"Only the body saves the soul"

     When we talk about word and sacrament, often what we mean is the how and the what of experiencing the divine in our lives. How do we think about access to God? Annie Dillard writes about encountering the divine in the world by turning to the Old Testament, specifically to the book of Exodus. In chapter 19, God calls the Hebrews to the foot of the mountain and declares that they will be God’s treasured possession and that they will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, who will represent (think image of God) the presence of God to the whole of the creation.[1] Thus, God draws close to the people and speaks, but the people respond by asking God to leave.

When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”[2]

Moses then becomes a mediator between God and the Hebrew people. Their fear did not lead them to wisdom before God, but to inaugurate their relationship to Yahweh in silence. The people told God to leave and be silent, and then they retreated to their tents. Annie Dillard contemplates how we might recover from such a horrible mistake:

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree … What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we’re blue.[3]

Thus, Dillard concludes, we feel alienated from the divine, but in the book of Exodus, Yahweh meets Moses, the elders, and the whole of the Hebrew people on the mountain. However, Yahweh was not a God that was limited to the mountain top. Yahweh wanted to show this group of people that he had set aside as holy that he was a God who dwells with his people. Yahweh is the God comes down off of the mountain and tabernacles (sets up his tent and settles down) with his people. But the people back away and ask for God to stop speaking. It seems that the moral of this story from Exodus is that God never remains on the mountain top, God always comes down off of the mountain to meet us where we live, even in the midst of our fear.

     

     Similarly to Dillard, Belden Lane talks of the liminal space of the "fierce landscapes of the soul":

There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer the soul. They heal as well as mirror the brokenness we find within. Moving apprehensively into the desert’s emptiness … you discover in wild terrain a metaphor of your deepest fears. If the danger is sufficient, you experience a loss of competence, a crisis of knowing that brings you to the end of yourself, to the only true place where God is met.[4] 

We want to limit our exposure to the divine. We want to contain our experience of God’s holiness, so that we might have categories to explain the overwhelming experience of God’s presence. Even Peter at the Transfiguration stumbles and wants to build tents. But Jesus never intended to stay on the mountain. Jesus wanted to share his glory. 

     

     In Paul’s words, Jesus shares his inheritance with us, we are adopted as co-heirs with Christ. In this context, it is no mistake that Paul’s vision of the consummation of our spirituality is a face to face encounter with God.[5] Our spiritual journeys are a preparation, through the mediation of the Spirit, for this face to face encounter with God. And this brings us to Colin Gunton:

the distinctive work of the Spirit is eschatological. One way of expending such an insight theologically would be to say that the Spirit’s peculiar office is to realize the true being of each created thing by bringing it, through Christ, into saving relation with God the Father.[6]

One barrier that we might have to this kind of active and eschatological pneumatology is an idea, which is deeply embedded within Western Culture. When we think of the divine we often think in terms of competition—it is either God or us; God’s will or our will; God’s freedom or our freedom. I think this is one of the reasons that struggling or recovering evangelicals recoil at the thought of the authority of scripture. It is a text meant to tame our desires and our carnal passions. We are to be beat down in to repentance and subservience by the Word, especially the preached Word.

     

     We rarely think in terms of our "sanctification" as God working with us in our bodies and our desires. Instead, we think of our bodies as the battleground of spirituality: the flesh battles against the spirit rather than our bodies and our experiences being the very ground where God meets us and sanctifies us. We are holy ground. As Rowan Williams puts it:

Only the body saves the soul. It sounds rather shocking put like that, but the point is that the soul (whatever exactly that is) left to itself, the inner life or whatever you want to call it, is not capable of transforming itself. It needs the gifts that only the external life can deliver: the actual events of God’s action in history, heard by physical ears, the actual material fact of the meeting of believers where bread and wine are shared, the actual wonderful, disagreeable, impossible, unpredictable human beings we encounter daily, in and out of church. Only in this setting do we become holy—in a way unique to each one of us.[7]

     British theologian, John Webster, can help us here. He uses three categories to help us understand scripture: Revelation, Inspiration, and Sanctification.[8] It is his concept of sanctification that most captures my imagination. At the core of his understanding of sanctification is that God works with creation, not against it. God graciously turns toward humanity and works with the stuffness of our culture, language, relationships, hang-ups, pathologies, addictions. God makes holy that which is categorically secular and not inherently "spiritual." The purpose is to take what is creaturely and set it aside for the purpose of God’s self communication, and it is the Holy Spirit that works through these creaturely processes and realities: 

“the rule is: sanctification establishes and does not abolish creatureliness.”[9]

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[1] Ex. 19:5-6 (NIV).

[2] ‘Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.” The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was’ (Ex. 20:18-21).

[3] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, 88-89.

[4] Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, Oxford University Press, 2007, 216.

[5] 1 Cor. 13:12. See also 2 Cor. 3:17-18.

[6] Colin Gunton, The One, The Three, and the Many, 189.

[7] Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, 94-95.

[8] John Webster, Holy Scripture, 8-9.

[9] John Webster, Holy Scripture, 30.