Many times, Christianity is understood as a purely spiritual faith. That is, faith has little or nothing of great importance to do with the material and physical world. To understand the Christian faith in a purely spiritual manner is a dangerous enterprise for both those inside the faith as well as those outside the faith.
Pope Pius XII was pope during much of the reign of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. During his pontificate and long after, including today, many historians and others criticize him for his near silence on the Holocaust and many terrors of the war and of Nazism. He has been accused of being cowardly, political, and, as one with a previous record of anti-Semitic statements, complicit in Holocaust atrocities.
I am not historian enough to have anything greater than an opinion on these charges. I do understand why such things would be said about him. However, as a pastor when I read Pius XII writings and statements, I see a theological failure in his understanding of the Christian faith. There is a reason we do theology in the church. Bad theology can be more than incorrect thinking or even heresy; it can be downright dangerous and deadly.
Pius XII in his writings always seemed to view the Christian faith as something almost purely spiritual. The body did not much matter. It is all about one’s soul in the pursuit of eternal life. Everything else is, at best, secondary. Therefore the spirits of both persecutors and persecuted is what mattered most. What happened to the body, while tragic, was of much lesser importance.
This flies in the face of a God who found it of ultimate importance to come to earth in the very human body of Jesus; a body that would end in pain, torture, and death. This is a God who while coming to God’s people in words of scripture, chooses to address and encounter God’s people more frequently through the embodied words of very human beings. Many times the words themselves matter more because they came forth from a human person in a human body.
Scripture is full of examples of God addressing its readers through prophets, very human persons. In many of those words God criticizes the spirituality of God’s people because they ignored bodily needs like hunger. While not against fasts and proper worship, God seems to find such infuriating when those acts do not result in the care of the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the hungry; those with very human and even bodily needs.
I have written and spoken often and recently about racism. In terms of our Christian faith, I think racism too in part is proliferated through a poor theological lens. Here, however, the issue seems to be the body is too important. It seems the color of one’s skin, the outward covering of the body, is what determines one’s value. Here is where spirituality can speak and proclaim loudly that this bodily difference is irrelevant in terms of one’s worth. Souls have no color. Neither do parts of the body such as brains, hearts or organs.
The gist of this is: the Christian faith is for Christian living; it is for Christian living in this world, now. What we do here now matters not in terms of some eternal reward but in terms of living as God created us to live and desires us to live. This is why the Christian faith isn’t primarily practiced in individual devotion but in community with other persons.
Among other things, every time we are ill, we are reminded the body matters. Such bodily illness greatly affects our spirits and even spiritual life. For that matter, our spirts have often been affected when some other’s body suffers. Christian faith and Christian ministry is not about caring only about souls. It is caring about us; all of us, literally from head to toe. The Christian faith is not only heard and felt; it can be seen. It is alive in this very material world.
