Disembodied
Author: Andrew Comiskey
April 08, 2024
‘To recover the true sense of the spiritual, we must
rediscover the mystery of the material…It may be our failure to enter deeply
and respectfully into the material that inhibits our discernment of the
spiritual.’
Fr. Robert Imbelli
A friend with whom I studied psychology in seminary
years ago insisted that she hold the tension between studying the inner lives
of persons (psychology) and theology, how and what we believe as Christians.
‘My childhood was all Spirit. We denied our messy humanity,
covered it up with faith. If I want to know this Jesus, I need also to know who
I am, who we are, how He made us.’
I never forgot her clarity. We refuse what is human to
our peril. Christopher West describes this split as ‘angelism’ and ‘animalism’—the
way Christians get into trouble when human desires, especially sexual ones, are
denied (angelism) then become scandalous (animalism).
Quoting philosopher Charles Taylor, Fr. Robert Imbelli describes our flight from ourselves as ‘excarnation.’ God took on humanity (incarnation) to help us reconcile with our troublesome
flesh. Yet we still tend to excarnate ourselves, opting to spiritualize what is
material—our flesh—especially when we conflict with ourselves.
That was my first impression of IHOPKC. My son Nick
found a good home for cultivating faith and spiritual discipline there. But I
was a little concerned when I noticed that the topics in the bookstore—prayer, prophecy,
deepening devotion—neglected any reference to what it meant to be a human being
worshipping alongside hundreds of others.
Where was the equivalent of St. John Paul II’s Theology
of the Body, exploring what it means to be human, made in His image, in our
sexual selves as male and female? These are primary questions for displaced young
people trying to figure out holiness from the vantage point of need and longing—plus
an authentic desire to glorify Jesus in all of it!
IHOPKC possessed a rich spirituality that was subject
to deformation due to deficient human formation. Without teaching and staffing that
regarded human need on par with spiritual growth, IHOPKC became imbalanced.
Added to this was Mike Bickle’s inordinate emotional and physical bonds with
certain women. That he could somehow spiritualize these bonds, thereby denying their
danger, set an ugly precedent that brought down the house.
3 cautionary factors for any Christian community:
Christian denial of what it means to be human is a
form of Gnosticism, a heresy as old as the New Testament. Gnosticism takes on
many forms, but St. Paul appears to major on and combat two aspects of it. The
first is a special knowledge or, in Greek, ‘gnosis’—a ‘secret’ truth that sets
one spiritual group apart from another (1 Tim. 6:20-21).
Such elitism is fanned by a second component, the divide
between what is ‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’: spirit good, fleshly humanity bad. Special
spiritual knowledge grants one privilege over human complications (Col. 2:18-23),
and in some strains, as at Corinth, human excess mattered little in the light
of their glorious ‘gnosis’ (1 Cor. 6:12-13).
St. Paul countered that the body mattered. God made the
body, God assumed one in Christ (incarnation) and thus Christians were responsible
to steward well the reality of housing ‘spirit’ within the body itself. Sexual
immorality violated both body and spirit; God gives His creation authority
through Spirit and Blood to be reconciled to that original dignity (1 Cor.
6:14-20).
Over-spiritualizing one’s humanity and minimizing
bodily violations results in my second caution: arrogance. Most Christian
movements that glory in a special anointing tend to minimize looking at the
human dimension of things. ‘Recovery’ stuff is often mocked as a navel-gazing tendency
of the weak, never for the spiritually elite. (This relates to the old boy’s club
mentality where interiority is deemed feminine and fussy.)
That mockery was sadly on display in this clip of Mike Bickle and Sam Storms as they laughed off attempts by an outside organization (in this
case, a directive from the Vineyard’s John Wimber for Mike to get Christian
therapeutic help) to reign in Mike by urging him to take a reflective look at
his broken humanity. Sickening.
IHOPKC tended to cultivate pride in possessing a special
awareness and commitment to Jesus that precluded taking care of the messier,
mundane aspects of their corporate humanity.
The third and conclusive point about a semi-gnostic
take on humanity? No authority to steward well the reality of one’s passions. Scripture
is crystal clear here. What we deny or minimize about our humanity can overtake
us and scandalize the whole. St. Paul said it best to the Colossians: ‘Such a
person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind
puffs him up with idle notions. He has lost connection with the Head…’ Their
‘regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed
worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they
lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence’ (Col. 2:18-19; 23).
Let us learn from others’ missteps. Jesus assumed a
body to help us reconcile with ours. We share a common struggle and dignity as
embodied spirits. Let us ‘submit to each other in reverence’ (Eph. 5:21) ‘so
that in everything’, including our bodily humanity, ‘He might have the
supremacy’ (Col. 1:18).
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