Dust of the Earth Enlivened by the Breath of God

I made some disparaging remarks about the word spiritual in my last blog, and I suppose it was because I don't really understand what we mean by the word. What is a spiritual life? I know God is Spirit and I believe that the Holy Spirit in some mysterious way lives in me. But all that seems so inexplicable. Here's a quotation from Rob Mull's review of David Eaglelman's book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain:
Many of the functions we ascribe to our core selves are dependent upon our brain functions. We're realizing how dependent our sense of ourselves is on our biology and its interaction with the environment. . . .
We often talk as if we are separable from our bodies. Futurists want to download their thoughts and live forever online. Some faithful Christians look forward to discarding their shell of a body in favor of a spritual life in heaven. But if we could separate our thoughts and memories, even our sense of self, from our bodies, we would discover that the line between me and you isn't so clear. . . . "The brain is not so much the seat of the mind as the hub of the mind." We're not so much involved souls with joysticks controlling a mass of muscle as we are the dust of the earth enlivened by the breath of God.

What Eagleman seems to be saying in his book, among other things, is that who we are, our very sense of self is completely connected to our physicality, our brains and nerves and even our environment. Take away the physical and you lose the person.

So in the New Earth we will be bodies, incorruptible bodies, as Paul says, but bodies nevertheless.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Santorum Takes His Gospel of Individualism to Dordt College

“You go to Dordt College and you ask me that question?” Rick Santorum said to Ryan Walters, Dordt College freshman, when Santorum spoke in Sioux Center recently. And the question that Santorum seemed amazed at was this: “If not for our [government] social programs, how can we take care of our poor?” Santorum asked the audience who should take care of the poor, and the answer he got first was “the church,” and then, the answer he wanted, it’s up to “the individual” to take care of himself. Before we parse those three answers, I want to comment on Santorum’s amazement at Walters question. Why was he so amazed? I can only speculate. Santorum was amazed because he had been led to believe that Dordt College is a bastion of conservative Republican political views. Where did he get that idea? Again, I can, only speculate. Perhaps his colleague in the House of Representatives, Steve King, told him that. Perhaps the fact that Sioux County is called the most conservative county in the country in...
Read more

A "Plumbline" I wrote that will run on KDCR Friday, 3/19

What Glenn Beck Does Not Know Should one even bother to reply to Glenn Beck? Clearly, he does not use reason when he tries to convince folks to think like he does. Often, he attempts to frighten people by using words that carry all sorts of emotional baggage. Sometimes he talks as if he knows a lot about something, but in reality he’s not very well informed. I would hope that people would see through this sort of manipulation, but I hear that Beck has a huge following—even in a town like Sioux Center. So I am going to respond to something he recently said. Beck said that Christians should check their church’s web pages for the words “social justice” or “economic justice” and if they find them, they should resign from the church. Why? Because those words are really code words for communism and Nazism. Now for those Christian Reformed folk listening, if you bother checking the website of The Christian Reformed Church in North America, you will discover—if you did not already kno...
Read more

Doing Something Useful

Image
As I write this, two men are in my kitchen, sanding and sawing and hammering. I know them slightly, they are good men, a father and son team that restores old floors. We discovered a fir floor underneath the linoleum of our kitchen, and we hired these men to take off the layer of gunk—linoleum adhesive, I suppose—and make the floor smooth. Some of the boards were damaged and there were other places where non-flooring boards had been inserted in a remodeling project of the past , so our workers had to replace some of these boards with fir, carefully fitting in the tongue and grooved old fir pieces they had found at a store in Paulina. The father of the team must be 75 years old but he crawls around the floor on his knees with no knee pads (his son uses them) and seems happy in his work. He saw my boat in the garage and commented on it, saying, he found no pleasure in fishing: “A half hour on the lake and I’m ready to come in.” His joy seems to be his work. His son, who knows I recently ...
Read more