Paul’s gnosticism

I am currently reading through Romans with a friend at college, and we are up to Romans 7.   One of the things we mentioned was how easy it is to mis-read Paul and interpret what he says as gnostic.

For example:

7.5  For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. 6  But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

Not only does Paul set up a radical distinction between ‘the new way of the Spirit’ and ‘the old way of the written code’, he also locates sin at work in ‘the flesh’, ‘our members’.   Equally, in the previous chapter Paul writes:

6.12  Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.

His emphasis is so strongly on our sinful bodies, on sin which works in our ‘mortal body’, that it is not a big step to gnostic theology, where the spirit is holy, the flesh evil.

It is also not a big step to the neo-dualism of contemporary evangelicalism.   Now there’s a sentence and a half!   When I worked for A Rocha in London, one of the things I did was go around churches giving talks about the biblical basis for creation care.   A regular comment that many of us encountered (and no doubt they still do) was that God is more interested in saving souls than restoring creation.

There is undoubtedly some truth in that statement.   God has a special love for humans, made in his image to worship, glorify and love him.   However it is no different to the gnosticism that was denounced as heresy, and completely fails to understand the Old Testament, and much of the new.

When Paul locates sin at work in mortal flesh, he is not saying that God will do away with physical bodies.   He is not saying that all material things are evil and that what is important is our soul.   What he is saying, is that God needs to transform our mortal bodies if we are to obey him.   The very next verse in Romans 6 is this:

6.13  Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.

God wants us to use our bodies, our minds, our strength, our souls - all of ourselves - to serve him.   He is not interested in disembodied children, but children in his image as he made them, bodies and all.   The ‘newness of life’ that Paul talks about earlier in Romans 6 is the basis on which we are able to ‘present’ our ‘members to God as instruments for righteousness’.

6.4  We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Just as our baptism is a physical event, and just as Jesus’ resurrection was a physical event, so also our newness of life is a physical event.   So, coming back to Romans 7, serving God in the ‘new way of the Spirit’ is correctly interpreted and capitalised by the ESV as the ‘new way of the Holy Spirit’: i.e. the new bodied life in the power of the Holy Spirit, not a new life somehow disconnected from our bodies, and purely ‘spirit’.   The true meaning of the word ‘spiritual’ is not ‘the life of a spirit’, ‘but life in the power of the Spirit’, mind, body, soul and strength.

I am sure that no self-respecting and thoughtful evangelical would disagree with what I have just argued.   Why is it then that the focus of ‘gospel ministry’ is so often proclamation on its own, without the accompanying care for people’s ‘fleshy’ side?   I myself have been guilty of this mistake, but hopefully no longer.

Wearing my A Rocha hat (A Rocha is a Christian environmental charity, seeking to transform communities and ecosystems in Jesus’ name and power) I would go further still, and say that God’s concern is for the whole of creation, not just humans.   After all, Revelation teaches us that heaven comes down to earth, not the other way around.   The whole world will be transformed by God, not just those people who call on Jesus’ name.   (For more on this, please look in the Sermons section, or search for ‘creation care’ or ‘hope for the planet’.)

When we pray ‘your kingdom come’, what we are praying for is the full and complete kingdom, which includes the transformation of the world, as well as the transformation of the people within the world.   The latter concern for people’s physical well-being is being rediscovered by the church, but we are still lacking the former concern for the world.

The challenge is this: have we sold out to a gnostic dualism between spirit and flesh?   Have we in practice (if not in theology) ignored the fleshy side of life in favour of the spirit side of life?   If we have, we need to do both to be doing full and proper ‘gospel ministry’.