Body and Soul

How many different ways have you heard it?

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”

“No pain, no gain”

“Side Hustle”

“#teamnosleep”

“Deny yourself”

“It’s your cross to bear”

All different ways of saying the same thing: “Your body doesn’t matter. Don’t listen to it. It’s only an obstacle in the way of achieving your goals”.

Culture has, thankfully, come around a bit on this, though there are still some who would have us deny our physical natures for something “greater”. I’ve even heard some Christians call their bodies “flesh suits”. Never mind that Jesus was resurrected in a physical (transformed) body and so we, like him, will have perfect physical forms in the last day. Or that God created people with bodies and called the whole thing “very good”.

I’m neither qualified nor interested in determining where the roots of this in the broader culture lay hidden. What I can discuss are the roots in the Christian church, particularly my least favorite corner: evangelicalism.

If you’re new here, hi. I’m Emily and I care deeply about an authentic Christian faith for all and sundry, not just those who “fit” the mold, talk the talk, or wear the right kind of skirts. I despise misogyny cast as Biblical ethics and find fault with much of American Evangelicalism. So much so, that I’m not sure it’s Christianity anymore, in its most extreme form.

In my first semester in seminary (about a year ago), I took a class called Ascetical Theology. I learned much in that class about the desert fathers and mothers, a group of early Christians in about the 4th century who withdrew to the desert to get away from society and experiment in asceticism and the Christian life. While some of them took their asceticism too far and claimed that the body was utterly wicked, many did not and there’s a lot to learn about their way of life and its implications for our hedonistic age.

In my second semester, I took a class in the first few centuries of Christian theology. It was there that I learned the details of many ancient heresies, including Gnosticism. This word is not totally unfamiliar in Christian contexts, but it’s likely new to many of you, so I’ll explain.

Gnosticism is an umbrella term for a group of heresies characterized by a key or search for “secret knowledge”, heavenly hierarchies, and a disdain for all matter and, thus, the physical body. Valentinus is the leader of the sect that we know the most about because many of the writings of his followers were found in the 20th century. Anyway, what I’d like to hone in on is the Gnostic disdain for created matter.

Early Christians fought quite hard against this heretical movement by writing countless polemics against their systems of deities, their understanding of Christ, and also their hatred of the body. The early church, while not denying the impact of sin, had a high view of the body because Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God had a body and has a body right now in the heavenly places.

Somehow, this ancient heresy crept down into the 20th century evangelical church and influenced leaders to interpret passages like Luke 9:23 and Romans 7 as a condemnation of the physical nature of human beings. I cannot tell you the number of times that I’ve heard this teaching not only on the internet but from the pulpit. It is subtle, but the message is clear, “Everything your body is telling you is a lie because your body is totally corrupt. You’re so disgusting and marred by sin that you cannot trust yourself, at all”.

This last part is rooted in a negative anthropology that gets its theology and concept of human nature from Genesis 3, rather than Genesis 1 and 2. Just so you’re tracking, Genesis 3 is the account of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God and his curse upon them due to their rebellion. Genesis 1 and 2 is the account of the creation of the world, the way things were supposed to be, God’s intention for humanity in which he called all that he created “good” and even “very good”. Before sin entered the picture and the world was turned upside down, God called bodies, the physical nature of humanity, good.

So, whatever you want to argue about the lasting impacts of sin, you have to concede that the body is not ultimately a bad thing or utterly sinful. The Biblical text just doesn’t back you up.

But the evangelicals act like it does.

Because they think that humanity, as a result of sin, is “totally depraved”. Saint Augustine got us started and John Calvin twisted and fine-tuned the doctrine of depravity into something that the current American Evangelical uses like a sledgehammer against the masses who want to learn how to redeem their bodies, rather than ignoring and abusing them.

Saint Augustine wrote about just about every doctrine of Christianity. It was he who developed the doctrine of original sin, which is good and backed up by Scripture. John Calvin and his super un-fun reformation buddies did a lot of work on the doctrine of total depravity which states that every part of the human existence is impacted and fractured by sin. So far, so good. The problem comes when American Evangelicals use this doctrine to teach that Christians, redeemed and indwelt by the Holy Spirit of GOD ALMIGHTY cannot trust themselves because they are totally depraved.

I ask you, what good is the Holy Spirit, redemption, justification, sanctification, and all the rest if we cannot be totally redeemed from our totally depraved state?! For them, it’s as if we’re so wretched that God can only change us through death. Frankly, this disembowels the power of the resurrection and, with St. Paul, I declare that “we are of all people most to be pitied!”

And this is what the desert fathers and mothers have to teach us. They were experimenting with the bounds of human transformation prior to death. Certainly, it is only through death that we attain the perfect resurrection of our bodies, but God intends to redeem and change us now! With our sin-soaked bodies, redeemed by his grace.

Evangelicals like to pretend like they’re all about grace, but so far, it seems to me as if they don’t really grasp the concept. Or at least the power.

I hope I’ve made my case that, if you are in Christ, then your body, as well as your soul, has been redeemed and is meant for the glory of God and the good of others until his Kingdom comes and his will is done on earth as it is in Heaven. Lord, let it be.

For us here, this means that what we do with our bodies matters. If we want to be more like Christ, then we need to practice being like Christ. We need to do the things that transform us into the kind of human that he was because there’s no other human worth being. He’s the best there ever was and he died to prove it.

So, I’m going to do what I’m best at: chat with you about how to use everything that we’ve been given - body, soul, time, energy, resources, and all the rest - to become who we were made to be. You weren’t made to hate yourself, doubt yourself, or spend your life just waiting to die so you can be perfect. There is work to do now, life to be lived, and a Kingdom to be built. Let’s do this. I’m tired of waiting around and letting (mostly) white Evangelical Christian men tell me I’ll never be good enough. Y’all coming along?