Originally Posted by InChristAlone
I know this is another topic, but I have been thinking over this for quite a while, since I tried to definite what spirit, spirituality, and spiritual life are.
BTW, there is a verse that distinguishes between the body, soul and spirit:
"May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."(I Thess. 5:23)."
Until we can define spirit and soul let's look at this verse as if it were an algebra problem and see where that takes us. "May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole x, y and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Oh look, it implies a tripartite man. Watchman Nee wasn't all wet after all.
I can't explain what spirit is, either. Probably, it's elusive because it's invisible, not physical.
Perhaps that's a clue. What is spiritual is what is incorporeal, intangible, invisible. Like infinity, the spirit is defined by negation. Infinite is what is not finite. Spirit is what is not corporeal. To say something is spiritual is not to specify what it is but to specify that it is not corporeal.
I tried to find answers reading the EOC doctrines, got some insights, but I am still unable to give a clear definition. And I believe even if I could get a definite answer, I'd not be able to comprehend it, anyway. Nevertheless, I'll try to explain the term "spirit". But first of all, let's define what body and soul are:
1. The body, “dust from the ground” (Gen. 2:7), is the physical or material aspect of man’s nature.
2. The soul is the life-force that vivifies and animates the body, causing it to be not just a lump of matter, but something that grows and moves, that feels and perceives. In the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, the term 'soul' refers both to the spiritual (not physical) element in our existence and to life itself.
This statement confirms what I said above.
Anything that has life is called a soul. The soul is the sign of life, but it is not the cause of life. It is the bearer of life. Animals also possess a soul, and so perhaps do plants. But in man’s case the soul is endowed with consciousness; it is a rational soul, possessing the capacity for abstract thought, and the ability to advance by discursive argument from premises to a conclusion. These powers are present in animals, if at all, only to a very limited degree.
Simply put, humans appear to have physical and nonphysical aspects the combination of which makes us "living souls." Insofar as consciousness is a non-physical phenomenon, it is spiritual.
In the New Testament, the soul appears also to be the bearer of eternal life, and therefore, the salvation of the soul is identified with the possibility of life which does not know corruption and death.
3. The spirit is that force which God breathed into man when He created him. Spirit, the “breath” from God (Gen. 2:7), is the highest aspect of the soul, which the animals lack. Animals have feelings and different character traits but they don't strive for God. The spirit represents man's active participation in God. It is important to distinguish “Spirit”, with an initial capital, from “spirit” with a small "s". The created spirit of man is not to be identified with the uncreated or Holy Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity; yet the two are intimately connected, for it is through his spirit that man apprehends God and enters into communion with him.
I think I understand what is being asserted. WL drilled John 4:24 "God is spirit" into my head for 13 years. So spirit is a generic term that includes God and some non-God entities. What they have in common is non-corporeality not divinity. Construing the spirit as a force is problematic except by analogy. A person such we and the Holy Spirit are supposed to be more than a mere forces.
With his soul (psyche) man engages in scientific or philosophical inquiry, analyzing the data of his sense-experience by means of the discursive reason.
We are souls (Gen. 2:7). So how would we do something "with" ourselves? Or, perhaps the question should be, would we do anything without ourselves? We cannot be other than what we are and what we are are souls. Therefore, the statement should more accurately be: As a soul, man engages in scientific or philosophical inquiry, analyzing the data of his sense-experience by means of the discursive reason.
With his spirit (pneuma), which is sometimes termed nous or spiritual intellect, he understands eternal truth about God or about theology or inner essences of created things, not through deductive reasoning, but by direct apprehension or spiritual perception – by a kind of intuition that St Isaac the Syrian calls “simple cognition”. The spirit or spiritual intellect is thus distinct from man’s reasoning powers and his aesthetic emotions, and superior to both of them. (I mainly quoted Metropolitan Kallistos Ware's book 'The Orthodox Way').
Yes, I think I get what you're postulating...the spirit is like a sixth sense through which we directly perceive the Divine. Why do you suppose this sixth sense is attributed to the spirit? Spiritual intuition is not a sense of the physical world as vision or hearing is. It's a putative ticket to an unseen world.
Spirituality in the EOC means the everyday activity of life in communion with God. The term spirituality refers not merely to the activity of man's spirit alone, his mind, heart, and soul, but it refers as well to the whole of man's life as inspired and guided by the Spirit of God. Every act of a Christian must be a spiritual act. Everyday thought must be spiritual, every word, every deed, every activity of the body, every action of the person. This mean, that all that a person thinks, says and does must be inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit so that the will of God the Father might be accomplished as revealed and taught by Jesus Christ the Son of God.
That's confusing isn't it? A purely spiritual act would not involve the body would it? It's a contradiction of terms.
"…whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." (1 Corinthians 10:31)
That quote doesn't mention the spirit so how it is related is unclear to me.
Doing all things to the glory of God is the meaning and substance of life for a human being. This "doing" is what Christian spirituality is about. A person can abide in Christ, accomplish His commandments and be in communion with God the Father only by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in his life.
No mention of the human spirit in all that. You include a lot that is not obviously spiritual in what you call spirituality.
Spiritual life is life in and by the Holy Spirit.
What happened to the human spirit? It seemed drop out of the account after the initial statement. As far as the Holy Spirit, we could call it the Holy Incorporeal or the Holy Non-physical. Those are better synonyms than Holy Ghost that came to have the unintended connotation that someone had died.
I can't logically understand WL's words when he said that God doesn't need spiritual giants. Was it something Asian or was he just afraid of competition? In my culture, spiritual giants are those who bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Their life is the life in and by the Holy Spirit. The more spiritual giants, the better. But according to WL, God needs a different type of people. They don't need to be spiritual. They don't need to develop their personal relationship with God. They just need need to belong to the LRC, "exercise their spirit" by reading WL's books, and do all things to the glory of WL and his church. That's a spiritual life in the LRC.
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