Spiritual Fitness - Excerpt 1

Principal of the new St Pauls Theological Centre, HTB staff member and Godpod creator Rev Dr Graham Tomlin has published a new book, Spiritual Fitness: Christian Character in a Consumer Culture.  Graham has been kind enough to give us permission to serialise his book in the form of three facinating excerpts, and so without further ado, here is the first one!

From Chapter 2
PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL FITNESS
When western societies were more explicitly Christian, the kind of discipline and effort now put into physical fitness went into the spiritual life. People tried to avoid the temptation to indolence and gluttony, and adopt disciplines such as prayer, fasting or frugality, to ensure inner, spiritual purity and health. Today, the need to avoid gluttony and the desire to live a frugal, simple life is just as common, but for different reasons. Gluttony is not so much seen as a spiritual danger as a physical one. Frugality will provide an escape from the acquisitive rat-race, not from the pains of hell. Overeating will threaten your life expectancy, not the state of your soul.

Although the growth of health clubs and centres of spiritual discovery might seem dangerous competition for the church, and therefore something to be opposed or feared, they may perhaps offer the church a vital clue as to where it is felt to be lacking. The gym ‘story’ might offer a model for how church might rediscover something more significant for the kind of people who go to gyms and are into ‘spirituality’. It may even help it rediscover some of its original calling, lost through the passage of time.

The physical fitness industry works because it has a clear story of salvation, progress, growth with which we can all identify. While we have a clear idea of what a perfect body looks like, there is in our culture little consensus on what a ‘perfect soul’ is. As it happens, this is one area where Christianity scores highly. It has a very clear idea of the ‘perfect soul’: it is portrayed for us in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. Christian faith also has a distinct story, which describes us as made by a loving and infinitely creative God, set in a world of delight and wonder. It tells how our ancestors fell from grace, choosing the path of arrogance and disobedience rather than playing the divinely assigned role of stewards and carers of the creation. It goes on to show how that act of disobedience acted as a stone thrown into a pool, disturbing the clear, pure waters of the world with ripples which reach us today in the form of selfishness, pride, envy, jealousy, crime and death itself. It also offers a path of salvation – faith in Christ, the divine Word sent from the Father, lived out in a life of transformation through the Holy Spirit and the learning of a renewed life of obedience, harmony and virtue, leading to participation in the new heaven and new earth which God will bring about one day.

It is a story that runs through the greatest literature, the finest art and architecture of the western world over the past two millennia. It has a much longer and richer history than the story of salvation through physical fitness rehearsed earlier. Yet it connects with this story significantly

At several points, the New Testament uses the imagery of athletic contests and training as an image for growth in the life of Christ. Try these for example:

Train yourself to be godly.  For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.’ (1 Tim 4.7-8)

Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly. I do not fight like a man beating the air. No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize. (1 Corinthians 9.24-27)

Solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves (the Greek word is gymnazo from which we get ‘gymnasium’) to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5.14)

In a culture that also prized athleticism, Paul was able to use physical training as an image for Christian growth and development. If this is a metaphor used by the earliest Christian writers, it may have some value for us - the gym might in fact prove a useful guide for the church in thinking about its role in twenty-first century societies.

As we will see in later chapters, the church has a long and distinguished history in the arena of personal and spiritual transformation. The church has seen the acquisition of Christian character and virtue as a central goal of the Christian life. It has also tended to prescribe a series of spiritual disciplines, the practice of self-denial and an ordered life as the path to virtue and spiritual wholeness, all of this built upon a foundation of faith.

We sometimes think of our society as self-indulgent, narcissistic and extravagant. Discipline, self-denial, order and effort seem alien. Selling discipline or self-control to laid-back, private, twenty-first century urban dwellers seems like selling top hats or penny-farthing bicycles – the need for that kind of thing went out a long time ago, and most of us feel we can survive very well without them now. Yet we understand perfectly the need for discipline in the area of physical and spiritual wellbeing. We all know that without such things as order and self-control we will never achieve the kind of physical and spiritual health we desire. This perhaps provides a clue to how the contemporary church can make significant connections for the kind of people we have been thinking about throughout this chapter.

The transformation from medicine balls, vaulting horses and PE to sleek health and fitness centres today is not just the story of new décor, fancy design and sophisticated technology. It is also the story of the creation of a new narrative for people’s lives, and the promise of real personal transformation. It shows how exercise can make a profound difference – not just to your ability to play old-fashioned public school games, but also work, relationships, sex, climbing stairs and longevity. Might there be a way in which theology, worship, church life and spiritual disciplines might all be re-cast in such a way that they seem as vital and necessary to our spiritual wellbeing as exercise and healthy eating is to our physical state? Might there be a new way of capturing the imagination of our culture though the offering of a pathway to spiritual health and fitness that offers something for more deeply rooted and substantial than the vague, narcissistic offerings of the New Age? And might this vision actually help us return to what the church was always meant to be about?

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