nephesh April 3, 2009

I just finished watching the movie slumdog millionaire. It reminded me of the darkness that exists in the world. Are there really people out there who trap innocent children in vicious cycles of violence, greed, and addiction—people who do things like burn out kids eyeballs to use them as street beggars? I saw a man today begging on the streets of Lima with no eyeballs. I had never seen that before. Then I watched this movie, and now I’m wondering what that man’s story is. I hope to God that his condition is not the result of oppression at the hands of ruthless evil. There is indeed evil in this world.

I was reminded this morning that I need to stay awake. What I mean is, Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to come back. We don’t know the time, the day, or the hour. But stay awake, he says. Keep watch. Don’t stop working, don’t stop waiting. In other words, don’t give up fighting for the kingdom of God to come on earth as it is in heaven. Don’t stop working to bring light into dark places. Stay alert. Don’t become so comfortable in your life on earth that you forget that Jesus is coming back, and that some day all things will be made right. The evildoers don’t win in the end.

I spent the weekend at a conference for pastors and leaders on the topic of integral mission. One of the talks was about eschatology and mission. Eschatology isn’t exactly a term that your average José Christian throws around in everyday conversation. But the word eschatos means the end of all things, so eschatology is simply a study of the end—the end of the world, the end of life as we know it, or the “end times” as it has commonly come to be known in the evangelical church. There is a lot of eschatological speculation out there. Books like the Left Behind series paint apocalyptic visions that scare people into their church pews. Some churches talk about the end times more than they talk about life here on earth. That’s a problem, and that’s what we talked about this weekend. We can pick out verses from all over the Bible, piece them together in some semblance of order, and come out with a theology of the end times that suggests there will be a series of events including a rapture, a thousand years of tribulation, a judgment day, and an establishment of a new heaven and a new earth. But nobody really knows. And you have to manipulate the scripture and interpret verses in a pretty narrow way to justify things like a rapture. But that’s beside the point. What I’m getting at here is this: our God is the God of Life. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

In the Hebrew mindset there was no distinction between body, spirit, and soul. When God formed man out of the dust of the earth and breathed life into him, the result was a living being, a whole person. The word used to describe this living being was nephesh, which has been translated in various parts of scripture as soul, mind, heart, living being, self, creature, appetite, desire, emotion, passion. This is an all-encompassing word that describes the fullness of what a human being is. Although the term nephesh is often translated as soul, it is not a term that simply describes a mystical kind of spirit, distinct and detached from the human body and mind. Unfortunately, that is the way that it has often been understood in western Christianity, especially in the western church that has been influenced by Greek and Platonic philosophy that created a sharp dichotomy between body and soul. There are actually modern evangelical churches that have created a “Christian Anthropology” that explains humans as beings with three different parts—soul, spirit, and body. They inaccurately use verses like 1 Thessalonians 5:23 to justify their tri-partite theory: May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. This perspective creates artificial divisions in our identity as human beings. It follows dichotomized Greek philosophy rather than the integrated Hebrew worldview described in Genesis. The big problem with this divided, dichotomized way of thinking is that it separates what is “spiritual” from what is material and physical, and it gives greater importance to things that are supposedly “spiritual.”

You can see how this dichotomized way of thinking has penetrated the Christian church in Peru. It is most obvious in the exaltation of the church building at the most spiritual place in the life of a believer. Faithfulness to the church means participating in the “culto”—the church service or meeting. There are Sunday meetings, prayer meetings, women’s meetings, men’s meetings, youth meetings, kids meetings, couples’ meetings, elderly folks meetings. You name it, the church will make a meeting out of it. The meeting itself is not the problem, the church should always gather together to be encouraged and strengthened. The problem is when the church building is the center of our spiritual lives, therefore the rest of the places we occupy in life are not as “spiritual.” This mindset seems to suggest that by going to church, praying in church, singing and worshipping in church, people can get close to God and have spiritual experiences. And while of course it’s true that people encounter God in church, it is devastating if we limit ourselves thinking that is the place where our practice and experience our spirituality. It is devastating not only for the individual who misses out on experiencing God in the mundane, everyday aspects of human life, like going to the market, washing dishes, typing on their computer, watching TV with his wife, or reading to her children, it is devastating for a world that is broken and raped and crying out for people who will bring the fullness of God’s presence and God’s values into all the spaces of human life—into the marketplace, into politics, into the education system, into media and entertainment, into the legal system, into agriculture and industry, into our understanding of history, into infinity and beyond.

This dichotomized way of thinking also turns spirituality into an escape from the world. The church becomes an escape from normal life, the kingdom of God (the “spiritual” realm) becomes something that is hoped for in the afterlife, rather than vigorously sought after here and now. But in the mind (or the nephesh) of Christ, spiritual life was no escape; rather, it was an entrance into the real world. It was an incarnation.

I’m sure that Jesus, ever present with the people, would have had something profound to say to the man on the street with no eyeballs. Then again, maybe he would have just said “buenas tardes,” knowing that a simple greeting can be full of meaning when we recognize the spirituality of every breath that God has given us since the moment he created us, breathed on us, and we became nephesh.