GROWING EDGES

In this issue we are giving attention to "incarnational living." This is a matter we will return to in an even more intensive way in a future issue of the Perspective—likely next spring or summer. We are talking about how our life with God penetrates all we are and all we do. In this regard you will want to give special attention to the two books we are featuring in this issue, The Reflective Executive: A Spirituality of Business and Enterprise and Messengers of God: The Sensuous Side of Spirituality (p. 5). But first things first. To rightly understand incarnational living, we first need a proper understanding of the material world and our place in it.

A Good Earth
Christianity is the most materialistic of the world's religions; that is, it takes material things seriously as created goods God has given us to enjoy. The Christian faith does not, as is so often the case in Eastern religions, dismiss material things as inconsequential, or worse yet, as genuinely evil. The stuff of the material world—what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called "holy matter"—was created by God and he declares it to be good, very good (Gen. 1:25, 31). Material goods are meant to enhance human life.

Deuteronomy 16:15 is typical of dozens of similar statements, "The Lord your God will bless you in all your produce, and in all the work of your hands, so that you will be altogether joyful. " Note that the rejoicing is because of the abundant provision from the hand of God. The New Testament picks up this same theme of God's loving provision for his children. Jesus reminds us that as we seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, we are more adequately cared for than the birds of the air and the lilies of the field (Matt. 6:25-34).

Strange Distortions
Having said this, I must warn of the way by which people have taken the gracious teaching of Scripture on the goodness of creation and twisted it into a thing of their own. Animistic religions, for example, will invariably gravitate toward a deification of the material world and end up worshiping it. Today, Western culture is witnessing something of a revival of the ancient animistic religions.

But distortions occur in the Christian faith as well. Some, having never understood the biblical stress upon the goodness of the material world, take on a consuming asceticism that rejects the world, seeing it in opposition to true spirituality. Still others have turned Scripture's teaching on God's gracious provision for us into a religion of personal peace and prosperity, crudely stated, "Love Jesus and get rich."

A Limited Good
What we need to see is that the material world is a limited good—limited in the sense that we cannot make a life out of it. But, you see, we were never intended to make a life out of material things, because material things were never intended to function independently of God and his other created realities. No, we are created so as to receive life from God, who is Spirit, and to express that life through our bodies and in the material world in which we live. The spiritual and the physical are not in opposition to one another, but are complementary. Far from being evil, the physical is meant to be inhabited by the spiritual.