Spiritual Life

Living beings, we noted last time, are active and interactive beings. They possess an inner power, the specific metaphysical nature of which is beyond our ability to conceive, that animates them. It enables cells to throb with activity, minds to teem with electrical impulses, hands, arms and legs to move. And more than that, it enables living creatures of all kinds to interact with their environment to influence it and draw from it what they need for continued existence.

When we think of the environment in which we exist, we automatically think of the earth we walk on, the air we breathe, the houses we live in and so on. As living beings we are able to act toward these things, and interact with them, gaining from them what we need to survive and function. But there is more than the visible world of material reality to our environment. At least, that’s what we Christians believe. On the basis of the Bible we hold that there is a realm of spiritual reality as well – a realm at the centre of which is the self-existent God, a spirit who is in himself the source of everything else that exists.

Willard defines “spirit” as “unembodied personal power” (The Spirit of the Disciplines, 64). Again he thinks of spiritual existence first of all in terms of “power”. Next, it is “personal power” – that is, power associated with “personhood.” Gravity might be thought of as a power, in that it exerts a force upon objects and causes them to move. But it is not a “personal” power – that is, one possessing the properties of personhood. Gravity doesn’t think, or feel, or choose. It is simply there – a created force that operates without reason or conscious thought. Not so a “spiritual” being. A “spirit” – be it divine, human or angelic – is a personal power.

But thirdly, it is an “unembodied” personal power. At least that’s true of “spirit” in its essential form. We humans are “embodied spiritual beings” in that we possess a spirit, but that spirit exists in an embodied form (at least while we are ‘alive’). “Raw spirit”, if I may speak in those terms, is “unembodied personal power.”

What makes this so important for Willard is that it introduces into our human environment a specific domain with which we can interact. God has made us not only physical beings, capable of interaction with the material world about us. He has also made us spiritual beings, able to interact with the realm of “unembodied personal power” that centres in him. That’s what sets us off from animals and other lower forms of life. What is more, it is what ultimately provides the direction and meaning our lives need. We were made to know the invisible God and interact with him.

This is how Willard puts this: “The biblical conception of the spiritual is that of an ordered realm of personal power founded in God who is himself spirit and not a localizable physical body... the biblical worldview also regards the spiritual as a realm fundamental to the existence and behaviour or all natural or physical reality (see specially John 1:1-14; Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:2; 11:3)... From a biblical perspective there can be no doubt that it is the appropriate relation to the spiritual Kingdom of God that is the ‘missing nutriment’ in the human system” (ibid, 64-5).