Dionysus on a Bike

1 Corinthians 12:1-3 – 6/1/2026

Now concerning spiritual [things] brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be ignorant.

1 Corthians 12:1 (NRSVue with my own correction)

Our life in Christ is concerned with the “spiritual.” Indeed, for Paul, that which pertains to the spirit, is the most important aspect of us, of who we are as humans. What is the “spiritual”? For Paul, as for many of the Hellenistic world, the spiritual is a super-material world that is over and above the material one that we grasp with our physical body and experience with our physical senses. The spiritual is opposed to and above the physical, but the spiritual is not opposed to the material. In fact, for someone like Paul, reality is composed of material “stuff” with varying degrees of perfection and reality. Some things like rocks, plants, and non-living matter are purely physical. Other things like angels and divine beings are purely spiritual stuff. Whereas human beings are a mixture of the physical and the spiritual. Paul’s view is that our physical bodies are limited and corrupted. In Christ, we are purified of the corruption of our physical bodies and our relationship with spiritual stuff is healed and redeemed by Jesus.

Paul, then, has an ontological description of reality, a metaphysics that attempts to explain what reality is like and how it is structured. The basic structure of reality for Paul is a material reality with gradations of being starting with lowly physical matter and becoming less and less “solid” and more and more “real” as those gradations rise to the non-physical matter of the spiritual world above us. Into this metaphysics, Paul places human and divine realities to develop a picture of how God and humans are related and how that relation is healed through Jesus Christ, a mixture of the physical and spiritual, just as we are.

Some would argue that since the Apostle to the Gentiles wrote of this metaphysical description of reality in what would become Scripture, this means that Paul’s ontology simply is the ontology of Christianity. I want to push back and argue that a particular metaphysics of reality is not an essential part of the Gospel message. Paul’s value and the insights of his letters is elsewhere. We can accept what he has to say about the Gospel without having the subscribe to his picture of reality.

Indeed, outside of the specifically religious sphere, very few people conceptualize reality today as Paul did in the First Century CE. In our disenchanted world described by the physical sciences, we do not require recourse to a super-sensible realm made of non-physical matter to explain our observations and experiences. Positing such a realm of spiritual “things” actually hinders reasoning about the world since it introduces ad hoc explanations instead of probing for explanations that requiring no reference to other kinds of matter than the physical. Can we take this contemporary mindset that rejects ontological descriptions beyond the physical and understand the gospel through this lens? Can we make use of what Paul has to say about the spiritual, even if we do not buy his Hellenistic metaphysics?

What if instead of positing the spiritual as another kind of “stuff” above the physical, we conceived of the spiritual as the intelligible, experiential, affective side of the material? In this picture, there is one material “level” as it were. All that is, is made up of physical matter insofar as it is a “thing” at all. The spiritual in this picture is simply the side of matter that matters, the side of matter that pertains to things like love, understanding, knowledge, joy, and the like. God, on this picture, is not another being made out of different better stuff than we are. God, on this picture is not a being at all. God is a kind of structuring ordering of things, a dynamic principle of change and becoming, not simply one being among many.

Throughout the two millennia of Christian history, theologians have tended to follow Paul in giving a metaphysical account of divine and our relation to it. This has led to the point where Christianity is viewed primarily a theory of reality, a conceptualization about what is truly real. Moving away from Paul’s thought in this regard can open us up to the more important side of Paul’s theology. Instead of a theory of the structure of reality, Paul has a narrative of how lives are changed and life made new through the person of Jesus Christ. Still affirming Jesus to be God incarnate, we can dispense with the question of whether this adequately describes objective reality and move on to the more important, indeed the only important question, how to live well in light of the grace freely given to us in Jesus. That is Paul’s real concern. Metaphysics is a distraction.

Further reading: Engberg-Pedersen, T. (2010). Cosmology and self in the Apostle Paul : the material spirit. Oxford University Press.

---

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.