Glorifying God – In the Body

from the editor – piotr J. malysz
originally published in the spring 2024 edition of the lutheran forum

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!

The second-century Epistle to Diogenetus captures some of this sentiment, albeit with a strong ethical thrust given to Christian otherworldliness. The letter’s author, a self-avowed “disciple of the apostles,” compares the presence of Christians in the world to the soul’s dwelling in the body. “The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world.”9 But this arrangement—a God-appointed “illustrious position” though it may be—has all the features of a necessary evil. “The soul is imprisoned in the body, yet preserves that very body; and Christians are confined in the world as in a prison, and yet they are the preservers of the world. Christians dwell as sojourners in corruptible [bodies], looking for an incorruption in the heavens.”10 The soul’s destiny, and by extension Christian destiny, lies beyond that which here only weighs one down (cf. Wisdom 9:5).

What it means in practice is that Christians remain minimally and rather passively involved in the ebb and flow of worldly events, steering away as much as possible from the entanglements of embodiment:

They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all.11

When Christians do become engaged, it is precisely on a personal level, that of individual neighbor through the world’s love. It is within this sphere that a Christian, “if he is willing,” is called to become “an imitator of God”:

For it is not by ruling over his neighbours, or by seeking to hold the supremacy over those that are weaker, or by being rich, and showing violence towards those that are inferior, that happiness is found; nor can any one by these things become an imitator of God. But these things do not at all constitute His majesty. On the contrary he who takes upon himself the burden of his neighbour; he who, in whatsoever respect he may be superior, is ready to benefit another who is deficient; he who, whatsoever things he has received from God, by distributing these to the needy, becomes a god to those who receive [his benefits]: he is an imitator of God.12

We may certainly put some of the epistle’s perspective down to the pervasive fragility of the Christian communities in the second century; but it would be imprudent to attribute this perspective only to historical contingencies.

Now, I certainly do not mean to suggest, by contrast, that oft-triumphalist Christian culture building, as it began to take hold in the late fourth century, is a viable alternative, let alone the desired one. Far from it. On closer inspection, Christendom, too, by and large enables only individualized and private involvement for the neighbor’s sake precisely because it, likewise, takes the world as a necessary and intractable given. Christendom’s overarching purpose is to keep this world in its seeming worldliness at bay, paradoxically doing so by whatever worldly means necessary—by means of all those “things [that] do not at all constitute [God’s] majesty.” Civilization-maintenance for the sake of saving God (sic) among us is Christendom’s overarching project. Thereby, however, one still merely guarantees the possibility of one’s own spiritual otherworldliness—undistracted, undisturbed, unchallenged, untarnished, unsullied, unscathed, even untouched. An otherworldliness with all the trappings of the worldly. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once indicated, pious worldly secularism and a spiritualizing otherworldliness are of a piece. At bottom, whether it is viewed as the locale of Christian civilization, or the devil’s playground, the world is only what it is, little more than “the jolly scene of a war between good and evil, pious and impious, which [one] kindles [oneself]” in order to find oneself above it all.13

One of Luther’s early forays into Christian existence in the world—his On Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523)—attempts to push beyond all this and give Christian existence, specifically as Christian, its proper place in the structures of the worldly. Luther seeks to challenge the inherited view that some of the New Testament injunctions, especially those associated with the Sermon on the Mount, can be practiced only within the safe haven of a monastic community. Luther rejects the view that there exist, within Christian ethics, “counsels for the perfect,” binding solely on those who have entered a self-contained religious universe which, unlike this world, stands at a remove from the “grating roar of pebbles” (to use Matthew Arnold’s phrase14), even tectonic plates, that defines life on the ground.15 A self-contained world that anticipates heaven, or at least serves as a clear way station on one’s pilgrimage toward it.

For Luther, even though “the children of Adam” do fall into “two classes, the first belonging to the kingdom of God, the second to the kingdom of the world,” it is in the world that the former live precisely as those who belong to the kingdom of heaven.16 A not insignificant reason for this is that, for Luther, the world is resoundingly God’s world, an object of his solicitation and activity. As Luther sees things, to live in the world, even as a Christian, means profound involvement and vigorous engagement. And yet Christian actions are not determined by what is practicable, pragmatic, safe, and carefully calculated. In a spirit not unlike the ethical thrust of the Epistle to Diogenetus, Luther argues that when it comes to their own persons, Christians must surrender any recourse to the world’s grammar of tit-for-tat. When it comes to serving the neighbor, things get more complicated. Guided by love, Christians are called to discern between situations that may require harsh realism and extraordinary indulgence, justice and mercy—all with an eye to aiding the exploited and defenseless.17

Luther’s advantage over the Epistle to Diogenetus lies in his standing at the end of a trajectory which has, undoubtedly undesirably, produced an ever conspicuous, fraught, and self-reinforcing bifurcation between worldliness and spirituality, a bifurcation surely latent already in the earliest strata of Christian thought. Now, whether Luther has succeeded in overcoming the bifurcation on more than an individual level remains debatable. It certainly goes to the reformer’s credit that he does overcome it on the level of an individual Christian: for a Christian, on Luther’s account, the world is no longer a prison, or a mere way station, but the arena of a vocational summons to enter its fray for the neighbor’s sake. It is God’s world.

To be sure, we are pilgrims here, journeying on toward the new heaven and new earth, awaiting the renewal of all things. To be sure, there are powers in this world who do not recognize themselves as God’s creatures any more: demonic powers which more often than not still carry the day. There is evil untold that cannot be reasoned with, horrendous, ugly, larger than us and our resources, larger, it seems, than life itself. This is undoubtedly true; it is painfully true. Yet life in the world remains decisively marked by God’s provision extending from “my body and soul,” through “all the necessities and nourishment for this body and life,” to protection from danger and preservation from evil.18 The gift of Christ—who “with his deeds and suffering belongs to you . . . as if you were Christ himself”19—does not supersede or in any way outshine God’s material provision but, instead, reinforces it. It, first, clarifies the nature of God’s provision as coming “out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all!”20; second, it makes possible the gift’s own creative increase, in that, with God being unstintingly for me, I am free to use creaturely gifts in service to my neighbor. The Christian life, as Luther envisions its character, approximates one of “genuine worldliness” (to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase21).

It approximates it—because it is also clear that Luther does not push through to an ecclesiological vision robust enough, so that it relativizes the givens of the world. It merely baptizes them. It summons the Christian to become involved in the world’s structures of authority for the sake of the gospel and, within those, to act Christianly, out of love, insofar as care for the neighbor-in-need necessitates it and the structures make it possible. Now, while Luther consciously aims at an active worldly unfolding of one’s Christian existence, it is doubtful whether he ever arrives at a corporate vision that, without being either utopian or naïve about the world’s ways, decisively undermines these very ways in their allegedly self-evident and totalizing character. To arrive at that kind of vision, I submit, it is necessary to think further through the divine gifts of “my body and soul” and their significance.

The Theological Merits of Not Bathing

This conflicted Christian relationship to the world and things worldly has not spared an object as close to us as our own bodies. The body—a thing so intimately ours, so (no pun intended) at our fingertips (you wish to raise your hand, and it obeys), and yet so beyond our control (the heart and the lungs cannot be commanded in the same way as the hand22). The body—a thing so

close to me, always with me, carrying me in happiness and weighing me down in my pain; yet so elusive, as if having a mind of its own, with its youth always behind, ageing, secreting, unruly, sometimes alien, sometimes even unwanted. It was none other than the apostle Paul who sighed: “Who will rescue me from this body of death [ἐκ τοῦ σώματος τοῦ θανάτου]?” (Romans 7:24). So, the body . . . Is it another trap? Another hoop, another test, another temptation? But this time one that cannot be shaken off and outrun, not even “if I give my body to be burned” (i Corinthians 13:3, kjv)? Here, too, the apostle’s words come ready to hand, seemingly reinforcing the bifurcation between the spiritual and the worldly: “we would rather be away from the body [ἐκτοῦ σώματος] and at home with the Lord” (ii Corinthians 5:8).

Again, to be sure, there are some who give in to the flesh wildly and without restraint, as if to run away from all the trouble of that very flesh. Just as there surely are those who gobble up all that the world has to offer. And even when it offers them much and generously, they claw and grab still more for themselves, as if there were no tomorrow, as if nothing else and nobody else mattered. But does this mean that Christians are to flee from all this, their bodies included—mortifying the body, always at least one foot in the grave, in the next life, single-mindedly pursuing the world of spirit, as if all that is material and fleshly were simply and irredeemably godless? A fifth-century author, Salvian of Lérins, goes so far as arguing that “our flesh must be made weak so that our hopes can be realized.” When the body is weak, he says, “[t]he soul alone rejoices, exulting over the weakness of the body as over a conquered enemy.”23

A representative specimen, albeit far more systematically articulated, of this kind of negative perspective on the body comes from the pen of St. Jerome (d. 420) in a letter to the Roman matrona by the name of Laeta.24 Jerome’s letter offers a response to Laeta’s inquiry seeking his advice about how best to raise Laeta’s infant daughter as a virgin consecrated to Christ. Even to our Christian ears, the request must sound rather bizarre, an impression which is compounded only further when we consider it is being made on behalf of a baby. Jerome certainly does not try to dissuade the Christian mother from her plan and recommend (godly) marriage instead—or waiting to see!

There is much to commend in Jerome’s letter, especially the section dealing with how to educate upper-class youth—including young women—in the knowledge of the Scriptures. Jerome gives us some insight into challenges faced by educated Greco-Roman elites when it came to continued habitual immersion in the sacred writings as the latter become better and better known. There are sound pedagogical considerations animating Jerome’s discussion, even if the specifics may leave us scratching our heads. “Let her begin by learning the Psalter, and then let her gather rules of life out of the proverbs of Solomon,” Jerome recommends. Job, the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles, the Prophets, the Books of Moses, and much else in the Hebrew Bible all follow thereupon, and in this particular order! “When she has done all these she may safely read the Song of Songs but not before.” The Apocrypha, or any apocryphal writings, are best swapped for Athanasius and Hilary.25 A thoroughgoing immersion and competency in the Scriptures—including theological competency—is indeed more than commendable.

Yet, when one considers the context, it becomes clear that Jerome has an agenda. Inhabiting the world of the text is to replace living on the ground, as it were. It is another strategy, among several, of distraction. On top of it all, it is rather clear that the letter affords Jerome an opportunity to construct the ideal of a Christian woman, such that a Christian theologian battling his own temptations might, in the end, persuade himself to find agreeable. Jerome’s comments unwittingly betray his own desires. First, there are some dubious recommendations about how to raise a child so that she (he?) is not tempted by worldliness: “When you go a short way into the country, do not leave your daughter behind you. Leave her no power or capacity of living without you, and let her feel frightened when she is left to herself. Let her not converse with people of the world or associate with virgins indifferent to their vows. Let her not be present at the weddings of your slaves and let her take no part in the noisy games of the household.”26 A sheltered, incapacitating, and co-dependent upbringing above all else.

At long last we are made privy to Jerome’s view of the female body, especially in the context of a staple of Roman life and civilization, bathing. Here Jerome feels compelled to opine on a number of topics: pregnancy, physical beauty, and (barely controllable female) desire:

As regards the use of the bath, I know that some are content with saying that a Christian virgin should not bathe along with eunuchs or with married women, with the former because they are still men, at all events in mind, and with the latter because women with child offer a revolting spectacle. For myself, however, I wholly disapprove of baths for a virgin of full age. Such a one should blush and feel overcome at the idea of seeing herself undressed. By vigils and fasts she mortifies her body and brings it into subjection. By a cold chastity she seeks to put out the flame of lust and to quench the hot desires of youth. And by a deliberate squalor she makes haste to spoil her natural good looks. Why, then, should she add fuel to a sleeping fire by taking baths?27

A tempting anti-temptress par excellence, at least as far as Jerome is concerned. Tempting on account of her effective disembodiment. Representative as Jerome’s perspective is, it advocates for a posture that is theologically aberrant and debilitatingly self-involved. What, then, is the embodiment that actually does give texture to genuine Christian worldliness?

All Things Are Lawful for Me

Despite St. Paul’s own conflicted pronouncements on things fleshly, the thrust of the apostle’s theology remains relatively unambiguous. Christians are not to turn their backs on the world. Christianity is not a form of escapism. It is not about running away, and congratulating yourself on leaving it all behind. Christianity is not hyper-spiritualism, as some among its early, Corinthian adherents apparently thought, and large numbers have ever since. On the contrary, Christianity is worldly and it is bodily—worldly and bodily in the best sense of the word.

Paul couldn’t be more emphatic: “All things are lawful for me” (i Corinthians 6:12). How so? In Christ, we are more than we could ever make of ourselves. And, as Paul adds elsewhere, “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). There is nothing that could add to, or for that matter subtract from, what God has made of us, namely, His beloved children. That is why all things are lawful for me. Who and what I am depends on God’s grace, not on my relationship to things, my body included. No need to flee from it all—as if we could anyway! Luther captures this insight well through his insistence that, in union with Christ, the Christian comes to be “omnipotent with God.”28 The divine attribute of omnipotence is communicated to the Christian. This does not mean that the Christian now becomes God, or can do anything, but rather that he or she images God’s omnipotence, His rule over all things, in a human way, in the midst of all things. That is, “a Christian is free from all things and over all things so that he needs no works to make him righteous and save him, since faith alone abundantly confers all these things.”29

Yet, having affirmed the believer’s independence of the law in relation to things, Paul immediately goes on to add, “not all things are beneficial. . . [and] I will not be dominated by anything” (i Corinthians 6:12). What Paul warns against here is the kind of freedom that can easily become the worst slavery. For if, as a Christian, I am very much on the ground, in my body and in the midst of a world of things, what is it that gives shape to my freedom in relation to all of them? If all that I am is free—free with an equal freedom in relation to all there is—then I will always be at the mercy of external forces to push me in some direction or other. At the mercy of fads and fears, advertising and popular opinion, peer pressure and competiveness, limited resources and limitless aspirations—in all this finding my own desires mimetically shaped by what others already desire, doing what others already do, relating to things the way others do.30 It is this kind of slavery, masquerading as freedom, that Paul warns against.

Because Paul’s focus is specifically on the body, Paul zeros in on sexual immorality. “Do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, ‘The two will become one flesh’ ” (i Corinthians 6:16). But the image of adultery and fornication has a much broader scope in the Scriptures and in the Christian tradition. Israel’s betrayal of God, in favor of worshipping the gods of other, more powerful nations, is repeatedly denounced by God through the prophets as adultery. Both Israel and Judah, for example, are described as prostitutes giving themselves to the elites of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon, and defiling themselves with their idols (Ezekiel 23). On a more personal level, Augustine speaks of the soul fornicating when it seeks rest not in God but in transient things, as if they could bring peace, happiness and salvation.31 The bottom line is that whatever you give yourself to inescapably comes to shape you. It makes you dependent on itself. It enslaves you. Precisely because if we are not careful, we will be led to find ourselves in things, to see in them the source of our identity, validation, status, visibility, even being itself. We will, so to speak, become one flesh with them. It can be sex, it can be your car, it can be your CV; it can be your house, your bank account, your education. The difference between those is only relative, though not unimportant: “Every other sin,” says Paul, “a person commits is outside the body, but the fornicator sins against the body itself” (i Corinthians 6:18). When I seek myself in things, I make them into what they are not—gods whom I expect to bless me and keep me. Turning my body into my own god, whom I must serve relentlessly for the bliss it grudgingly gives me, only takes it all to another, inherently contradictory level.

So, yes, as a Christian I am on the ground, with the feet of my body firmly planted in the world and my face turned toward it. But being on the ground does not yet mean that I am grounded. And it doesn’t yet mean that my relation to things, my body included, is a relation of true freedom, rather than enslavement. How then do I become I grounded, both body and soul?

The Flesh of Christ

“Anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him,” Paul points out (i Corinthians 6:17). In other words, what grounds me, what gives me an abiding identity, what makes me into who I am is the fact that the Lord has offered His very self to me. What determines me and defines me is nothing short of God’s self-giving, so much so that I am now one spirit with Him. “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price,” says Paul (i Corinthians 6:19-20). But this, he means not that we are taken away from ourselves, deprived of our selves, alienated. What he means, rather, is that we have been given a pearl of the greatest price; we have been gifted with the best God can give, God’s self. Here, in this divine condescension, we are to discover our selves anew. We are to find ourselves in the enjoyment of this Gift of gifts—in the blessing which He Himself is and which eternally validates us, gives us an unshakable identity, and elevates us to a status that is beyond all that the world can give us. For, as those to whom God gives Himself, we are no less than God’s children. A gift beyond anything even the best CV can give! A gift beyond what any idol could ever bestow. A gift exceeding what bodily ecstasies so desperately and fleetingly grasp at. This is our grounding, this is our foundation—even on the ground, even here in the world, even in this body of death, amidst the transience of “all things visible and invisible.” The gift of God Himself. God with us through thick or thin.

What constitutes the center of all this is, of course, the Incarnation. The gift of God we receive is not some vague power or status, but God Himself enacting new humanity in our own flesh and for our sakes. Tertullian (d. 240) stands as one of the earliest, and to date most eloquent, defenders of the divine Son’s incarnation, uncommonly dwelling on its bodily aspects. For Tertullian, nothing short of God sharing in our bodily condition can provide hope. And God’s sharing in our condition means that it, too, is not transcended, shaken off, left behind, abandoned but, instead, healed and restored. It is given a new lease on life.

Over against residual Marcionite (and not only Marcionite) revulsion at the functions of the body, Tertullian calls on his Marcionite-leaning reader to “start from birth itself,” and goes on through a series of vivid images, doing so to great rhetorical effect in the language largely that of his opponents. The images are all meant eventually to underscore the depth of God’s own self-giving:

the filth of the generative seeds within the womb, of the bodily fluids and the blood; the loathsome curdled lump of flesh which has to be fed for nine months off this same muck. Describe the womb—expanding daily, heavy, troubled, uneasy even in sleep, torn between impulses of fastidious distaste and those of excessive hunger. Then, too, inveigh against the modesty of the woman who is giving birth, a modesty to be honored because of the danger it involves or counted holy because of its nature.32

We should note, in passing, that Tertullian’s language in praise of motherhood is quite unlike that of Jerome. After a brief description of infancy, Tertullian then moves on to underscore the profundity and concreteness of God’s gift in Christ’s own enfleshment:

You repudiate such vernation of nature, do you, Marcion? Well, but how were you born? You hate a human being in process of birth? In what possible way can you love anyone? . . . Christ loved that human being, that lump curdled in the womb in the midst of impurities, that creature brought into the world though unmentionable organs, that child nourished on mockery. On his account Christ came down. On his account Christ preached. On his account Christ, in all humility, brought himself down to death, the death on a cross. Clearly he loved one whom he redeemed at great cost.33

God’s love would be a sham if it had shied away from our flesh. The upshot of God’s love, which leads Him to make the depths of humanity His own, lies in the restoration of human flesh, eventually to be freed from the trouble of death: “he cleanses what is leprous, gives sight to it when blind, heals it when paralyzed, purifies it when it is demon possessed, raises it when it has died. Does he then blush to be born in it?”34 But there is more.

Let us connect even more tightly the two strands of our discussion in this section and draw out their implications. I have argued that, for Paul at his clearest and Christian thought at its best, we are summoned to find our selves in the gift that God Himself becomes for our sakes, while at the same time realizing that the gift is given in a human body like ours and for the sake of our embodied humanity. This means, first, that who we are—in our very selves—is a gift. It is not a matter of our achievement through negotiating our relation to the world around. More than that, the gift that we are is a gift of the Other, God in His self-at-work “for us and for our salvation.”35 It also means, second, that the body, my body, is of God’s special concern. Even as mine, it now exists in unity with Christ’s body in such a way that, together with fellow believers, I find my true body within the body of Christ that we now constitute. Even as I am beyond myself, so is my body—coming to me larger than life and overcoming the isolation of a vanishing self weighed down by physical perishing.

The implications of this perspective are groundbreaking. In fact, they add up to a whole new world, or a new metaphysic of the world, to be precise. In order to illuminate this new metaphysic, we must, however, outline the old, dominant one, first. It has been pointed out, mostly by African-American thinkers, that the world as we make it and as it meets our eye—the world that not so

long ago spawned colonialism and thrives on all manners of systemic oppression—rests on the view that humanity is an accomplishment.36 That is its fundamental feature—and its deep flaw; much else is a fluctuating epiphenomenon. To be precise, being human is an achievement of which, as it so happens, the white man (sic) alone is really and completely capable.

Precisely such, and none other, are the implications of the view that man is a rational animal. Whether we lay its origin at the foot of the Greeks, it has been one of the foundations and abiding elements of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian Western culture.37 Now, if rationality, indeed, constitutes the specific difference that distinguishes humanity proper from animality, then to be human means to elevate oneself above the animal body, to subjugate the body and to make it submit to the dictates of reason. An ever-threatening carnality becomes the necessary backdrop against which humanity comes into its own. Or fails to do so. Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), to give one example, sees the effects of Adam and Eve’s transgression in that “their bodies were [now] like those of brute animals, subject to corruption and carnal appetites, while their souls were infected with carnal affections from the corruption of the body and its appetites, as well as from the lack of the goods that it lost.”38 Humanity is permanently threatened with a loss of itself—which is nothing else than a thoroughgoing collapse into an inordinately expansive body. To succumb to it is to abandon one’s human vocation and to give sin free rein. It is not surprising that Anselm (though he is by no means alone) believes that original sin does not appear in infants until they have a rational soul, “no matter what might have taken place in the body before it was ensouled.”39

To preserve one’s humanity is certainly no easy feat. It may require grace. Interestingly, at the threshold of the modern world, grace increasingly assumed the form of a sense of providentially appointed destiny, while its manifestation was discerned in a providentially guided spread of Western Christendom. Grace became what humans now claimed and what authorized their worldly ventures. Here what makes the human feat even more difficult is that, in this accomplishment, one is also always threatened, not by animals as such, but, rather, by irrational and desire-driven female flesh, as well as incontinent, bestial, and lascivious black flesh.40 It is those that one must repeatedly kick back in order to salto time and again into one’s true humanity. It is also those that one must master, just as one first masters and disciplines one’s own flesh (perhaps, perversely, one might seek to master the animal-like other as a proxy for one’s own flesh thus giving the latter its free rein). Humanity on this account is not only disembodied—albeit tethered to the flesh as its constant threat and negative source of identity. It also lacks any meaningful togetherness—which is both unnecessary and impossible insofar as one is always “not like …” (cf. Luke 18:11).

On the canvas of Western culture, it was Martin Luther who first insisted that “to be human is to be justified.”41 It does not seem Luther ever realized the world-shattering implications of his assertion. But among them was a return of the self to the allegedly animal body; the self no longer need be a self only vis-à-vis the body and at its expense. Embodiment is no longer an entanglement but a gift. Furthermore, what stands at the fountain of being is a relation. This relation constitutes the possibility of the gift and so of coming to be and of being. The primary relation is God’s choice to establish a relation with us in our flesh, which He has made God’s own. The Incarnation of God’s Son is the final creative act that renders the relation abiding. For our part, we have no choice but to relate in the flesh. One could even venture that when it comes to our humanity, theologically understood, it is the body that is primary: the body of Christ which gives meaning to our bodies as selfed bodies in the midst of other such self-ed bodies (i Corinthians 12). It is in this context—that of my bodily use of the world around for the neighbor’s sake—that my body finds its significance.

Here an entirely new world comes to life. It is a world that not only subverts the metaphysical foundations of the old world. It also, by giving rise to a new human togetherness, puts in question the givens of the world around in their totalizing claim over reality. Those include, among others, necessary self-sufficiency, security, self-preservation against the material and self-justification through various appeals to it; they include scarcity, finitude, and death. Those givens are now no longer self-evident. What comes to life is an otherworldliness which manifests itself precisely through embodied worldliness, a worldliness more profound than anything the world is capable of and so truly otherworldly. It is in this way that the kingdom of God not only comes but comes also in our midst.42

The Body We Are

The body—yes, even this body, your body as well as mine—is now a temple of the Holy Spirit within us, whom we have from God (i Corinthians 6:19). What Paul means, first, is that it is precisely with our bodies that we honor God. This begins with confessing and praising him with our lips and then moves to all kinds of service along the pathways of our lives. Our feet go where he sends. Our ears listen to the voices of those who seek him. Our hands serve the neighbor. So much so that we also come to embody Christ to the world. “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” Paul asks (i Corinthians 6:15). Think of Christ in the manger, Christ in the midst and in the depth of the world, Emmanuel, God with us, teaching, healing, feeding, even dying for us in His own body. And now calling us to be available to each other by means of our bodies with the same kind of selfless presence, giving of ourselves. After all, in Him our selves are blessed beyond measure, and the body, well, the body is there precisely to distribute those blessings to one another, to keep them circulating.

This is where the things of this world—“genuine worldliness”—come in. Just as in the body we can be there for each other, so also by means of things—whatever we have been blessed with—we are to bless each other. We cannot create anything out of nothing. We are not God. But we are like God in the way that we can give of ourselves. And so, we share what we’ve received, build, bake, crochet and quilt, make, form, assemble, pass on; and in doing all that, we come out of our selves and come together as one body. We have our bodies, and we are surrounded by things, so that we might be larger than our own bodies, “being knit together in the love” of God (Colossians 2:2), being knit together as the body of Christ, embodying His presence in the midst of His world, sharing His healing touch, carrying one another’s burdens, following him who first bore our sins and carried our sorrows.

The point of it all, to put it simply, is not so much to be on your guard as to be reckless. Not untouched, but shaking hands and sharing a kiss. For only in this way can the blessings of God be shown to be blessings indeed: when we become free for the world to share his love, when the blessings come to bless. So glorify God—in your body! (i Corinthians 6:20) What other way is there, after all?

Endnotes

1. As in Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Synopsis; as well as Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I. q. 75; cf. also the following by Thomas: “the proper operation of man as man is to understand; because he thereby surpasses all other animals. ... It follows therefore that the intellectual principle is the proper form of man. But we must observe that the nobler a form is, the more it rises above corporeal matter, the less it is merged in matter, and the more it excels matter by its power and its operation…” (Ia, q.76, resp., in the standard English translation by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province).

2. A brief account of the complicated trajectory that led to a self-aware assertion of creatio ex nihilo can be found in Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (Louisville: Westminster, 2014), 85-107.

3. Justin Martyr, First Apology, §§10, 59, 67; in Early Christian Fathers, ed. Cyril C. Richardson [Library of Christian Classics, vol. 1] (Louisville: Westminster, 1953), 247, 280, 287.

4. Genesis 1, it should be noted, does not as such support creation from nothing (ex nihilo). The syntax of the opening sentence is ambiguous. Robert Alter renders it, for example, as “When God began to create heaven and earth—and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters—God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.” But the more important, less ambiguous argument comes from the meaning of the verb ברא, which does not mean creating as understood in particular by later Christian theology, but rather separating, and connotes diving, cutting, even hewing. To the latter, see Ellen van Wolde, “Why the Verb ברא Does Not Mean ‘to Create’ in Genesis 1.1-2.4a ,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 34 (2009):1, 3-23. According to Genesis 1, God by His word imposed order on what the Septuagint calls the “unseen and unworked [ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος].”

5. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies, V.1-2; in Richardson, Early Christian Fathers, 385-389.

6. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, I.10; in Richardson, Early Christian Fathers, 360.

7. Biblical quotations in the text follow the New Revised Standard Version, unless indicated otherwise.

8. Paul Gerhardt, “Entrust Your Days and Burdens [Befiehl du deine Wege]” (1653); in Lutheran Service Book #754.

9. Epistle to Diogenetus, VI; in Ante-Nicene Fathers (various editions available), 1:27.

10. Ibid.

11. Epistle to Diogenetus, V; in Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1:26-27.

12. Epistle to Diogenetus, X; in Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1: 29.

13. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thy Kingdom Come! The Prayer of the Church-Community for God’s Kingdom on Earth,” Berlin: 1932-1933 [Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 12] (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 288. To a critique of Christendom as an avatar of Christianity, see my article “The End of Christianity,” Lutheran Forum 56:4 (Winter 2022), 6-17.

14. The phrase comes from Arnold’s 1867 poem, “Dover Beach.”

15. Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523); in Luther’s Works, American Edition, 82 vols. (St. Louis/Philadelphia: Concordia/Fortress, 1955- ), 45:87-88 [hereafter LW].

16. LW 45:88.

17. LW 45:96.

18. Martin Luther, Small Catechism (1529), First Article of the Creed; in The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000), 354.

19. Martin Luther, A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels (1521); in LW 35:119.

20. Luther, Small Catechism, First Article of the Creed; in Book of Concord, 354-355.

21. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Concrete Commandment and the Divine Mandates,” Ethics [Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 6] (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 400-401.

22. The picture is more complex than Augustine’s adage might suggest: “The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance” (Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 147 [VIII.ix (21)]).

23. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei I.3; in The Writings of Salvian, the Presbyter, trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1962), 34.

24. Jerome, Letter 107: To Laeta; in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 6, 189-195 (various editions available).

25. Jerome, Letter 107:12 (194).

26. Jerome, Letter 107:11 (194).

27. Ibid. It is interesting to consider that one of the most Antichristian spaces in our homes may be the quintessentially American shower!

28. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520); in LW 31:355.

29. LW 31:356

30. A point made persuasively by René Girard, who argued that desire is neither purely subjective, mysteriously welling up in a person, nor purely objective, as if objects and people around us were inherently desirable. Rather, desire, for Girard, is always mimetic: what gives rise to it is others’ desires, which we imitate, thereby rendering those others both our models and competitors. See, e.g., I See Satan Fall Like Lightening (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001).

31. Augustine, Confessions, 32 and 62 [II. vi (14) and IV.x (15)].

32. Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, 4.1; in The Christological Controversy, ed. Richard A. Norris, Jr. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 67.

33. Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, 4.2-3; in Christological Controversy, 68.

34. Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, 4.4; in Christological Controversy, 68.

35. The phrase comes, of course, form the Nicene Creed.

36. Especially Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020), and Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright, 2020)—neither of whom is writing from a Christian perspective or drawing on Christian resources. Some aspects of this view, especially a critique of Western culture’s inherent docetism, can be found in Willie James Jennings’ The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

37. There has been some debate whether the Aristotelian ζῷον λόγον ἔχον denotes a rational animal, or rather a lifeform with speech. See Aristotle’s Politics, 1253a; and Nicomachean Ethics, 1093a

38. Anselm, On the Virginal Conception, and on Original Sin, Ch. 2; in Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 330.

39. Anselm, On the Virginal Conception, Ch. 27; in Basic Writings, 357, et passim.

40. See British philosopher Mary Midgley’s discussion of the role that women, slaves, other races and non-human animals jointly play in the construction of the properly human. She notes perceptively that descriptors such as reason or self-consciousness are not employed in their ordinary meaning here, whereby they might be empirical descriptions of observable qualities which allow of degrees; they function, rather, as symbolic “marks of status, often with the explanatory tag ‘what separates men from beasts’, as if it were absurdly obvious what this was.” See Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 82-83.

41. Martin Luther, Disputation Concerning Man (1536); in LW 34:139.

42. Luther, Small Catechism, Second Petition of the Lord’s Prayer; in Book of Concord, 357. Of course, Christian theology cannot, on soteriological grounds, return to a view of creation which is any other than ex nihilo. Nevertheless, if we were to re-appropriate the Hebrew Bible’s view of creation as separation and forming (see note 3), we might be able to bring into relief the primarily material dimension of creation and, within the material, that which is justified and so truly is over against other (impossible) possibilities, whatever their status, which are set aside. To be created is to inhabit one’s very finitude precisely as justified and in a manner in which it is justified for good. This perspective would supplement a Christological account of creation’s order, such as the one found in Athanasius, On the Incarnation, §§ 1-3.