Body & Soul

My friend Chris Lee, who wrote something I posted here before, had a Facebook status about how sex and fighting (he's an MMA fighter) were spiritually renewing. I personally have a similar response to my dancing (I take dance classes with my wife) and of course to sex too. This experience should not surprise anyone grounded in the Bible in the slightest.

The Biblical religion is unusual among the great rational religions of the world in that it affirms the goodness and indeed holiness of the physical. All God creates in Genesis is pronounced 'good' and through most of Hebrew history the idea of some kind of dichotomy of body and soul is all but unheard of. So grounded were the Hebrews and later the Jews in the physical and it's holiness, that the first ideas of the afterlife were all about resurrection of the dead, which is unusual in the annals of  eschatological history. The Jews could not even conceive of a disembodied soul. The soul and the body for the Jews, were a unity.

Now, I don't think the disembodied soul idea is without merit or truth behind it, but focus on heaven and on escape from the physical is a terrible infection in modern Christianity, something it picked up from the Greek side of its heritage. The truth is the complete de-valuation of the physical is a heresy called gnosticism, and it is this rejection of the goodness of physicality that makes me, in the final analysis, see gnosticism as untenable (though some aspects of it I agree with).

God is discovered in human experience, both spiritual AND physical. Anyone who has not had a transcendent encounter through physical activity and indeed through the physical union of physical intimacy has a spiritual blind spot. It is not by chance that the word used for unity with God in the Bible, ineffectually translated as 'knowing' also has a sexual connotation. Now there can be no doubt that the spiritual dimension in these physical experiences can be exploited and misused, but in fact all the transcendent experiences I write about are necessarily dangerous, capable of being corrupted by sin in terrible ways (more fodder for future blog posts...the danger of mundane religious experiences). But one turns away from them as genuine routes to divine contact at one's peril.

In the end, I remain a hedonist. It is the one thread that binds my life together. The miracle of Biblical religion is the conviction is that God, who is beyond our experience, chooses to reveal Himself in and through our experiences. And He impinges at every point in every positive encounter with the world. Sex and physical exercise being two prime examples.