Our trinitarian nature and wholeness

Now if what I say about us being trinity, is true (see Reflections of Trinity in the natural), we will need to be whole in body,  soul and spirit. It is here where our one dimensional approaches to life are seen to be truly inadequate.  If is it sickness of soul that is the root cause or our behaviour, then changing our behaviour will not bring the healing we so desperately need.  Yet this type of one dimensionality is the sum total of what many secular sources advocate. Thus for example one branch of Psychology is behaviourism.  I am not saying that our behaviours do not need to change, nor that Psychology cannot,  at times,  be useful and helpful  (though it can also be misleading – see coming post Psychological and spiritual truth). What I am saying is that it is more that needs to change than simply behaviour.  Another modern one dimensional approach is to try to handle everything through drugs independent even,  of our desires let alone a decision to change.  

Part (and just part) of what I am saying,  in  modern jargon, is that our  approach to wholeness needs to a mixture of (the more balanced forms of) the  holistic and the reductionist.  In other words I am saying that there is room both  for looking at the parts, and for looking at how they fit together.  So for example there is room for both individual counselling and the type of counselling that regards the family (or marriage, or group, or culture) as a system.  I am suggesting that a more balanced approach includes a mixture of both. Thus again I am suggesting unity in diversity (but this is not yet trinity).

Still in terms of what can be discovered in the secular, modern medicine has begun to see that the well being of the body is not independent of the well being of the soul. There is a whole area of research that supports this position. We hear talk for example,  about about psycho-somatic illnesses – body (soma) maladies  that have their origin in the psyche – the soul. Thus we get ulcers because we worry, and it is well known that cancer patients who fight the illness live longer than those who simply give up.  And then of course research has shown that drugs can affect our personality, in both positive and negative ways.

So then a mixture of the reductionist and holistic approach is better than the one dimensionality we see too often, but it is still missing one essential component, namely the spiritual. In an earlier post we talked about wanting and needing to be made whole.  Just as the body needs physical healing at times in order of us to be whole, so we also need healing of the soul,  and healing for the broken or lifeless spirit.  When the Bible talks about being whole, it is referring to being whole in precisely in this trinity of body soul and spirit.   This is what the fullness of the Biblical word “salvation” is all about, it is about rescue in all three aspects of who we are.

So then what I want to suggest is that just as there is a connection between physical and emotional health, so also there is a connection between the health of our soul and the health of our spirit, and between physical and spiritual health.  In particular our emotional well being is not independent of the health of our spirit. To put is another way, if we do not deal with the spiritual aspect of our maladies, we will never be fully whole.  When we have done something wrong for example, we can be plagued with guilt. The cure for true guilt of course is to be forgiven and “who can forgive sins but God?”  Well no-one, but God can forgive (see the July post “Guilt, shame …”). But malady of spirit can also have physical consequences. Jesus makes a strong connection between morality and physical health when he finds the man He healed by the pool of Bethesda, and tells Him to sin no more least a worse thing befalls him. This is not to say that all sickness, or all suffering is sin related (see Luke 13:4,5), but to emphasize the point that all these things are interconnected.  By the way, the “something worse” is not necessarily physical here. I suspect that many readers know about suffering that is other than physical.

Now we can choose to live out lives excluding the spiritual realm, and clearly many do, but  the abundant life (fullness of life) that Jesus promises will not be found outside of living out spiritual principles. These so often are foolishness to the World. Take for example “He  who would save his life shall loose it, and he who shall loose his life for My sake,  shall find it”.  Spiritual principles include, integrity and self denial and admitting wrong doing and the like  (more later in Psychological and Biblical truth.)  Secular self help too often looks for scape goats that deal only with the symptoms, and can do nothing else, because the root causes are violations of spiritual principles it cannot yet acknowledge.