In Reply to: Buddhist art & Christian thought posted by AG on January 15, 2004 at 04:04:26:
Somebody else had touched on the very same point before but there were no followups, so here I am
I think that the spirit-flesh dichotomy takes place at a different dimension but is similar to the spirituality-philosophical dichotomy. Both dichotomies can be extracted from the Bible and that can be confusing. When the natural man thinks that things of the spirit of God are foolish and that they must be discerned spiritualy (1 Cor 2:14), the second dichotomy is at work but when Jesus tells to his disciples to pray less they fall into temptation (Mat 26:41), is the first.
In my opinion, the reason this distinction is important is that spirit-flesh is an imposed universal condition that exists within each individual while the spirituality-philosophical dichotomy requires a certain degree of participation from the individual. The first is already hard-wired in the human condition while the second is an ongoing wiring process in which the individual actively participates, it is the journey, our own individual journey.