The nonexistence of the spirit world

To Islam, for example, to identify God with this destitute and degraded one is an insult to God. We just do not want God to be like this and so we demote Jesus to something less than God. Trinitarian theology will not allow us to escape the unwanted identification thus subverting the idea that we make God up for our own comfort, for who would invent such a God?

The irony of the early English scientists leaning towards Arianism is that this belief must presuppose the presence of the spirit world. Jesus was seen to be an independent and subordinate divine being. We know that Newton had great trouble with Descartes’ mechanical picture of the universe and his own physics that seemed to leave no room for the intervention of God and here we see him subscribing to a view of the universe that would have to be inhabited by multiple spirits.

Wiles makes the observation that Arianism and its cousin Unitarianism decline in the 18th century because belief in the spirit world declined. It is hard to assess this proposal, although Keith Thomas’ book Religion and the Decline of Magic would be a good starting place. I am aware of highly educated Victorians attending séances and in our day, especially among the religious, belief in the spirit world is alive and well.

One example that comes to mind is the Charismatic churches who base their practice on the presence of the Holy Spirit and His actions among the congregation healing and giving the gift of tongues. It seems that if you believe enough and pray hard enough then God will make himself be present to do the bidding of the worshippers. The presence of God is not in the form of Word and Sacrament or as the Church but is an actual ethereal being summoned up by the worshipers.

This is why Trinitarian theology is so important, because it closes the door on such superstitious belief, who knows what the church would be like if Arius had won the day!

The attack on Christianity that comes from prominent scientists is based on the presupposition that if the spirit world does not exist, then God cannot exist and Christianity is a delusion. If Arianism had triumphed this would have been a valid criticism. But orthodox Christian belief holds the truth of the Father with the historical existence of the Son, and the mysterious way they are communicated to men and women by the Spirit, together in the one holy and undivided Trinity.

This is a far cry from the theistic monism that the modern persecutors of Christianity presume. It does not presume the existence of a spirit world, invisible but permeating everything, but the coalescence of interpreted historical event and our perception of it.

The mistake that our present day persecutors make is to think that the Christian revelation is a revelation of the existence of the spirit world. One can understand how this can come from scientists, being as they are so focused on the nature of the world and being so dependent upon that world behaving in predictable ways (not being imbued with mind).

But Christian revelation includes the revelation that the world is not the habitat of mind, this is why natural science arose in the Christian West despite the glitch of Galileo’s trial.

If Arius had his way and his system became orthodox, then natural science would have been crippled. Christian revelation is the revelation of things we do not naturally see, that brokenness runs not between groups who are right or wrong but in a jagged line through each individual person, that on the cross we murdered the one true man.

Christian revelation is the revelation of the nature and destiny of man in the flesh, not the exposure of a parallel spirit world.

Athanasius did not win the argument against Arius with a reasoned discourse, in fact he was devious and a bully and one wonders at the establishment of such a key concept as the Trinity to theology and indeed the whole of Western civilisation from such a quagmire of personality and politics. But despite the methods used, the Nicene formulation has served the Church and the world well.