Collision w/ Jeff Durbin: Rainn Wilson's Spirituality

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Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Collision. I'm Pastor Jeff Durbin, and today we are engaging with some comments made by Rainn Wilson, otherwise known as Dwight Schrute.

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I love this guy. And we're going to try to engage with this in such a way that it's not just a little comment.

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Here we go. So I love

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Rainn Wilson. I think he's a phenomenal actor. He's fun to watch. I thought some of his stuff in the office was just incredible and amazing.

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He's just he's just someone who brings me so much joy. So I love Rainn Wilson. Rainn Wilson is popular today talking a lot about spirituality, spiritual things.

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And so I want to engage with some of the comments that Rainn makes here from, of course, a biblical worldview, a

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Christian worldview. So let's get started. The reason why spirituality is important is because it is reality.

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We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

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So this is really important when we talk about things that are reality. We're talking about things that we're making claims about that are actually true.

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So Rainn's in a good conversation right now. We wouldn't want to be opposed to the conversation. We are talking about reality.

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But the question, of course, that we can bring as a challenge maybe over a cup of coffee with Rainn is how do you know that reality is real?

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How do you know that there is a an essential reality, a true reality?

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Like, what do you know about reality? And we talk about knowledge from a Christian worldview.

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We're talking about what is popularly known as justified true belief. Are we just spinning our wheels here?

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Are we all just saying things that might sound, you know, very eloquent and erudite, but don't have any real meaning?

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Because I want to go with Rainn in this conversation and say, yeah, we're talking about reality here.

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Things that are actually fundamentally true, unchangeable. This is reality.

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So that's a good conversation to have. But you could press Rainn and say, well, Rainn, how do you know that? Is it just through your own personal experience?

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Because there's so many people in the world with differing views on reality or of reality.

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And so what is reality and how do you justify your belief in what is actually true, what is real?

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And so I want to just start this, not by chastising Rainn and but actually saying, no, it's a good conversation and it's an important one.

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But do you have a foundation that can make sense of the questions, the great questions, the important questions about reality?

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Now, he makes the claim here at the beginning. He says that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience.

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We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Now, that in itself comes right up against the

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Christian worldview in collision. And this is what's really important here in this conversation. I think why this particular video and these claims are important to engage with, because actually what

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Rainn says here is it's wrong. It's not full.

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It's not complete. It's not reality. But what he says here is is in reality bought into by a lot of Western Christians today.

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This is not true from a biblical perspective. You know, we're not human beings having a spiritual experience or spiritual beings having human experience.

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That kind of dichotomy is, of course, rooted in paganism and pagan thought.

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You see it in dualism. You see it even in Gnosticism in some ways, some expressions of Gnosticism.

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But many Christians actually think like this today. They think just like that, like the ultimate goal is the spiritual.

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The physical is not really that important. And even in some Christians minds today, the physical is a throwaway like this is all going to be destroyed and thrown away.

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Like, really, what we want to do is get on that one way street street to the spiritual. So like in pagan thoughts, in pagan thoughts, death was final.

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In pagan thoughts, death was essentially that one way street to the spiritual.

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If they believed in a spiritual realm and an afterlife, it was a one way street to that ultimate spiritual experience.

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We want to get to that higher spiritual story, which is the spiritual. The physical is really ultimately irrelevant.

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The physical is is a throwaway Gnostics, the early enemies, the arch enemies of the

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Christian church that Paul rebukes and speaks against and the

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Apostle John speaks against. They had that kind of understanding where, you know, this world is tainted by sin.

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God would never sully himself with the physical realm because it is corrupt and tainted with sin.

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And so in reality, it's the spiritual that is premier. The spiritual is to be highlighted and pursued.

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And what we need to do is get to that spiritual experience out there somewhere. What matters is the spiritual, not so much the physical and the humanity portion.

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This is in total collision to the basic parts of the

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Christian worldview. Just go with me for a second here as we engage with rain. It's important. The biblical worldview starts with the spiritual and the physical harmoniously together, right?

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Not simply compartmentalized and, you know, and the physical not so important. And the spiritual is the really greater thing over here.

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But humanity is in the image of God. God is spirit. Jesus said that God is spirit.

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And so we know that's God's nature. God's nature is spirit. But he creates a physical cosmos, a physical world, a physical creation, physical creatures and a physical humanity in this life, in this world.

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And in the beginning of the biblical story, humanity is harmoniously together with the spiritual and the physical.

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Both are good. Both are creations of God.

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And there's not one that is like this is the premier. This is the better. And the physical is not so important.

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As a matter of fact, the biblical story, the biblical worldview starts by saying that the physical is good.

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The spiritual is, of course, good. And they're harmoniously together. And so from the Christian perspective, we would never want to say something like this, even though so many modern

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Christians think in unbiblical categories when they think about the physical and the spiritual, many modern

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Christians and maybe perhaps some of you watching this today think just like Rainn Wilson.

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But that is not the case. It is not, as Rainn says, reality.

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Reality, we can have knowledge about and certainty about because God has revealed himself and what he's revealed about the physical world, the physical body and the spiritual body don't comport with what

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Rainn actually says here. This is, I would say, very much in line with just classical pagan thought of whatever expression, right?

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The physical, not so important. It's the spiritual that really matters. We want to escape the physical to get to that ultimate spiritual place one day.

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And again, so many Christians believe that today really is upsetting that we think that like, we just got to throw away this physical, escape the human body and get out to the, to the spiritual.

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I'll have more to say on that in a moment here, but that's an important thing to talk about. Who I am and what

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I am is not my body. It's not even my personality. You know, it's not the trauma I suffered.

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It's not what I've been through. That there is a little spark of the divine inside of me.

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So I would want to have a conversation with Rainn to ask more questions. Like, can you expatiate on that?

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Talk about that a little bit more. What exactly do you mean by that? Because there's certain aspects to what he's saying here that it's like, okay,

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I think I can go there if there is a proper grounding and definition of what we mean by a spark of the divine.

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If you mean that we are like one with the universe and all is one and we're all divine and part of this oneness, you know, there's, you know, a popular way of describing this, the difference between Christian worldviews and all other worldviews is a distinction between like one -ism and two -ism.

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In one -ism, that's all pagan thoughts. All is one. We're all part of the universe. The universe is divine in some sense.

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All is one. We're all part of this oneness. There's no creator, creation, distinction.

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And so all is one. So there's one -ism, right? And so you have a lot of language connected to that worldview.

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Like we're all one and part of the divine. We have the divine essence. Now we would totally reject that because the biblical worldview, again, going back to creation is the creator, creation, distinction.

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There is two, creator, creation, distinction. God is God by nature.

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We are not God by nature. We are the creatures, not creator.

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We are not divine by nature or in essence. However, when someone says a spark of the divine,

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I want to say, if you mean one -ism, that kind of spark of divine, absolutely not.

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We are not by nature, God or the essence of God. But if you mean a spark of the divine, just in the general sense of there is something unique and distinctive about the

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Christian, about the image bearer of God, and that we are actually, in fact, in the image of God, the imago

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Dei, and we are different and higher than, and something distinct from all other creation,

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I would say, yeah, because you're in the imago Dei, you are made to reflect the glory in many ways, the character and attributes in some senses of the creator himself.

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So if you mean the spark of the divine in that sense, I would say, if you mean that God created us in the imago

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Dei, okay, I think there's better ways to talk about it than that. But he makes a point here about you are not simply the expression of your physicality, and again,

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I would want to have more conversations with Rain to say, like, what do you mean by that? Let's talk about that. Because I would agree that the human being, because we are actually physical, spiritual beings together, that we are not to be identified simply by the physical, this is so critical, so important.

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Human beings in the biblical worldview are both physical and spiritual beings harmoniously together.

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And of course, sin has disrupted that relationship and the relationship of creation itself and our relationship with God.

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Jesus heals that, but we are not to have our identity rooted simply in, say, the physical abnormalities or the brokenness in our physicality.

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It's really important that we would say that our identity needs to actually be rooted in Jesus Christ and our union with the

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God -man who, of course, is God who took on flesh, so that's important too.

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Just think about the Christian worldview, fundamental assertion, God became a man. The word became flesh and dwelt among us.

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So this distinction between the physical and the spiritual with Rain Wilson is something that is actually not biblical because God shows the fundamental goodness of humanity, the human body, in that God takes on flesh to redeem physical humanity.

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And so, yeah, we're not to be identified simply with, say, the broken wiring in our brains or the trauma that's taken place within us, we're more than that because the spiritual and the physical are harmonious in the biblical worldview.

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Reality is that way. Hey, what's up guys? This is Pastor Jeff Durbin. Thank you for watching

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Collision. We wanted to provide a solid resource to help you to respond to anything coming into collision with the

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Christian worldview. There's more as a response to this video and others at ApologiasAllAccess at ApologiasStudios .com.

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