Leisure: Volume 6, #3

By Jasmin Biggs, Anna Beresford, Zachary Biggs and 7 more

In a fast-paced society that prizes utilitarian productivity, leisure and play can be difficult to enjoy without guilt. Rather than resist this cultural tide, the church often inadvertently baptizes such workaholism, spiritualizes the idolatry of productivity, and participates in the functional desecration of the physical creation that God declared "good." But leisure is not only fun; it is essential for our spiritual health. 

 

This issue of An Unexpected Journal explores the theological and philosophical foundations for the sacredness of play, along with lighter reflections on how various sports, hobbies, and leisure activities reveal the goodness and character of God.  

 

Contributors

• "The Curse of Gnosticism and the Cure of Play: Why Leisure is Essential for Spiritual Health" - Jasmin Biggs on the Imago Dei & Its Implications for Play
• "Leisurely Rambles: Hiking & Birding as Sacred Play" - Annie Nardone on Hiking and Birding
• "Vortex" (Short Story) - Molly Hopkins on Workaholism
• "Taylor Swift, T.S. Eliot, and C.S. Lewis: Eras for the Ages" - Seth Myers on Taylor Swift's Timeless Themes
• "The Arrow That is Not Aimed: Flow in the Art of Archery and Writing" - Megan Joy Rials on Archery and Writing
• "Leisure the Basis of Education: Applying the Sabbath Principle to the Classroom" -Alex Markos on Sabbath and Education
• "Fly Fishing and the Fall" - Jim Swayze on Fly Fishing
• "Obeying the Rules of the Game" - Zak Schmoll on Power Soccer
• "Sea Reflections" - Tiffany Kavedzic on God's Character
• "Pursuing the Tempest: Why We Chase" -  Zachary Biggs on Storm Chasing and Landscape Photography
• "How My Horse Taught Me to Be a Parent" - Annie Crawford on Horsemanship and Parenting
• "In The Image of a Playful God: Flourishing Through Playfulness And Connection" - Anna Beresford on Play & Connection
• "Bones Will Sing: Dance in Spiritual Formation" - Rachel Bruce Johnson on Incarnational Embodiment
• "Craft and Glory" - Molly Hopkins on Hobbies and Craftsmanship
• "Forgiveness in the Foam" (poem) - Dwayne Sheridan on Cosplay and Redemption
• "Take Me Out To The Ballgame: How Baseball Can Restore Our Senses And Our Souls" - Sandra G. Hicks on Baseball
• "Counterpunching Trials With Joy: Boxing As A Unique Parallel To Christian Sanctification" - Matthew Hill on Boxing
• "Kings Over Bishops: The Play of Chess in Late Medieval and Early Modern England as a Representation of the Relationship Between the Sacred and the Secular" - James L. Underwood on Chess and History
• "Bombs, Board Games, and Bede the Venerable: But Mostly Chess" - Seth Myers on Board Games and Chess

 

Fall 2023; Volume 6, Issue 3.
310 pages

Illustrator: Virginia de la Lastra
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: An Unexpected Journal
• Release date: Sep 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223263869

Book preview

The Curse of Gnosticism and the Cure of Play: Why Leisure is Essential for Spiritual Health

Jasmin Biggs on the Imago Dei & Its Implications for Play

It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars . . . that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.

– G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered¹

This world is not a distraction that keeps us from God. It is the wonder that will delight us into the worship of God.  . . . We’ve been missing the miracle of the majesty that reveals itself in the most mundane things — in leaves and streams and bees and the flutter of a butterfly’s wings. This world will be a witness to us of the wonder of God’s goodness and love, if we will watch for it.

– K.J. Ramsey, The Lord is My Courage²

Introduction

MANY CHRISTIANS RAISED in American evangelicalism struggle to practice leisure. Between the endless needs of a destitute world, our relative material wealth compared with the world’s poor, and an impoverished anthropology that says true Christians must perennially function beyond their human limitations in order to be radically committed to God, the practice of rest is rife with shame. Leisure is tantamount to backsliding. To play is to give in to selfish materialistic worldliness, forsaking our first love. So we slip into a boundary-less savior mentality. We burn ourselves out for God while steadily losing any capacity to experience His delight in us, aside from our utilitarian worth within the faceless factory of soul-saving. The inexorable end result is that we forget that the Gospel is, in fact, good news.

Such an understanding of Christianity steals, kills, and destroys. But Jesus makes it clear that He calls us into abundant life: I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.³ Christians who cannot rest struggle to experience the green pastures that Jesus promises. He also tells us, Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.⁴

I will argue in this essay that beneath a leisure-less faith underlies a deadly Gnosticism that condemns as worthless both the physical world and our physical bodies alike. This heresy fuels joyless legalism and, after exploiting its adherents to the dregs, leaves them broken, empty, and worthless, a far cry from the abundant life promised by Christ. To combat this heresy, we must relearn the spiritual practice of play as an essential component of spiritual health.

What is Gnosticism?

THE HERESY OF GNOSTICISM originated as an ancient cult that saw the spiritual realm as the only good and holy one and the physical world as disgusting and shameful. According to Gnosticism, Everything originated from a transcendent spiritual power; but corruption set in and inferior powers emerged, resulting in the creation of the material world in which the human spirit is now imprisoned. Salvation is sought by cultivating the inner life while neglecting the body and social duties unconnected with the cult.⁵ Notice that the realm of holiness and godliness is that of spirit, while the physical world is fundamentally corrupt. Its very existence is a result of sin.

The Gnostics even denied the physical body of Christ, claiming that His body was an illusion created by His spirit. After all, the holy spiritual realm can have no contact with the polluted physical realm, so Jesus could not have had a real human body. But as we will examine later, Jesus’ embodied personhood grants dignity both to the physical world and to our own embodied lives.

While it would be tempting to think of Gnosticism as no more than an interesting historical factoid, it is unfortunately far from dead. Gnostic undertones permeate a good deal of modern Christian thinking. Evangelical Christian culture tends to elevate ‘spiritual’ activities like prayer, church, and missions while denigrating ‘worldly’ activities such as fitness, recreational travel, sex, the arts, business, and leisure. The holiest activities are the least physical and seemingly involve only our spirits, while activities that involve our physical bodies and our interface with the physical world are at best deemed inferior, selfish, and materialistic. Author, poet, and cultural critic Wendell Berry writes, 

There are no unsacred places; 

there are only sacred places 

and desecrated places.⁶

Modern-day Gnosticism desecrates what God created as good and sacred.

As another example, Gnosticism rears its ugly head in Christian purity culture by denigrating our physical bodies. When we believe that our physical form is inherently corrupt and polluted, devastating consequences result: alienation from oneself, inner fragmentation, gender dysphoria, sexual dysfunction, and a host of other problems. As an example, due to their female form, women are fundamentally considered sex objects and objects of temptation, and due to their male form, men are fundamentally considered predators. Therefore, amongst other consequences, friendship between the sexes in many Christian circles is forbidden. Such a view of men and women is deeply dehumanizing, ignoring their true identity as persons made in the Imago Dei, the image of God. The reality of the Imago Dei means that men and women ought to treat one another as sacred image bearers, with respect, dignity, and friendship, rather than as dehumanized sexual objects that must be avoided.

What is the Imago Dei?

IN FACT, THE THEOLOGY of the Imago Dei is central to overcoming the curse of Gnosticism and recovering a truly Biblical understanding of the embodied human person and the role of play in our spiritual health. This doctrine is rooted in Genesis 1:26-27, when God declares,

Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.

God created humankind in his own image,

in the image of God he created them,

male and female he created them.⁷

When God creates Adam and Eve, He gives them His own image. God imbues His characteristics into both man and woman; both reflect God’s character and His various attributes. Then, God saw all that he had made – and it was very good!⁸ Scripture tells us that all of God’s creation, including our physical bodies and the physical world, are in fact very good. Furthermore, notice that both man and woman are created to rule . . . over all the earth — the physical world that God had just created. We were created with the express purpose of ruling over and therefore interacting with the physical world in robust ways. As we will explore in greater depth later in this piece, we cannot experience the fact that God’s creation is ‘very good’ unless we allow ourselves to enjoy it.

How Gnosticism Erases the Imago Dei

BUT AS THE KEEN READER may have already noticed, Gnosticism and the Imago Dei clash. In fact, Gnosticism depends on the functional erasure of the first two and last two chapters of the Bible for its power. Devastating consequences result.

Andy Crouch, theologian and author of the book Culture Making, explained in a book lecture how this misreading of Scripture affects our imaginative picture of the life of faith.⁹ Many of us leave off the first two and last two chapters of the Bible in our understanding of the story of reality. Crouch explains what happens when we miss

. . . the first two chapters, Genesis 1 and 2, the story of the good beginning of the world, and the last two, Revelation 21 and 22, the story of the remaking of the world, and of God re-giving the world to His redeemed people. And if . . . your functional Bible, the Bible you actually let shape your imagination, doesn’t include those bookend chapters of the Bible, the first two and the last two, what are you left with? You’re left with a Bible that starts in Genesis 3 and ends in Revelation 20 . . . What happens when you have a Bible that starts with sin and ends with judgment? Well, it’s a bad news to bad news Bible.¹⁰

In other words, here is how the story of reality goes when we neglect these crucial Scriptures: In the beginning, humans were corrupted by the Fall. We are wretched and worthless sinners, disgusting worms mired in sin. Due to our depravity, there is no good in us. We are worthless. We ruin everything we touch. But God mercifully sent Jesus to save us. When God looks at us, He doesn’t see us; He sees Jesus. (The unfortunate implication is that even if God loves us, He doesn’t like us; and even His love for us is in question if He only sees Jesus when He looks at us.)¹¹ So if we stay in the faith and fight sin, we will survive Judgment Day and the lake of fire. Meanwhile, those who are yet unsaved are also totally and wholly depraved, with no good in them. Since the whole world is dripping with sin and utterly worthless, true Christians must stay far away from anything that might be tainted, because we have a Judgment Day to survive.

When we skip Genesis 1 and 2 and neglect the Imago Dei, we face devastating consequences for personal worth and value. This story desecrates sacred image-bearers by convincing them that they are worthless — thereby aiding and abetting the enemy of our souls. Gnosticism and the popular understanding of total depravity are both tools Satan uses to convince us of our own worthlessness. When he succeeds, one of many consequences is that despair plagues many. Without a firm theology for our own value, many are gutted of the power to overcome mental illness in its worst forms. After all, the pit of suicide depends in many cases on a deep-seated belief in one’s own worthlessness. And recovery from such harrowing darkness requires the embrace of one’s own infinite worth as a precious and dearly beloved creation of God Himself.

Now, none of this changes the fact that the doctrine of original sin still stands: all of us are infected with the tendency to sin. It may even be permitted to argue for the doctrine of total depravity, when used in the narrow sense that our sinful minds and hearts prevent us from saving ourselves by our own efforts. However, when understood in a way that erases the Imago Dei, doctrines like these can be perverted to baptize the Satanic lie of our worthlessness as sacrosanct theology — making such theological perversions nearly impossible to question, much less overcome. These perversions are hauntingly similar to Gnosticism in how they desecrate the sacred. Any theology or ideology that defaces, mutilates, or erases the glory of God's creation must be vigorously repudiated.

After all, we do not praise Vincent Van Gogh by destroying one of his paintings; we do not ruin a masterpiece so that the painter will be seen as greater or more glorious by the starker contrast between himself and the ruined work of art. Likewise, when we tear down image-bearers, using the fact of our sin to erase the fact of our Creator’s signature, we do not lift up our Creator or display a high view of God.¹² Instead, however inadvertently, we spit in the Artist’s face. We join in on the work of Satan, the Accuser and Enemy of our souls, in destroying God’s good creation. The fact of the matter is that God is not threatened by the goodness of His handiwork — the goodness that He Himself imparted. Rather, our good glory reflects the infinitely greater glory of our Maker.

Neglecting the Imago Dei leads not only to devastating consequences for our personhood, but also for cultural engagement. If all humanity is worthless and devoid of any good or value, why should we engage with our sinful culture? We would have compelling reason to cloister ourselves far from the touch of sin and wretchedness in order to keep our own robes clean. And many do. Using the terms of philosopher Richard Niebuhr in his book Christ and Culture, this approach towards cultural engagement is known as Christ against culture.¹³ This posture positions the whole world as fundamentally worthless. There is no engaging with sinners because there is no good amongst them to engage. In the process of scrubbing our lives clean of anything that might be tainted, we destroy any possibility of meaningful interaction with the sinners who still drip with the filth we despise. Their sin replaces their Author as the most important thing about them.

If we evangelize at all, we do so in the most superficial way possible, through stilted evangelism at arm’s length. We are unable to engage with our culture’s artistic forms, its stories and films, its music, the meaning-making mechanisms that shape and form its worldviews, let alone sinners themselves. If we cannot watch a film or read a book with a single curse word in it, for fear of pollution, how are we to seek and to save the lost soul who drops an F-bomb every third word? We shun our culture to the detriment of effective engagement — and to the neglect of the law of love. We fail to walk in the footsteps of the Savior who touched diseased sinners, befriended and ate with prostitutes and tax-collectors, and permitted unclean Gentile hands to nail Him to a Roman cross. But if we take the Great Commission seriously, we must learn to see the good value and worth in the yet-unsaved image-bearers for whom Christ died.

Furthermore, where does sin reside when we deny the Imago Dei and embrace Gnosticism? Sin lives in unsaved sinners, our bodies, and in earthly, secular cultural forms, but not in ourselves. While we may pay lip service to our own sin and brokenness, it may still feel inconceivable to recognize widespread corruption on our own side. When we believe that the culture has cornered the market on depravity, we lose the ability to recognize, much less fight, the evil in our own souls, churches, and institutions. This mindset leads to what we see today: explosive scandals across the evangelical world — most recently, the sexual abuses and/or power abuses of the Southern Baptist Convention, Mark Driscoll, and Ravi Zacharias. But the fact of the matter is that sinners and saints alike bear the Imago Dei. Sinners and saints alike bear the capacity to sin, and sin gravely (see, for example, how David, who according to Scripture was a man after God’s own heart, sinned against Bathsheba and her husband Uriah.)¹⁴ ¹⁵

When we neglect the place of the Imago Dei in our theology, we not only destroy image-bearers, but we also become complicit in church corruption as we leave hell-bound sinners to their fate. Doing so runs counter to the message of cruciform love upon which hangs the whole of Scripture.

Restoring the Imago Dei

BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN we include the first and last two chapters of Scripture in our vision for the life of faith? Everything changes. As we saw when we defined Imago Dei, God declared mankind good, as the crowning glory of His good creation. Unfortunately, the doctrine of Soli Deo Gloria, to the glory of God alone, can sometimes obscure the Biblical fact of man’s glory:

"When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set in place,

what is mankind that you are mindful of them,

human beings that you care for them?

You have made them a little lower than the angels

and crowned them with glory and honor."¹⁶

Let that sink in: God crowns humans with glory. Humans are created good. This is not a manifesto of secular humanism; it is straight from the pages of Scripture. (Or more precisely, perhaps Scripture warrants a form of Christian humanism, but I digress.)

Of course, Genesis 3 still follows. We still fall. Our sin is still odious. We still need redemption. But the end is not Judgment, but the creation of a new heaven and a new earth: a perfected physical world without sin. We can presume this new earth, being better than the current one, will include at least all the glorious goods of the current physical world: bejeweled hummingbirds, snowcapped mountains, playful otters, intricate ferns, and perfect human bodies of many different hues gleaming with the design of their Creator.

God created the whole world good — everything from our national parks to our oceans, to the wood used in woodworking, the pigments in paints, the sand in silicone computer parts, the rubber in our footballs, and the ingredients that stock every chef’s cupboard. Every material we use in our sports, hobbies, and leisure activities was declared very good on the sixth day. Crouch again explains,

Six times in Genesis 1, as God is making the world, God saw that it was good. Good, good, good, good, good, good. The world that culture happens in, the world that we human beings find ourselves in, is not a world fundamentally characterized by conflict and violence, as real as those things are. But deeper down and further back is a world that God looked at and said, ‘That’s good.’ Made by a very good God.¹⁷

Genesis 1-2 tells us that this world is the handiwork of God. Revelation 21-22 tells us that God is not forsaking His creation but redeeming and renewing it. So the physical world matters. Our bodies matter. Sinners matter. All is sacred. Though much has been desecrated, God is committed to redeeming and renewing His creation until the curse of Gnosticism itself is cast into the lake of fire.

The Imago Dei in the Face of Sin

THE FACT OF OUR GOOD creation by our Father’s hand is the most essential thing about us. And so the fact of our sin is not.

The popular question asks, Is man fundamentally evil or fundamentally good? I would argue that given God’s divine authorship in Genesis 1-2, along with the tragedy of the Fall in Genesis 3, this question is a false dichotomy. Scripture seems to indicate that mankind is essentially good, but incidentally evil. Our identity as ‘sinners’ is incidental, not essential.

What I mean by these terms is precise: Our essential identity is our sine qua non, or that without which we do not exist. If ‘sinner’ is essential to our identity, to cease to be a sinner is to cease to exist. But we know it is possible to be a human without being a sinner: Jesus proved it. And we also know that in glory, with sanctification complete, we will cease to be sinners. But we will not cease to exist. Therefore, being a sinner is not the most fundamental thing about us. Our essential identity, then, is not that of sinner, but that of image-bearer.

Our incidental identity is related not to our ontology (or being) but to our circumstances and actions. For example, I am an American citizen by birth, but that identity marker could change if I chose to emigrate to another nation. As another example, there was a time before graduate school and motherhood when I was not overweight; then through neglect I became overweight, and through hard work and discipline that incidental identity has been reversed. Such incidental identity markers can fluctuate or change, but my essential, non-changing identity remains throughout: I am a good creation of a good God, made in His image and likeness and bearing His signature. Because each of us is God’s creation, it is good that you exist, for everything that God creates is good. It is, of course, bad that we sin, but God’s authorship of our being is more significant for our ontology and more fundamental to our identity than our contingent sinful actions. In other words, our value stays constant.

So with all this in mind, the story of our identity goes like this: there was a time when humans were not sinners. Given the truth of Genesis 1 and 2, our essential identity is that of good creations of God, made in His image and likeness and bearing His signature. Then we became sinners, an incidental (and devastating) identity. And the doctrine of original sin teaches us that all humans inherit this tendency to sin, called the sin nature. But our sin nature does not erase our value as God’s creations. In his book On Getting Out of Bed, English professor and Christian writer Alan Noble writes, To God, your existence in His universe is a good act of creation, and it remains good as God’s creation, even in its fallen state.¹⁸ And through Christ, our incidental identity is reversed, and our essential identity remains. Of course, the process of sanctification remains to be completed; we live in the tension of the ‘already and not yet.’ Paul exhorts us,

Not that I have already attained this – that is, I have not already been perfected – but I strive to lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus also laid hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have attained this. Instead I am single-minded: Forgetting the things that are behind and reaching out for the