The Importance of the Physical

Several years ago, I traveled to southeastern Wisconsin to hear the Anglican author and theologian Fleming Rutledge speak at Nashotah House, the iconic seminary of Catholic-minded Anglicanism in the United States. Recounting and commenting on what she spoke about on that occasion would be a fascinating project in itself, but my purpose here is to tell of something profound that merely happened to coincide with that event.

After Mrs. Rutledge (as she – intriguingly – prefers to be known) had spoken, she made herself available to sign books. Being a longstanding and enthusiastic admirer of her work, I was delighted with this opportunity and joined the line to have my copy of her then-recent book Three Hours signed. As I waited in that line, I eavesdropped on two men standing near me. They discussed the difference between a Catholic worldview (to be understood in this context as including a traditional Anglican worldview) and a Protestant worldview. One of the men said a deficiency – perhaps even the deficiency – in the Protestant worldview was a lack of a “theology of place.” 

Theology of place – how that phrase has stayed with me ever since then, and how I wish I knew who this man who said it was, so that I could explicitly give him credit for it! I am not sure what exactly he had in mind in saying it, but I can say that because place has to do with being grounded in physical particularity, the way in which I interpreted the phrase was as referring to a theology of physical things. 

And why would we need a theology of physical things? Today everything “spiritual” seems to be in fashion, as can be heard in the popular phrase, “spiritual, but not religious.” Is not spirituality enough?

To state it unambiguously: no, it is not. Spirituality, if understood and implemented properly, is of some value, but mere spirituality on its own is incomplete, for we are not merely spiritual people. We do not merely have a physical body. As one of the documents of the Second Vatican Council put it, “Though made of body and soul, man is one” (Gaudium et Spes 14). In other words, both our body and our soul together comprise what we are. We are physical and spiritual people (as used here, “spirit” and “soul” are, for practical purposes, synonymous). I wonder whether people realize that mere “spirituality” offers something less to them – because it only has to do with one part of their nature – than Christianity, which is a religion of both the body and the soul.

It is in light of all this that the Incarnation and the sacraments make sense. The Incarnation is God becoming human – which includes taking on a physical human body – and sacraments are particular physical means by which we receive God’s grace. It is fitting that because he did not create us as merely spiritual beings, but rather as beings that are also physical, he would use physical means such as these to reach out to us. C.S. Lewis, in his enduringly popular work Mere Christianity, made this point, writing: “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not…He likes matter. He invented it” (from Book II, Chapter 5).

Now, to return to the idea of theology of place – or theology of physicality – as having to do with the division between the Catholic and Protestant worldviews, it is understandable why this might be said, because the sacraments, rooted in the physical as they are, do not have such pride of place, such emphasis in Protestantism as they do in Catholicism. I suspect that this difference of emphasis in Protestantism may have inadvertently paved the way for the misguided cultural enthusiasm for so-called “spirituality” today. 

Related to all of this is another misconception; namely, the idea that Christianity is merely oriented towards a spiritual afterlife – towards “going to heaven when you die” – rather than toward what the Apostle’s Creed calls “the resurrection of the body[.]” I fear that many who read or say those words in the Creed may not realize or notice that they refer not merely to the resurrection of Jesus, but rather to the bodily resurrection of us all. The vision set forth in scripture is so much richer than a mere spiritual afterlife: it is of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1, emphasis added). Perhaps it is upon realizing the richness of this vision that the value of the physical might finally become apparent to some of the people to whom it had not previously been clear, for how could anything offered in a mere “spirituality” rival this?