Acknowledgements xvii Foreword: V. Rev. Dr. Stephen De Young xxiii Introduction

Introduction

Ever since I was a boy, I have loved the good, true, and beautiful things of this world. I have enjoyed music, poetry, dance, art, literature, and above all, the natural beauty that surrounds us in creation. Yet for a long time, I had no idea how to integrate these interests into my relationship with Christ. Unconsciously, I assumed the things I loved were related to this world whereas the spiritual life is about the next world.

Perhaps you find yourself in a similar position. Do you ever feel like your love for the good and beautiful things of earth is disconnected from your spiritual life and maybe even in competition with it?

In my own case, part of the problem is that I grew up in an evangelical culture that expects Christ’s imminent return to coincide with the destruction of the world. This teaching entails the notion that all the good things of this life have no lasting value. Everything that happens in this world is merely temporary whereas the life to come is eternal. Thus, I looked upon my worldly interests as a distraction from my relationship with Christ.

Maybe this sounds familiar. Perhaps you have also found yourself struggling with a division between the spiritual versus the physical, the earthly versus the heavenly, this life versus the life to come. If you have found yourself entangled in these dualisms, you are not alone:

many Christians struggle with similar binaries, with the result that they find it difficult to live as whole people in this world of space and time.

Often this confusion finds its focus in the following issues. While each of these issues raises a different set of theological questions, they all hinge on this same struggle to relate our spiritual lives to our experience in the material world.

• Vocation. Many Christians have shared with me that they grew up thinking that if they wanted to serve Jesus 100 percent, they would need to go into full-time Christian ministry. Yet as they find their lives moving in more secular directions, they sometimes feel confused about how their jobs relate to their spiritual vocations. • The physical body. Many Christians share that no one taught them about the resurrection of the physical body, and thus they assume that the material body is at best spiritually neutral and at worst something filthy—an obstacle to the spiritual life. The spiritual life, they assume, is about escaping from the material body. Consequently, how we treat the body at death—whether burial or cremation—is of little importance; the body is just a shell. • Culture. Are the cultures of this world beyond redemption so that trying to transform culture is like polishing brass on a sinking ship? Is it perhaps even the case that the cultures of this world need to become more evil so that Jesus will come back sooner? For many believers, the answer to these questions is “yes.” • Ecology. Is God interested in our efforts to protect the planet and its various environments? Should we even try to take care of the earth? Or is this world just passing away, so it does not matter if we pollute and destroy creation?

• Worship. Is it appropriate to involve the physical body and material things in our worship of Jesus? Or does worship become more spiritual the more it is detached from the physical world? Many Christians, especially American thinkers, have answered the second of these questions in the affirmative, while some have even gone so far as to argue that Christians shouldn’t raise their hands in worship or make the sign of the cross since worship is more spiritual when it doesn’t involve the body. • Beauty. When you encounter beauty in the world, in things such as art, or even in the physical body, do you unconsciously perceive these as in competition with your pursuit of spiritual goals? Does God even care about beauty? • Institutions versus relationships. Have you ever come across the notion that institutional religion is at odds with genuine heartfelt faith? Have you ever heard someone say that “Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship,” where the person making this claim wishes to de-emphasize the corporate and structural connotations that come with the term religion? • Eschatology. Have you ever come across the idea that there is a complete discontinuity between what happens in this world and what will happen in the age to come? Or have you encountered the notion that in the future, God will completely destroy the earth?

When wrestling with some of the above issues, I have often gone to extremes. For example, after I witnessed the crude politicization of the gospel, I was tempted to conclude that God’s Kingdom has nothing to do with this world and its culture; God is not concerned with creation at all, I thought, only with saving souls so that they can escape from this world. Similarly, when I’ve felt a sense of futility about my employment, I have concluded that only Christian

ministry counts: it doesn’t matter whether I do a good job at work because my true work is composed of spiritual activities such as sharing the gospel with unbelievers. Or again, after seeing how people associated with the New Age movement have colonized concepts like protecting the environment, I’ve reacted by assuming the Church shouldn’t concern itself with issues of ecology, conservation, and sustainability. Similarly, concern about grossly materialistic forms of worship has led me to overreact and conclude that the body should play no role in worship and that church is primarily about what happens in the mind.

I think one of the reasons I tend to react in such extremes is because I’ve jumped into these practical issues without first exploring the underlying theological questions that should inform and guide all such inquiry. Ultimately, the fundamental theological questions are twofold:

1. What are God’s intentions for this world, including and especially humankind, the pinnacle of creation? 2. How can we, as human beings, participate in God’s purposes for this earth?

Even to phrase these questions this way assumes that God does indeed have a purpose for the earth. But that may not be clear to many. Is God actually in the business of healing the earth, or is this world simply a training ground for the life to come? Is the doctrine of last things 100 percent about heaven and hell, or does a renewed earth play any part in God’s eternal plan? Do the good, true, and beautiful things of this world last forever, or are they part of a temporal order that will one day pass away?

On the surface, Scripture does not answer these questions in a straightforward manner. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells His

disciples that they are not of this world1 and later proclaims that His Kingdom is not of this world.2 When we combine that teaching with passages suggesting that the devil is the ruler of this world3 and with other passages apparently prophesying the earth’s coming destruction,4 we may easily conclude that God’s purposes have nothing to do with this earth. Yet we also read that Jesus is the savior of the world5 and that He claims authority over the earth,6 both of which suggest that God’s purposes are very much earth-centered. Faced with these and other biblical paradoxes, it is little wonder many Christians are confused about God’s plan for the world.

I never achieved clarity on these questions until I changed both how I framed them and how I read the Bible. In short, I had to come to see Scripture not as a collection of isolated proof texts but as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Let me explain.

I grew up around Bibles and Christian books. My father owned a Bible bookstore and was also a Christian author, editor, and publisher. But although I was steeped in the Bible from as early as I can remember, I rarely enjoyed reading Scripture, apart from the Gospels. For me, reading the Bible was an “eat your greens” activity I did out of duty. The problem, I later came to realize, was that I was not reading the Bible as a single narrative; instead, I was reading it as a collection of isolated stories and imperatives with little or no relation to each other.

Again, I suspect I am not alone in this respect. Consider how many sermons, Bible studies, and debates about various points of theology end up merely proof texting various Scriptures, or zeroing in on one

1 John 15:19. 2 John 18:36. 3 2 Cor. 4:4. 4 2 Pet. 3:10–11. 5 1 John 4:14. 6 Matt. 28:18.

or two passages, without any sense of how those verses fit within the larger matrix of Scripture’s story. I say “Scripture’s story” rather than “stories,” for although the Bible contains many stories, everything in Scripture is really part of one overarching, continuous story. What is that story? We call the story redemption history, and it is the narrative of God’s purpose for the world, including how human beings can participate in that purpose. For years I did not know about this overarching scriptural narrative, and thus I did not understand God’s purpose for the earth. I had no concept of how Scripture formed one, continuous story of God’s plan for humanity and creation, let alone how my own life fit within that story.

As a teenager and young adult, I sat through hundreds of evangelical sermons and Bible classes in addition to attending a Protestant Bible college. But for all the teaching I received, no one helped me see how all the interconnected threads of Scripture formed a single narrative about God’s purpose for the earth. At one particular church, the teaching elders continually reminded us that they were not interested in giving us theological training but in simply helping us glean insights from the Bible we could apply to our lives. That pragmatic anti-intellectualism sounded very pious, but without biblical theology7 we find it impossible to grasp how the different parts of the Bible fit together into the larger narrative about God’s purpose for the earth. At best, this gave us a very compartmentalized approach to the world where we have a spiritual history and a secular history running parallel to each other, sometimes intersecting, but basically proceeding on two different planes. This basic sacred-secular

7 Biblical theology is the term theologians use for redemptive-historical approaches to Scripture, and it is distinguished from—though complementary with—other types of theology such as systematic theology, exegetical theology, patristics, dogmatics, etcetera. As a discipline within academic theology, biblical theology explores the progressive nature of God’s unfolding plan in time and space.

dualism left me and my peers unequipped to understand the fundamental question of how the spiritual is related to the physical and the subsidiary questions about how the gospel fleshes itself out within time and space. This, in turn, created a dangerous vacuum in which pessimistic concepts about creation could emerge in denial of Scripture’s teaching that “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.”8

Most of us think we believe in the goodness of God’s creation. Yet merely affirming the goodness of this world does not guarantee your thinking hasn’t been unconsciously tinctured by practices, assumptions, and biases that run counter to that affirmation. The process of writing this book impressed this upon me. As I spoke to people from all the major branches of Christianity about these concepts, I was surprised by the pushback I received. Doctrines that I did not consider particularly controversial became a matter of dispute. If anything, this negative feedback confirmed my suspicion that much of Christendom has become the unwitting prey to heterodox assumptions about the material world, its role, and its purpose. We genuinely need to rediscover the goodness of creation.

Perhaps you too will find yourself challenged as you encounter these teachings. Be prepared to feel uncomfortable! But also, be prepared to be amazed as you learn things from the Bible and the Church Fathers that you’ve likely never heard before. Above all, be prepared to reframe how you ask some common questions about Scripture. Instead of asking you to look at verses in isolation and then puzzle over some of the paradoxes I mentioned earlier, I’ll invite you to analyze these questions in light of where we are and where we are going within the larger story of earth’s redemption. In the process, I’ll also invite you to rethink common assumptions about redemption itself.

8 Gen. 1:31.

One assumption I’ll invite you to rethink is the popular view that the locus of redemption is primarily individual persons. We will find that the redemption wrought by Christ stretches as far as the curse is found—which is to all of creation, including the natural world and the products of human creativity. This means that Christ’s redemption does not just speak to our moral lives as if the goal of Christianity is simply not sinning; nor does Christ’s redemption merely cover our spiritual future as if the goal of Christianity is simply to get to heaven. Rather, the redemption wrought by Christ covers the entire material world, including all the little nooks and crannies of existence. In short, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ changes literally everything.

Another assumption I’ll invite you to rethink is why it’s important to affirm the goodness of creation. Much of modern, seeker-friendly Christianity—with its knee-jerk reaction against legalism and fundamentalism—has no problem affirming the goodness of creation and using such an affirmation as a cloak for worldliness. What it misses is that the things of creation, while genuinely good, possess a merely derivative goodness. Just as an icon receives its meaning from its prototype, so the good things in this world—from our perception of beauty to our enjoyment of artistic creativity to our experiences of love—receive their coherence from participation in divine beauty, creativity, and love. We become not fully human, but only subhuman, when we use and appreciate the many good and beautiful things of this world in such a way that goodness and beauty become final ends rather than icons pointing toward the original goodness and beauty of God Himself.

Finally, a word about what this book is not. This is not a book about heresy. Our topic is the goodness of the world, God’s promise to bring creation to perfection, and what this means for you and me today. Given that various heresies (such as Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Docetism, etcetera) have led to misunderstandings about

God’s purpose for creation and humanity’s role in it, we must address these misunderstandings as we go along. Indeed, I intend to provide a handbook for those whose thinking has been tinctured by operational forms of these heresies, especially Gnosticism. Yet the fundamental focus of this book is not the heresies themselves but the solution: what the Bible teaches about the purposefulness of the material world, the goodness of the human body, and the eschatological hope of a transformed universe.

Part 1 of this book looks at my journey through various forms of incipient Gnosticism and explores how I came to learn that the patristic denunciations of this heresy—rooted always in a robust affirmation of the goodness of the created world—provide a template for addressing a range of questions arising in our own day.

Part 2 introduces the reader to Gnosticism more fully while exploring how this false teaching came into conflict with the proclamations of the early Church. We will see that something transformative and world-changing occurred on Easter morning that still has ripple effects throughout the very structure of matter itself. But as people who live in the wake of Easter morning, we don’t always clearly see how our individual lives fit into the picture. Specifically, does God call us to isolate from the world and culture or integrate with them? This part of the book will frame the basic contours of these questions.

Part 3 explores God’s plan for creation and humanity from Genesis to the nation of Israel. We will see that God originally intended for men and women to act as His vice-regents in making the earth a temple suitable for His presence. After this plan got off track through sin and death, God began a rescue operation for the earth focused in the nation of Israel. His goal remained the same as in the Garden, namely that the entire earth would become Edenic under the loving stewardship of His images. Yet this rescue operation seemed to fail as God exiled the Israelites from His presence and cast them out into the wilderness.

Part 4 discusses how God’s rescue operation for the earth reached fruition when God became human Himself to fulfill the human vocation of connecting heaven and earth. Through Christ, the story that began at the Garden of Eden and continued through Israel reaches its happy fulfillment in new creation, namely, the transformation of all things through the work of Christ and the new order this transformation brings to the cosmos. Yet new creation does not happen immediately: it is a process with a beginning (inauguration), a middle (continuation), and an end (culmination).

Part 5 looks at how God’s promise to renew the world provides incentives for a variety of cultural, ecological, and political projects. Specifically, the hope of physical resurrection—so often eclipsed in modern Christianity—gives meaning to our lives and context to the present Christian struggle.

Part 6 looks at how the good things of creation—particularly beauty and love—act as icons to disclose the goodness of God. In this path of ascent from creation to Creator, one of the greatest recovering Gnostics of all time, St. Augustine of Hippo, will guide us. But while earthly experiences of beauty and love disclose the goodness of creation, such experiences remain only hints or instances of the infinite beauty of God. The Augustinian teaching on reordered affections helps us to look through the beauty of creation to divine beauty and in the process to approach both chastity and marriage in their true eschatological context. We will see how the goodness of the physical body and human sexuality—so often a target of Gnostic and Manichaean attacks against creation—are signposts in the journey toward a transfigured world.

Part 7 offers a toolbox to help us avoid being Gnostic. We will explore how everything from liturgical worship to church architecture to the practice of art can guide us in living out the truth of creation’s goodness.

Part 1

My Journey from Gnosticism to Orthodoxy

Copyright ©2023 by Robin Phillips. All Rights Reserved. Published by Ancient Faith Publishing.

Chapter 1

Confessions of a Recovering Gnostic

Having grown up a Christian, I would always have said I believed in the resurrection of the body. However, my primary concern was the immortality of the soul. Without giving it much thought, I simply assumed that the doctrine of resurrection was shorthand for going to heaven when you die. Even though I had read the Gospel accounts of Christ’s Resurrection many times, and even though I was familiar with Paul’s lengthy discussion of bodily resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, I still unthinkingly assumed that the resurrection of believers would be nonphysical.

My belief in a nonphysical resurrection was part of a larger perspective that de-emphasized the importance of the physical world. In some of my earliest writings as a teenager, I argued that during the Old Covenant the Lord had focused His work on the material world, whereas in the era of the New Covenant His work was purely spiritual. Accordingly, what happens in the material world is unimportant to God. The best we can hope to do, or so I thought, is prepare for the next life. In the next life, the soul will be liberated from the body that now imprisons it.

Along with this anti-material outlook came an exaggerated antithesis between the sacred and the secular, the physical and the spiritual,

this world and the next. My framework for thinking about the spiritual life had no place for how Christ’s lordship might extend to thisworldly areas such as social justice, art, education, ecology, and the vast gamut of human culture. At best, these domains were “things of the earth” that distracted Christians from their primary calling. We ought to focus entirely on the life to come, not on the secular world. I wrote that Christians should retreat from the public sphere, not compromise their faith by trying to improve the present order of things.

Although my parents raised me in an ecumenical environment and facilitated a variety of religious experiences ranging from Presbyterianism to Episcopalianism, I instinctively sought out the most radical type of evangelicalism, imagining that holiness resided there. But while the Protestants I looked to for spiritual counsel were strong on getting saved and going to heaven, they didn’t offer much guidance about what happens in between. In fact, they often saw a strong disjunct between the earthly and the spiritual as a sign of piety. One of my mentors who was animated by this dualistic logic went on record saying that it was a sin for Christians to vote. After all, hadn’t Christ explicitly declared that His Kingdom is not of this world? To underscore this point, another mentor frequently drew attention to how bad the world is, proclaiming, “Just look around you—clearly Christ isn’t Lord of the world; the devil is!”

When these ideas combined with belief in Christ’s imminent return, I came to eschew any planning for the future: after all, I reasoned, why would I want to plant trees or save money since doing so might signal lack of faith in Christ’s imminent return? Moreover, by focusing too much on earthly renewal, I might inadvertently delay Christ’s Second Coming.

My pessimistic views about the physical world made me instinctively suspicious of Christian traditions that incorporated tangible gestures of piety into their worship—gestures such as raising hands, making the sign of the cross, kneeling during confession, and so