In the course of its history, Christianity has had a rather conflicted relationship to the world and to things worldly, and, as a subspecies of this, an equally, if not more, fraught relationship to the human body. In what follows, I shall highlight some diachronic elements of this conflictual picture and draw attention to attempts at resolution. In the end, I will argue that renewed theological consideration given to the body will also be the source of repair of the larger tension between an otherworldly focus on heaven and an inescapable worldliness. It is the body, I will claim somewhat provocatively, that provides the foundation of a Christian metaphysic of (human) being, rather than, for example, some immaterial, simple, pure, and hence also, imperishable and immortal substance.[1]

Between God and the Devil

On the one hand, it has nearly always been a decisive part of the Christian confession that the Lord God is the creator of “all things—[all things!]—visible and invisible,” as we affirm in the Nicene creed. To be sure, it took much of the second century to work out exactly what “all things” entailed.[2] Justin Martyr, for example, still holds that God “in his goodness formed all things that are for the sake of men [but He has formed all of them] out of unformed matter . . . as expounded by Moses, and Plato and those who agree with him”; for Justin, this is the reason why Christians gather “on Sunday, since it is the first day on which God transforming matter and darkness made the universe, and Jesus Christ our savior rose from the dead on the same day.”[3] However, by the century’s end, in the theology of Irenaeus of Lyons, the idea of an unformed substratum falls away entirely, and it does so on soteriological grounds.[4] Christ’s coming in the flesh is a coming into His own. The “apostasy” that has tyrannized over humanity has no legitimate claim to us whatsoever. The world is all God’s doing through His Logos, God’s through and through, and God’s alone. And its destiny rests in humans’ being raised to God, and all creation finding itself transformed by God’s Spirit.[5] There is nothing whatever, no native recalcitrance that can in the end, however slightly, resist God’s action. Irenaeus anticipates later creedal formulations when he professes God’s creative and redemptive work. The church’s faith, Irenaeus insists, is:

in one God, the Father Almighty, who made the heaven and the earth, and the seas, and all that is in them, and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was made flesh for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit, who through the prophets proclaimed the dispensations of God—the comings, the birth of a virgin, the suffering, the resurrection from the dead, and the bodily reception into the heavens of the beloved, Christ Jesus our Lord, and his coming from the heavens in the glory of the Father to restore all things, and to raise up all flesh, that is, the whole human race, so that every knee may bow, of things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, to Christ Jesus our Lord and God and Saviour and King . . . [6]

There is not just no thing, but nothing that is not, in one way or another, a creature of God—no matter how broken, how vitiated, how sinful or shot through with fallenness, how distorted, how much in need of redemption and restoration. At bottom, then, there is only God; and all the rest are God’s creatures. In the same vein, the fundamental message of the Book of Revelation—a message which is often overlooked for the sake of self-serving weaponizations and all-too-convenient denunciations—is that the world, even though it may present itself as the devil’s very playground, is and remains God’s world, God’s creature. And God will not give up on it. God Himself will go to battle for it to “make all things new” (Revelation 21:5, nrsv).[7]

On the other hand, there have always been Christians who are more than willing to relinquish the world to the devil, if not explicitly and as a matter of principle, then certainly practically. These are not merely Christians given to self-serving and self-righteous weaponization of Scripture so as to denounce all and sundry, offhandedly consigning their own enemies to the devil’s ranks. For, more fundamentally, isn’t Christianity in its very essence about the afterlife? Hillsong’s “heaven forever is our home” may evoke little more than an eye-roll. Paul Gerhardt’s prayerful plea must, by contrast, give us pause: “And so throughout our lifetime / Keep us within Your care / And at our end then bring us / To heav’n to praise You there” (stated even more clearly in the German: “So gehen unsre Wege / Gewiß zum Himmel ein”).[8] That is where we are to rest our gaze and, even more so, orient our entire being.

What about the interim, then? Are we—as Christians—to live with our backs turned on the world, as if the world were nothing but the devil’s all-too-real, all-too-unyielding playground? Worse still, are we to live—really, to keep ourselves alive—as if the world were an obstacle course set up by God to tempt us, a game of snakes and ladders that God has put in place to see if we really deserve that better, spiritual world? Edenic snakes and Jacob’s ladders, as it were! Above all, are we to go through life as if everything out there were out to get us; as if God himself, through the world’s unmitigated brokenness, were out to get us, test us, and trip us up at every opportunity? It is not too difficult to find scriptural proof texts to warrant such a posture: “Set your minds [φρονεῖτε] on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth . . . Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth [Νεκρώσατε οὖν τὰ μέλη τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς]; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col 3:2, 5, nrsv, kjv). In the interim, you must do all you can to make sure you make it. You must preserve yourself undistracted, undisturbed, untarnished, unsullied, unscathed, even untouched. Otherworldly already in the world!

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