The crux of my theology

[theatokos]

The Christian tradition has long struggled with keeping body and soul together and naming both good. The Church has long fought, not always successfully, against gnostic ideas that the body is false or bad, something to be spurned and separated from in the quest for the ultimate good in spirit. Many Christians even go down the path to keeping the flesh violently in check, an extreme form of discipline. But Genesis 1 repeatedly affirms two truths: that creation - physical and material, including human bodies - is good and that human beings are have the Divine breath of life within them. Whatever our faults, flaws or failures, these two truths remain constant. These two facts alone, if taken to heart, are radical, transformational and foundational underpinnings, profoundly effecting not just how we treat one another, but how we treat our environment and ourselves.

The Christian Church has long held that after death our bodies and souls will be reunited. While it is unclear (especially to me) exactly how this happens given the scientific reality that our bodies decompose and become part of the earth, therefore becoming part of the planet and future generations, this point of theology indicates a holistic view to the human person. We are not only our souls, neither are we only our bodies. Rather we are both, united in a complete complexity.

The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions also speak of a concept called deification, a process in which we grow ever closer to, and more and more like, God. This process is begun at baptism, but does not end when we die. This is part of what is possible thanks to the Divine spark, the breath of life within us. Because at our core, our nature and purpose is union with the Divine.

Jumping forward to Jesus as God incarnate, he is the ultimate example of complete union between creation and divinity. While we may never be able to reach this perfection, his example and especially the example of his mother, Mary (Theotokos, the God-bearer), who in her own flesh bore the union of creation and divinity, reveals to us the dignity and possibility of our humanity. As Sarah Boss says, it reveals to us "creation's capacity for glorification."

We do not miraculously attain perfection but we can confidently claim our dignity and divinity and move toward this union with God. We are all gods. This theology that divinity and creation, body and soul, spirit and matter, are not separated is a powerful corrective to damaging modern ideas that we completely control matter and/or that we are slaves to the tyranny and totality of our flesh, and to weak theologies that ask us to renounce this creation in favor of the "spiritual" and to hope only in the life to come.

The more I study theologies of the Virgin Mary, the more I realize what the crux of my theology rests on.

Comments

[ewigweibliche.livejournal.com]

My main point was not to get into eschatology (end times/after life) but to raise the point of wholeness. I am seriously agnostic about what happens after death. I deeply believe that it shouldn't impact how we live now. BUT, some of the thinking is important, because if we view matter as insignificant it is easy to dismiss our lived, embodied experiences and other living beings, for example animals, which most religions believe to have spirits but not souls. And yet, all are part of the God's good creation.

What I really like this wholeness in the ideas I wrote about. Honestly, I can't wrap my brain around what it would be like to have our bodies resurrected, or to live in a more glorified form, etc. But, for me, that is a bridge to cross when I come to it! For now, I take refuge in the underlying idea that we are whole human beings.