The ancient Hebrews were holistic in their perceptions of life. God made the body, and therefore the body was good. Greek thought, on the contrary, was characterized by a dualism in which the spiritual world was good, and the physical world was bad. Plato, for example, called the body a “prison” that held captive the soul. In his statement “Soma sema” (“a body, a tomb”), Plato suggested that the spirit’s highest destiny is to be free from the body. (What I call “Christoplatonism” still infects many churches, teaching that human spirits are better off without bodies, and Heaven is a disembodied realm.)
In the early centuries A.D., there were two schools of Greek thought: Stoicism and Epicureanism. The Stoics treated their bodies harshly, denying themselves even the most simple pleasures. Spirituality, to them, consisted of depriving themselves of all comfort and pleasure. In contrast, the Epicureans readily indulged their bodies, gratifying every appetite. While very different in behavior, the Stoics and Epicureans shared a common disregard for the body. The Stoics demeaned it, and therefore refused to satisfy it. The Epicureans demeaned it, and therefore felt free to abuse it in the pursuit of pleasure.
Some early Christians adopted Stoic philosophy and lifestyles. Other believers who elevated personal liberty gravitated toward Epicurean ideals and behavior. Christians on both extremes tended to view the body as vulgar and base.
C. S. Lewis spoke of Christians to whom the body was “‘a sack of dung,’ food for worms, filthy, shameful, a source of nothing but temptation to bad men and humiliation to good ones.”
Sometimes the apostle Paul is accused, even by Christians, of fostering this tragic disdain for the human body. But in Paul’s writings, “the flesh” is not synonymous with the body. Rather, the flesh is the depraved force that influences a man toward sin, prompting him to misuse the members of his body to disobey God. While Paul speaks of the flesh as the Christian’s enemy, he also speaks of the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). If the shekinah glory of God dwells within our bodies, surely they are not inherently sinful!
When the Christians of Corinth were indulging in the excesses of gluttony and immorality, Paul reminded them their bodies were “for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” (1 Corinthians 6:13). Furthermore, the bodies they were abusing would be raised up and inhabited for all eternity (6:14). Indeed, Paul devotes all of chapter 15 of the same book to the resurrection of the body, a concept held in disdain by the Greeks, who wanted only to rid themselves of their bodily prison.
Paul sees consecration as the submitting of the body to do the will of God (Romans 12:1-2). He is careful to discipline his body (1 Corinthians 9:27), but never to degrade it. He says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that the Christian can glorify God with his body (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). He even compares the holy Church of God to a human body, with Christ represented by the head (1 Corinthians 12:14-27). Properly understood, Paul was not anti-body!
“Your hands made me and formed me,” the psalmist says to his Lord (119:73). David expressed to God, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:13-14). The body is something to thank God for, not be ashamed of.
Scripture contradicts antagonism between body and spirit. God created body and spirit; both were marred by sin, and both are redeemed by Christ. Our bodies aren’t prisons. Nor are they something we can occupy or abandon at will as a hermit crab does a shell. They’re essential and God-designed aspects of our being. Our bodies weren’t created to distract from our Creator but to disclose him. Bodies and spirits can, under the Fall, sometimes work at odds with each other (hence the references to the flesh in Romans 7:14-24), but this is not their natural, God-created relationship, nor is it a permanent one.
C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy.”
Christ’s incarnation is permanent proof that the body is not sinful. The human body is compatible with deity—God was not too good to inhabit a body! Jesus’ body never made him sinful. The New Earth will be inhabited by redeemed bodies, both Christ’s and ours.
