Wonderfully Made

A Protestant Theology of the Body

John W. Kleinig

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781683594680
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Why do we have bodies?
When it comes to thinking about our bodies, confusion reigns. In our secular age, there has been a loss of the body's goodness, purpose, and end. Many people, driven by shame and idolatry, abuse their body through self-harm or self-improvement. How can we renew our understanding and see our bodies the way God does?
In Wonderfully Made, John Kleinig forms a properly biblical theology of our bodies. Through his keen sensitivity to Scripture's witness, Kleinig explains why bodies matter. While sin has corrupted our bodies and how we think of them, God's creation is still good. Thus, our bodies are good gifts. The Son took on a body to redeem our bodies. Kleinig addresses issues like shame, chastity, desire, gender dysphoria, and more, by integrating them into the biblical vision of creation.
Readers of Wonderfully Made will not only be equipped to engage in current issues; they will gain a robust theology of the body and better appreciation of God's very good creation.

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BODY MATTERS

In fact, however, the value of an individual does not lie in him. He is capable of receiving value. He receives it by union with Christ. There is no question of finding for him a place in the living temple which will do justice to his inherent value and give scope to his natural idiosyncrasy. The place was there first. The man was created for it. He will not be himself till he is there. We shall be true and everlasting and really divine persons only in Heaven, just as we are, even now, coloured bodies only in the light.

—C. S. Lewis

The slogans on two sweatshirts worn by young women recently caught my attention. The first was “My body! My choice!” The second was “Your body may be a temple, but mine’s an amusement park.” Both sum up how people commonly now regard their bodies. Since it belongs to them and only to them, they may do as they please with it. Therefore they use it for their own amusement in pursuit of physical pleasure for themselves apart from God and any higher purpose in life.

What are we to make of our bodies? That is not a theoretical question for idle speculation, something for philosophers to consider. It is a practical matter that determines the course of our lives. Even if we rarely think about our bodies, our opinion of them and attitude toward them subconsciously govern how we live and act every moment of our lives. Our beliefs about our bodies are always in play because our bodies are part and parcel of what we are. Wherever we are, there our body is with us. Whatever we do, our body does.

But unless something bad happens to me, I mostly take my body for granted, like the air I breathe. Even though it is my constant companion, I seldom consider how I relate to it and what it is meant to be. Yet it is, or should be, obvious how important it is to me and the people around me. It locates me in a particular place at a particular time with particular people in my particular society, family, marriage, and workplace. I am born with my body and die when it can no longer sustain me. The pattern of my life as a whole involves me with my body from childhood to adolescence, marriage to parenthood, employment to retirement, old age to death. My body also marks the daily rhythm of my life with waking and sleeping, dressing and undressing, working and resting from work, eating and drinking, engaging in sexual intercourse and disengaging from it. It governs how I interact with others and how they interact with me. I experience the world around me through it. I live with my body and do everything with it. My human life is, most obviously and simply, life in the body.

Yet I did not make my body; it was given to me and remains given to me as the foundation for my life here on earth. It is never apart from me, nor am I ever apart from it for as long as I live here.

My body is equally important for my life as a Christian. Just as I live my entire earthly life in my human family, my spiritual life in God’s family involves my body from its earthly beginning to its final, heavenly destination. My life in Christ is based on a physical event, my baptism. The washing of physical water accompanied by the speaking of certain words joined my body with the body of the risen Lord Jesus, just as the rite of marriage joined my body to my wife’s. Jesus now interacts with me physically with his spoken word that I hear with my physical ears, his audible word that animates me with his Holy Spirit and makes me a saint. Jesus also gives himself to me physically in his Holy Supper. There I receive his life-giving body and blood with my mouth and in my whole body. Through his body and blood, he unites me physically and spiritually with himself and all other Christians. He also calls and equips me to serve him bodily—that is, with my actual body and its individual members. So, paradoxically, my spiritual life, the life that is created and sustained by the Holy Spirit, is always lived in the body. It does not take me away from my body or occur apart from it. Rather, it takes me ever further and deeper into bodily life and into fuller embodiment as a human being. It makes me at home in my body as I live here on earth.

All that makes scant sense unless we understand the spiritual life in biblical terms. The biblical understanding of human spirituality differs radically from views commonly and rather vaguely held. Most people see the spiritual as the opposite of the physical and material. Thus, the human spirit is identified either with the conscious mind and its thoughts, emotions, and self-awareness, or with the immaterial soul, the disembodied spirit, of every living person. As such, it can exist and works best apart from the body.

In contrast, the biblical view is that what is spiritual has to do with the Holy Spirit. My spirit is what makes me a person rather than a thing or an animal, a living person animated by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that gives personal life to every human soul, and eternal life to every believer. The Holy Spirit makes us and our deeds spiritual through faith in Jesus Christ. As Martin Luther says, “The Spirit is whatever is done in us through the Spirit.”1

Since the spiritual life is produced by the Holy Spirit for people with bodies, Christian spirituality is embodied piety. We human beings are not just spirits, like the angels, nor animated bodies, like the animals, but are embodied spirits, or, if you will, spiritual bodies. We do not just have bodies; we are bodies. They are not just what we are as people but an essential part of who we are. That is why the body is so important. It has been designed to be a temple of the Holy Spirit rather than an amusement park. Like the human mind, it is meant to live in harmony with God and his Holy Spirit. It was created for eternal life with God, not merely temporal life on earth. No matter how damaged it may actually be, every human body is designed for perfection in eternity.

HIGH REGARD

It is true that some vain people overrate their bodies. Like Narcissus in Greek mythology, they admire themselves. Their bodies serve their own self-glorification. Since their sight is turned away from the world and the people around them, they see nothing but themselves. They confuse the way they look with what they are and identify themselves with their appearance. Despite their self-regard their body is actually underrated, because it is treated as an object, a thing in itself apart from the person and its relationship with others. They idolize their bodies.

Yet it seems to me that most people do not regard their bodies highly enough. They underrate and despise their bodies. Because they are in thrall to the image of an ideal body, the body beautiful, they do not appreciate how amazing and wonderful they actually are. They belittle their bodies for their apparent idiosyncrasies and supposed imperfections. They fail to see how the value of the body does not merely lie in its total physical arrangement but in its personal use with all its parts. Each body is like a violin made by Stradivarius. In its appearance a Stradivarius is no more attractive than any other musical instrument. It comes into its own when it is used by a master musician to play the piece of music that brings out the best in it. So too with our bodies! We should hold them in high regard for their wonderful construction and their amazing potential, potential that is realized when they are used in the right way to serve others and glorify God.

Sadly, our society as a whole does not know what to make of the body. People disagree on what it is, what it is meant to do, and how it is to be regarded. That is not new. The human body has always been a matter of contention, most of all with regard to its sexual character—perhaps never more so than in Western societies today, in which some of the sharpest social, moral, and religious conflicts have to do with the body! Think of the disagreements in our society over sexuality and gender, marriage and divorce, same-sex intercourse and same-sex marriage, artificial reproduction and genetic engineering, cosmetic surgery and gender reassignment, pornography and voyeurism, sexual abuse and prostitution, abortion and euthanasia, overeating and malnutrition. Think, too, of disagreements in the church over creation and evolution, the incarnation of God’s Son and his physical resurrection, the ministry of the church and its use of spoken words and physical objects like water, bread, and wine as the means of the Spirit, the resurrection of the body and bodily participation in eternal life with the Triune God. All these conflicts stem, in large part, from confusion about the body.

Popular culture shows that our society seems to be in two minds about the human body. On the one hand, it is obsessed with the physical body and its health. Our happiness and wellbeing seemingly depend on what we eat and how we feel, how fit we are and how sexually active we are, how we look and what we can do. Since the condition for a good life is a fit, healthy, attractive body, people assess themselves and their bodies by comparison with the images of the socially sanctioned ideal bodies that they see on screen and in print. My ideal self, the person I would like to be, must match that ideal body. Yet that ideal is never fixed. It changes as fashions change. What’s more, makeup and photographic trickery ensure that no one ever actually measures up to that artificial ideal. Besides that, even the best body is marred and scarred; it becomes sick and unwell; it ages and dies. No actual body is ever perfect in appearance or in health. No body is ever good enough; it never measures up to what it should be like. Bodily perfection is in fact an illusion, an impossible dream.

On the other hand, an obsession with the body coexists with contempt for the body. Surveys show that most people are so unhappy with their bodies that they would readily trade them in for something better and more attractive. Since they are unhappy with themselves, they project their dissatisfaction onto their bodies and attempt to get rid of its blemishes by the pursuit of bodily self-improvement with diet and exercise, makeup and dress, cosmetic surgery and decoration with jewelry and tattoos. When these efforts fail to deliver the desired outcome, they despise their bodies and treat them harshly as if to punish them for their failure.

In disappointment, more and more of our contemporaries who feel trapped in their bodies try to escape by dissociating themselves from them. Some who have been hurt physically switch off their emotions and live in their minds. Others try to achieve a state of emotional ecstasy through intoxication, music, or spiritual possession. Still others deliberately practice a kind of deep meditation that seeks to transcend the body and reach a state of higher consciousness. It is also true that many Christians who feel uneasy about their bodies reduce the Christian faith to the pursuit of theological knowledge or the cultivation of their own subjective spirituality. Oddly, the focus on the body as the be-all and end-all of human life can result in the unhealthy embrace of a disembodied kind of spirituality.

So neither of these approaches regards the human body highly enough. Both fail to appreciate it properly.

THE ANIMATED BODY

Up to this point I have quite deliberately refrained from explaining how the human body is connected with the mind and the soul, one’s sense of self as a person rather than just a thing. But now an explanation is in order to avoid possible misunderstanding. The connection of the human mind with the body became a central issue in Greek philosophy, and centuries later it remains still pertinent. Like the Greek philosophers, many modern Christians reduce the mind to its cognitive powers and identify it with the human soul. This dualistic view of a person dissociates the mind with its thoughts and judgments from the body with its senses, passions, and desires. Thus, even though modern science shows that the mind cannot be separated from the body, the human mind is still commonly identified with the soul as the spiritual part of a person and as a separate entity from the body. So, for many people, embryos and mentally disabled people are not held to be persons because they are not fully sentient entities with self-consciousness.

But that is not how the human body is regarded in the Scriptures. It could be said that Scripture speaks about embodied minds and mindful bodies. In fact, the Hebrew Old Testament has no terms that correspond exactly to “body” and “mind” in English. The Old Testament speaks more generally about the “flesh” of a person. So does the New Testament. Although sometimes it uses the Greek word for the body in a more technical sense (that is, the human body), the same word is often translated “flesh” to mean not merely the physical body (for example, Gal 2:20) but the sinful self that is opposed to God’s Spirit (for example, Rom 8:5–7).

The New Testament occasionally uses nous, a Greek word that approximates what we now call the mind (for example, Rom 12:2). The Greeks regarded it as the organ for physical, mental, moral, and spiritual perception. But the Old Testament has no technical term for the mind as we know it. Instead, it regards the heart, the central physical organ of the human body, as the seat of what we now call the mind, much as we now locate the mind in the brain. The heart is regarded as the organ for perception and understanding, thought and emotion, reflection and meditation, memory and enjoyment, imagination and calculation, invention and action, desire and volition. The symbolic use of this physical term presents us with a unitary, synthetic view of the whole person. In this view, the whole body with its respective organs is not only involved in perception and action but also in all mental and emotional activity. So when we think, we speak to ourselves, and when we speak, we think aloud for others to know what we are thinking. We have mindful bodies that interact physically and mentally with the world around them, receptive bodies that need eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to understand what is presented to them (Deut 29:4; Isa 6:9–10). Thus, for instance, when someone speaks to me, my brain interprets what I hear. So if that part of the brain that deals with hearing is damaged, I can no longer make sense of the sounds that strike my otherwise unimpaired eardrum.

Just as the human mind is associated with the heart of a person in the Scriptures, so human souls are connected with the throat and its breath. Thus, “soul” is the word in Hebrew (nephesh) and Greek (psychē) for any animate creature, for animals and people who breathe and remain alive as long as they continue to breathe. They die when they no longer breathe as well as when the heart stops beating. Their soul is their life-breath. Thus, the word for soul is also the word for human life (for example, Mark 8:35–36). A human soul is an animate, living person. People do not just have souls; they are souls.

This commonsense way of thinking is carried from the Old Testament over into the New Testament. It has the same holistic anthropology, the same view of the whole person. It employs a range of terms to describe human life from different points of view, different aspects not meant to exclude each other. Thus, when Jesus teaches his disciples about the necessities for physical life on earth in Matthew 6:25, he considers them physically from two complementary points of view, both as persons with living souls and as persons with living bodies. But when he teaches them about death in Matthew 10:28–29, he distinguishes the soul from the body. Similarly, Paul identifies the heart with the mind (Phil 4:7) and the mind with the conscience (Titus 1:15) as complementary aspects of a person. He also distinguishes the body from the mind when he discusses congregational behavior in Romans 12:1–2, and he differentiates among the body, soul, and spirit of God’s people when he teaches them about their total sanctification for eternal life with God in 1 Thessalonians 5:23.

This view of the whole person, coupled with the use of the same terms for different entities—like “soul,” “flesh,” and “body” all referring to the life of a person and to a person’s self—can make it hard for us to fathom exactly what we mean when we talk about the body. Take, for instance, Paul’s use of the phrase “the body of flesh.” In Colossians 1:22 it describes the physical body of Jesus, but in 2:11 it describes the sinful nature of all Adam’s descendants. Similarly, in Colossians 2:18 “the mind of the flesh” does not refer to the physical mind but to the sinful mentality that is hostile to God and concerned only with its own spiritual self-advancement.

Human beings do not possess a body or a mind; they are both bodies and minds. They cannot be reduced to either of these. Every person is not just a body or a mind, but both. And yet they are also more than both. As people, they are always much more than self-conscious bodies or embodied minds. Their personal nature and identity, their souls, transcend both their bodies and their minds. So, for example, those who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, or lie unconscious in a coma, are still persons, even though they have lost much of their physical and mental ability. What’s more, even though we change physically and mentally in the course of our lives, we still remain the same person. In fact, these changes actually establish and confirm our continuous identity.

Even though we all experience ourselves as the same person for the whole of our conscious lives, our self, our soul, remains a mystery to us. We do not invent our own selves and construct who we are. Our self, our identity, is something given to us together with our bodies to distinguish us from other bodies, and with our minds to make us aware of ourselves as persons, active agents in the story of our lives.

The mystery of our personal identity is understood in three ways in the New Testament. First, the body is distinguished from the soul. Jesus explains it in these terms in Matthew 10:28: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.” He therefore distinguishes the soul from the body and teaches that while the body can be killed physically here on earth, the soul cannot be killed even if the body is killed. It survives the death of the body (Heb 10:39; 1 Pe...