Good Doubt / Better Theology (wk 4: Spirit & Flesh)

Hayley and Vince re-load a Bible study on the oft-misused references to spirit and flesh in the New Testament, as they continue modeling the use of two strategies for cultivating life-giving faith in the face of modern confusion, injustice, and burnout.

SPEAKER NOTES

Good Doubt-Better Theology (wk 4: Spirit & Flesh)

Series Intro: (Vince)

We’ve been looking at this big question: How do we cultivate life-giving faith in the face of confusion, injustice, and the burnout of modern life
Two strategies for doing this seem really well represented in BLC’s community when we talk to people, and that’s why we’re highlighting these.
- Good Doubt and Better Theology
- Good Doubt -
  - leaving dissatisfying, one-size-fits-all answers behind or leaving a demand for certainty behind
  - for the gift of not having to know, of being okay with a little mystery or ambiguity
  - experientially this is the story of spiritual growth for so many people
- Better Theology -
  - Learning and pursuing better, more worship-worthy pictures of God, more consistent understandings of how life works, more reasonable ways to attach to the Bible or to Christianity —
  - because those are out there! Whatever each of us grew up with is not all there is!
  - Also the story of so many here
- Neither approach is better than the other -
  - either way you’re in good company in this community
  - and historically
  - We’ll all likely use a mix of the two as we mature
This series of messages has been: let’s talk about these two strategies so we can all grow in confidence using them

Transition: So we are returning to what we started to chat about last week before the Great Coughing Fit of Feb 2025. Take 2!

Good doubt —> Better Theology

We’re going to continue talking about how better theology can be built upon good doubt. Instead of being separate and distinct approaches, they can be steps in the same process

Transition: Yeah, you were starting to show us this with another Bible study — this time on the often-misrepresented references to “spirit” and “flesh”.

Spirit and flesh

Usually spirit and flesh are set up as a divide whether we are thinking of scripture/religious tradition or wider culture. Spirit vs flesh, soul or mind vs the body
We just wrapped up a book club on the book The Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary McBride
- And I have loved engaging with McBride’s work around embodiment, around valuing the body as a sacred source of wisdom instead of something to be denied, ignored, or overcome

Let’s lay out a few scripture passages that address this theme so we know what we’re working with:

Scripture passages:

Matthew 26:41 “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”

Romans 7:18 “For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh”

Romans 8:9 “But you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit”

Galatians 5:16-17 ”Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.”

Alright. So face value — things are not looking good for the body right now! For the flesh. We have words of Jesus portrayed in the gospel of Matthew. We have words attributed to Paul (who we talked more about a couple of weeks ago when we unpacked household codes)

How do we get here? How do we arrive at such an anti-body, anti-flesh stance?

Identifying the problem

This is representative of Greek thought at the time of the New Testament writings. For example, maybe you’ve heard of Gnosticisms, various Greek schools of thought contemporary with the formation of the early church
- Gnosticisms taught that the body and soul are utterly separate:
- good soul trapped in an evil body.
- This is called dualism in philosophy.
- Many early followers of Jesus, including Biblical authors, were pushing back against this
But, especially after Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Empire in the 300s, the ongoing development of Christian theology largely became fused with the ongoing development of Western philosophy (built mostly on dualistic Greek thought)
So, now 17 centuries later, most of Christian Theology has reinforced rather than pushed back on dualistic Greek thought that the body and soul are distinct, and no surprise that’s our automatic interpretive lens when we read the Bible, that we think it’s saying body=bad, flesh=bad
In the last 500 years, since the Scientific Revolution, Western dualism has shifted from soul-body to a more secular “mind-body” — but it still persists that the body is lesser
And, even in the last 70 years, since the 1960s Sexual Revolution, while it can seem on the surface like we’ve now elevated the body, a deeper story has been the commodification of the body as a product to be sold or a brand to be curated.

I don’t think I need to belabor why such a degrading view of the body or a separation of the body and spirit is dangerous because we feel it.

- Culturally:
    - On a personal level- how many times have we thought bodily discipline is the route to feeling better about ourselves? The inner critic loud when we judge our desires, when we’re surrounded by messaging that tells us we need to change our bodies
    - On a greater scale- we see how dangerous it is when some bodies are deemed more human than others. When bodies are portrayed as disposable.
 - Religiously:
    - The emphasis on the spirit over the body has so many problematic implications. We get purity culture, which is a whole other message on its own. Cutting people off, especially women, from value and sexuality and pleasure.
    - You can see how this messaging of  “you are loved” but… “your body is bad” is confusing! It leaves us doubting if we can ever be fully loved as our full, embodied selves
 - From the legacy of a spirit and body divide:
    - At best: the body irrelevant and inconvenient and limited
    - At worst: the body is evil and dangerous and needs to be controlled
 - Vince comment
    - This is how we get a faith focused on the afterlife of “heaven vs hell” while failing to take seriously the embodied and material plight of the poor and the planet in the meantime. (That’s justified when you say the physical body dies but the soul lives on forever.)
    - And, more broadly, this is how we all have gotten lulled into believing that a disembodied digitally connected world will automatically save us from all our divisions, while failing to see that it takes embodied ethics, learning to walk in others’ shoes, for connection to actually be healing; digital connectedness is not automatically good, social media being exhibit A.

So let’s put our two strategies to work to help us move through the challenges here. How does good doubt help us?

Good Doubt

Good doubt interrupts the autopilot of body shame and says wait a minute. There has to be another way.

This is confusing! So many other places in scripture we have our goodness affirmed. The goodness of Creation! We have the image of a Collective Body as the example of how we live together, unified and sacred in 1 Corinthians.

We have Jesus incarnated, God dwelling in a body -surely bodies can’t be bad!

This is the big one for me! When John’s Gospel says of Jesus “God’s Word became flesh”, that’s the exact same Greek word (“sarx” translated “flesh”) that is used in the Matthew passages we read where the Spirit and Flesh are contrasted and Flesh has a negative connotation. To me, this is major evidence that the Bible is more complicated than “spirit=good, flesh=bad”.

Hillary McBride asks a key Q, one that starts that unraveling process of Good Doubt as we try to reconcile the body and spirit divide: she asks

“Why did creation get to be good, profoundly telling of love itself, except when creation was my body? When God and bodies seem antithetical, I must ask, What am I missing about God? What am I missing about love, life, and the messy, gritty, unpredictable unfolding process of faith?”

I love her question of “What am I missing about God?” — it reminds me of the language we’ve talked about lately
- “trusting our best picture of God”
- When what we’re reading or hearing or experiencing doesn’t align with who we long for God to be, we choose God. We choose what is most loving
As we’re thinking of healing this bodily separation I’d love for us to extend that mindset, to say “I am going to trust the best picture of myself”
- Radical if you have ever been taught to view yourself with suspicion, to be over critical of your body, your flesh, your desires and pleasures
- God is not the disapproving Father dress-coding you on your way to church
God made creation and proclaimed it was good and I am creation and I choose to fully believe I am good — that is the best picture of who I am as a full, embodied self
- I do not need to subscribe to this dualism, to the separation of self
- To saying my spirit and mind could ever be separate (and better) than my physical body
Because I know there is goodness here! And I’m going to doubt the parameters being set on my goodness
I have experienced freedom and pleasure and goodness being a whole self
- Invite you to consider: When have you experienced this freedom? Feeling alive and really connected to your body
- Story of running races by the lake:
  - With Andy, kids and sister - decided to run races! At a park in Evanston right by the lake. Running and laughing, the cool breeze. Just fully present, not judging my body at all
- For me, the freedom is in experiences where my inner experience and bodily experience feel like two sides of the same coin rather than at war with each other.
  - When I’m playing basketball and I’m NOT in my head about it — like NOT wishing I was taller, NOT wallowing in self-pity about how “that guy doesn’t know what it’s like to be small and a slight-build and have to scrap and claw for respect on the court”…
    - I may have some resentment issues…
  - But I feel the freedom you’re talking about when I’m playing and my mind is just present in the play, grateful to get to be active.
  - Or, to go spiritual, I feel the freedom you’re talking about when I’m praying and I get in a flow following my breath, or feel a relaxing in my shoulders, or feel a warmth in my chest or in my ears
  - The moments my body and my inner experience (my spirit or soul or mind) are aligned, not at odds — that feels like freedom.
We do not have to accept bodily disconnection with a religious stamp of approval
- Good doubt that begins in our embodiment (connection to the body as good) this is the fuel to keep us asking questions. To bring us to new theology:
Do the words we read earlier mean what we think they mean? What theologies around our understanding of God can help heal this divide?

Better Theology

Yeah, one example of a better theological alternative to dualism builds on the trusting of our experience, exactly as you have been describing, Hayley.
- We can point out how every experience any of us have has an external component (observable to the world), AND also an internal component (known only to us the experiencer) which must also be trusted to get a whole picture of reality,
- And though we might distinguish those components as mental and physical, or soul and body,
- They can’t be pulled apart or taken on their own. How I internally experience something affects my body. What happens to my body affects how I internally experience something. They’re interconnected.
- Theologians build on this trusting of experience to offer an understanding of God
  - People report experiencing God as Mind or Spirit — a fellow experiencer in that internal side of life
  - AND people report experiencing God as embodied in the external Physical World, including in other people — because all things carry the image of God, and we are “the Body of Christ”
  - So, just like with all experience, we might say: the Spirit of God and the Body of Christ (which includes our bodies) are distinct but not separate or hierarchical — they’re interconnected.
  - It’s not unlike the way theologians talk about the Trinity — father, son, spirit — as distinct but not separate aspects within God
- If you want to use pretentious philosophical words and sound smart, this alternative to dualism is called “dual aspect monism”
- Which just means, instead of two separate realities, you have one unified reality (a monism, not a dualism) just with dual interconnected aspects, which we can call mind and body, or spirit and flesh, or internal and external, or subjective and objective — there's lots of different ways philosophers and theologians talk about it.
The point is: if THIS is our starting point, not dualism,
- then we’re not looking at the Bible (or our lives) for how the Spirit needs to “win” over the Flesh,
- (or vice versa!)
- We’re looking for alignment between them, the honoring of both sides of experience, like the experiences of freedom I was sharing before.

Returning to the passages

In our Matthew passage, when Jesus laments “the Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”, we don’t have to read Jesus as disgusted with his flesh, we can read Jesus as distressed by a misalignment within him.
Transition: So what happens when we take this better theological starting point to the Paul passages we read that are maybe even harder to not see as anti-body?
In short, we can see more nuance.
So, for example, we may lump body and flesh together as one idea, describing the same thing. But actually Paul was using two different words that were meant to invoke different ideas.
- Vince mentioned this earlier: the Greek word translated as “body” is soma and the word “flesh” (what we see in the passages for today) is sarx
And I was reminded of how helpful this distinction is when reading Hillary McBride’s thoughts on spirit and flesh
- She explains, “Sarx is more often used to refer to meat, in a kind of disembodied way, whereas soma often refers to the living, breathing, subjective experience of being a person.”
- Paul does not contrast soma (body) with soul or spirit
- He’s using the term sarx, flesh
We can’t totally know the reasons behind the authors picking soma or sarx to speak about the body, the flesh
- Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as saying the references to soma are always positive and to sarx are always critical —it would be convenient , but I actually don’t think it would be more helpful
Paul is not arguing for a clear body and spirit divide, he’s not a dualist
- It’s just more complicated than that!
When Paul uses flesh, sarx, he could be metaphorically talking about our collective domination, the bodily ways we engage with violence and harm (disembodiment)
- He’s not necessarily critiquing our own, individual physicality
- That would be consistent with what we know from historians about hyper-patriarchal Greco-Roman culture and the way demonstrating domination with one’s body was a lot of the way the world went round, unfortunately. Paul often pushed against this.

Hillary McBride writes:

The words for “body” and “flesh,” soma and sarx, are both used to describe important, sustaining, holistic principles: what it means to be human, the struggles of existing, and the importance of coming together in community. These words are often about the whole of humanity, not just an individual person. In some cases, the words are used in a negative sense to represent our way of being in the world that is not loving or that moves us away from wholeness.” — Hillary McBride

If we take a look again at the Galatians passage:

Galatians 5:16-17 ”Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.”

In this instance, if we think of flesh as the ways we create hierarchies, we dominate the body, our inclination for violence and retribution — this passage reads differently!
- It’s not a contrast of degrading the body and praising the soul, it’s an invitation to live in more just and loving ways of the spirit.
- And Spirit here is the word pneuma — breath, to be breathed.
- “Live by the breath of God, I say, and do not gratify the desires of domination.”
- Live in a way that brings about breath, that allows you to breathe deeply.
  - A demand for domination gets in the way of creating a life of flourishing for all people, all bodies
  - Our disembodied, disconnected ways of living are opposed to the breath, the being fully alive
It kind of reminds me of the saying we use or idea we have of “Just being human!”
- When we acknowledge we’re human, we’re not claiming to be bad
- And we acknowledge that it’s messy, it’s real, it’s limited. We are not curated beings that are only capable of good
  - Bodies are beautiful and bodies can be used to harm
  - Spirituality can be sustaining and spirituality can be weaponized
Despite our own inconsistencies, we need to stay connected to ourselves. Our own embodiment, our inner connection has a ripple effect and contributes to the healing of the Collective Body as well
We are called to live in a way that brings about more breath—
- we can see ourselves as good, a goodness that is intertwined with a loving God who cares about our bodies, about all bodies, about all of us’

Good doubt moving us to better theology so we can embrace our best pictures of who God is and who we are- alive and breathing and full.

Vince, any closing thoughts?

(Moltmann quote?)

Prayer

1 Corinthians, Romans, MatthewVincent BrackettMarch 4, 2025Good Doubt-Better TheologyComment