Friends, We can call ourselves anything we want … but if we get it wrong, it hurts us, not God. We live because He lives. See the column below. Blessings, Bob

Spirituality Column #856

April 11, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Living for Glory

By Bob Walters                                 

“The glory of God is a living human being ...” – St. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies

Of all places to run into my old friend Irenaeus (eye-ruh-NAY-us), last Friday’s Wall Street Journal “Houses of Worship” column expounded on what I thought was an enlightening and timely critique of the human body (material) vs. the human soul (spirit).

Serving as a rudder in the discussion – of the body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion, and then noting the ancient heresy of Gnosticism which cleaves human body from soul – Irenaeus reminds us that God’s glory manifests in our entire being.

It is important not to believe, like the Gnostics, that – in a nutshell – matter is evil and spirit is good.  Hence our bodies are throw-away vessels of sin and it is only our soul / spirit that lives eternally. This is timely because it sheds light on the “religious” though heretical underpinnings of things like the current “gender” madness.

We are, physically and sexually, what God made us to be, from our external and obvious anatomical features all the way down to sub-microscopic strands of DNA.  We must not, like the Gnostics, diminish the importance of our body by casting off its creation as something evil from the start.  Because in that case, if my body is already evil, why can’t I screw it up further by claiming it to be what it is not?  Who cares? 

Well … God does.

And not because we hurt God when we misinterpret His Creation.  What we hurt with our misinterpretation and sin is His Creation … i.e., us.  And this is surely the season when we see God’s concern and love for us; we see it in His Son Jesus on a Cross, crucified to cover our sins and bring us back into full life with God.  We know we are restored to full life with God because the tomb was empty and Jesus was restored to full life with God.  That’s what Easter means … our lives are restored to God’s glory.

We are “created in the image of God” (Genesis 1:26-28), and Irenaeus, a second century Greek bishop who preached extensively in what is now southern France, spoke forcefully against Gnosticism, a leading heresy of the day.  Gnostics, among many other things, denied God could become material, i.e., the human Jesus, and denied the resurrection.  Irenaeus declared the totality of the person of Christ as man and God.

“For the glory of God is a living human being,” Irenaeus wrote. “And the life of the human consists in beholding God … the glory of the human being is God.”  We behold God in Jesus Christ with the totality of our being: our bodies, minds, souls, and spirit.

The Internet is awash with memes that distort Irenaeus’ words to “The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” and overlay them on all manner of “life on the edge” activities, or in some cases, images of serenity and contemplation.  The resulting error is that we make our lives “full” and glorify God by our activities, not by our faith in Jesus.

Easter reminds us that “fullness of life” requires God. That is what Jesus meant when He said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).

Like the Gnostics, we are free to maim our physical lives to our least holy whims, though I don’t know how God deals with that in the end.  I do know that joy, peace, grace, and love, in Christ, make God’s glory shine with a full life in the here and now.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) considers Irenaeus an “old friend” because of how often mentor George Bebawi mentioned him in his Wednesday classes at E91.