[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.