91ĆŢÓŃPaul describes the Christian life as the process of “being transformed into the same image [of Christ] from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). There is an upward and a downward reading of this text. One reading will transform and the other deform us.
On the upward reading, transformation “from one degree of glory to another” means becoming more “heavenly” and less “earthly.” To understand this reading, consider a competition that broke out between some Protestants and Catholics in 16th century Europe. It was not a competition for converts, or land, or political power. It was a contest over who could use less soap, yes, who could use less soap. Charles Panati’s work Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things offers a fascinating history of hygiene, revealing in grimy detail a close correlation between stink and spirituality in the 16th century. The less you bathed, the thinking went, the less you were fixated on the trifles of bodily existence. The more odorous your filth, the more amorous your faith. Why? Because your stench reveals your zeal for what really matters⎯the spiritual world⎯and your carelessness for what doesn’t matter⎯the material world.
This prejudice against the world God made and called “good” has nothing in common with Paul (or Jesus). It was Plato who famously argued that “the noblest and the highest” form of inspiration is a state in which one “stands apart from worldly interests and is fastened upon the divine, careless of the world below” (though it is doubtful whether the great Athenian pondered the pungent implications of his philosophy).” Such an upward vision of glory would later inspire such western ascetics as to spend thirty-seven years on a pillar in the Syrian desert. Then there was Alypius who stood atop a pillar for fifty-three years before his legs gave out, after which he laid another fourteen years until his death.
But Jesus, in his topsy-turvy way, turns such spirituality on its head. He reveals the profound spirituality of all of life, how even the most mundane and material of actions can be acts of worship. Whether he was fixing tables, finishing dinner, or fishing with friends, Jesus was spiritual. And it is Jesus, not Plato, who shaped Paul’s view of glory. We are better off, then, with a downward reading of “being transformed into [his] image,” a reading more compatible with what N.T. Wright calls, “God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven.”
A downward reading of what it means to be transformed first struck me in the dairy box of a local supermarket. I was working the graveyard shift. Around 3 a.m. the big rig would pull up with pallet after pallet of cheese—Goat, Cow, Blue,