The Goodness of the Physical World

God is the author of the physical world, and in his wisdom, he designed physical realities to convey spiritual mysteries. “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God,” as C. S. Lewis insisted. “God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not….

He likes matter. He invented it.” We should like it too. For we are not angels “trapped” in physical bodies. We are incarnate spirits; we are a marriage of body and soul, of the physical and the spiritual. Living a “spiritual life” as a Christian never means fleeing from or disparaging the physical world. Tragically, many Christians grow up thinking of the physical world (especially their own bodies and sexuality) as the main obstacle to the spiritual life, as if the physical world itself were “bad.”