Why the Body Matters

We are in the second week of a new, post Easter series (or Easter season series if you were to follow the liturgical calendar) called 'Life in Light of the Resurrection'

First two weeks – Theology or ‘How the resurrection changes our thinking.’
Next three weeks – Praxis or ‘How the resurrection changes our actions.’

We are going to do theology first, looking at three views of the body and then briefly look at three case studies regarding how those views work out.

I. Three Views of The Body

Disclaimer: Today I am going to be teaching. Pretty much every time I have taught at college life this year I have been preaching, which is pitched primarily to the passions and volition and secondarily transfers information. Today, I am going to teach, which means my primary purpose will be to transfer information. But my hope is that it will be useful information with deeply practical outworkings.

i. Materialism

Materialism is the belief that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things. I don’t think I have to spend too much time convincing you that materialism is the primary perspective on ‘the body’ in our culture.

The body is reduced to organs, the will is reduced to survival instincts, love is reduced to the desire to propagate our genetic material, creativity is reduced to electrochemical impulses, we are simply carbon based machines. Organic robots.

Dopamine clip

In materialism, the body is simultaneously too important and not important enough. The body has a frenzy of importance because once it expires, so do you. Yet it is not important enough, because it is simply a machine. While the theist has some trouble with what is called ‘the problem of evil’ the materialist tends to have trouble with ‘the problem of beauty.’

ii. Gnosticism

The Gnostics were a philosophical/religious sect common in the Roman empire in the first century. It was a very popular religion at the time that the early church was just starting to grow. They had a complex belief system that would be tedious for me to describe. But they essentially believed in two gods, a ‘greater’ god who was good and who created the spiritual world and an evil one that created the physical universe. They called the latter the demiurge[1]. They see the physical universe as a mistake that never should have happened. Therefore, the main project of Gnosticism was to transcend the physical into a spiritual existence.[2]

Within the first 50 years of Christianity there were Gnostic teachers in the church who wanted to make Jesus a prophet of their belief system. There are actually texts in our Bibles where the authors are warning against a Gnostic view of the world. Check out the first couple verses of I John 4:

1Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.

Many people read this and think that ‘testing the spirits’ is some kind of mystical skill, a kind of spooky demon detector. But that is not what John was talking about. Already, within a couple decades of the church, there are already Gnostic influences that want to deny the bodily death or resurrection of Jesus and elevate the importance of the soul over the body. John says that the key to right belief is that Jesus rose, not just spiritually, but bodily.

You see, the Gnostics had trouble with why God would take a physical form and, in particular, why he would die. So they claimed that he was essentially a ghost and that on the cross he tricked the Romans into killing someone else (which just strikes me as deplorable). Incidentally, we see this idea that Jesus escaped crucifixion in two other places:

1. Islam[3] - only a prophet, yet God would not let this happen to him
2. Monte Python and the Life of Brian

Gnosticism makes the opposite error to materialism. While materialism holds that the body is all that is, Gnosticism elevates the spirit as good and despises the body as evil. In our souls are our true and better selves and our bodies are the enemy.

So why bring up a 2000 year old philosophy. Because many Christians are closer to Gnosticism than the Bible in their view of the body. We are often so busy not being materialists that we end up Gnostics. Some of you are probably closer to Gnosticism than Christian theology in the way you view the body and the physical universe.

Here one example from Bronwyn. You often hear Christians say that Jesus has come to save your souls…no he hasn’t…he has come to save you…all of you.

Which leads us to the Christian view of the body:

iii. Christianity

So the materialist and Gnostic views of the body leave it either too important, not important enough, or somehow, both too important and not important enough at the same time. The interesting thing about the Christian position is that it is not half way between these. The Christian hypothesis is that the physical and the spiritual were both created good and are fundamentally intertwined to the point that you cannot make a value distinction between them. We embrace the fantastic beauty and importance of both our physical and spiritual existence, because they cannot be separated.

So to build a Christian view of the body, lets do a really brief Biblical survey. I think the major data on how God views our bodies, our physical existence, comes from the beginning of the story (creation) the climax or turning point of the story (the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus) and the end of the story (what theologians call Eschatology).

-Creation

We are often trained to think about and explain Christianity by beginning in Genesis 3. Sometimes it seems like it all starts with the fall, with things going horribly wrong. I could see how this would give us a pretty negative view of the body (And, don’t get me wrong, I think understand human falleness is fundamental to understanding humanness). But…the story doesn’t start there. It all starts with God creating a physical reality oozing with spiritual reality, set up as the perfect environment for worship and human flourishing. He made us physical beings with a capacity for worship and called it GOOD. Whatever you do with a Christian theology of the body…you have to believe that our physical bodies are good.

-Incarnation

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” John 1:14

Then at the climax of salvation history, God himself takes human form in the person of Jesus Christ. This is shocking! The Gnostic heresy withers under the story of Christmas. The idea that God himself, in the form of little baby Jesus soiled his swaddle totally offends the Gnostic sensibility. In fact, my Muslim friends will sometime bring up the idea Jesus had bodily functions as a slam dunk argument that he could not be God. I argue, instead, that it imbues our human, bodily, existence with dignity…because not only did God create it good, he essentially declared it good a second time by experiencing it himself.

The sublime mystery of Christianity is that our physical, bodily existences are ennobled by God himself experienced a bodily existence and did it perfectly. He had a mom and chores and a job. God essentially said for a second time in the incarnation, ‘It is good’ by taking a human body.

-Resurrection

And then Jesus rose from the dead. As Dan said, in the resurrection, the thin veil between heaven and earth was traversed, and God’s perfect and eternal rule which exists in a parallel but intersecting reality with our fallen and rebellious reality, broke through in one particular event…the resurrection. Jesus raised from the dead, and he was not a ghost. His body was raised. I love that line in the Updike poem my friend read during the sung worship time:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

God’s primary sign post to the totality of his eternal rule, was the eternal and renewed body of the risen Christ. Let me make a couple brief observations about this:

Darrell Bock: “The Resurrection Body is both like and unlike our current bodies.’
There is a discontinuity and continuity between Jesus’ pre and post resurrection bodies. Three of the gospels have different post-resurrection encounters and ALL THREE have something in common. At first, Jesus is not recognized, then he unequivocally is. There is continuity and discontinuity. In several of these passages, he eats something, which is a blatantly tactile demonstration of his renewed physicality, the continuity between his new body and his old one. Yet he disappears and walks through closed doors, indicating that, clearly, the new body is also fundamentally different.

When we die, we will be raised from the dead. Not just our souls, as if that was who we really are. Our selves will be raise…our bodies will be raised as well as our consciousness. And if we are found in allegiance to Christ, our bodies will be renewed like his. They will be like our current bodies, fundamentally physical (for example: we will not become angels as many people erroneously believe) but they will be better bodies.

-Eschatology

If you are like me, Eschatology, or a theology of the end times, kind of creeps you out. My early experiences with eschatology involved charts and descriptions of multi-headed beasts and precise speculations about who the anti-Christ is. Most people tend to think the Bible has a lot more to say about the events surrounding and following the return of Christ than it actually does. But if you wade through the nonsense…there is some really important information. Jesus will return and create a new heaven and a new earth and he will be there and if you have submitted your allegiance to him you will be there and we will all have bodies. Jesus will still have the wounds with which he purchased our salvation. Because those wounds, like our salvation will be physical. The most famous verse about what this will be like is in 1 Cor 15:

35But someone may ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?" 36How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body… The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

I actually think Modest Mouse (who is an agnostic – in one of his songs he gives God ~ a 20% chance of existing) has one of the best lines about this. He says

For your sake I hope heaven and hell are really there
But I wouldn’t hold my breath
You wasted life
Why wouldn’t you waste death
Why wouldn’t you waste the after life

-Ocean Breathes Salty

I think that is pretty insightful of Isaac Brock. If you spend life waiting for some disembodied escape from the body and the earth…you are going to be disappointed with eternal life. It is going to be physical. It is going to be AWESOME, but it is going to be PHYSICAL. There is no scriptural justification that it will be some sort of eternal church service.

In the book Surprised by Hope that some of the student leaders read together this summer, NT Wright’s argues the Christian, ‘heaven’ is not our final destination.[4] Wright talks, I think correctly, about ‘life after life after death’ in which we will be have a renewed bodily existence on a renewed earth living perfectly intertwined existences of physical and spiritual reality.

II. Three Implications of the Christian Theology of the Body

So I really believe that theology matters. What we believe affects how we act and how we act affects what we believe. That is why this series deals with both. But I’d like to look briefly at three case studies regarding how our view of the body works out practically in three aspects of our lives, work, sleep and sexuality…I am going to cover them in order of increasing ‘funness.’

i. Studying

You are vocationally students, though many of you do have jobs to make it through school. How does a Christian theology of the body affect that? Well, for the materialist, studying can either take on way too much importance or way too little. And you know people who suffer from both. Either academic achievement is the door to happiness which is all there is so it has ultimate value or it is as meaningless as anything else we do.

(http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/ comic here)

The Gnostic view tends to undervalue studying, especially for Christians. Every choice you have to make between studying and ministry gets decided for ministry because the spiritual is the only thing that is of value.

Here’s an interesting implication of the theology of the new body. If we are going to have bodies and live in a city eternally…I think we are going to have jobs. As I have said before, work is what is called a pre-fall ordinance, which is to say that in paradise, in Genesis, before the temptation and fall, when the first couple were living God’s best possible plan for human flourishing, they had jobs. Work and vocation…in your case school…should be a worshipful act.

In the scriptures, Solomon and Adam were Scientists. The scriptures say Solomon “described plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also taught about animals and birds, reptiles and fish. 34Men of all nations came to listen to Solomon's wisdom, sent by all the kings of the world, who had heard of his wisdom.” 1 Kings 4:33-34

And then there is Adam…God’s first task to Adam was an act of biological taxonomy. He named the animals. It probably took him a long time. It was hard work. But why would God ask Adam to do science instead of ‘ministry’ right off the bat. Why biological taxonomy rather than building a temple or writing a worship song. Because when done correctly, in gratitude before Jesus, with a desire to be a co-creator and, like God, bring order out of chaos…Science is worship.

(Side note: If Adam was actually a biologist before he was a gardener, does that make science the world’s oldest profession?)

And lest we forget the humanities. Daniel studied pagan literature under duress. Not only was did he spend all of his time studying arcane literature, it was the literature of a civilization that had wipe his out. And he did awesome at it. This was God’s task for him for a season. He became a student of that culture and gave it everything he had, because in his life, his physical vocation and his spiritual devotion were intertwined. So a Christian view of the unity of the physical and spiritual, can protect you from making your studies too important but can also keep you from making them not important enough.

ii. Sleep

Sleep is, obviously, connected with studying since the more you do one the less you do the other. Again, materialists distort sleep in both directions. It either becomes too important, or, more often, entirely expendable. Gnostics generally see fatigue as spiritual weakness that must be overcome. If you are truly spiritual you shouldn’t need sleep.

A Christian view of the body includes the idea that God providentially made our strivings limited. Our bodies were designed to shut down cyclically in an act of worship and recognition of who actually rules. I consider sleep a spiritual discipline. Amanda will ask me from time to time, “Are you sleeping like a Christian?” The unspoken question is ‘are you trying to be God?’

If I could change anything about my undergrad, I would sleep more.

And here is the thing, if you have tended to your studies along the way as if it was worship and, therefore, worthy of your serious and diligent attentions, then brain scientists tell us sleep turns out to be more useful than cramming when you get to the end of the quarter.

iii. Sexuality

‘The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;’ Ps 16:6

And then we come to sex. I put it at the end because I figured that even if I was going over time, I might still hold your attention. I want you to see, especially with sexuality, how the materialist view of the body fails in both directions…for the materialist sex is simultaneously too important and not important enough.

I do not think I have to work too hard to make the case that the materialist culture of the academic setting makes sex too important. A couple weeks ago, nearly a thousand students showed up for the authorized porn screening. Nearly 300 people in line did not make it in. In my opinion they were the lucky ones. Malcolm Muggeridge says this:

“Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.”

Because sex is such a powerfully transcendent experience, the materialist gives it almost ultimate value…but it ends up too important. The experience simply cannot bear the expectation in the long term.

But I would also argue that, for the materialist, sex is also not important enough. I don’t think this point is better made than by Russell Crowe in the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind.’

Nash: I don't exactly know what I am required to say in order for you to have intercourse with me. But could we assume that I said all that. I mean essentially we are talking about fluid exchange right? So could we go just straight to the sex.

You see, sex might be the only religion of the materialist. It may be of ultimate importance. But ultimately, it is not important enough. It is basically a fluid exchange. This is an impoverished view, not only of sex, but of humanity.

But the Gnostic view of sex also fails. To reject sexuality as unspiritual is to deny the obvious gift of God. The world rightly labels us as prudes if we can’t admit that sex is Awesome.

Of course, as we all know, Christianity does include boundaries for sexuality. God has limited sex to marriage and within marriage it is limited to activities that both partners find ennobling and edifying. But here is the thing people don’t understand. God does not place boundaries around sex because it is bad. He placed boundaries around sex because it is so intensely good that it is volatile. CS Lewis argues that there are very few ‘bad things.’ Most ‘evil’ is simply the misuse, distortion, or overuse of a created good. And the better something is the more powerful is its distortion. That is why we are a culture enslaved to sexuality. The Christian response to this distortion is not the Gnostic rejection of sex as bad or the materialist capitulation of sex as causal or ultimate…but an acceptance of sex a very good when experienced within the boundaries God has created it for.[5]

So, anyway, I hope you can see how spending two weeks on the theologies of the new earth and the new body…on who we are and where we are headed in light of the resurrection…starts to define our new task. We have a responsibility and privilege to tell the story of how heaven broke into this age in the person of Jesus and the event of the resurrection. But because Christians believe in the unity and wholeness and comlete dignity of the human person…because wse believe that the physical is intertwined with the spiritual…we are also called to be a people who are about justice and beauty. We reject the false dichotomy between a message for the soul and a mission to the body. We see our friends and neighbors as whole people and do what we can to offer them what we can

___________________________
[1] Brief Aside: I love my job. There are not a lot of jobs I would rather do. But occasionally when I do entertain the idea of a different kind of career, it is always as a writer for television or movies. It is not without a little embarrassment that I confess that my favorite television show of all time is Buffy the Vampire Slayer…but wouldn’t the demiurge be the best Buffy super villain of all time.
[2] I also blame Plato who perpetuated the unhelpful dualism between the inner and outer life exalting the former over the latter.
[3] Whether or not this passage actually teaches that someone was crucified in Jesus’ place turns out to be a pretty complicated question of Qur’anic hermeneutics. But it is a common folk or popular belief within Islam.
[4] It actually seems questionable as to weather it is a place at all.
[5] I had to cut the ‘will there be sex in heaven?’ material for time but here is what I was working on: Incidentally, sex also a pre-fall ordinance. Which means that it is unconditionally good (though our bent natures tend to turn it into a weapon rather than a service)…but also raises the question…will there be sex in heaven? (From Nic's Blog - Kreeft's Talk is here)

“Asking "will there be physical sexual intercourse in heaven?" is like a kid asking after 'the talk', "Can you eat ice cream while you do it?" We do not eat during sex, not because eating isn't good, but because we are taken with a greater pleasure. And in that case, it is likely we will experience all kinds of greater and more intimate forms of 'intercourse' that will make love making as we know it now facile and clumsy in comparison. It's not that sex will be outlawed, it's that it will be swallowed up in something greater, in something that renders it wholly obsolete.” –Peter Kreeft