SETTING OUR MINDS (17 OF 52)
Scripture: Romans 8:6-17
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Setting Our Minds (17 of 52)
Series: Lectionary, Year A
Christopher B. Harbin
Romans 8:6-17
We like to think dualistically. We want the world around us to behave in clear terms as positive and negative, black and white, male and female, good and evil, Godly and ungodly. We want those categories to be absolute. We want the spiritual and the fleshly or worldly to be clearly defined, separated by strictly defined rules. We want the world to be orderly and unrelentingly fall into nice, neat categories. We want to believe the Bible backs us up on this. We find plenty of contrasting terms there and want to force them to fit our dualistic notion. Could we be missing something?
Gnosticism was alive and well in the First Century. It was a notion that the spiritual reality was all good, while the material or physical reality was all bad. Furthermore, it stressed that special knowledge was the means of navigating from the physical realm into the spiritual reality. Pushed to its logical conclusions, Gnosticism taught that Jesus could not have been both human and divine, as that would have contaminated God. Jesus must have only appeared to be human. There was no redeeming the material world, there was only an escape from its clutches to enter the spiritual plane, completely being unattached to the realities of this physical existence.
When Paul writes of a contrast between the spirit and the flesh, this is not at all what he is talking about. His words here in Romans speak of an existence that spans the range of spiritual and fleshly, death and life mingled from one extreme to the other. This is consistent with the Hebrew notions of using terms that appear as extremes or opposites to speak of the whole experience of life from one extreme to the other.
We find this notion throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. We hear of cycles of dark to light, young to old, good to evil, heaven to earth, rich to poor, and the like. These phrases are meant to convey the whole of hu ...
Series: Lectionary, Year A
Christopher B. Harbin
Romans 8:6-17
We like to think dualistically. We want the world around us to behave in clear terms as positive and negative, black and white, male and female, good and evil, Godly and ungodly. We want those categories to be absolute. We want the spiritual and the fleshly or worldly to be clearly defined, separated by strictly defined rules. We want the world to be orderly and unrelentingly fall into nice, neat categories. We want to believe the Bible backs us up on this. We find plenty of contrasting terms there and want to force them to fit our dualistic notion. Could we be missing something?
Gnosticism was alive and well in the First Century. It was a notion that the spiritual reality was all good, while the material or physical reality was all bad. Furthermore, it stressed that special knowledge was the means of navigating from the physical realm into the spiritual reality. Pushed to its logical conclusions, Gnosticism taught that Jesus could not have been both human and divine, as that would have contaminated God. Jesus must have only appeared to be human. There was no redeeming the material world, there was only an escape from its clutches to enter the spiritual plane, completely being unattached to the realities of this physical existence.
When Paul writes of a contrast between the spirit and the flesh, this is not at all what he is talking about. His words here in Romans speak of an existence that spans the range of spiritual and fleshly, death and life mingled from one extreme to the other. This is consistent with the Hebrew notions of using terms that appear as extremes or opposites to speak of the whole experience of life from one extreme to the other.
We find this notion throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. We hear of cycles of dark to light, young to old, good to evil, heaven to earth, rich to poor, and the like. These phrases are meant to convey the whole of hu ...
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