We are saturated with materialism (some call it physicalism). The Christian reality is a bodily/physical religion; we aren’t Gnostics. Nevertheless, Christians maintain that there is a spiritual realm; indeed, God is spirit. But He has freely chosen to be physical with us, which is how we come to know God, in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. This represents some level of mystery. The Incarnation is the mystery of the eternal God, who is spirit, become human in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. Christians, thus, live in a dialectic. We live in a physically affirming creation, our bodies included, and at the same time maintain that we are composed of spirit (some want to call this ‘consciousness’).

The secular, by-and-large, has reduced all of reality to a materialistic frame. It has immanentized the spirit realm of the eternal God into the physicalist realm of observable reality. In so doing it has come to imagine that God has really been humanity after all. As such the secular, or modern world has reduced all possible explanatory power, in regard to all phenomena to the physical; it allows for no appeal to a transcendent God who is spirit. Van der Kooi and van den Brink describe this sort of physicalism, particularly as it pertains to anthropology, this way:

This physicalism, is in fact, the anthropological side of the worldview that used to be known as materialism and is now often referred to as naturalism (or more specifically, metaphysical naturalism, as distinguished from the merely methodological naturalism that is the common basis for scientific research). The controlling premise in these views is reductionistic in nature: there is only matter. That is, there are only natural processes by which everything that needs explanation can be explained. Thus there is no God, and neither is there a human self or an “I.” This metaphysical naturalism plays relatively well in the media, but it is generally recognized to be plagued by some major problems. The question remains whether it can do full justice to such phenomena as human consciousness and the human longing for transcendence . . . and even to the human ability to know. On this latter front it has often been argued that our ability acquire knowledge can hardly be trustworthy it if has evolved in a purely naturalistic manner (see Beilby 2002 and Plantiga 2011, 307-50).1

This sort of mentality is not uncommon to come across out there in the public market of ideas; indeed, many of our fellow Christian believers operate with this sort of worldpicture at functional levels. That might sound counterintuitive to assert, but in my experience most Christians operate with a level of physicalism in their daily lives; alongside their pagan compatriots in the world at large.

To put a finer point on this here is how Charles Taylor describes the same phenomenon:

Science alone can explain why belief is no longer possible in the above sense. This is a view held by people on all levels; from the most sophisticated: “We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of physical relations among material entities,” to the most direct and simple: Madonna’s “material girl, living in a material world.”

Religion or spirituality involves substituting wrong and mythical explanations, explaining by “demons.” At bottom it’s just a matter of facing the obvious truth.

This doesn’t mean that moral issues don’t come into it. But they enter as accounts of why people frun away from reality, why they want to go on believing illusion. They do so because it’s comforting. The real world is utterly indifferent to us, and even to a certain degree dangerous, threatening. As children, we have to see ourselves as surrounded by love and concern, or we shrivel up. But in growing up, we have to learn to face the fact that this environment of concern can’t extend beyond the human sphere, and mostly doesn’t extend very far within it.

But this transition is hard. So we project a world which is providential, created by a benign God. Or at least, we see the world as meaningful in terms of the ultimate human good. The providential world is not only soothing, but it also takes the burden of evaluating things off our shoulders. The meanings of things are already given. As a well-known contemporary theorist put it:

I think that the notion that we are all in the bosom of Abraham or are in God’s embracing love is—look, it’s a tough life and if you can delude yourself into thinking that there’s all some warm fuzzy meaning to it all, it’s enormously comforting. But I do think it’s just a story we tell ourselves. [Stephen Jay Gould]

So religion emanates from a childish lack of courage. We need to stand up like men, and face reality.2

It is the above materialism that shapes the current nihilism our world labors under. It is ironic that the further advanced we become, technologically, the more oppressive and tyrannical the world becomes; not to mention immoral and hedonistic.

Indeed, the sort of physicalism we have been thinking about, at our post-secular time has been losing teeth among people in the know. Nevertheless, the brute god of materialism continues to reign unabated in the broader world out there. As such, Christians who uncritically inhabit this sort of world similarly labor under conditions of thought that cause them to doubt, or least soften some of the more embarrassing mythos we might encounter in Holy Scripture. At an even lesser or more innocent level, many Christians, the masses living unexamined lives, simply accommodate the materialistic culture they inhabit in ways that denude the Gospel of its power by remaking it into a material image. You see, and this is to the point, metaphysical or philosophical materialism works under the premise that humanity has the potential to rise above the material world and master it in such a way wherein the übermensch (‘supermen’) can overcome and manipulate the created order to meet whatever their singular or collective desires might be. This is the world we inhabit, and we can see it in full and living color through the current technocratic medical tyranny COVID has afforded the current ‘supermen’ of this world order.

And yet Christians function under the pressures provided for by this sort of artificial understanding of the created order. Christians, some anyway, become squeamish when talking about demons and the devil as if real spiritual entities. Many Christians believe that the demon-possession referred to in the New Testament was simply childish humanity attempting to explain a physical phenomenon they had no intellectual vocabulary to grasp at this impish stage in natural human development. Or, many Christians today have bowed the knee in to ‘science,’ which of course means to the metaphysical materialism we have been considering in this post. These sorts of Christians have neatly divided physicalism from the message of the Gospel in a dualistic way, such that they believe they can maintain a personal world order wherein they can have the hard sciences “over here,” and keep their Christianity and metaphysics “over there.” And yet the analogy of the incarnation itself defeats this sort of dualistic (or Nestorian) attempt at keeping the physical disentangled from the spiritual; the incarnation, in all of its sui generis glory, doesn’t allow this sort of nice and tidy to thinking the world; it doesn’t allow the Christian to hat-tip the physicalist world order from the safety of their Christin perch.

More to be said, but these are some thoughts toward considering physicalism and its implications for Christians. We need to do better at engaging this world with the power of God, the Gospel, without selling out to material world of Madonna and/or the likes of a Stephen Jay Gould. There is a better way; but it is considered both foolish and weak to this world order. Be a fool.

1 Cornelius van der Kooi and Gijsbert van den Brink, Christian Dogmatics: An Introduction, translated by Reinder Bruinsma with James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), 270.  

2 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 561 kindle edition.