holy person that God created you to be, you will be more glorious than you can possibly imagine.

This isn’t salvation by works.  It’s trusting God to do what he promised by grace.  But you must submit to death; there’s no way around it.  Don’t be deceived.  The false Gospel says, “Christ died so that I don’t have to die.”  The true Gospel says: “Christ died, so that I too can die and be resurrected along with him.  Those who suffer with him will reign with him in glory, and be happy forever.”

Is it possible that some of you, who who have been in this Church for such a long time, have never really understood or accepted the Gospel of Jesus Christ?  Even if you don’t repent of your sins, God will still raise you from the dead.  But then I can’t promise that you’ll be happy forever.  Since our bodies are part of who we are, God will judge us in our new bodies for what we do with our bodies here on Earth.  So be reconciled to God.

So that is why Easter is important. It teaches us that God loves our physical bodies, that there is hope for the future, and that we can give things up with joy and confidence, because we know God will give our life back to us again, only a million times better.

“The flesh is indeed willing, but the spirit is weak”—Jesus

A while back St. Anne / Weekend Fisher asked whether human nature is basically good or totally depraved.   I left a comment as follows:

There is no such thing as pure evil. God is pure good, and the things he creates are all good when properly related to him. Evil is always goodness twisted and perverted. It cannot exist on its own; it is a parasite on goodness.

Thus, when we say that human beings are depraved or evil, this necessarily presupposes that human nature is good. If we had not been meant for something better, it would not be a sin to fall short.

I am not sure I believe in “total” depravity, or even that I am sure what it would mean if it were true. I think it is clear that almost every person has, at some time in their lives, done something ethically good, out of love for other people, rather than hypocrisy or self-righteousness. Christ calls human fathers evil, but he also says that they know how to give good gifts to their children.

What I affirm is that (a) every part of our nature, though created good, is corrupted to some extent, and (b) we are sufficiently enslaved to sin that we are incapable of saving ourselves, but need God’s gracious act of redemption through Jesus.

Also, I think people mistakenly think that because the doctrine of “original sin” applies to children, it is therefore especially about children. Children may be fallen, but adults are more so. Otherwise Jesus would not have said that you have to change and become like a child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But this still leaves the question I asked last time, why, if God created us good, are we all so whacked?  (OK, I used a slightly different word, but nobody called me out on it.)  The Christian answer is well known: because some dude and his wife ate a piece of fruit a while back…wait, what?

The Genesis story is full of rich archetypes and symbols, and if we treat it too literalistically and fail to notice the applicability to our present state, we’re missing out on the point.  The name Adam means Human Being.  The name Eve means Life.  In other words, we are all Adam and Eve, as Paul says:

For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive… (1 Cor 15:22, 44-50)

Point is, YOU are Adam, and when you rebel against God you experience what it is like to be a fallen human being.  That is when you experience shame and nakedness and the desire to justify yourself by clothing yourself with whatever fig leaves you can gather, even if it isn’t always that effective.  We can tell the Genesis story about ourselves, as Paul does:

I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”  But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead.

Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.  I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. (Romans 7:7-10)

There was once, for our species perhaps as well as each individual, a time of rosy innocence before we became aware of morality as we now experience it, in the form of unattainable ethical imperatives and guilt for having disobeyed them.  At one time we lived in a state of innocence and spiritual simplicity, but then we wanted to make our own decisions and go our own way, and there were the consequences.

The way people usually tell the story of the Fall, they act as though Adam had eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Depravity and Sinfulness.  But that’s not what the book says, it says the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  What’s more the Knowledge is considered in itself something good, a property of God.  As the serpent says:

“For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4).

and on the off-chance you don’t think the devil is a reliable source of information, God speaking to himself (in the communion of the Holy Trinity) says the same thing:

“The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 3:22).

Perhaps human beings were supposed to eventually receive the Knowledge of Good and Evil when we became mature enough, but we wanted to try out both good and evil for ourselves, learning about each from experience, and now we experience the moral law in the form of commands which we find impossible to satisfy, with all the resulting effects on our mental and spiritual health.

Since the genetic evidence suggests that there was never a time in which the early homo sapiens population was smaller than about a thousand or so breeding pairs, it seems that we can’t take literally the idea of only 2 human beings (even leaving aside the question of where Cain’s wife came from!).  But I believe that the primary point of the Genesis story is to speak to the reality of the human situation, not to give a factual, literal account of what happened in the past.

Yet given that human beings were created to be in communion with God, but we now find ourselves alienated from him, we can deduce that there must have been some actual set of prehistoric events by which this happened, but because it happened in prehistory we don’t know the precise details, just the aftermath.  So in that sense the Fall is indeed also about something that happened a long time ago, even if it is recapitulated in each generation (just as Evolution is also recapitulated in each generation, as the traits which were useful in the past manifest once again).

We also have the Tree of Life in the story.  Apparently if human beings had remained in communion with God (a state known as Original Justice) there would have been no need to die.  Given the laws of physics and biology as we know them (which have certainly been operating for a long time before human beings arrived on the scene) this would have required supernatural intervention.  But if touching the body of Jesus in the Gospels allowed supernatural healing to sinners, why should immortality not also have been available to sinless beings in full communion with him?

After people fell, how did the badness get transmitted to later generations?  Well the absence of immortality and spiritual communion with God doesn’t really need to be explained, that’s kind of the default position given the loss of Original Justice.  As for more specific morally undesirable traits, they are presumably passed on through genetics and culture, the same way we inherit everything else.  Of course it would have required many generations for our genetics to adapt in response to cultural changes (Lamarck was mostly wrong), but it has been a long time since then.

Also, a large part of our evil fleshly impulses are just our animal nature, evolved through natural selection by our pre-human ancestors prior to the Fall.  These fleshly impulses are not bad per se, since we are supposed to be spiritual animals in the image of God.  But once the Fall disrupted our communion with God they got out of control and started causing problems.  If we had remained under the control of the Spirit of God, our animal impulses would be holy as well as spontaneous, and thus part of our blessedness.  Or if we were still just animals, who had never known better, we would still have the innocence of animals.  A cat is morally innocent when it plays with a mouse, not because that is morally wonderful but because it doesn’t know any better.  But now we know better (or else ought to know better but are in denial), and it pains us to experience our own worst impulses.

While some animals seem capable of embarrassment or shame at times, so far as I know we’re the only animal to frequently feel shame just at the thought of having a body.  That’s pretty weird!  It’s also why most of us wear clothes even when it’s not needed for protection.

This animal/evolutionary origin for most of our evil fleshly impulses seems a lot more plausible to me then simply being inexplicably cursed with evil-rays as a punishment for having eaten a fruit once.  (What do you get when you combine Christianity with evolutionary psychology?  Christianity, of course…)

Of course we aren’t personally responsible for the fact that we are born in a morally problematic state.  But we do need to take responsibility for who we are, as best we can, to control the damage.  And while none of us were doing the right thing, God himself took on responsibility for the human condition by uniting himself to human nature in order to redeem it and make holiness and sanctity possible.

A couple more quotes to round out the discussion.  The first is from the rationalist blogger (who happens to also be a psychiatrist) Scott Alexander discussing the politics of “trigger warnings”:

…I think [the essay he’s responding to] contains a false dichotomy: privileged people don’t have any triggers, oppressed people do. You guys are intact, I am broken. But truth is, everybody’s broken. The last crown prince of Nepal was raised with limitless wealth and absolute power, and he still freaked out and murdered his entire family and then killed himself. There’s probably someone somewhere who still believes in perfectly intact people, but I bet they’re not a psychiatrist.
…
A Christian proverb says: “The Church is not a country club for saints, but a hospital for sinners”. Likewise, the rationalist community is not an ivory tower for people with no biases or strong emotional reactions, it’s a dojo for people learning to resist them.

Now Scott isn’t a Christian, but he’s sensible enough to steal good ideas even if they come from the Church.  Likewise I encourage my readers to steal all the good ideas from rationalism! Take all thoughts captive for Christ (2 Cor 10:5), to prepare for the day when the splendor from all the kings on the earth will be brought into the New Jerusalem (Rev 21:24).

The concept of Original Sin understood properly is equalizing, not dehumanizing.  As St. Chesterton wrote:

We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things…

Christianity spoke again and said: “I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human beings. This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress. If you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of original sin. You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I call it what it is—the Fall.”

I have spoken of orthodoxy coming in like a sword; here I confess it came in like a battle-axe. For really (when I came to think of it) Christianity is the only thing left that has any real right to question the power of the well-nurtured or the well-bred. I have listened often enough to Socialists, or even to democrats, saying that the physical conditions of the poor must of necessity make them mentally and morally degraded. I have listened to scientific men (and there are still scientific men not opposed to democracy) saying that if we give the poor healthier conditions vice and wrong will disappear. I have listened to them with a horrible attention, with a hideous fascination. For it was like watching a man energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is sitting on. If these happy democrats could prove their case, they would strike democracy dead. If the poor are thus utterly demoralized, it may or may not be practical to raise them. But it is certainly quite practical to disfranchise them. If the man with a bad bedroom cannot give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he shall give no vote. The governing class may not unreasonably say: “It may take us some time to reform his bedroom. But if he is the brute you say, it will take him very little time to ruin our country. Therefore we will take your hint and not give him the chance.” It fills me with horrible amusement to observe the way in which the earnest Socialist industriously lays the foundation of all aristocracy, expatiating blandly upon the evident unfitness of the poor to rule. It is like listening to somebody at an evening party apologising for entering without evening dress, and explaining that he had recently been intoxicated, had a personal habit of taking off his clothes in the street, and had, moreover, only just changed from prison uniform. At any moment, one feels, the host might say that really, if it was as bad as that, he need not come in at all. So it is when the ordinary Socialist, with a beaming face, proves that the poor, after their smashing experiences, cannot be really trustworthy. At any moment the rich may say, “Very well, then, we won’t trust them,” and bang the door in his face. On the basis of Mr. Blatchford’s view of heredity and environment, the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming. If clean homes and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air? If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them? On the ordinary environment argument the matter is fairly manifest. The comfortable class must be merely our vanguard in Utopia.

Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides? Is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul? As far as I know, there is only one answer, and that answer is Christianity. Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man’s environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest—if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this— that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. (“The Eternal Revolution”, Orthodoxy)

In my previous post in this series I was talking about the goodness of being created with male and female bodies, and somebody brought up the issue of gender dysphoria.  I said that it was just a more extreme example of the type of body-image problem that we ALL struggle with.  Christianity, while it is willing to call particular acts sinful, problematizes any use of such words to stigmatize anyone, since after all Christ had to die for my sins as well as your sins.

I read an article once which had a list of derogatory language and insults, and in addition to the usual suspects, included the word “sinner”.  The barely concealed goal was to reclassify the Christian church as a hate group.

Except that’s not how the word “sinner” is used at all.  Sinner is indeed a derogatory word, but one of the key attributes of this word in Christianity is that it applies to everyone, and that you aren’t allowed to use it to refer to anybody unless you bear this in mind.  This is not to say that all sins are equally bad; that is total nonsense which deprives the word of any meaning at all; there are plenty of Bible verses which quite explicitly say that some sins are worse than others.  But all sins come from a root cause that is present in all of us, and you’d have to be morally clueless not to sympathize, given that we all struggle with the same things.  Except that, once again, we are all morally backwards when it comes to self-righteousness and looking down on others, that’s part of the problem.

On my bookshelf I have a section for Heretics, books which I own that contain serious distortions of Christian teaching.  Some of these books, I agree with the title even though I disagree with almost everything inside of them.  One of them is The God who Risks, by John Sanders.  Another book with a great title is The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes.

I don’t recommend either of these books, but the title of the second one makes an important point.  It’s an interesting fact that Jews don’t make a big deal out of the story of the Fall in Genesis, it’s not really a central theological point for them even though it’s right near the beginning of the story.  It’s only after Jesus rose from the dead, and the idea of a new human nature became solidly founded, that we have a platform to go back and criticize the old human nature we all have.  Paul talks about Adam so much because he needs something to compare to what Jesus did.

Christian theology centers around Jesus and the Resurrection (a thing which happened in historical times i.e. during the period of written evidence).  Our attitude towards Adam, the Fall, and our fallen neighbor must be recalculated in light of this new glory.  That’s why it isn’t a bummer to learn you’ve been wrong the whole time about how you’ve been living.  A fish can’t really tell it’s swimming in water until it learns to fly.

Update: I answered some of the questions in the comments below in
Questions about Adam.
The grand conclusion to the series is here:
Flesh and Spirit III: Easter Sermon

“What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the spirit is spirit.” — Jesus

I want to talk about something which is essential to the Gospel, yet widely misunderstood.  It has to do with the relationship between our flesh and our spirit.

Clearly we have both of these things.  We know we have a physical body, and we know we have something like a mind or inner self, with a personality, consciousness, and also deep subconscious mysteries that we do not fully understand.  Our mind has to deal with various urges and desires which come up from the physical or animal side of our nature, but we also have a sense of ourselves as rational and spiritual beings.  We have both a body and a soul.

I think this is all obviously true no matter what we decide about the philosophy of mind.  Leave aside the metaphysical questions, I think we know that all of this is true from our experiences as human beings (if I wanted to be fancy I would use the word phenomenology here).  Materialists assert that the mind is just another name for certain arrangements of matter, specifically the neural network in our brains.  For the purposes of what I have to say, my response is who cares?  That doesn’t change the fact that we experience ourselves as having a more physical and a more mental part.

Suppose you fall to the ground upon hearing some devastating news, and a sympathetic materialist philsopher walks by.  “Are you okay,” he says?  “My body feels fine,” you say, “but my heart is broken.”  Somehow he knows what you mean.  There is no need for him to reply: “Technically, your mind is part of your body, and oh by the way you should have said brain instead of heart.  We now know that the heart pumps blood, it doesn’t think.”

Also, when I say we have both flesh and spirit, I don’t necessarily mean that they can be separated in a clean way.  Our physical condition affects our mind, which in turn controls our body.  Our bodily desires cannot be experienced until they enter our mind.  There’s not necessarily a clear-cut distinction between where one ends and the other begins.  But even if it’s a continuous spectrum, we can still label the two ends of the spectrum, and decide how we feel about each of the two ends.

So what should we think about our physical or fleshly self?  This is a key distinction between Christianity and several heretical off-shoots such as Gnosticism or Manicheeism.  These sects taught that the physical world was evil, and that human beings are basically souls trapped in bodies.  Matter is evil, spirit is good.  Many Gnostics even claimed that the creator of the physical world was a lesser, evil god several emenations removed from the true God.  If this is true, then salvation consists of being rescued from our physical or corporeal nature.

But Christianity could not disagree more.  Matter as such is not evil, nor is it morally neutral, it is fundamentally good!  We believe that the physical universe is intrinsically good and glorious because it reflects the infinite splendour of the one who created it.  Seven times he calls it good; three times he blesses it:

God saw that the light was good…

God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good…

The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good…

God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night.  He also made the stars… And God saw that it was good…

So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.  He blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”…

God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good…

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
___So God created Man in his own image,
___in the image of God he created him;
___male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”…

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good…

Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

If this were not enough, we also know that the Word of God became flesh, that he physically rose from the dead, he communicates his flesh and blood to us through a physical sacrament, and that on the Last Day he will raise all of our bodies from the dead.  The Incarnation and the Resurrection show that God of the New Testament is the same as the God of the Old Testament: he continues to bless the physical, corporeal, material world.

The implications of this for our self-conception could not be greater.  It means that we must resist as a damnable heresy the idea that we are souls trapped in bodies.  We are meant to be physical.  We must treat our bodies with respect and strive for integration between our souls and our bodies.  They are part of who we are.  If we think of ourselves only as “souls”, we will be continually frustrated by our inability to live up to our own prideful perfect image.

Most people struggle with shame, and with various body image problems.  The first step is to recognize that our body is indeed created good by God—I’m not saying that a merely intellectual affirmation is a magic bullet, but it’s a start.  Instead of restricting our sense of identity to the smallest that it can be, a speck of consciousness in our skull, we must extend it to the extremities of our body.  Even our spouse’s body if we are married.  (Note that all Christians are married to Christ, whose physical body in turn includes all of us in the Church, whether on Earth or in Heaven).

With respect to human faculties, we must accept the rule that every constitutent part of human nature is good.  We cannot identify any part of ourselves, e.g. our capactity for anger or sex, or our ability to rule over Nature, and say that this is evil.  It was created good by God.  We may corrupt or twist it by sin, or it may be stunted by disease or deformity, but the original plan and purpose was good.  Even if our anger leads us astray 99% of the time, we cannot say that anger, depression, anxiety, pain, pleasure, or joy are inherently bad.  Jesus experienced all of these feelings.  Admittedly he chose to remain celibate for the sake of the Kingdom of God, but Genesis 1-2 makes it clear that God blesses sex and fertility.

And yes, this includes gender.  God created us male and female, each one in the image of God (who, you will notice, speaks of himself in the plural at this point).  Although our salvation in Christ does not depend in any way on gender, the details of our personality are influenced in countless ways by our particular makeup, and our gender will remain eternally part of who we are.  This is good.  Of course, the things which humans have in common are more important than the things which separate us.  But we cannot give up on entirely on gender distinctions (like some Gnostics tried to do) simply because people have often used them to oppress people.  If gender roles seem oppressive, that is because they have become distorted by sin, not because they are inherently bad.  Men, embrace your masculinity!  Women, embrace your femininity!  (I don’t mean the sterotypes or false generalizations, but the truth of who you really are.)

Our spirtual self is also obviously good and noble, even if sometimes it seems to be more trouble even than our corporeal self.  Still, it is what makes us human.  Even if we attempt to live as if we were merely animals meant for pleasure, we will never succeed.  I don’t just mean that it can’t lead to satisfaction (as the book of Ecclesiastes points out) but also that people can’t help but turn even simple ethical nihilism into some sort of weird affected ethical game.  We are human beings, we can’t help it.  As the Bl. Simone Weil said, “Man would like to be an egoist and cannot.  This is the most striking characteristic of his wretchedness and the source of his greatness.”

So if we were created good, then why are we all so royally fucked up?  (Pardon my French, but I cannot think of an equally potent and apt word to describe the human condition.)  That will be the subject of the next post in this series.

But let me just say now that for a long time the Church has over-empasized the faults of the physical world, and embraced a severely ascetic mindset.  This was wrong, as it implicitly denied (what was theoretically admitted as doctrine) that the world was created very good.  But we are now so hedonistic as a culture, even in the Church, that we are not likely to make the same mistake.  In the present day we are much more likely to fail to see the need to crucify the flesh with its desires and passions!  (Gal. 5:24) Seems like a total contradiction with what I said before, doesn’t it?  But without this you cannot be saved, so it’s a bit of a shame no one talks about it much these days, because it is an essential part of the Gospel which has the power to save you.  More on this to come.

Next in series: Flesh and Spirit II: Original Sin