Contemporary Christians have made a false division between spirit and body that the early church rejected; the early church opposed the idea that matter was evil and spirit was good. Before the discovery of the atom, the writer of Hebrews said, “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Hebrews 11:3 ESV). The visible is joined to the invisible, matter is wed to energy, and the spiritual is one with the physical. When we discover this in our own devotional thinking we understand the unity of creation in new ways. We also understand that our very bodies embody the intangible spiritual and that true spirituality is meant to be lived out in a tangible bodily existence.
