Most Christians reading the title of this post might think I’ve mixed things up. Shouldn’t it read, “The Spiritual Implications of the Gospel”? Well, yes, it does if read the right way. The gospel’s spiritual implications have material implications as well because we live in a material world. We can’t divorce spiritual from material, nor material from spiritual. Many varied influences throughout Christian history gave us a kind of dualistic thinking about things, as if material reality were on one side, and spiritual reality on the other, and never the two shall meet. And when we see or think of the word “spiritual” we envision a kind of ethereal non-material thing, ghostly, something you can see through, not something solid like a brick. I would suggest this is a faulty view of spirituality and the spiritual, more Platonic and Gnostic than Christian, influenced more by Greek philosophical thought than the Jewish faith which birthed the Christian religion.

Having recently read through the Old Testament again, I was impressed with what an earthy book it is. There is even a sect of Jewish religious professionals that developed in the intertestamental period called Sadducees who we read about in the gospels. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, and because there is little reference to “spiritual” things in the Pentateuch, they denied the resurrection of the dead, and the existence of angels and spirits (or demons). The concept of heaven and a non-material reality where God and angels dwell is an Old Testament theme, but everything about the Jewish faith is focused primarily on man’s life in this world, and the implications for it. They had no conception of a bodyless spiritual existence of the soul going to heaven when they died. The focus for Jews always remained on this world where God blessed His people with long life, prosperity, children and descendants into the future, rather than on hope for existence after death. The are many examples of God exhorting the Israelites to obedience that they might receive blessings in this life.

Deuteronomy 8 is a good example. Moses is giving the people a vision of the life they can have, the material blessings of the promised land, if they just obey and observe His commands. Toward the end he says:

¹⁸ But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.

We tend to think of wealth in a narrow sense, as mainly money and material possessions. The Hebrew word for wealth, however, is much broader and all encompassing. It has the sense of a force, whether of men, means or other resources. So, it can be an army, wealth itself, money, or virtue, valor, and strength, along with the idea of being able, of activity, like accomplishments, even an army, or band of soldiers, or great forces, including power and riches, strength and valor. The way I read this verse is that because of God’s covenant promises to the Patriarchs, he gives us the ability to prosper and flourish in this life, to accomplish substantial things for His glory, our good, and the good of others. Blessing in this life is the point of Christianity, not an accidental by product of capitalism. It was Christianity that allowed for the creation of capitalism!

This more Jewish conception of blessing carried over into Christianity, but it also inherited a strong other worldly focus that often competed against life in this fallen world. Nonetheless, Christendom was built by men and women who sought blessing in this life, not escape of this life for the next.

The Origin of our Faulty Notion of Spirituality
Joe Boot wrote a book called The Mission of God, and when we see a phrase like that, most Christians immediately think of proclaiming the gospel, of saving people from their sin so they can go to heaven when they die. The word missions brings to mind the same thing, people going to the nations of the world to proclaim the gospel with primarily a spiritual or soteriological focus, the saving of people from their sins so they can have eternal life and escape the punishment of hell. Of course it is that, but it’s so much more. Everything about the mission of God changed for Christians in the 19^th century, from a this-worldly spiritual focus to a primarily other-worldly spiritual focus, the faulty kind. Nineteenth century conservative Protestant Christianity is exemplified by evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899). All things, including doctrine, took a backseat to winning souls. By the early twentieth century, according to George Marsden in Fundamentalism and American Culture, for Christians “evangelism overshadowed everything else.”

When I became a Christian in 1978 I was born-again into a type of fundamentalist Christianity where the focus was on evangelism, Bible reading, Scripture memory, and fellowship with other Christians. Discipleship was about developing our relationship with Jesus, and sharing that with others so they too could experience that same saving faith. This is all to the good; the problem is that that’s as far as it goes. Any implications of this faith for the culture or societies in which we lived was never mentioned. It was irrelevant because the implication was that it was the spiritual, eternal things that matter, not this life and its worldly concerns. This kind of fundamentalist Christianity came from somewhere, and I’ve written about that here many times, so I won’t rehash all that. I will briefly, though, mention the word I would like anyone who is influenced by my work to remember, Pietism. That mindset, a faulty view of spirituality, is the enemy of the true full orbed mission of God in the world.

As I always have to say, however, I’m not talking about being pious, something I’m grateful to have learned from my brothers and sisters in college in my early Christian life. I still daily practice all the things I learned there, but what I constantly warn Christians about is the German Lutheran movement of the 17^th century with good intentions that over time ended up destroying Christian cultural influence in the world. Fundamentalism with its narrow, truncated version of Christianity came from that influence. It went through a first and second Great Awakening, and the Moody type of revivalism in the 19^th century, eventually doing battle with the German higher criticism. Praise God for the fundamentalists in the early 20^th century who did battle against the modernists and liberal Christians who turned Christianity into a completely different religion, a non-supernatural religion.

By the 1920s, unfortunately, fundamentalist Christianity had become almost completely culturally enervated and lost its ability to influence the culture it once created in America. The symbolic turning point was the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity started there until in the 1960s when it was finally openly mocked and despised, when not ignored.  Scopes was the first culturally accepted overt hostility to Christianity in American culture, and it eventually weaved its way into the popular imagination in the 1960 movie Inherit The Wind, staring Spencer Tracy and based on a 1955 play of the same name. For decades prior to Scopes, modernists were portraying fundamentalists as backward, benighted enemies of progress, science, and all that was good about civilization. As Marsden says about the liberal perception of fundamentalists:

Modern liberal culture was fighting back against the efforts of “bigots and ignoramuses” (as Darrow described them) to retard its progress, and ridicule was perhaps the most effective weapon.

After Scopes the mainstream media was merciless. Marsden says the trial and its fallout “would have far more impact on the popular interpretation of fundamentalism than all the arguments of preachers and theologians.” Unfortunately, fundamentalists often lived down to the caricature, and their alienation from the wider American culture was complete.

In trying to keep from being defiled and reviled by the culture, Christians increasingly developed their own sub‑culture. Isolated in a Christian cocoon, they were soon creating their own educational system, books, movies, and media, all of which still have little impact on the wider culture today. Much of conservative Christianity for the next 50 years embraced a Christ against culture posture which is informed by an over spiritualized dualistic Platonic spirituality. Let’s see how God in Scripture reveals to us a different kind of spiritually, one that has material implications for this world.

Christianity and Transforming Our Material World
One of the challenges of reorienting to a more this world spirituality is that modern Evangelical Christianity tends to focus on the New Testament to the exclusion of the Old. It’s built into the fundamentalist theology inherited from dispensationalism that separates the Jewish Old Covenant people of God from the Christian New Covenant people of God. The implication is that the Old is not relevant for the New, that Moses and the Law of God revealed to Israel no longer apply to the Christian life. That’s unfortunate because the New is the fulfillment of the Old, not something different from it. Everything that was revealed under the Old Covenant was to find it’s fulfillment in the New, including the material blessings of a redeemed and renewed relationship with our Creator.

I was inspired to write this post after reading one of the most powerful gospel passages in the Old Testament, Zechariah 3. Standing before the Lord being accused by Satan, the high priest Joshua is wearing filthy clothes. The Lord rebukes Satan and tells the angel to take off those filthy clothes and he tells us why. “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.” He next gives Joshua a charge to obedience that should always result from a sinner being saved, and then telling him about a Branch to come, a prophecy referring to Christ. Then the chapter ends with this:

¹⁰ “‘In that day each of you will invite your neighbor to sit under your vine and fig tree,’ declares the Lord Almighty.”

To our modern eyes there doesn’t seem to be anything overtly “material” here in terms of prosperity or success, but to an ancient Jew living in Israel in the 5^th century BC it definitely suggested exactly that. The phrase “in that day” and variations is used 16 times in Zechariah, and they are all Messianic references. Do a Bible word search and you can see all 16 on one page. It’s a powerful confirmation of God’s transformational intentions of the mission of the Messiah in this world, with not one mention of a heavenly or spiritual life.

Given that the entire Old Testament is about Christ, you would expect there are probably more than a few passages that refer to the transformation of Messianic fulfillment to come, and the specific material implications for this world. It starts with God’s promise to Adam and Eve that her seed will crush or strike the serpent’s head, and that promise begins to make its way into history with God’s calling of Abram. The blessing God promises him and his descendants implies a this-worldly prosperity, and the Hebrews eventually called Jews as those from Judea certainly believed that. As I mentioned above, to them God’s covenant promises were for the blessings of a prosperous life in this world, the spiritual making itself real in the material circumstances of their lives. It was sin that got in the way of true peace and prosperity which would only be found in relationship to their Creator God as he dwelled among them. They missed that it was only in the Messiah that they would find the fulfillment of this promise, in Immanuel, the one who would be God with us.

If you want a wonderful picture of how Christ and the gospel and God’s word, the Bible, really changes the material circumstances of our lives, I’d suggest reading a wonderful book by Indian Vishal Mangalwadi called, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. As an Indian, he has seen first-hand what a civilization without Christianity looks like, in his case a Hindu culture. I recently listened to an interview he did with Jordan Peterson called India, Europe & Biblical Revolution. I highly suggest giving that a listen.

A Different Kind of Discipleship
My college Christian experience was all about discipleship, but a truncated, narrow, other worldly one that ignored the culturally transforming power of the gospel. I would suggest a different kind of discipleship, one that sees cultural and societal transformation as one of the primary purposes of the gospel, of bringing God’s kingdom to earth just as Jesus taught us to pray. That was the purpose of Jesus being given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” to bring the fulfillment in this world of all the types, shadows, and promises of the Old Testament. That is a completely different, and more exciting vision for life than the over spiritualized personalized Pietism of much modern Evangelical Christianity.

That means a young person should taught beginning in their teenage years that their career is more than just making a living, but a calling, a way to live out a Christian, gospel infused world and life view in the marketplace. When we see the word gospel we tend to define it narrowly as salvation from sin and primarily personal, but the good news of Christ is that this salvation affects all that we are an everything we do. The transformation started in our hearts is then worked out into our lives into the lives of others and how those lives develop into a civilization. Christians miss this not only because of Pietism, but because of the modern notion of secularism that programs us to believe there is a realm where our faith doesn’t apply, but biblical faith applies to every square inch of existence, everything we see or do or experience, it’s all through the lens of our Christian faith.

We can see this civilizational transforming power of the gospel develop in the early centuries of the church as it battled paganism. When Constantine converted to Christianity in the early 4^th century, he started the process of outlawing crucifixion and gladiatorial games, blood for sport. A nation’s laws are a reflection of its faith and worldview. Christianity had begun a slow process of infusing its morals and values into Western culture. Thomas Cahill writes in his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization:

In his last years St. Patrick could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland . . . With the Irish—even with the kings—he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.

That is the gospel! As Paul says in Romans 14:17, the kingdom of God is a matter of “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Christianity is never merely personal, and that is how we are to raise and disciple our children, with a faith that is transforming on a societal level, not just about their own personal holiness and relationship to God.

For just one example, in practice that means, speaking of laws, that if your son gets into the middle school years and likes to argue, you might begin thinking he could make a good lawyer. Then you begin teaching him about the Christian nature of law, where it comes from, what are its purposes, and so on. He can then see his calling as a lawyer as a Christian mission to advance God’s kingdom on earth by brining justice to the nation. It could lead to a political career as a Christian legislator who brings God’s law to bear upon the state’s or nation’s law. This can be done with any career, including the calling to be a wife or husband, a mother and homemaker or father. This gives our lives and our children’s lives what every person is looking for, meaning, hope, and purpose, and on a grand scale, the spiritual-material touching and influencing everything we and they do. Life doesn’t get any better than that!