Embodied and Consequential

Faith is more than a subjective state of mind

It has not been by choice, but for the last three months, I have been totally occupied thinking and reading about the practice of Christian baptism, and ultimately about embodied faith more generally. That effort has occupied most of my discretionary reading and writing since before Thanksgiving. But, for personal reasons, it simply could not be avoided. This post may not be your cup of tea. I’m not sure it’s my cup of tea, tbh. I post it here because it is the “Stuff I’m Thinking About”, as the title of this Substack explains. Also, I’m especially posting it to put it within the reach of some of my friends. If none of this interests you, not only should you skip it, but maybe you will find fellowship with me in knowing that the author himself would have been happy to skip it if he could have.

“‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’

‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.’” - C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Imagine a young child. The child has been playing with matches in the attic and has accidentally set some storage boxes on fire. He runs to his second-story bedroom to escape from the flames, where he becomes trapped. The flames spread rapidly and the house becomes an inferno. Fire begins licking at the outside of his bedroom door. Smoke is seeping into the room where the door meets the threshold. And now the child is coughing and choking on the smoke he himself has caused. The child is utterly incapable of providing for himself a way of escape.

Outside the house, unbeknownst to the child, a fireman knows of the child’s plight. The fireman races against time to save the child before the fire is able to consume the house. After leaning a ladder up to the child’s bedroom window, the fireman runs with his axe up the ladder. Finding there are bars on the window, the fireman employs his axe to chop a small hole in the wall, thereby creating a portal through which the child can be rescued. The fireman places his mouth near the portal and calls to the child, telling the child to come to the portal and be saved. Choking and sobbing, the child crawls to the portal and thrusts his arms out through the opening. The fireman pulls the child through the opening to safety, clambering down the ladder, child under his arm, sprinting away from the house just as the roof caves in behind him.

Now, I ask you, who is the hero of our story? Who did the work that resulted in the child’s rescue? Did the child, simply by his cooperation, and through some sort of metaphysical alchemy, transform himself into the hero? Did availing himself of the portal created by the fireman reverse the moral polarity of our story? Did the action of the child - thrusting his arms through the hole provided by the fireman - obligate the fireman to save the child? Was the embodied act of reaching out for help an act of virtue on the part of the helpless child?

Or were the child’s embodied actions, instead, a demonstration of the child’s utter dependency and, even, desperation? If you perceive, as I do, that the hero of this story is unavoidably the fireman and not the child, then you may be drifting from the mainstream of modern evangelical thought.

It is foundational to modern evangelical thinking that no truthful understanding of how a person comes to Christ can involve an embodied expression of dependency on God. If an expression of faith is embodied, it is thereby - somehow - transubstantiated from an act of dependency into an act of self-righteous work. Using modern evangelical reasoning, the desperate child, by thrusting his arms through the portal, has somehow made himself the author of his own salvation. By merely cooperating with his rescuer, so the reasoning goes, the child is somehow laying claim to having rescued himself.

For the fireman to be the hero of the story, many evangelical thinkers reason, his saving of the child must involve no embodied expression of need by the child. Salvation by grace through faith, the modern evangelical insists, forecloses any means of appealing for redemption that involves embodied action. Saving faith must be confined to the realm of pure cognition. The only expression of saving faith that is not somehow transubstantiated into a work of self-righteousness is a faith that inhabits the realm of pure thought. Paradoxically, words of saving faith actually can be vocalized, but any other embodiment of the meaning that attends those words must be considered as inconsequential to one’s spiritual rescue. Thus, you may pray with words, but embodying the meaning of that prayer must be taught and understood as something that produces no spiritual effect. According to this line of reasoning, the very act of thrusting his arms through the portal, precisely because it is an embodied act, must be understood as being an assertion by the child that it is through his own efforts that he is being rescued.

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It is hard not to notice the unpleasant gnostic aroma that wafts around some of the presuppositions of modern evangelicalism. I have written elsewhere regarding how the Western church’s response to Covid restrictions started me down the path of thinking about a gnostic reemergence within modern Christianity. Not only have I been unable to shake that concern, but the more I look around, the more the evidence of it seems to appear. Sometimes you just can’t unsee things.

For at least one hundred fifty years, modern science has insisted that the materiality of the physical universe is all that there is, or at least all that can be truly known. Only those things directly or indirectly susceptible to the human senses may be considered real and affecting of human life. This belief, of course, puts doctrinaire materialists in the awkward position of needing to avert their eyes from pesky questions raised by the annoyingly real existence of non-material things like, say, mathematics. The insistence that only the material is real is as unscientific as it is silly.

But modern Christians have not been immune to the assumptions of materialist ideas. The late Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer, writing in the 60’s and 70’s, suggested that materialist assumptions, being culturally ascendant, had also leeched into Christian thinking, producing an understanding of the concept of truth as something that is bifurcated. Schaeffer described this in terms of “upper-story” and “lower-story” realms of truth. Lower-story truth, in Schaeffer’s framing, corresponds to the realm of science and the material world. Lower-story truth is verifiable and objective. (Rabbit trail: If, after Covid, you still believe that modern science is “objective”, there may not be much help for you.) Matters of faith, and beliefs concerning non-material realities, inhabit the “upper story”. Upper-story truths are relegated to the realm of subjective inner experience and thought, and they are definitionally (according to materialist assumptions) neither verifiable nor objective.

Modern evangelical theology has drifted into mirroring this bifurcation in noteworthy ways, not least by insisting that the concept of saving faith be relegated to the realm of pure thought. It is hard not to perceive the unacknowledged similarity between the basic assumptions of scientific materialism and the way modern evangelicalism separates faith, in this way, from physical embodiment.

The Reformation principle of salvation sola fide - by faith alone - is in large part the very raison d’être for protestantism. But in the years following the Reformation, the meaning of sola fide seems to have slowly evolved into something now more closely resembling disembodied cognition. None of the earliest Reformers conceived of sola fide as a purely interior, cognitive activity. But for many modern evangelicals, at least, any embodied expression of faith which is tied to the act of conversion, is ipso facto considered to be a work of self-righteousness. Embodied expressions are presumed to transform all actions into “works”. There is one exception to this, however, according to current evangelical practice. Through some kind of special dispensation I am unable to account for, vocalization of the “sinner’s prayer”, uttered at the time of conversion, is accorded immunity from being deemed a “work”. Thus salvation by vocalization is considered consistent with sola fide. But in the minds of many/most modern evangelicals, something like baptism, which is itself described in scripture as a kind of embodied prayer (the apostle Peter describes it as “the pledge of a clear conscience toward God”), now runs afoul of the by-faith-alone terms of salvation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but what I am suggesting in all of this is that, conceiving of Christian baptism as anything other than the embodiment saving faith, is to make a modern category distinction informed more by scientific materialism than by the biblical text itself.

The modern evangelical mindset, of course, reflects a set of assumptions about the kind of world we inhabit. And those assumptions exhibit striking similarities to the upper-story/lower-story framing insisted upon by scientific materialism. Notably, an impenetrable membrane between the material world and the spiritual realm is assumed, at least insofar as any means of saving grace is concerned. In the modern evangelical view, saving faith is confined to the realm of thought and words. Any understanding that involves a physically embodied faith which produces a spiritual effect, through which the spiritual and material interpenetrate, is ruled out a priori. That baptism might be one such physical means, put in place by God, with which physically embodied souls can call out to God for rescue, is something that is rejected by most modern evangelicals. By thus relegating saving faith to the subjective “upper-story”, one hears an unmistakable echo of Schaeffer’s warnings about the bifurcation of truth.

This is perhaps why, for many modern evangelicals, baptism has devolved into not much more than a kind of spiritual skit; a performative affectation; a puzzling hobby-horse of the Lord Jesus. Something we do, but which seems kind of cringey and embarrassing.

Most modern evangelicals probably practice some form of baptism, but only so long as there is a strict understanding, by everyone involved, that baptism is spiritually irrelevant to one’s standing before God. This, unsurprisingly, has led to no small amount of confusion among modern evangelicals, who are thus being encouraged to submit to a rite that, we are also assured, is spiritually inconsequential.

Belief in the general salvific irrelevance of any kind of embodied expression extends beyond even the question of baptism. There is a modern understanding of grace itself which, when combined with a popular understanding of God’s sovereignty, can lead a Christian to conceive of his entire embodied existence as something largely inconsequential where his eternal destiny is concerned. Accordingly, a great deal of contemporary protestant teaching against sin, to the extent such teaching still exists, concerns itself primarily with sin’s unhappy psycho-therapeutic and social effects.

At the end of the day, if embodied expressions of faith are inconsequential to my spiritual standing — if there is a hard separation between my embodied existence and my spiritual destiny — it becomes difficult to work up too much concern, in any context, over the spiritual consequences of embodied sin. Because, in such a circumstance, there can be no lasting consequences, so long as I have made the necessary subjective affirmations.

Early 20th century theologian Griffith Thomas serves as a useful example of an influential evangelical who rejected the idea that anything physical, like Christian baptism, can have any role to play in one’s salvation. Expanding on his position that baptism is unable to produce any spiritual effect, Thomas posits an overarching principle by rhetorically asking, “How can that which is physical effect that which is spiritual?”¹ One is left bewildered by such a constrained vision of the possible interplay between the physical and spiritual, especially when one considers that it is the spiritual effects produced by Jesus’ very own physical body, along with his blood, upon which the entirety of the Christian faith rests.

Thomas is not alone among twentieth century scholars who hold such presuppositions. E.K. Simpson was another scholar who wrote, in his 1954 commentary on the pastoral epistles (still popular and recommended among evangelicals) that “a spiritual economy cannot be tied to a material agency as an indispensable channel of grace”.²

We moderns have all been propagandized by the materialist culture to believe that inquiry into material things, using exclusively material means, tells us all there is to know about the nature of those things. There may be no better example of modern evangelical syncretism with the claims of scientific materialism than Griffith Thomas’ and Simpson’s similar insistence upon the wall of isolation between the physical world and spiritual effects.

By contrast, C.S. Lewis, also beloved by modern evangelicals, was curiously less averse to the possibility that things which are physical can be far more spiritually potent than their material ingredients, considered in isolation, would otherwise suggest. He sprinkled his writings with the suggestion that the material and spiritual worlds are intertwined. Lewis, we should remind ourselves, was not only a popular Christian writer, but was also a widely recognized scholar of medieval literature. Perhaps this inoculated him against the claims of scientific materialism. As the epigraph at the top of this post illustrates, Lewis perceived that the spiritual weight and effect of a material thing could not be deduced by merely cataloguing its material composition.

The modern insistence that a faith which saves must involve no physical means of conveying God’s grace is deeply ironic in light of the very incarnation of Jesus himself. If, as evangelical Christians, we are ready to accept that the death and resurrection of the incarnate Word - physical and embodied - produced eternal spiritual effects, then perhaps we should avoid rushing to the fainting couches upon hearing someone suggest that there could be other ways and means within the world, whereby material things are intertwined with spiritual effects of their own. Maybe the analytical tools of scientific materialism can never fully describe the kind of world we live in, or the complete nature of reality.

It is the reduction of sola fide into something more akin to sola cognito, then, that emits the gnostic aroma which is increasingly hard for me to ignore. Saving faith is thus not something that envelops both body and soul so much as something known and affirmed only by a subjective mind.

The way we conceive of the world inescapably frames the way we think about our spiritual lives. Many Christians conceive of their lives as a kind of gigantic spiritual accounting exercise. Life entails one’s participation in a persnickety cognition ledger. God, in this context, can be seen as kind of an OCD accountant in regard to our subjective thoughts. Within this modernist theological framing, spiritual effects are brought about, less by embodied actions than by what people think. Many modern Christians have been led to conclude, in this way, that one’s eternal destiny is essentially determined by one’s state of mind. Our place on the cosmic balance sheet is decided by what we affirm. Do we think the right thoughts? Do we cognitively embrace the right truths? These are the decisive things that produce spiritual effects.

An alternative view of the world might be that we are creatures caught up in an ancient, cosmic conflict between light and darkness; that our situation is desperate and we are helpless to provide our own avenue of escape. But in this alternative view, a way out has been provided by God through the embodied actions of his Son. Thus, according to this view, life is less an exercise purely in right-think, and more of an all-out spiritual war, during which we struggle to yield our minds and bodies to God for transformation into what he, being the creator, always intended for them to be. This view of the world would say that the incarnation of Jesus, to say nothing of all of the biblical events involving angels, miracles, heavenly hosts, descending doves, et cetera ad infinitum, is evidence that the material and spiritual worlds do interpenetrate, and that our embodied existence in the world is necessarily spiritually consequential.

The bible tells us that the Father had the incarnation of his Son in mind before the foundation of the world. Why should we find it surprising if God, in his wisdom, has prepared the physical battle space by weaving things into the material world that produce spiritual effects? Might submission to the water and the Word at baptism be better conceptualized as an embodied plea for mercy, through a physical means, which God himself long ago emplaced for us to have within our reach? A physical means through which God himself acts to produce spiritual effects? Perhaps, similar to the intertwining of bodies and souls, there are things which seem only physical - things such as blood, water, wine and bread - which are actually both physical and spiritual, interwoven according to the Word who himself “holds all things together”. What if we live in a world in which things we have been conditioned to think of as purely material are not purely material at all?

Alas, the downstream effects of ignoring the spiritual consequentiality of embodiment were never likely to confine themselves only to questions related to baptism and initial conversion. There has been a longstanding abdication of pastoral leadership, within modern evangelicalism, on many questions related to anthropology, human sexuality, contraception/reproductive tech, the moral authority of science, and more. (On these, and adjacent subjects, do yourself a giant favor by following Haley Baumeister and subscribing to her Life Considered. She has been blazing an evangelical trail on these issues, challenging her readers to think more rigorously about human sexuality, reproduction and embodiment generally. She is keenly perceptive and also a delight to read.)

Having foreclosed the possibility of physical embodiment producing spiritual effects, evangelicals should perhaps not have been surprised by the resulting difficulty in thinking well and rigorously about contentious issues related to embodiment. For my entire life, at least, almost anywhere the spiritual implications of embodiment have loomed large, the discussion among evangelicals has been reductively framed as a question of transactional morality rather than as a question of embodied purpose. Accordingly, the Christian who sees himself engaged in a moral accounting exercise is usually more inclined to confine his thinking about contentious moral questions to asking “What are we allowed to do?” It is much less intuitive for him to grapple with contentious questions in terms of “What are we for?” In other words, evangelical theology inclines us to be more oriented toward discussions about technique than telos.

Consider, for example, the disputes within evangelicalism over homosexuality, and how those discussions are frequently framed. If you find yourself discussing whether same-sex-attracted Christians can refer to themselves as “gay”, nothing about that conversation has even begun to come to grips with the purposeful ends of embodied sexuality as intended by God. If you’re being told that “Jesus didn’t talk about homosexuality”, as if that statement offers a dispositive insight into biblical sexual ethics, then you are talking with someone who is reductively (and childishly) reasoning about biblical sexuality transactionally, without regard to sexual purpose or exhibiting any rigor regarding questions of biblical anthropology.

But let’s turn our attention to a completely different context. The fallout from rejecting the spiritual consequentiality of physicality, extends beyond questions of sexuality and medicine. The groundwork for the blithe indifference we observed, when embodied Christian gatherings were cancelled during Covid, had been laid long before the appearance of Covid itself. Conceiving of saving faith, not as dependence and trust of the whole person on God (i.e. heart, soul, mind and strength) but as only a subjective exercise, was something that was well established long before gain-of-function research yielded unhappy results in China. But a modern Christian faith which had become predominantly informational could well explain why it was that so many churches offered so little resistance to local authorities canceling their church gatherings. What had evolved to become the real function of the modern church - merely the transmission of information - could easily be accomplished through a combination of online giving and livestream videos. The evangelical belief in the irrelevance of embodiment to one’s personal salvation was thereby revealed by Covid to have become the loss of belief in the importance of embodied Christianity at all.

I have been trying to sketch a picture that can serve as a useful vantage point from which to reconsider the interplay between embodied faith and spiritual effects. The intersection of the material and spiritual, a theme found throughout the biblical text, is one that modern evangelicals have, I think, mostly been discouraged from considering. No doubt some of that discouragement reflects entirely legitimate concerns about the temptations toward self-sufficiency that can attend embodied rituals. But my growing intuition is that, notwithstanding an understandable evangelical aversion to salvation by “works”, modern evangelical theology - at least at the popular level - has been slowly transforming into something that is more than a little gnostic. It is losing sight of the spiritual consequentiality of embodied faith.

My intent here has also been to question the necessity of the logical contortions that modern evangelical presuppositions impose, regarding the nature of the world we inhabit. Specifically, I am questioning the long-held insistence among moderns that our embodied actions cannot, as a matter of principle, produce spiritual effects. I have been suggesting the possibility that these modern evangelical presuppositions might be partially an artifact of adopting category distinctions assumed by scientific materialism, distinctions which have insinuated themselves into the way we moderns read scripture. By contrast, I want to suggest that the moral teachings of scripture are saturated with the spiritual consequentiality of embodiment. Though what is found in scripture is more in the context of our purpose within the created order than in regard to any arbitrary transactional morality. The spiritual effect of embodiment, as revealed in scripture, cannot be reasoned about as something untethered from the telos which God himself intends.

God has invited us to be involved in something he himself is doing with the world. He has formed us for a task. We responded, as his creatures, by setting our spiritual house on fire. It is well and truly burning down around us. But God has, through his embodied Son, provided us a way of escape. He wants no conscripts, though, only volunteers. He has formed us in such a way that we are equal parts physical and spiritual — fully interwoven. Our embodied form is so significant to him that God the Son, himself, chose to share our form, eternally humbling himself to do so.

In light of Christ’s incarnation then, if for no other reason, perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to consider the possibility that what is physical can be absolutely fraught with spiritual consequentiality. Must evangelicals be so anxious to wave away the possibility that God has provided embodied means to facilitate the rescue of embodied souls? Perhaps the physical act of baptism is the furthest thing from being a work of self-righteousness. What if baptism is actually no more “meritorious” than an embodied plea for help? Like a toddler, pleading with his arms reaching up toward his father. A plea that suggests, not self-sufficiency, but simply a desire to be rescued. Any rescue effected by such a baptism could only be the result of something done to us, and not because of anything done by us.

So perhaps something consequential occurs - something more than symbol - when, superintended by God’s Spirit, water and body and Word combine.

1. “The Place of the Sacraments in the Teaching of St. Paul”, The Expositor, 1917. p. 379

2. The Pastoral Epistles, p. 115