I Ain't Got No Body
Examining Bodily Resurrection as Our Hope for Rescue, Renewal and Redemption
Why Does the Trinity Matter? I’m guessing that you, like the rest of us, haven’t really given a great deal of thought towards this question. Oh, we know what the Trinity is, and what it does , and even go so far as to say that we have the same makeup; being made in the image of God, but when we try to contemplate the implications of the Trinity, we come up blank. We just can’t seem to understand why it matters—which leads some to chop it up for spares parts purporting some heresy like the eternal subordination of the Son or some crap.
God is eternally three in one—and we, like good Westerners, study each part separately but are no closer to understanding God’s dynamics. This, I think, is why God has made us Tripartite. Our Good Creator knew that we would need to study something closer to home to reveal the truth about God’s nature.
In case you’re wondering, tripartite theology1 suffers from the same bane that Trinitarian theology suffers under—we know the parts and have studied them but are clueless as to how they fit together and see some as more important or enduring than others and end up abusing ourselves and others as a result. Heresies like the Eternal Subordination of the Son translate to the abuse of certain types of bodies over others and an overall neglect of the body centred aspects of our faith. But enough bellyaching, let’s examine the human body and why we need it.
I Ain’t Got No Body
Examining Bodily Resurrection as Our Hope for Rescue, Renewal and Redemption
In What if God, but Flesh we considered the Biblical idea that our bodies are being redeemed along with all of Creation and that it is a great source of hope for us. Now, the resurrection shouldn’t be a surprise to us but again we haven’t put much thought into the implications of our resurrected bodies—mainly why God would want our bodies after roughly 80 years of misuse and abuse on this planet! The mere reality that God’s image is fashioned into human bodies, that human bodies are temples for the Holy Spirit, Human minds are being renewed and that our very souls are in process of being rescued by faith doesn’t seem to register with us as being one and the same salvation. Just as Christ is the fullness of the Godhead; so we ourselves are soul, spirit and body but one human.
In our bodies reside the whole Anthrohead, so what happens at salvation happens all at once to the whole human and not in segmented out parts. All together our whole selves receive the love of God and so our whole selves respond in like fashion; our bodies cry out to Jesus, our spirits commune with God’s Spirit, our souls find rest in the Father’s bosom. We can no more focus on the soul or spirit over the body then we can focus on the Father or Spirit over the Son—we are inextricably one with ourselves just as God is inextricably one with Godself.
Because our bodies hold us together in time and space they are the conduit; the primary interface by which we communicate our souls to one another and God under the power of our spirits in the same way that Jesus communicated the love of the Father to the world through the guidance and empowerment of the Holy Spirit. This basic makeup of humanity is standard issue—there are no bodies which do not fulfil this primary function of communicating our souls to one another under the power of our spirits.
One of the evidences of our abandonment of the human body’s redemption has been the reality that we so very easily give it up as a lost cause. Oh Honey, their the wrong colour to be good Christians, their the wrong gender to be spiritual leaders, they’re homosexual for Pete’s sake! In our minds the salvation of the body is ridiculous; the body just has to go! John A. McDonald, the very first Prime Minister of Canada2, once famously quipped about His barbaric Indian Reservation Schools, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”. This same sentiment seems to have been applied to the whole human body in our theologies, or at least those bodies that are not white western males. “Kill the Female and Save the Theologian” could very well have been applied to many women in Church history who, to their male colleagues, forwent being regarded as a woman in order to teach the Word of God.3 Many other aphorisms could be applied to the theologies we abuse our bodies with. Kill Your Sex Drive & Save Your Soul, Live on the Edge of Starvation and Feed Your Soul, Demean your body and save your marriage. The cost of the salvation of our souls is always our biological bodies and its desires which it cries out to us to fulfil but which we have been taught are full of lies.
I said before that white western men are usually exempt from this collateral cost of salvation, this is because we are usually the ones taking out a pound of flesh from our siblings; the ones abusing countless women and children in the name of “saving souls” the ones indoctrinating women to run one another into the ground rather than listen to our good names being sullied or threatening them with the same treatment if or when they don’t. The truth of the matter is that by demeaning and abusing the human body we do the Devil’s work of convincing people not to see one another as conduits of God through whom God may well speak; save (again) through men who get to keep their bodies unmolested.
Our bodies, as stated above, are the main conduit by which we communicate our souls to one another and God. That interface is broken when we disregard the primary interface; one another or else the rest of creation designed to proclaim God’s existence as the Eternally Powerful Divine One. The Scriptures are replete with instances of God’s people falling under judgement because they did not give themselves, others nor the land they dwelt in sabbath rest prescribed by God. Peter in the New Testament says that men (specifically) who do not live in an understanding way with their wives have their prayers hindered.4 What we do in the body matters.
Our bodies are precision instruments of intersoul communication and yet we pay very little attention to their needs and notifications. We short-key desires into easily dismissible functions that we’ve been taught are fundamentally evil—we eat just enough, sleep just enough, make love just enough to stave off our weakness in the flesh—like Adam and Eve we despise our bodies and wish that we would just be rid of them to join Jesus in a disembodied Heaven where there is no pain or suffering (coded for: no bodies). Much of our hopelessness comes from ignoring the body’s loud groanings that Paul says are like the pains of childbearing; but we have forgotten why we are in pain and therefore have no hope for the future. Indeed there is no future—no salvation without the resurrection of the body to carry our whole selves into the presence of God where we belong for eternity.
As we have said, all bodies serve this function. A theology of the human body must necessarily contain all manifestations of the human body—all identities, ages, genders, abilities and ideologies whether natural, accidental or intentional such that a theology pertaining to all humans carries no credible caveat. If even one human is excluded then such a theology does not, in fact, pertain to all people over all of time and space from the beginning until the end. Such has been the failings of previous theologies of human bodies. For example, grandiose statements of all men being created equal fall on the deaf ears of the people not considered fully human at the time or else the dubiously evil doctrine of “separate but equal”. Heart wrenchingly hopeful statements of gender equality are buried in the patriarchal doublespeak of complementarianism. Clear prohibitions in the scriptures from discriminating against anyone according to the flesh are flouted by Christians claiming to hold the Scriptures in the highest regard. No such theologies or practices truly apply to the universal human body. This is the task before us. There are no bodies who do not fulfil the task of communicating their souls to us or to God, and furthermore, there is no secondary interface which occludes or silences this basic task of the human body.
I’m reading Exodus to my 10.5YO and Pharaoh is attempting to silence the children of Israel by working them to the bone after God has already heard their cries and sent Moses and Aaron to deliver them. They cannot be silenced by Pharoah’s secondary interface of an Nation oppressing and enslaving the foreigners in their country. It is an echo in our minds when we reach Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a Donkey and the religious leaders plead with Him to tell the people to be quiet. Jesus’ response was that even if they were to be quiet the stones themselves cannot be kept quiet from declaring who He is. The Primary Interface always fulfils its purpose of intersoul communication with God and with one another—it can’t be stopped anymore than the sun or moon or earth can be pulled from their rotations to stop the seasons from changing, or the tide from going in and out. So it is with our bodies that they cannot, cannot, can not be silenced; remove our eyes, deafen our ears, cut out our tongues and the violence done to us will tell our story for us.
How can we better live in community with ourselves; at one in our Anthrohead: spirit, soul and body? What was it that disunified our triune nature? Sin, that metaphysical lie—that poisonous if to a deadly then keeps us enslaved to secondary interfaces that try in vain to silence this basic task of communicating to one another and God.
In Of Evil Pain & The Hole we discussed the nature of evil and pain as metaphysical deceptions. The Prophet Jeremiah supports this theory in his characterisation of the human heart.
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Jeremiah. 17:9 NIV
We are not broken and empty but deceived into thinking we are broken and empty and in need of fixing and filling. However, the deception is lethal—we will not escape death. The good news is not that Christ saves us from death by this one weird trick but that after death is rebirth unto new life with a new heart in which there is no deception but what we bring to it.
Too often we are told that the deceptions that our hearts tell us are about our natural bodily functions; our inclinations towards hunger, sleep, sex, thirst, comfort, love—and we are told that if we do not guard our hearts we will sin (code: fulfil our desires) and put a wedge between us and God. Imagine the frustration that Pharoah felt for not being able to silence the people of God from their groaning and desire to leave their work and then internalise it. We can no more stop ourselves from crying out then Pharoah can stop us. The knotted up contention at the guilt of trying to stop the unstoppable from taking place and being held responsible by those in spiritual authority over us for not stopping ourselves and pouring their frustrations over us from not being able to stop us either. It is a fools errand that results in bottled up passion that explodes in intersoul communication—only what once was a whispered desire is now shouted from the rooftops and exploding in inelegant gasping declarations of freedom.
3 Suggested Applications
The deception we are unfortunate enough to believe in our hearts is that our bodies don’t matter and to stop listening to them. If we would increase in love, faith and hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ, we must strive towards reunification with our own bodies in which dwell the fullness of our Anthrohead. Doing so means taking unapologetic ownership of our unstoppable disposition towards intersoul communication and using the power of our spirits that energises that work to proclaim an unstoppable love for one another and God and the whole world.
Our love, faith and hope depend on opening our ears to the suffering bodies around us who are telling us and God of their suffering and God is listening and sending others to tell us “let my people go,” and the calamities we see around us are from Pharoah; Angry God Himself saying, “No. Stop complaining. Go back to your work—you’re obviously not trying hard enough to be Godly and have too much time on your hands to feel and be hungry and desire sexual connection and thirst and fulfilment.” Opening our ears, eyes and hearts to them and being like the Egyptians full of love for their neighbours and sending them off with everything they need for their journey our hearts will be plundered but we know the One who fills it again.
Our ultimate love, faith and hope rest in the resurrection of our bodies. It is true that we cannot be stopped from our core task of intersoul-communication but it is also true that the full range of our bodies run the gamete from relatively whole to surviving on life support; both communicate but someday our bodies will be whole in a way that makes being able bodied seem as disabled as living on life support. We will know as we are truly known, communicate fully without misunderstanding and be fully present and contained in our Anthrohead before God and one another. It is this hope of final and full redemption of our whole selves that means our souls can be rescued, our minds renewed and our bodies redeemed along with the rest of Creation.
the theological anthropology that says that humans are comprised of body, soul, and spirit.
John A. McDonald served two terms from 1867-1873 & 1878 until his death in 1891.
A sentiment I communicated last International Women’s Day in When God's Voice is Unfamiliar via Drs Grace Hamman and Beth Alison Barr. I encourage you to check it out.
See 1 Peter 3:7
You came in hot and ready for putting down the facts. You are making a deep criticism of what I call white evangelical salvific escapism. The wholistic implications of your ideas in this post will keep me thinking for a while. I am asking myself, right now after reading your essay, am I loving my body and the bodies of my neighbors? Thank you for this reminder of what the implications of the incarnation are in our day and age.
Great stuff!!! I love your style.