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[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, many, particularly those who share Kirk’s Christian faith, insist that he is the latest casualty in a “spiritual war” that has long been driving our politics. That political conflicts are ultimately spiritual in character is true enough. This being said, the contexts within which Christians make this assertion suggest that they hold a view of the “spiritual” that isn’t Christian at all.
To a greater extent than any philosophical tradition that’s ever existed, Christianity resoundingly affirms the goodness, the beauty, the dignity, indeed, the sacredness of the human body. God declared all of His creation good. But humanity is the apex of His creation, its members the bearers of His image. That Christianity ascribes unprecedented value to the human body is gotten readily enough by the fact that its central doctrine is the of the Incarnation: The disciples of Christ are unique insofar as they maintain that God Himself chose to reveal Himself in the flesh, in human form.
And God, as the Church Fathers were at pains to demonstrate, didn’t mask Himself behind a skin suit, so to speak. He didn’t wear a body.
He became a body.
The Second Person of the Triune God, God the Son, became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. The first-century Middle Eastern carpenter, the son of Mary and Joseph, the man who was born in a manger, who drank, ate, laughed, yelled, spoke, prayed, rested, walked, worried, and cried; the man who argued with opponents, embraced friends, who suffered, died, and was buried, and who eventually resurrected from the grave—this man, so His disciples have maintained for two millennia, embodied the fullness of God.
Even when He was resurrected, He didn’t come back as a ghost. He rose with a new body.
In other words, while Christianity recognizes that human beings are indeed spiritual beings, it categorically denies that the flesh is but a mere material means to be enlisted in the service of some immaterial entity, a “spirit,” that inhabits the body in, say, a similar manner to that in which people inhabit their domiciles. Plato, and certainly the Neo-Platonists who succeeded him, advanced a dualism according to which human beings are essentially disembodied souls residing within inferior matter. The body, on this reckoning of it, is nothing more or less than an instrument that is inherently subservient to the mind, but from which, ultimately, the mind seeks emancipation.
Christianity is not Platonism. Yet Christians sound more like Platonists than Christians when they claim that they are engaged in spiritual warfare, for they are typically quick to draw a sharp contrast between this conception of the spiritual and that of the physical. Ephesians 6:12 is the Biblical passage invariably quoted to support this metaphysical dualism:
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
This verse, however, and contrary to what most contemporary Christians evidently think, does not preclude the permissibility, or even the necessity, of physical warfare. Given Christianity’s unique endorsement of the incarnation of God, both in the person of Jesus as well as within all of God’s creation, it is a bit perplexing, on its face, that any Christian would think, or be so careless as to imply, that while they are called to be warriors for God, they should never expect to have to engage their bodies in that war, the very bodies with which their Creator blessed them and by means of which they are called to serve God in all other respects—except, apparently, when it comes to serving God by combating the wicked.
At least contemporary Christians sound this way when it comes to domestic conflicts—i.e., to the possibility that they personally may have a responsibility to train their bodies, “the temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6: 19), with an eye toward defending themselves, their loved ones, their communities, their countries. When, though, it comes to the use of physical violence in foreign conflicts, these same Christians either refrain from quoting Ephesians 6:2 or, if they do quote it, it’s free of the dualistic interpretation that is imposed upon it domestically. High profile Christian media personalities will repeatedly insist that “violence is never the answer” when dealing with violence from their political and ideological rivals at home, for while we must “fight, fight, fight,” Christians and conservatives must never “stoop” to the level of their adversaries. Christians are called to be spiritual, not physical, warriors, they’ll repeatedly insist. On the other hand, these same people, as far as I can determine, recognize zero incompatibility between spiritual and physical warfare when it comes to those generations of Americans who simultaneously affirmed their love of God and country as justifications for answering violence with violence in the War for Independence, the War of 1812, World Wars I and (especially) II, to name just a few instances among countless.
When Islamic terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, these same Christians didn’t loudly and incessantly proclaim, while quoting Ephesians 6:2, that a violent response on the part of America can “never” be the answer. Nor did they presume to lecture Israel on its need to refrain from physical violence against Hamas when the latter slaughtered and captured Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
The human-person is a spiritual unity of body and mind, from the Christian perspective. We don’t just have bodies. We are bodies. Evil, which Christians are commanded by God to combat, is not some abstraction. Evil, like the virtues that Christians espouse, are concretized in persons. They are expressed, reinforced, perpetuated by way of the principal agent, the body, by means of which human beings “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
It is high time for Christians, the disciples of God-in-the-flesh, to retire their selective dualism and train their God-given bodies, those temples of the Holy Spirit, for the purpose of protecting themselves and their loved ones against the evil-doers among them.
“To a greater extent than any philosophical tradition that’s ever existed, Christianity resoundingly affirms the goodness, the beauty, the dignity, indeed, the sacredness of the human body.”
The secular philosophical tradition of the pagan Greeks celebrated the human body and the beauty and splendor of life on earth, the medieval Christians not so much. Saint Paul and Augustine, not so much.
How can a creature born of Original Sin, condemned by the Christian God to suffer, toil, and die on earth as punishment for Adam and Eve’s disobedience celebrate the body, sex, or the splendor and beauty of life on earth? He can’t. And the medieval Christians proceeded to do just that, renounce the body, sex, and the pleasures of life.
Jesus was a virginal ascetic, renouncing the pleasures of this life on earth. According to the Christian mythology Jesus did not come to earth to celebrate life on earth but to save FALLEN mankind from this punishment of life on earth and take the saved to his kingdom in some supernatural and higher dimension.
“As to the realm of physical nature, the medievals characteristically regarded it as a semi-real haze, a transitory stage in the divine plan, and a troublesome one at that, a delusion and a snare — a delusion because men mistake it for reality, a snare because they are tempted by its lures to jeopardize their immortal souls. What tempts them is the prospect of earthly pleasure.
What kind of life, then, does the immortal soul require on earth? Self-denial, asceticism, the resolute shunning of this temptation. But isn’t it unfair to ask men to throw away their whole enjoyment of life? Augustine’s answer is: what else befits creatures befouled by Original Sin, creatures who are, as he put it, “crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous”? – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
Do the cut and paste. Do the cut and paste.
Everybody do the cut and paste!
Like anyone is going to take the time to read this pile of gobbledegook.
And big fat TLDR to you.
“In the second and third centuries, during the growing decadence of the Roman Empire, a new cultural and historical force began to make its impact felt on the Western world, a force that would affect man/woman relationships as profoundly as it affected the rest of Western culture: Christianity. The central thrust of this new religion was a profound ascetism, an intense hostility to human sexuality, and a fanatical scorn of earthly life. Hostility to pleasure — above all, to sexual pleasure — was not merely one tenet among many of this new religion; it was central and basic. The Church’s hostility to sex was rooted in its hostility to physical — earthly — existence and its view that the physical enjoyment of life on earth necessarily meant spiritual evil. While such doctrines were already present in the Roman world in the doctrines of Stoicism, Neoplatonism, and Oriental mysticism, Christianity mobilized the sentiments behind such doctrines, capitalizing on the growing revulsion against the mindless decadence of the time and offering the appeal of a cleansing and purifying acid.
Saint Paul elevated the Greek concept of the soul-body dichotomy to unprecedented importance in the Western world. The soul, he taught, is an entity separate from the body, transcending the latter, and its proper sphere of concern is with values unrelated to the body or to this earth. The body is only a prison in which the soul is trapped. It is the body that drags a person down to sin, to the quest for pleasure, to sexual lust.
Christianity upheld to men and women and ideal of love that was consistently selfless and nonsexual. Love and sex were, in effect, proclaimed to stand at opposite poles: the source of love was God; the source of sex was, in effect, the devil….
Sexual abstinence was proclaimed the moral ideal. Marriage — later described as a “medicine for immorality” — was Christianity’s reluctant concession to the depravity of human nature that made this ideal actually obtainable.” – Nathaniel Branden, “The Psychology of Romantic Love”
Well ole Nattie certainly didn’t practice what he preached, He was doin’ the Aynus while she was still married.. What a woman….screwin’ around on her husband. What a loser Hubbie was putting up with being cuckolded.
How absolutely effed up is the Objectionable crowd.
No wonder you are the way you are.
Nathaniel Brandon was born Blumenthal. Taking the name “Brandon” to honor Rand. That shows how submissive he was — like a wife, taking her husband’s name. Definitely cult like. So much for individualism. So much for male strength and initiative.
Brandon’s theology is gnosticism, not Christianity. Gnosticism was one of the earliest heresies with its teaching that the body was evil and only the spiritual was good. Christ did not have a physical body? No incarnation? Heresy.
I would as soon go to Brandon for theology as to a janitor for major surgery.
Nathaniel Branden isn’t writing about his theology but about Saint Paul’s theology.
So now you are going to argue that Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, founding fathers of Christianity, were heretics! LOL! You’re a clown!
Male strength and initiative? Jesus was no paragon of male strength, he was no manly man, or man’s man. He was a Shmoo looking to be eaten and sacrificed by the manly Romans.
THX, You falsely assert that Christian love was selfless and non-sexual. There can be no love without both a self and an object of love. Gnostics believed the body and all its functions (including sex) was evil. Song of Solomon is a very sexy book, and the joy of marital relations is not confined to that book. Our LORD took upon Himself a human body with all its weaknesses and functions. He ate, pooped, sweated, grew tired, slept, etc. And He has chosen to keep that body, together with the marks of His suffering and crucifixion, into heaven itself.
You can believe whatever you wish, but your consistent misrepresentation and perversion of Christian teachings and doctrines is morally and factually wrong. In your language — it is irrational – because that is what you would say if I were being immoral or contravening facts.
Why have you never once given me Scripture to back up what you say? It would be dispositive.
But you can’t even define “reason,” insisting it is “man’s mind” despite so much objective evidence to the contrary. Whose mind? Yours? Rand’s? Brandon’s? What is “reason” or “truth”? You have no answer because you are the answer to everything and, like St. Paul’s enemies you compare yourself with yourself and prove your ignorance. See 2 Corinthians 10: 12 “We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they show their ignorance.”
I still pray for you. At least you have hatred. If you ever slide into apathy, then you are finished.
If you think Jesus was no manly man, then read the chapter at John 8. You cannot read that chapter and include Jesus was not totally in charge. The phrase “like a boss” comes to mind.
Like you are a manly man. Here’s what you wrote a few years back:
*I don’t recognize any such absurdity as service to my country.*
You are basically a keyboard warrior pussy.
Taking cues on Paul’s theology from a marshmellow like Nattie Brandy is like taking ques from you on theology.
Thus confirming my theory that Objectivism attracts male marshmellows.
Well said Kynarion
Yes Nattie was a weak self-indulgent beta male You can also see it in the men THX admires. Lennie Peikoff is one. There are several others he uses over and over again. And the Greeks, Yes the Greeks. Those delicate flamers. We aren’t talking about the Spartans here, are we.
Objectivism seems to attract girly. men.
This could be one big reason why they never rise out of the intellectual morass, for the most part
Christians can’t protect themselves with words and prayers alone.
When a war is waged it’s time to fight back. Physically defeating and eliminating the threat.
Forget Spiritual Warfare. Christianity needs to muscle up and get more muscular. Anyone remember the Crusades? Anyone remember Charles Martel and King Sobieski.
Muslims in Nigeria have been murdering Christians for years. Biden abandoned the Afghans to their fate against the Taliban. We have lost the War on Terror.
If we end up in a civil war against the Left it won’t be pretty. It won’t be spiritual. It will be bloody. Read Schlichter’s American Apocalypse.
Islam is Not the Religion of Peace as some fools have claimed its a phony one of fools for Satan
“We don’t just have bodies. We are bodies.”
I’m not so sure about that. Many well-documented near-death experiences seem to show otherwise. Also, check out neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s now book and videos showing that the mind is more than just the brain.
“It is high time for Christians, the disciples of God-in-the-flesh, to retire their selective dualism and train their God-given bodies, those temples of the Holy Spirit, for the purpose of protecting themselves and their loved ones against the evil-doers among them.”
I do agree with this but there is a caveat.
That being said, God has nothing to do with religion and has been gravely misrepresented by religious groups, who are in fact political parties of old (as in before democracy/communism/tribalism or whatever adherence to tradition as a moral authority or hierarchy) that represented groups of like-minded sheep. Don’t confuse religion with faith!