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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
Strange Bedfellows
By Mark P Shea
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This Rock
Volume 5, Number 6
 June 1994 
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OKAY, gang. Game time! What do these statements have in common?
1. Jesus needed his body in order to die on the cross and rise from the dead as proof of his divinity. But once he was through using it (after the Ascension), he got rid of his body and returned to the realm of spirit.
2. Jesus' true teaching was that we can, like him, realize our spirituality, transcend this realm of matter, and create a universe of pure, ethereal spirituality. We are to overcome our humanness and become spiritual energy beings.
3. Jesus, the Word made flesh, had a sinful or fleshly nature. He had to have had one because being human means being sinful. The difference about Jesus is that he always resisted temptation and so remained sinless. That's why he's an example to us.
4. I don't believe people wrote the Bible. "Transcribed" is a much better word. God and God alone wrote Scripture. Men merely took down what he commanded.
5. God is the one who drew you to himself--you weren't drawn by the people he used as mouthpieces--so the Church doesn't really matter except as a place where we can go and meet with God in our spirits. It's just a human organization.
6. God does not use physical sacraments. He is purely spirit and works only by spiritual means. Sacraments are dead works of the outer man; only faith and spiritual communion are true reality.
7. Of course Mary was a sinner. She's human, isn't she? To say otherwise makes her equal to God.
8. God has made us valuable by giving us the only thing that gives anything worth, a spirit. Scientifically speaking, our bodies are just finely-tuned bags of genetic chemicals and are as disposable as toenail clippings. That's why we don't hold funerals for amputated limbs. To God only spirit is important--or do you think Jesus died for DNA?
9. These environmentalist nature lovers are nuts! God doesn't give a rip about rocks, trees, and fish. Did God send his only Son to redeem things? Heaven and earth will pass away, and only the spiritual will remain.
If you guessed that all these statements came from the mouth of the same person, you're wrong. The most striking thing is that these statements (which are accurate paraphrases of comments I've heard with my own ears) were spoken by people who would be horrified at being identified with each other.
The first statement comes from a Bible study given by my old charismatic non-denominational pastor.
The second is a comment by a warm and fuzzy devotee of the New Age who seeks "spirituality" in "astrology, energy, and the Christ" and who wants nothing to do with "born-again types."
The third is from a thoroughly devout "born-again" Christian who wants nothing to do with New Agers.
The fourth is from an anti-Catholic arguing that humans had nothing to do with the writing of Scripture.
The fifth is from another anti-Catholic arguing that the Church has nothing to do with salvation.
The sixth is a standard complaint against Catholic Eucharistic belief often spoken in my old church.
The seventh was made by a Protestant friend in the midst of a debate on the Immaculate Conception.
The eighth is the view of an Evangelical molecular biologist who argues, contrary to all the other Christians in this line-up, that a Christian pro-life position is unbiblical.
The ninth statement was asserted by a Fundamentalist acquaintance in opposition to someone's claim that Mother Earth is sacred (probably someone very like the second speaker).
Give up? The common thread of belief among these strange bedfellows, and among many more I encounter on the Internet every day, is gnosticism.
What is gnosticism? It has many attributes, but one of the chief, which we shall focus on here, is a distrust of physical creation, a tendency to say "spirit=good, matter=bad," a habit of viewing humanness as identical with sin, and thus a deep suspicion of
and a desire to downplay or overlook the Incarnation. In one way or another, every one of these quotations relies on gnostic assumptions--even while they appear to be speaking from radically different presuppositions.
Gnosticism has been around a long time. In the New Testament we find the apostles are already locked in combat with it. Gnostic tendencies in the Church at Colossae force Paul to remind his hearers that "all the fullness of the Godhead" dwells, not in some Spielbergian haze of disembodied spirituality, but "in bodily form" in Christ (Col. 2:9).
Similarly, a strong theme in John's Gospel and first letter is that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). John fairly beats this point to death in his zeal to make certain his audience understands that Jesus is really human. "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched"--this is how he describes the Word of Life (1John 1:1). In another passage he interrupts a warm and grandfatherly discourse on love to utter this thunderous warning: "Every spirit that acknowledges Jesus has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist" (1 John 4:2-3).
The Gospels (especially Luke) go out of their way to make clear to the reader that the Resurrection means that, so far from shedding his body like an old rag, Jesus took his glorified humanity with him to heaven.
So the Incarnation is not just a theological doodad for the apostles. It matters to them--a lot. But why? Primarily because it's true, and we should believe truth whether or not it has any practical benefit for us. But in addition to the raw factuality of the Incarnation, orthodox Christianity has been steadfast in pointing out that our perception of truth determines how we think and act. To see what these consequences are, let's return to the strange bedfellows. How can the Incarnation get them out of their gnostic bind?
First, it radically alters our understanding of who Jesus is. Contrary to our first and second speakers, the scriptural witness is that the Incarnation is a permanent arrangement. The Second Person of the Godhead did not zip on a temporary human skin like a wet suit; he became and remains eternally Son of Man as well as Son of God. That gives our own humanity eternal significance as well, for it shows that our bodies are not disposable Tupperware containers for some pure spirits within. Rather, we are intended to be glorified as he is glorified--in a glorious human body (Phil. 3:20-21).
This eternal significance leads to further consequences--for instance, to the fact (so shocking to adherents of total depravity) that our humanity, though fallen, is still good. The corollary to this is that sin, though normal in this life, is never natural (that is, never what God wills in creating). This is difficult for a gnostic habit of mind to comprehend. The universality of original sin has ingrained in us the assumption that humanness equals sinfulness. That is the assumption which dominates the mind of speaker three, who believes that for Jesus to be truly human, he must have a sinful nature.
But the Incarnation (and, in particular, the Resurrection) denies this assumption. To be sure, Jesus is the Word made flesh, as speaker three observes. But "flesh" in English and Greek has different meanings depending on context. It sometimes means merely "the body" and is morally neutral, or it can mean "the selfish will." The irony is that the latter usage of "flesh" refers to a spiritual reality and is no comment at all on the supposed intrinsic evil of the body.
Why does this matter? Because Jesus, contrary to speaker three, has no sin in him. This is different from saying he did not succumb to his sinful nature and did not engage in sin. It is to say instead that Jesus has no fallen nature a
t all. He has a perfect human nature in union with and in submission to his divine nature. In a mysterious way, these two natures unite to comprise the one person of Jesus of Nazareth, the God-Man.
This Man, by virtue of his perfection, demonstrates something important and hope-filled for sinners. He shows that sin, though pervasive as death, can be eradicated from the human person without obliterating that person's humanity. The Incarnation is the proof that sin, so far from being the essence of humanness, is precisely the thing that destroys humanness. In contrast, it is the divine life which perfects our human nature and rids it of the plague of sin.
How does this affect us in real life? Well, for starters, it gives a radically different view of how we ought to approach our own attempts at holiness and love. If we begin with the view that humanness equals sinfulness, it should not be surprising if we immediately conclude that redemption means the destruction of humanness by grace.
As an unwitting gnostic Christian once said to me, "Redemption from sin is really an annihilation of our humanity. That's the whole point, isn't it?" No. It is emphatically not the point. But it is the belief of many well-meaning Christians and adherents of "spirituality." It can have disastrous results not only in our lives, but in the lives of those over whom we exercise power.
A belief that redemption means the annihilation of our humanity can and does lead to some astonishing cruelties (inflicted "to free us from the old, fleshly man"). It leads to the neurotic belief that "if I like it and I'm good at it, it must be sin." It leads people to regard God's love as indistinguishable from a desire to destroy them (for their own good, of course). It leads to child abuse by parents who believe it their duty to quash their child's God-given personality as "natural" and therefore identical with the "old man."
In response the Catholic depositum fidei replies (with a blow on the table), "Redemption is not the annihilation of our humanity!" It is sin that annihilates our humanity. Redemption is the repair and glorification of that sin-damaged nature. That is what Irenaeus was getting at when he said, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." The human person is intended not for annihilation, but for participation in the divine life and exaltation to glory next to the Risen Christ.
This mention of the deposit of faith brings us to another effect of gnosticism: It causes many who do believe in the Incarnation to relegate it to the long ago and the far away. For many Christians the Incarnation is just an event in Bethlehem isolated from us by 2,000 years of history. That was then. This is now.
But for Scripture and Catholic Tradition, the Incarnation is a permanent, living reality which begins in Christ and is extended through his one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. That is why the Church is called the Body of Christ. The Incarnation continues through his people, through their Spirit-guided words and sacraments, and through their work of worship in the world.
To this reality speakers four and five are curiously blind (at least when they are arguing against the Catholic Church). Pitting Creator against creation, speaker four assumes that the inspiration of Scripture necessarily means humans could have nothing to do with its composition. The writers were just human dictaphones, and thus the Church's claim of authorship and right to interpret is null.
Ditto the entire process of salvation and the body of Christ for speaker five. God's love is not expressed through the creation, but is always independent of and in spite of the creation. The Incarnation means precisely nothing, and there is no such thing as sacramentality. What matters is not the Word-made-flesh or the flesh-and-blood body of Christ. These are mere preludes to the "real" gospel, the great abstract, disembodied concepts of justification by faith or predestination that can be embraced "spiritually" by us as atomized individuals. As the Church is not needed for the creation of Scripture, so it is not needed for "my walk with the Lord."
In contrast, the biblical writers themselves look not primarily to Scripture, but to the extension of the Incarnation called the Church as the source of truth. Indeed, Paul calls the Church (not Scripture) the "pillar and foundation of the Truth" (1 Tim. 3:15), commands that we hold fast to all its traditions, not just the written ones (2 Thess. 2:15), and states that through the Church and not Scripture the "manifold wisdom of God should be made known" (Eph. 3:10).
Thus the logic of the Incarnation is that the Word-made-flesh raises other human flesh (known as the Church) to participate in his life. This Church, in turn, produces a Scripture which partakes of the Incarnation in its own way. Like Jesus, who is one hundred percent human and one hundred percent divine, so Scripture is one hundred percent human and one hundred percent divine. Similarly, the saving work of Christ is entirely his and entirely the Church's to do (Phil. 2:12-13), for the Church is an enormous sacrament and is destined to share perfectly in him.
This fear of Incarnation and of its corollary, sacramentality, is nowhere more keenly felt than in the distrust many Protestants feel for Catholic adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. They think adoration of the Eucharist is idolatry since the Eucharist "is just a piece of bread baked by human hands." Likewise, an ancient Jew regarded adoration of a certain Galilean carpenter as idolatry since "he is just a man whose father and mother we know."
The solution to both riddles is the Incarnation. The Catholic, taking Jesus' words literally, believes not only that "I and the Father are one," but also that "this is my body." He says, "If God can become incarnate in the physical body of Christ, why not also under the appearance of bread and wine?" This is exactly what the apostles taught happens at Mass (1 Cor. 10:16, 11:27).
Catholic teaching is that God is incarnational and we are intended to be participants in that Incarnation. We have been given a little sample of what awaits mere mortals who say yes to participating in this incarnational gift of grace, and that little sample is known as the Blessed Virgin Mary, the first person to say of the Incarnation, "Be it done unto me according to thy word."
Here we run into speaker seven's fear that Mary's sinlessness makes her equal to God. But the Church claims no such thing. It maintains that, since, as the Incarnation demonstrates, sin is not essential to our humanity, it is possible that God could preserve Mary from sin at the moment of conception. In short, the Church teaches that Mary is the first (but by no means the last!) recipient of the saving work of Christ.
Thus speaker seven (who, like speaker three equates sinfulness with humanness) must sooner or later confront the fact that what happened to Mary here on earth is exactly what will happen to us if we reach heaven. If Mary "can't be sinless because she's human," then neither can the saints in glory. The gnostic speaker must picture heaven as something more like Nirvana than the glory Christ promises, since for gnostics redemption means annihilation. Perhaps getting used to millions upon millions of sinless humans will be the first stage of purgatory for folks like this.
If not, then getting used to the idea of God muddying himself with matter surely will. Speaker eight is so turned off by the idea that he regards it as a crushing dismissal to pro-life Christians to ask, "Did Jesus die for DNA?" The assumption for him, as for the various Christians quoted above (all ardently pro-life), is that God doesn't give a rip about DNA molecules, tissue, or matter in general.
Instead, God "transfers worth" at some mysterious point by breathing "valuable" spirit into a substrate of "valueless" matter. What matters to God is the spirit. The body, says speaker eight, is a "finely-tuned bag of genetic chemicals and are as disposable as to
enail clippings." Since Scripture says nothing about when this alleged transfer happens, we know nothing about when human life begins and cannot claim that human beings are sacred from the moment of conception.
The curious thing is that many non-sacramental pro-life Christians find speaker eight infuriatingly unanswerable because they share his gnostic assumptions about spirit versus matter but have never followed their own logic to its conclusions. For the Catholic tradition, speaker eight poses no great menace because that tradition knows it is the assumptions themselves which are false in light of the Incarnation.
Strange to say, God does care about DNA molecules--and all the rest of his creation, both human and non-human. His grace is expressed first in the creation of a non-human nature, which he declares not "valueless" but "good." This grace is further manifested by his loving (according to their proper station) each creature his hands have made in a great web of sacredness.
His creation of the human person takes place by raising nature, in the form of DNA molecules, protein, and whatnot, to participate in human life. Grace does not ignore, supplant, or destroy nature, but perfects it. At the crown of this process of raising and glorifying nature, the Son of God becomes human--as the Athanasian Creed says, "not by the conversion of the Godhood into flesh, but by the raising of the manhood into God."
God's concern then is for the total human person, right down to our DNA, for he came to us in a created human body made of the same primordial goop as the rest of us. Human nature--all of it--is now united with him.
And not just human nature. Paul says of the Incarnate One that he is the first-born, not merely of the dead or of the Church or even of all humanity, but the first-born "over all creation" (Col. 1:15). "God was pleased to have his fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things" (Col. 1:19-20). The phrase "all things" comes from Greek words meaning, well, "all things"--the whole kahuna, everything that is, not just airy-fairy ethereal spirits.
Speaker nine is radically mistaken, therefore, when, like speaker eight, he assumes that God cares nothing for the non-human creation and plans to dispose of it like an old stage set as soon the truly spiritual show is over. On the contrary, Scripture is replete with insistence that all creation will be redeemed and healed of the damage wrought by the sin of humans and of fallen angelic spirits. That is why Paul writes, "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom of the children of God" (Rom. 8:19-21). God intends the Resurrection as a first fruit not merely of our redemption, but of the redeemed "new heavens and new earth" (Rev. 21:1).
The Incarnation causes us to see Jesus, ourselves, our neighbor, our Church, and our world in the light of the Word made flesh. It frees us from the crippling and false divisions of gnosticism by uniting grace and nature, matter and spirit, humanity and God. It frees us to celebrate the truth of God's love for his whole creation, not as some pantheistic soup in which "all is God," but as a loving union between really distinct creatures (among whom we alone are called the "image of God" [Gen. 1:26-27]) and a loving Creator.
The Incarnation frees us to participate in that love in neighbor, word, and sacrament. It gives us hope by illumining just how good creation is and just how big God's plans for it are. And it jolts us with the delightful surprise of a revelation which is wholly unexpected (we thought it should be more "spiritual") yet strangely congruent with what we always deeply desired,
a universe in which all the beauties of earth are transfigured and given back to us in Heaven. Were it not for this gift of the Incarnation, we would have slumbered endlessly in the comfortable stupor of disembodied "higher spirituality." Only the incarnate Lord could raise us from this gnostic bed and say to us, "Behold my hands and my feet."
Mark P. Shea is the author of This Is My Body. He resides in Mountlake Terrace, Washington.
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