A brilliant student once shared his philosophy with me...

... When we become a Christian, he said, God takes out our spirit and replaces it with his Spirit. So God literally lives inside of us. The Spirit inside us is not able to sin, like 1 John 3:9 says, because it is God's Spirit. But because we still have a human body and soul, though, we might still sin.

I can't remember if he said the sinful nature was in our human spirit, so that God takes our sinful nature out when we are saved. But you can see that a statement like, "What you do flows from what you are," becomes literal.  We have God inside as part of us, so it is only natural that we would act a certain way.

I remember thinking to myself, Wow, that is brilliant.  Brilliant and bizzare. Brilliant, bizzare, and probably not really what the biblical authors had in mind. (I also thought of Apollinarianism)

Man, I could start my own cult by going hog wild creative with this. So your body is why you can still sin after having your sin nature taken out. But because our resurrection bodies will be spiritual bodies, we will never sin in heaven. We will neither have the sin nature nor the body that is weak toward sin.

Then the soul is where our mind, emotions, and will are. This is the part of us that gets transplanted into our heavenly, resurrection body, along with God's Spirit that will still be inside us. So we'll still have our basic personality and memories.

This is what happens when you take things literally that are really more like metaphors and pictures... or is this actually the way it works?????

Symposium on Human Nature: Brief Reflection

I missed the final morning of the conference, which involved a paper on society by Chris Accornero of SWU and a summary by Jo Anne Lyon, General Superintendent. But I heard all the papers on Saturday.

There was some good material here: one paper on sexual transformation and one on spousal abuse stand out as very informative. It was enjoyable to listen to one paper through a video link with Jamaica--problems getting a visa for the speaker, probably because of some of the problems they're having there right now. There were other enjoyable papers and I regret I did not hear Chris', which was on the societal dimension of restoring human nature.

There were thus some great pieces to the puzzle of human nature at the conference. I look forward to reading how Dr. Lyon integrated the pieces in the final summary.

There were also some glaring omissions of pieces, at least during the time I was there. For example, it is hard to see how a Christian can speak about what it might mean to be fully human or fully restored as human without talking a good deal about Jesus Christ. Oops. In terms of the assumed topic of Human Nature, therefore, we must on this point alone consider the conference deeply incomplete.

Also, in an age where brain science can locate the part of the brain where spirituality "lights up" and where evolution overwhelmingly dominates the scientific landscape, no symposium meaning to be relevant to the current questions about human nature could possibly be complete without significant engagement here. This is also not to mention the recent trend even in evangelical circles to question of whether the Bible teaches we have a detachable soul.

In short, it is always nice to have a reason to meet with old friends. :-)

P.S. Start of next chapter on seminary Dean's blog, this one on postmodernism and Wesleyanism.

Wesleyan Symposium on Human Nature

In Indy today and tomorrow at the regular Wesleyan Symposium. This year's topic is "Human Nature: Perfect, Flawed, and Redeemed: Wesleyan Perspectives on Human Nature." Right now Jack Connell is speaking on the image of God, etc.