Life....
It's all about context - life that is.
C S Lewis once observed that the native woman, almost naked upon a south sea island was just as modest in her culture (if not more so) as the Victorian woman dressed in multiple layers that hid her body.
What is good in life is not often defined by 'externals' (Jesus spoke about how it's not what we take into ourselves which makes us wicked, but what comes from inside us) - it's really all about relating to ourselves and the world in a worthwhile, valuable way - life defined by love.
I spend a great deal of my time these days prepping and displaying images, and I've come to learn just how bare a picture can appear when it's not properly framed and mounted (there are times, of course, when it's good to have something that stark, but I've learned that it pays to be discerning about where and when). It's really the same regarding much of the material I've included on these pages. Take my photography or naturism, for example, and detach these from the context of a Creational world view, and they quickly become something just to shoot 'moral' holes in (I'm sure there's some who are doing that anyway!) - but for me, on these issues, the framework is just as important as the content.
Christianity states that God designed the material world as something inherently good (- it's been tainted by our disobedience, but redemption is the purpose being employed through Christ to rectify this). This means that the world we inhabit now, the life we live now, has an eternal value, so we need to engage with life on that basis. "Redeeming the Times"; investing this life with true value, means that we are, in a very real sense, 'redeeming' or reforming the natural by engaging with life in a way which seeks to express and exemplify God's love for the world. We are, writes Paul, to be those who provide a savour or fragrance of Christ to people, showing the integrity of our faith by the way our lives 'speak' of Christ (2 Corinthians 2:15-17).
With that in in mind, then, I've placed below a study I've made on the value of this framework - of God, through the coming of Christ, at work to reconcile this world to Himself.
It is a controversial piece, as it seeks to re-affirm an understanding of the immediacy of this truth so often negated by the majority of supposedly 'spiritual' christianity.
Some may find it challenging (a little hard to get through in places), but please persevere, and if you have questions, then please feel free to write and ask - I'm not saying I have the answers, but corresponding may help us both!
Others may want to dismiss what I'm advocating - for both religious and non religious reasons.
All I'd say here is that the general tenor of what's written here has not been arrived at quickly - or comfortably!
My understanding and relationship to this framework has been (and continues to be) derived over many years of thought, study and living, so don't expect to 'arrive' and be settled with everything here - or on this site - at first view. If you do want to discuss anything here, then please get in touch.
Finally, a word of thanks.
Like the traveller in Pilgrim's Progress, there have been many who have helped me on the way,
but five friends here are worthy of mention -
Irenaeus of Lyons. Your 'Against Heresies' rightly aids us still, after almost 2000 years.
Martin Luther. We sorely need to be reminded of the power and the freedom the Gospel, found in your work.
Albert Wolters. Many thanks for showing the marriage between Creation and Redemption.
Paul & Liz Blackham. The 'bread' we have broken in table talk is the sustaining substance of what we confess.
On Holy Ground
The Redemptive Ramifications of Embodiment Theology
By Howard Nowlan
It is Sunday, and the communion service is about to begin.
On a table in front of the congregation, the ‘offertory’ – the small flasks of wine and loaves of bread, brought by all of those attending – is spread out, as the minister leads the company in prayer and worship. Those present give great significance to this provision of the bread and wine by each member of the body. They believe that it is a very real form of the church offering itself to God, as together its members present to him the fruits of creation – not merely grapes and grain, but creation worked by human hands to speak of something profound – the very bread of heaven.
The description above of part of a typical 2nd century understanding of the communion service (Needham-Ch 3), touches upon something key concerning an essential theme of the theology of the early church – an understanding all but lost to the Christian of today.
As believers in those early times gathered to celebrate ‘the mysteries’ of the faith, they recognized an ‘Incarnational, Soteriological and Eschatological’ (Gunton: Lecture on ‘The Holy Spirit and Creation’) focal point in the meal which spoke of God's reconciling work between heaven and earth. “As Jesus Christ our Saviour became flesh by the Word of God to save us, so the food which is blessed by the word of prayer, handed down to us by Christ, by which our flesh is nourished, is the flesh and blood of the same Jesus who became flesh” (Justin: 1st Apology). Participation in the sacraments, then, was a fundamental part of a faith in which the early church sought to convey the profound nature of God’s work of reconciling the world to Himself through Christ (2 Corinthians 5:19), a form of worship which offered up “both the church and the created order” to its creator and redeemer (Irenaeus: Against heresies). It is this life, evidenced in the understanding of Koinonia (Elert: Eucharist & Fellowship), that was imperative to the very nature of Christian theology, for Christianity is inherently a framework of belief and practice made tenable by the very tangibility of the truth it proclaims.
If we examine the form and content of many of the later creeds and confessions, often viewed as cardinal in mainstream belief today, we could easily be mistaken into thinking that the understanding outlined above was something quirk-ish; a marginal attitude towards the faith and not the essential teaching just described. What we have to recognize, however, is that this modernal approach follows in the wake of both Hellenistic (Epicurean and Aristotelian) and Humanistic incorporation into ancient, reformed and modern ‘christian’ teaching (Wiker: Modern Darwinism) – each ‘leavening’ progressively wrenching Christian spirituality from its genuine understanding of such matters and marginalizing theology in a siding tagged by Gnostic dualism (Ellul: Subversion of Christianity). “In many contemporary reformed & evangelical circles, (classical) forms for Baptism and the Lords Supper were viewed as too high in their sacramental theology, so (some) felt compelled to counter such a strong emphasis. In this way the sacraments (& embodiment theology in general) die the death of a thousand qualifications” (Horton: Mysteries of God).
The cost to the Christian community is extremely high. The scriptures open by revealing creation – the material order – as the handiwork of God, and therefore as something created as good (Genesis 1:31) – a state renewed and perfected by the redemptive work of Jesus Christ (Romans 8:21). The Christian community are those who partake of the ‘first fruits’ of this coming kingdom (Romans 8:23). By participation “in Christ’s reconciling work, (we) participate in the new creation – 2 Corinthians 5:17” (Riddlebarger: Case for Amillenialism). It is this divine ‘invasion’ of a world corrupted by sin, fully realized in Christ’s Incarnation, life, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension, that is responsible for our coming to understand that “God is unconditionally Lord of the world, of life, and of history”. Thus we are able to engage in daily tasks in the confidence that they hold worth (Gunton: Christian Faith). The pearl of redemptive truth, then, of an immanent God (John 16:7-9, 13) is often obscured amongst Christians today because “the theme of the (God given) goodness and permanence of the world is usually neglected” (Marshall: Heaven is not my home). The very manner of thinking concerning creation that was plain to the early Judaeo-Christian understanding, outlined in our opening, is inherently alien to most church teaching and practice today.
To re-gain what has been lost, we must delve beneath the waste and spoil that ‘captivating philosophy’ (Colossians 2:8) has disposed upon the faith to drink afresh from the clear waters provided to satiate our deepest thirst (Revelation 22:17).
Handling the Word of Life
The pivotal moment in the history of our world is the resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:17-20). Here we see that God has not only destroyed the power of sin and death through the work of His Son (1 Corinthians 15:56,57), but we open the underlying truth concerning God’s work within the created order – the deliverance and vindication of creation itself. Through the ‘fullness of God’ embodied in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, God was pleased to reconcile all things in heaven and earth to Himself (Colossians 1:19). The original character and intent for creation, marred by the fall, is now regained and will be revealed at the final day when Christ returns. “The horizon of creation is at the same time the horizon of sin and of salvation. To conceive of any of these states as encompassing less than the whole (the entire creation) is to compromise the biblical teaching concerning both the radical nature of the fall and the cosmic scope of redemption” (Wolters: Creation Regained).
In His being raised from death, the body of Jesus is clothed in immortality – death no longer having dominion over Him (Romans 6:9). This triumphant moment becomes the fulfilment of the promises provided since Eden and the lively confidence of all who share faith in God’s work to overcome the present futility. By this work, the body once again becomes owned by its creator (2 Corinthians 6:16); a vessel not to be ascetically eschewed or immorally squandered, but as the residence of God’s Holy Spirit, a temple in which the physical, sexual and sensual qualities of a person can again become viable through being tempered by the abundant life from Christ (Philippians 4:8). “To express the experience of creation in thanksgiving and praise is (our) designation from the very beginning, and it is also the content of life in its consummated form…to understand and apprehend the world as a communication of God’s fellowship” (Moltmann: God & Creation).
It is as the body of Christ – the members of God’s ecclesia upon earth – embrace and employ the all encompassing ramifications of these truths (as defined by Apostolic doctrine amidst the epistles), that the life of heaven is ‘embodied’ in the physical communion of God’s family (Romans 12:4-8). These outward activities will be accompanied by the inward ‘fruits’ of God’s justifying grace (Galatians 5:22-24), transforming the natural (Romans 8:9) into the coming inheritance of Christ and His bride by the work of His Spirit (vs. 19-25). The conflict for the Christian is the life lived between the two realms – the present, where the realities of sin, decay and death press upon us, and the future, when the agony of creation bound by such chains is no more. “To be delivered from the body of death means that the body which is now one of death might become a body of life – that is the conclusion of the struggle” (Luther: Commentary on Romans).
Through the great salvation brought about in the redemptive sacrifice and suffering of Christ, the present ‘groaning’ of all of creation is drawn into the eternal purposes of God, ‘eagerly awaiting’, as Paul writes, the proper revelation of God’s children. In His triumph through the cross, the Lord renews the relationship between Himself and His handiwork. This work of reconciliation re-establishes the relational (covenantal) structure that is at the very heart of the universe, removing the corruption of the fall. The community of redeemed humanity, adhering to a life cradled by this Gospel, provides the relational (social/ethical) context that reverses the alienation inherited by mans rebellion (Ephesians 2: 14, 22). Thus, true life should be ‘tasted’ by God’s people in this present world (John 10:10). The problems arise when aspects of this theology are effectively negated or misconstrued in teaching and practice, demeaning the true scope and ramifications of Christ’s work in our world.
The Heart of the Matter
The truths we have outlined grant us to gaze into the proper employ of this living faith; that of the Word and of its adherents casting light upon “God’s creating and saving love” (Gunton: Christian faith). How we therefore seek to understand and implement this truth is crucial, not only to ourselves, but to the defining of the very nature of Christian faith and practice and equally in defining its relationship to our fallen world. The revelation of the Word on earth - both in the Incarnation (John 1:1-4, 14) and through God’s redeemed people (Hebrews 2:3, 12:1, 23) –reveals within creation itself the inauguration of the coming of the new order of completion to earth. If we mutilate the purity and richness of this revelation by how we teach and live, we have surely undermined the goodness of that manna which has come down to us from God Himself.
That such attempts have been made from the very first days when the Apostles taught is clear from the testimony of scripture (1 John 4:1-3). Gnosticism, the great enemy of the faith, has sought to first encroach upon and then remove the testimony of the goodness of the creation by seeking to propagate the belief that God has rejected the material in favour for the ‘purity’ of the spiritual – a realm totally detached from the ‘evil’ of the physical order. This basic concept, derived from earlier Greek and Pagan notions, was to influence an array of religious and cultural ideas. These included the rationalism inherent in our modernal Western perspective, thereby ‘emptying’ creation of God’s inherent activity in the process. First to embrace such thinking was several of the church fathers, but these would be followed by many scholastic theologians, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant.
The Great Conflict
The watershed that changed the direction and content of Christian doctrine came early in the second century. Irenaeus, a theologian taught by men who were the disciples of the Apostles, contended against the mutative effects of Gnosticism, already at work undermining Christian truth. He argued that nothing that has been made is unrelated to God (Psalm 24:1), who holds, sustains and works through all things by His Word (Colossians 1:17). He also argued that these things were so purely by God’s will – that the material is pleasing to the Almighty, and that redemption – God reconciling the world through the revelation of Christ in the flesh - secures the removal of evil (that which is alien to God’s work) from the created order. By this astonishing revelation, then, the Lord has not only rescued the material world from its present estate, but has made Himself known by becoming part of this order – the great ‘mystery’ of Godliness (1 Timothy 3:16). This embodiment not only re-affirms, but also re-establishes the purposes of God amongst the things that are made – providing the means whereby creation will finally reflect the beauty, harmony and perfection that He wills. It was this truth, of the union of will within the Trinity’s creative & redemptive acts, that has been so savaged and rent asunder by the poison of Gnostic attitudes and dicta, stirred into Christian teaching.
The Apostolic understanding of the Gospel, so well defended by Irenaeus, produced an entirely distinct individual, social and moral identity to the Hellenic suppositions inherent in the culture of the day. It demonstrably revealed the crucial distinctions between the Hebrew/Christian affirmations concerning the inherent goodness of life in the body on the one side, and the Grecian/Roman tendency to denigrate life to the finite on the other. The might of the true faith enabled the followers of Jesus to both refute and resist unto death the pluralistic syncretism of the age, but this would not be the battle that would sorely wound the church. The demeaning of truth occurs when the foul notions of dualistic philosophy choke Christianity’s fundamental attitude to the essential truths that we have outlined, replacing these with a ‘spiritual’ detachment from creation and God’s explicit redemptive work. The ‘inferior’ understanding of redemption as something encompassing the physical is subtlety displaced by the more ‘proper’ view of God being concerned with the saving of the soul, with rationality (knowledge or ‘gnosis,’ conveyed to the mind or intellect) being the cardinal channel for such a hope. That such inroads occurred quite early can be seen in the ambiguities that begin to appear in theological writings that proceed from these Gnostic incursions, certainly from the fourth century onwards.
It is the sheer depth – the comprehensive acceptance – of such anti Christian tenants, which is the real shock.
The Downward Spiral
The key theological conflicts of the early centuries of the church were focused upon the issue of the nature of God (the Trinity) and the revelation of that nature through the person of Jesus Christ. The various creeds from this period (Nicene, Chalcedon, and Athanasian) have become renown for their defence of the orthodox understanding on these matters, but what is less realized is that amidst this same period, the first significant steps are taken in Christian theology that divorces the proper creation-redemptive emphasis of scripture. Whilst God is still viewed as the Creator, redemption itself becomes narrowed to the salvation of the human soul – the reason Christ came being to redeem ‘the rational race’ (Athanasius: Contra Gentes). As Christianity began to emerge from persecution into acceptance in the Roman world, so its teaching through many of the Cappadocian Fathers, and Augustine himself, accommodated particular Neoplatonic assumptions regarding the nature of matter. These related to the physical body and to negating ‘non rational’ (i.e. total redemption) belief. Basil of Caesarea, for example, advocates the same distinction between matter and (divine) form as expounded by Platonic and Aristotelian teaching (De Spiritu Sancto), and Gregory of Nazianzus’ account of creation follows suit (De Anima et Resurrectione). This established the Platonic view that God can be known logically from the order within creation (perceived rationally), thus revelation was not required. Only those ‘states’, the ‘forms’ of being, that are closest to God – the angelic, or the enlightened human mind (soul), however, are capable of encountering such truth. There were a few theologians – John of Damascus and Cyril of Alexandria – who recognized the appalling mistake inherent in this approach, but their voices were almost ignored amidst the march to merge the leaven of the Greeks with the community of established Christendom.
Once the essential aspects of Gnostic belief were transposed to a Christian framework, it was not long before the entire weave of Biblical testimony underwent the same process of ‘correction’ as begun in the works of Athanasius and Gregory. Adam soon became an intelligibly weak creature (due to the material combination of body & spirit), thus the purpose of the incarnation is to do no more than to restore the human soul from the scourge of such embodiment. The great error within the universe, then, is not the fall of humanity – we could not really do otherwise, given our wretched estate, but the entire work of the introduction of matter, tainting the purity of form and thought that had existed, prior to such creation.
With the adoption of such attitudes, Christianity began a discernible slide away from its creation/body-affirming perception of its early days (so clearly evidenced, for example, in its teaching and practice regarding baptism – Beasley Murray: Baptism in the New Testament) to an ascetic stance toward community (i.e. Marriage and living in society) and culture (severance from the world). If God was no longer taught to be at work in the world, redeeming not only the soul, but also creation in general, then there was no longer any need to really associate or inter-act with such things (indeed, to do so would be seen as a sure sign of corruption). The effects of this deceit were miserable, severing God by the very teaching of the church from the world that He had made and come to save. Outside of the mind attuned to the divine, it was taught, creation became null and void, almost arbitrary in its beginning, continuance and end. Augustine’s seeking to refute Gnosticism, for example, not by showing the inherent relationship between creation’s existence and the shaping of this by the Word (a weak field in his theological thinking), but by discussing human freedom as the origin of evil in the world, paved the way for the medieval philosophical ‘evacuation’ of the concepts of order and truth conveyed by means of the external world (i.e. revelation). This allowed a re-inventing of the natural order beneath the plumb line of human wants and needs. The process devised here, of observable and repeatable ‘checks and balances’, permeating all schools of theological, philosophical and humanistic scholasticism, became the bedrock of learning in both the Renaissance and later, the Enlightenment. Equally, the basis for the scientific definition of the cosmos stems from such an understanding – a universe in which the actions of the divine became more and more remote (and inherently irrelevant) and the ‘progress’ and discoveries of man more and more central.
The rationalistic tenants that had been employed by earlier theologians were equally embraced by the majority of church leaders during the Reformation. Whilst traditional scholasticism was refuted widely, the context and objectives of reform were very different both in substance and goal between Wittenberg and Zurich. “Zwingli began by opposing the life and morals of the Zurich church; Luther began by opposing (the very) form of (contemporary) theology…Luther’s concern with doctrine as such finds no echo in humanism or the early Swiss Reformation” (Mc Grath: Reformation Thought). As with Zwingli, John Calvin also sought to follow through in asserting the nominalistic assumptions employed by earlier thinkers, dividing the redemption of the chosen from the judgement of the rest of creation, for “only in the souls of the elect does there remain an unambiguous reflection of the divine light” seen at the first in creation (Institutes II, 2.19). Creation, according to Calvin, even before its fall, had no inherent goodness, for its purpose was to witness to God’s saving power for the elect, the souls of whom it exists to serve (Institutes I, 14.2). The entire emphasis generated by such ‘Reformed’ theology, provided a focus and outworking very different from that known in the early church. Whilst all the Reformers confessed a faith in the renewal of creation, the encompassing theology known by teachers like Ireneaus was effectively eclipsed in both ‘early’ and ‘modern’ permutations and adoptions of Gnostic ideas, which focused primarily upon the saving/enlightenment of the individual soul, by a truth conveyed to the mind. The true impact of this approach was to yoke a pragmatic, utilitarian theology to the awakening zest and vitality of the new humanism, driving the West toward the essentially nihilistic enthronement of the rational in the Enlightenment.
Grafted to the roots
The first Christian teachers sought to follow the orthodoxy of their mentors – the Apostles – and declare with clarity and polemic conviction the Creative/Redemptive theology of both Old and New Testaments, declaring that the very world we know is at the heart of the Lord’s purposes, both in history, in the present and in the future (Psalm 93:1). This witness, however, was to fall prey to the corrosive Hellenisation of Christian assumptions by the gradual and continual adoption of Platonic, Aristotelian and Epicurean notions into mainstream teaching, distancing the faith from its true purpose – to act as agent of the ministry of Christ’s reconciling work to the world. It is by means of the Redemptive work that God has achieved through His Son, that not only the human race, but the entire created order, blessed by God’s ‘inhabiting’ on the seventh day, has "been moved into a new position…changed universally and forever” (Gunton: The Christian Faith). It is only as the church of today is re-orientated to this genuine faith, acclimatizing to its true parameters and ramifications, that the proper focus of our work – towards the actual telos of the ages (Ephesians 1:10) can be regained.
“The dualistic outlook has resurfaced throughout church history, in the form often called neo-Platonism… The Reformation, in many ways, was a reaction against (dualism)…but later evangelicalism became increasingly dualistic, focusing upon the inward rather than the historical Christ… God has created us, given us purpose and provided means for taking pleasure in all things He created, reflecting on His goodness. In redemption, God has in mind not only the souls, but the bodies also, and in fact, the entire created order”.
Michael Horton: The shaping of modern Evangelicalism.
Book List:
N R Needham 2000 Years of Christ’s Power Grace Publications
Colin Gunton The Christian Faith Blackwell Publishing
Werner Elert Eucharist & Fellowship in the first four centuries Concordia
Jacques Ellul The Subversion of Christianity Eerdmans
Michael Horton Mysteries of God & Means of Grace (Article) Modern Reformation Magazine – June 1997
Benjamin Wiker Moral Darwinism IVP
Kim Riddlebarger A Case for Amillenialism IVP
Paul Marshall Heaven is not my Home Word Publications
Albert Wolters Creation Regained Paternoster Press
Jurgen Moltmann God in Creation SCM Press
Martin Luther Commentary on Romans Kregel Publications
G Beasley-Murray Baptism in the New Testament Paternoster Press
Alister McGrath Reformation Thought Blackwell
C S Lewis once observed that the native woman, almost naked upon a south sea island was just as modest in her culture (if not more so) as the Victorian woman dressed in multiple layers that hid her body.
What is good in life is not often defined by 'externals' (Jesus spoke about how it's not what we take into ourselves which makes us wicked, but what comes from inside us) - it's really all about relating to ourselves and the world in a worthwhile, valuable way - life defined by love.
I spend a great deal of my time these days prepping and displaying images, and I've come to learn just how bare a picture can appear when it's not properly framed and mounted (there are times, of course, when it's good to have something that stark, but I've learned that it pays to be discerning about where and when). It's really the same regarding much of the material I've included on these pages. Take my photography or naturism, for example, and detach these from the context of a Creational world view, and they quickly become something just to shoot 'moral' holes in (I'm sure there's some who are doing that anyway!) - but for me, on these issues, the framework is just as important as the content.
Christianity states that God designed the material world as something inherently good (- it's been tainted by our disobedience, but redemption is the purpose being employed through Christ to rectify this). This means that the world we inhabit now, the life we live now, has an eternal value, so we need to engage with life on that basis. "Redeeming the Times"; investing this life with true value, means that we are, in a very real sense, 'redeeming' or reforming the natural by engaging with life in a way which seeks to express and exemplify God's love for the world. We are, writes Paul, to be those who provide a savour or fragrance of Christ to people, showing the integrity of our faith by the way our lives 'speak' of Christ (2 Corinthians 2:15-17).
With that in in mind, then, I've placed below a study I've made on the value of this framework - of God, through the coming of Christ, at work to reconcile this world to Himself.
It is a controversial piece, as it seeks to re-affirm an understanding of the immediacy of this truth so often negated by the majority of supposedly 'spiritual' christianity.
Some may find it challenging (a little hard to get through in places), but please persevere, and if you have questions, then please feel free to write and ask - I'm not saying I have the answers, but corresponding may help us both!
Others may want to dismiss what I'm advocating - for both religious and non religious reasons.
All I'd say here is that the general tenor of what's written here has not been arrived at quickly - or comfortably!
My understanding and relationship to this framework has been (and continues to be) derived over many years of thought, study and living, so don't expect to 'arrive' and be settled with everything here - or on this site - at first view. If you do want to discuss anything here, then please get in touch.
Finally, a word of thanks.
Like the traveller in Pilgrim's Progress, there have been many who have helped me on the way,
but five friends here are worthy of mention -
Irenaeus of Lyons. Your 'Against Heresies' rightly aids us still, after almost 2000 years.
Martin Luther. We sorely need to be reminded of the power and the freedom the Gospel, found in your work.
Albert Wolters. Many thanks for showing the marriage between Creation and Redemption.
Paul & Liz Blackham. The 'bread' we have broken in table talk is the sustaining substance of what we confess.
On Holy Ground
The Redemptive Ramifications of Embodiment Theology
By Howard Nowlan
It is Sunday, and the communion service is about to begin.
On a table in front of the congregation, the ‘offertory’ – the small flasks of wine and loaves of bread, brought by all of those attending – is spread out, as the minister leads the company in prayer and worship. Those present give great significance to this provision of the bread and wine by each member of the body. They believe that it is a very real form of the church offering itself to God, as together its members present to him the fruits of creation – not merely grapes and grain, but creation worked by human hands to speak of something profound – the very bread of heaven.
The description above of part of a typical 2nd century understanding of the communion service (Needham-Ch 3), touches upon something key concerning an essential theme of the theology of the early church – an understanding all but lost to the Christian of today.
As believers in those early times gathered to celebrate ‘the mysteries’ of the faith, they recognized an ‘Incarnational, Soteriological and Eschatological’ (Gunton: Lecture on ‘The Holy Spirit and Creation’) focal point in the meal which spoke of God's reconciling work between heaven and earth. “As Jesus Christ our Saviour became flesh by the Word of God to save us, so the food which is blessed by the word of prayer, handed down to us by Christ, by which our flesh is nourished, is the flesh and blood of the same Jesus who became flesh” (Justin: 1st Apology). Participation in the sacraments, then, was a fundamental part of a faith in which the early church sought to convey the profound nature of God’s work of reconciling the world to Himself through Christ (2 Corinthians 5:19), a form of worship which offered up “both the church and the created order” to its creator and redeemer (Irenaeus: Against heresies). It is this life, evidenced in the understanding of Koinonia (Elert: Eucharist & Fellowship), that was imperative to the very nature of Christian theology, for Christianity is inherently a framework of belief and practice made tenable by the very tangibility of the truth it proclaims.
If we examine the form and content of many of the later creeds and confessions, often viewed as cardinal in mainstream belief today, we could easily be mistaken into thinking that the understanding outlined above was something quirk-ish; a marginal attitude towards the faith and not the essential teaching just described. What we have to recognize, however, is that this modernal approach follows in the wake of both Hellenistic (Epicurean and Aristotelian) and Humanistic incorporation into ancient, reformed and modern ‘christian’ teaching (Wiker: Modern Darwinism) – each ‘leavening’ progressively wrenching Christian spirituality from its genuine understanding of such matters and marginalizing theology in a siding tagged by Gnostic dualism (Ellul: Subversion of Christianity). “In many contemporary reformed & evangelical circles, (classical) forms for Baptism and the Lords Supper were viewed as too high in their sacramental theology, so (some) felt compelled to counter such a strong emphasis. In this way the sacraments (& embodiment theology in general) die the death of a thousand qualifications” (Horton: Mysteries of God).
The cost to the Christian community is extremely high. The scriptures open by revealing creation – the material order – as the handiwork of God, and therefore as something created as good (Genesis 1:31) – a state renewed and perfected by the redemptive work of Jesus Christ (Romans 8:21). The Christian community are those who partake of the ‘first fruits’ of this coming kingdom (Romans 8:23). By participation “in Christ’s reconciling work, (we) participate in the new creation – 2 Corinthians 5:17” (Riddlebarger: Case for Amillenialism). It is this divine ‘invasion’ of a world corrupted by sin, fully realized in Christ’s Incarnation, life, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension, that is responsible for our coming to understand that “God is unconditionally Lord of the world, of life, and of history”. Thus we are able to engage in daily tasks in the confidence that they hold worth (Gunton: Christian Faith). The pearl of redemptive truth, then, of an immanent God (John 16:7-9, 13) is often obscured amongst Christians today because “the theme of the (God given) goodness and permanence of the world is usually neglected” (Marshall: Heaven is not my home). The very manner of thinking concerning creation that was plain to the early Judaeo-Christian understanding, outlined in our opening, is inherently alien to most church teaching and practice today.
To re-gain what has been lost, we must delve beneath the waste and spoil that ‘captivating philosophy’ (Colossians 2:8) has disposed upon the faith to drink afresh from the clear waters provided to satiate our deepest thirst (Revelation 22:17).
Handling the Word of Life
The pivotal moment in the history of our world is the resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:17-20). Here we see that God has not only destroyed the power of sin and death through the work of His Son (1 Corinthians 15:56,57), but we open the underlying truth concerning God’s work within the created order – the deliverance and vindication of creation itself. Through the ‘fullness of God’ embodied in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, God was pleased to reconcile all things in heaven and earth to Himself (Colossians 1:19). The original character and intent for creation, marred by the fall, is now regained and will be revealed at the final day when Christ returns. “The horizon of creation is at the same time the horizon of sin and of salvation. To conceive of any of these states as encompassing less than the whole (the entire creation) is to compromise the biblical teaching concerning both the radical nature of the fall and the cosmic scope of redemption” (Wolters: Creation Regained).
In His being raised from death, the body of Jesus is clothed in immortality – death no longer having dominion over Him (Romans 6:9). This triumphant moment becomes the fulfilment of the promises provided since Eden and the lively confidence of all who share faith in God’s work to overcome the present futility. By this work, the body once again becomes owned by its creator (2 Corinthians 6:16); a vessel not to be ascetically eschewed or immorally squandered, but as the residence of God’s Holy Spirit, a temple in which the physical, sexual and sensual qualities of a person can again become viable through being tempered by the abundant life from Christ (Philippians 4:8). “To express the experience of creation in thanksgiving and praise is (our) designation from the very beginning, and it is also the content of life in its consummated form…to understand and apprehend the world as a communication of God’s fellowship” (Moltmann: God & Creation).
It is as the body of Christ – the members of God’s ecclesia upon earth – embrace and employ the all encompassing ramifications of these truths (as defined by Apostolic doctrine amidst the epistles), that the life of heaven is ‘embodied’ in the physical communion of God’s family (Romans 12:4-8). These outward activities will be accompanied by the inward ‘fruits’ of God’s justifying grace (Galatians 5:22-24), transforming the natural (Romans 8:9) into the coming inheritance of Christ and His bride by the work of His Spirit (vs. 19-25). The conflict for the Christian is the life lived between the two realms – the present, where the realities of sin, decay and death press upon us, and the future, when the agony of creation bound by such chains is no more. “To be delivered from the body of death means that the body which is now one of death might become a body of life – that is the conclusion of the struggle” (Luther: Commentary on Romans).
Through the great salvation brought about in the redemptive sacrifice and suffering of Christ, the present ‘groaning’ of all of creation is drawn into the eternal purposes of God, ‘eagerly awaiting’, as Paul writes, the proper revelation of God’s children. In His triumph through the cross, the Lord renews the relationship between Himself and His handiwork. This work of reconciliation re-establishes the relational (covenantal) structure that is at the very heart of the universe, removing the corruption of the fall. The community of redeemed humanity, adhering to a life cradled by this Gospel, provides the relational (social/ethical) context that reverses the alienation inherited by mans rebellion (Ephesians 2: 14, 22). Thus, true life should be ‘tasted’ by God’s people in this present world (John 10:10). The problems arise when aspects of this theology are effectively negated or misconstrued in teaching and practice, demeaning the true scope and ramifications of Christ’s work in our world.
The Heart of the Matter
The truths we have outlined grant us to gaze into the proper employ of this living faith; that of the Word and of its adherents casting light upon “God’s creating and saving love” (Gunton: Christian faith). How we therefore seek to understand and implement this truth is crucial, not only to ourselves, but to the defining of the very nature of Christian faith and practice and equally in defining its relationship to our fallen world. The revelation of the Word on earth - both in the Incarnation (John 1:1-4, 14) and through God’s redeemed people (Hebrews 2:3, 12:1, 23) –reveals within creation itself the inauguration of the coming of the new order of completion to earth. If we mutilate the purity and richness of this revelation by how we teach and live, we have surely undermined the goodness of that manna which has come down to us from God Himself.
That such attempts have been made from the very first days when the Apostles taught is clear from the testimony of scripture (1 John 4:1-3). Gnosticism, the great enemy of the faith, has sought to first encroach upon and then remove the testimony of the goodness of the creation by seeking to propagate the belief that God has rejected the material in favour for the ‘purity’ of the spiritual – a realm totally detached from the ‘evil’ of the physical order. This basic concept, derived from earlier Greek and Pagan notions, was to influence an array of religious and cultural ideas. These included the rationalism inherent in our modernal Western perspective, thereby ‘emptying’ creation of God’s inherent activity in the process. First to embrace such thinking was several of the church fathers, but these would be followed by many scholastic theologians, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant.
The Great Conflict
The watershed that changed the direction and content of Christian doctrine came early in the second century. Irenaeus, a theologian taught by men who were the disciples of the Apostles, contended against the mutative effects of Gnosticism, already at work undermining Christian truth. He argued that nothing that has been made is unrelated to God (Psalm 24:1), who holds, sustains and works through all things by His Word (Colossians 1:17). He also argued that these things were so purely by God’s will – that the material is pleasing to the Almighty, and that redemption – God reconciling the world through the revelation of Christ in the flesh - secures the removal of evil (that which is alien to God’s work) from the created order. By this astonishing revelation, then, the Lord has not only rescued the material world from its present estate, but has made Himself known by becoming part of this order – the great ‘mystery’ of Godliness (1 Timothy 3:16). This embodiment not only re-affirms, but also re-establishes the purposes of God amongst the things that are made – providing the means whereby creation will finally reflect the beauty, harmony and perfection that He wills. It was this truth, of the union of will within the Trinity’s creative & redemptive acts, that has been so savaged and rent asunder by the poison of Gnostic attitudes and dicta, stirred into Christian teaching.
The Apostolic understanding of the Gospel, so well defended by Irenaeus, produced an entirely distinct individual, social and moral identity to the Hellenic suppositions inherent in the culture of the day. It demonstrably revealed the crucial distinctions between the Hebrew/Christian affirmations concerning the inherent goodness of life in the body on the one side, and the Grecian/Roman tendency to denigrate life to the finite on the other. The might of the true faith enabled the followers of Jesus to both refute and resist unto death the pluralistic syncretism of the age, but this would not be the battle that would sorely wound the church. The demeaning of truth occurs when the foul notions of dualistic philosophy choke Christianity’s fundamental attitude to the essential truths that we have outlined, replacing these with a ‘spiritual’ detachment from creation and God’s explicit redemptive work. The ‘inferior’ understanding of redemption as something encompassing the physical is subtlety displaced by the more ‘proper’ view of God being concerned with the saving of the soul, with rationality (knowledge or ‘gnosis,’ conveyed to the mind or intellect) being the cardinal channel for such a hope. That such inroads occurred quite early can be seen in the ambiguities that begin to appear in theological writings that proceed from these Gnostic incursions, certainly from the fourth century onwards.
It is the sheer depth – the comprehensive acceptance – of such anti Christian tenants, which is the real shock.
The Downward Spiral
The key theological conflicts of the early centuries of the church were focused upon the issue of the nature of God (the Trinity) and the revelation of that nature through the person of Jesus Christ. The various creeds from this period (Nicene, Chalcedon, and Athanasian) have become renown for their defence of the orthodox understanding on these matters, but what is less realized is that amidst this same period, the first significant steps are taken in Christian theology that divorces the proper creation-redemptive emphasis of scripture. Whilst God is still viewed as the Creator, redemption itself becomes narrowed to the salvation of the human soul – the reason Christ came being to redeem ‘the rational race’ (Athanasius: Contra Gentes). As Christianity began to emerge from persecution into acceptance in the Roman world, so its teaching through many of the Cappadocian Fathers, and Augustine himself, accommodated particular Neoplatonic assumptions regarding the nature of matter. These related to the physical body and to negating ‘non rational’ (i.e. total redemption) belief. Basil of Caesarea, for example, advocates the same distinction between matter and (divine) form as expounded by Platonic and Aristotelian teaching (De Spiritu Sancto), and Gregory of Nazianzus’ account of creation follows suit (De Anima et Resurrectione). This established the Platonic view that God can be known logically from the order within creation (perceived rationally), thus revelation was not required. Only those ‘states’, the ‘forms’ of being, that are closest to God – the angelic, or the enlightened human mind (soul), however, are capable of encountering such truth. There were a few theologians – John of Damascus and Cyril of Alexandria – who recognized the appalling mistake inherent in this approach, but their voices were almost ignored amidst the march to merge the leaven of the Greeks with the community of established Christendom.
Once the essential aspects of Gnostic belief were transposed to a Christian framework, it was not long before the entire weave of Biblical testimony underwent the same process of ‘correction’ as begun in the works of Athanasius and Gregory. Adam soon became an intelligibly weak creature (due to the material combination of body & spirit), thus the purpose of the incarnation is to do no more than to restore the human soul from the scourge of such embodiment. The great error within the universe, then, is not the fall of humanity – we could not really do otherwise, given our wretched estate, but the entire work of the introduction of matter, tainting the purity of form and thought that had existed, prior to such creation.
With the adoption of such attitudes, Christianity began a discernible slide away from its creation/body-affirming perception of its early days (so clearly evidenced, for example, in its teaching and practice regarding baptism – Beasley Murray: Baptism in the New Testament) to an ascetic stance toward community (i.e. Marriage and living in society) and culture (severance from the world). If God was no longer taught to be at work in the world, redeeming not only the soul, but also creation in general, then there was no longer any need to really associate or inter-act with such things (indeed, to do so would be seen as a sure sign of corruption). The effects of this deceit were miserable, severing God by the very teaching of the church from the world that He had made and come to save. Outside of the mind attuned to the divine, it was taught, creation became null and void, almost arbitrary in its beginning, continuance and end. Augustine’s seeking to refute Gnosticism, for example, not by showing the inherent relationship between creation’s existence and the shaping of this by the Word (a weak field in his theological thinking), but by discussing human freedom as the origin of evil in the world, paved the way for the medieval philosophical ‘evacuation’ of the concepts of order and truth conveyed by means of the external world (i.e. revelation). This allowed a re-inventing of the natural order beneath the plumb line of human wants and needs. The process devised here, of observable and repeatable ‘checks and balances’, permeating all schools of theological, philosophical and humanistic scholasticism, became the bedrock of learning in both the Renaissance and later, the Enlightenment. Equally, the basis for the scientific definition of the cosmos stems from such an understanding – a universe in which the actions of the divine became more and more remote (and inherently irrelevant) and the ‘progress’ and discoveries of man more and more central.
The rationalistic tenants that had been employed by earlier theologians were equally embraced by the majority of church leaders during the Reformation. Whilst traditional scholasticism was refuted widely, the context and objectives of reform were very different both in substance and goal between Wittenberg and Zurich. “Zwingli began by opposing the life and morals of the Zurich church; Luther began by opposing (the very) form of (contemporary) theology…Luther’s concern with doctrine as such finds no echo in humanism or the early Swiss Reformation” (Mc Grath: Reformation Thought). As with Zwingli, John Calvin also sought to follow through in asserting the nominalistic assumptions employed by earlier thinkers, dividing the redemption of the chosen from the judgement of the rest of creation, for “only in the souls of the elect does there remain an unambiguous reflection of the divine light” seen at the first in creation (Institutes II, 2.19). Creation, according to Calvin, even before its fall, had no inherent goodness, for its purpose was to witness to God’s saving power for the elect, the souls of whom it exists to serve (Institutes I, 14.2). The entire emphasis generated by such ‘Reformed’ theology, provided a focus and outworking very different from that known in the early church. Whilst all the Reformers confessed a faith in the renewal of creation, the encompassing theology known by teachers like Ireneaus was effectively eclipsed in both ‘early’ and ‘modern’ permutations and adoptions of Gnostic ideas, which focused primarily upon the saving/enlightenment of the individual soul, by a truth conveyed to the mind. The true impact of this approach was to yoke a pragmatic, utilitarian theology to the awakening zest and vitality of the new humanism, driving the West toward the essentially nihilistic enthronement of the rational in the Enlightenment.
Grafted to the roots
The first Christian teachers sought to follow the orthodoxy of their mentors – the Apostles – and declare with clarity and polemic conviction the Creative/Redemptive theology of both Old and New Testaments, declaring that the very world we know is at the heart of the Lord’s purposes, both in history, in the present and in the future (Psalm 93:1). This witness, however, was to fall prey to the corrosive Hellenisation of Christian assumptions by the gradual and continual adoption of Platonic, Aristotelian and Epicurean notions into mainstream teaching, distancing the faith from its true purpose – to act as agent of the ministry of Christ’s reconciling work to the world. It is by means of the Redemptive work that God has achieved through His Son, that not only the human race, but the entire created order, blessed by God’s ‘inhabiting’ on the seventh day, has "been moved into a new position…changed universally and forever” (Gunton: The Christian Faith). It is only as the church of today is re-orientated to this genuine faith, acclimatizing to its true parameters and ramifications, that the proper focus of our work – towards the actual telos of the ages (Ephesians 1:10) can be regained.
“The dualistic outlook has resurfaced throughout church history, in the form often called neo-Platonism… The Reformation, in many ways, was a reaction against (dualism)…but later evangelicalism became increasingly dualistic, focusing upon the inward rather than the historical Christ… God has created us, given us purpose and provided means for taking pleasure in all things He created, reflecting on His goodness. In redemption, God has in mind not only the souls, but the bodies also, and in fact, the entire created order”.
Michael Horton: The shaping of modern Evangelicalism.
Book List:
N R Needham 2000 Years of Christ’s Power Grace Publications
Colin Gunton The Christian Faith Blackwell Publishing
Werner Elert Eucharist & Fellowship in the first four centuries Concordia
Jacques Ellul The Subversion of Christianity Eerdmans
Michael Horton Mysteries of God & Means of Grace (Article) Modern Reformation Magazine – June 1997
Benjamin Wiker Moral Darwinism IVP
Kim Riddlebarger A Case for Amillenialism IVP
Paul Marshall Heaven is not my Home Word Publications
Albert Wolters Creation Regained Paternoster Press
Jurgen Moltmann God in Creation SCM Press
Martin Luther Commentary on Romans Kregel Publications
G Beasley-Murray Baptism in the New Testament Paternoster Press
Alister McGrath Reformation Thought Blackwell