The Great Reversal
- Till around 1850 AD normal people’s worldview in Christian countries was roughly biblical in these points: People believed in an all-powerful Creator God, who was actively involved with his created order: blessing, saving, intervening, instructing etc. God is Lord of everything, and all things are his.
- From 1859 AD onward Darwin challenged that worldview from a ‘scientific’ perspective. > Believers condemned his teaching, but did not rebut it on scientific level, rather retreated and declared science to be anti-faith, to be ungodly, to be evil. Christians came to think: don’t believe science, don’t trust science, don’t do science.
- Similar things starting happening in the other domains as well: Bible-hostile government philosophies were proclaimed (Communism, National Socialism, …). > Believers retreated from politics, media, etc.
- This lead to a split in the Christians’ thinking into spiritual and worldly, good and bad, important and unimportant, worthy to pursue and not worthy to pursue.
- Spiritual is: Sunday, church, ministry, full-time service, mission, family.
- Worldly is: professions, politics, science, business, work, money.
- Example of this thinking: Medical mission. Doctors were sent to help missionaries survive on the field, but not for treating locals.
- There occurred a shift of focus from ‘kingdom theology’ to ‘salvation theology’. Christians started to preach ‘the gospel of salvation’, an expression that is in this form not to be found anywhere in the entire Bible.
- Also the understanding of ‘salvation’ and the language with it changed. It became ‘saving souls for heaven’ and ‘Don’t polish brass on a sinking ship’.
- This lead to a split in the Christians’ thinking into spiritual and worldly, good and bad, important and unimportant, worthy to pursue and not worthy to pursue.
- Spiritual is: Sunday, church, ministry, full-time service, mission, family.
- Worldly is: professions, politics, science, business, work, money.
- Example of this thinking: Medical mission. Doctors were sent to help missionaries survive on the field, but not for treating locals.
- There occurred a shift of focus from ‘kingdom theology’ to ‘salvation theology’. Christians started to preach ‘the gospel of salvation’, an expression that is in this form not to be found anywhere in the entire Bible.
- Also the understanding of ‘salvation’ and the language with it changed. It became ‘saving souls for heaven’ and ‘Don’t polish brass on a sinking ship’.
- In contrast to that ‘salvation’ (or in Hebrew: ‘shalom’), is understood differently in Deuteronomy 28: ‘Shalom’ or ‘Salvation’ has very clear practical, this-side components: it means peaceful relationships, fertile fields, godly children, economic well-being, political stability, truthful speech etc.
- With the popularity of Dispensationalism and the related ‘End Times craze’ this split became even stronger. There came to be an escapist theology: a complete focus on saving souls and waiting for rapture, with no view for serving and blessing this world now.
- Through Christian Missions this split thinking was exported to most of the world.
What is spiritual?
The split thinking is supported by a misunderstanding over how Paul used words like ‘world’ or ‘flesh’. The split thinking wrongly understood the contrast to be:
- spirit and heaven body and world
- spiritual, heavenly fleshly, worldly
- spiritual material
- good evil
- will last, eternal will disappear, temporal
- sacred secular
- evangelicals liberals
- salvation social change
- The underlying thinking was that the physical world, the body is the believers temptation and problem. The physical world is affected by sin and doomed.
- Believers thought that if only they only overcame this body (the ‘flesh’), then they would be spiritual
What is wrong with this picture?
- If the physical world is bad, then why did God make it, want it, sustains it and love it?
- if the body was bad, then why did he not create us like angels?
- If the flesh is my problem, then why do two thirds of Paul’s list of ‘fleshly sin’ (Gal 5:19-21) have nothing to do with the body?
- If the body is temptation and the spirit is desirable, how then did Satan fall, who has no body but rather is a spirit?
- If the future is spiritual, then why is Jesus given a physical resurrection body?
- If this world is evil and is going to end, then why does Revelation say explicitly that it will be made anew (Rev 21:1)? Surely not that we as disembodied spirits can look down on it from the cloud? For details please see ‘SCI 09 – Heaven & Earth‘.
The amended picture
- Both the spiritual and physical world are created, wanted and sustained by God
- Sin enters and mars both realms, first the spiritual and then the physical.
- Both realms now suffer under sin … so according to the New Testament:
- both will be ‘destroyed‘ (2 Pet 3:7)
- all will be ‘changed‘ (1 Cor 15:51)
- both will be ‘reconciled‘ (Col 1:20)
- both will be ‘gathered up‘ (Eph 1:10)
- creation will be ‘set free‘ or ‘redeemed‘ (Rom 8:21) and
- heaven and earth will be ‘renewed’ (Rev 21:1).
- The future is not to escape from the physical and peacefully live in the spiritual, the future is both worlds completely restored and under God’s full reign.
- The believer’s problem is not being in this world and having a body, but to bring everything under the control of the Holy Spirit, which is what it means to be ‘spiritual’
The 4000 year Connection
- Adam Ge 1:28-30 take dominion over this earth!
- Abraham Ge 12:1-3 bless all nations!
- Jesus Mt 28:19 disciple every nation!