A Feast on Fasting: Scot McKnight’s Book-Part 2
Jun 18th, 2009 by John
Imagine a circle of pure spirit beings, ethereal and pure, contemplating God in rapture and extreme holiness, lost in divine wonder. Suddenly another spirit being shows up tardy dragging in a corpse, a human body, into the middle of this very spiritual circle. We imagine gasps, screams and shrieks. “Yuck! What *is* that?! Get it out of here! It stinks! It leaks! How dare you pollute our communion with God!”
That is the ancient gnostic and current prevailing USAmerican evangelical view of the human body. Somehow the human body is not only unwelcomed in worship and spirituality, it is viewed as a lumpy barrier or soilly encumbrance to spirituality. Scot McKnight says, “Enough!” His book on Fasting gives the human body its rightful place in Christian spirituality and worship.
Scot introduces some provocative phrases as he unpacks biblical texts and quotes from church history on the practice of fasting. Phrases like “body image,” “body talk,” “body turning,” “body plea,” “body grief,” ” body discipline,” “body calendar [intriguing, eh?],” “body poverty [my favorite],” ” body contact,” and “body hope.”
Did you happen to observe a repeated word in those phrases? For the less observant, it’s “body,” as in the human body. Scot, my friends, is that tardy spirit dragging in the corpse. He is telling us that the body belongs smack dab in the middle of the circle of our purest spirituality and worship. He is making us look at the human body in a new way: not as a hindrance to worship, but as the very God-designed vehicle for worship. Down with gnosticism!
What I appreciated about Part 1 of Scot’s book is the plethora of quotes from church history that complement Scot’s handling of the major biblical texts on fasting. I mean, John Wesley was not so long ago relatively speaking and yet we as USAmerican evangelicals would probably consider Wesley a flaming cult-leader because of his insistence on fasting Wednesdays and Fridays (as the early church established as “stationary fast” days). Sing with me, “Where have all the fastings gone, long time passing…?”
Next– Part 2:Wisdom and Fasting
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