Embodying the Faith

This blog post was adapted from a devotional and discussion led at our church's men's group monthly coffee shop meeting. If you're a man of the church, you should definitely consider meeting with us, and enjoy the company, coffee, and hashing things out in discussion. If you're a man not-of-this-church, but in the area, you're still welcome to join us.

Do the physical acts of kneeling or bowing while praying do anything at all, or are they completely irrelevant to the prayer? If your first instinct is to say that it doesn’t matter what your body is doing while praying, and that you can pray just as easily while driving or walking, I can understand and sympathize with that. I am not frequently on my knees in prayer myself, and tend to think that the 30-second prayer that you actually make while driving is better than the hour of prayer and contemplation that you don’t do. C.S. Lewis, for what it’s worth, thought it mattered, writing that “the body ought to pray as well as the soul.” The idea is that how we orient our physical bodies affects us spiritually. Church historian Eusebius, quoting a passage from 2nd-century writer Hegesippus which would otherwise be lost to us, says that James, the brother of Jesus, was known for having knees like a camel’s due to being worn and callused from long hours of praying at the temple. In a time when broader evangelicalism seems to be in a rush to deformalize our relationship to Jesus Christ, it's worth noting that James, a man who would have known Jesus for a long time in an informal way, was not too proud to also kneel before him in prayer as his lord.

Some Gnostics believed this guy created the world. I guess I wouldn't trust him, either.

The Gnostics of antiquity believed all sorts of different things, but had in common a low view of the material world. For the Gnostics, the material world was evil, and the creation of an evil being. Only spiritual things were good. For some, this meant a strict asceticism, abstaining from material comforts as if they were evil things. For other Gnostics, in total contrast, it meant indulging in whatever they wanted, because their view of the body was that it was inessential. The body imprisoned a pure soul which remained untainted by what the body did. This idea of the body’s inessentialness can sometimes creep into our religious practices, too. No Christian would say that the faith consists of this particular sequence: intellectually accepting that Jesus is God, getting baptized, living as comfortable a life as possible, and then dying and punching a ticket to a heavenly paradise in which God has made us perfectly holy beings independent of our lived-out lives. And yet that is tacitly accepted in the way we sometimes choose to live. That is a functional kind of Gnosticism, and, really, a magical way of thinking when it comes to our spiritual development and training.

The apostle Paul, not at all a Gnostic, takes aim at some Gnostic ideas while writing to Timothy, and calls for a fully embodied godliness which he compares to physical training. Here is I Timothy 4:1-11:

Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.

If you instruct the brethren in these things, you will be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished in the words of faith and of the good doctrine which you have carefully followed. But reject profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise yourself toward godliness. For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come. This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance. For to this end we both labor and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe. These things command and teach.

In what ways is spiritual training like physical training? Like physical training, getting to your goal involves making it routine. To be a prayerful person, you have to pray. To be more generous, you have to practice generosity. Also like physical training, we shouldn’t begin on day one lifting the heaviest weight and expecting to be successful, and you don’t have to invent your own routine. Adopt a prayer book, or when you pray, you can just pray a psalm from the Bible. You can pray the same psalm over and over again until you don’t even have to read it. Make it a part of yourself.

Nearly all churches had their attendance significantly impacted following the return to in-person gatherings following the covid outbreak. The Norfolk Church fared, mercifully, better than most. I think that decline has a lot to do with simply being out of the practice of going; and being out of practice, many people's beliefs and priorities changed. A common tendency is to think we have to adopt the faith intellectually first, and that our actions follow, but that is not necessarily the case. Our actions can inform our intellectual beliefs. Blaise Pascal is famous for Pascal’s Wager, which he laid out in his Pensées. Pascal's case was that believing in God is a safer bet than not. The wager itself is not the subject of this blog post, and I'll let you decide how persuasive his argument is. More interesting to me than the wager itself is what Pascal's solution is for those who are persuaded but still lack belief in God: act as though you did. Here's what he had to say: "Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed...this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness."

God is making us holy, but he invites us to participate in the change he is working in us. This means not merely intellectualizing the faith, but living it out through disciplining the body. There is no better means of doing that than by learning and practicing it with the community of the faithful.