Allberry What God Has to Say about Our Bodies

How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4335-7018-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

'God's eternal plan for us involves our body. We can't write off our physical life as spiritually irrelevant.' -Sam Allberry There's a danger in focusing too much on the body. There's also a danger in not valuing it enough. In fact, the Bible has lots to say about the body. With the coming of Jesus, 'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us'-flesh that was pierced and crushed for the sins of the world. In What God Has to Say about Our Bodies, Sam Allberry explains that all of us are fearfully and wonderfully made, and should regard our physicality as a gift. He offers biblical guidance for living, including understanding gender, sexuality, and identity; dealing with aging, illness, and death; and considering the physical future hope that we have in Christ. In this powerfully written book, you'll gain a new understanding for the immeasurable value of our bodies and God's ultimate plan to redeem them.

Sam Allberry is the associate pastor at Immanuel Nashville. He is the author of various books, including One with My Lord; What God Has to Say about Our Bodies; and Is God Anti-Gay?, and the cohost of the podcast You're Not Crazy: Gospel Sanity for Young Pastors. He is a fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Allberry, Sam

Leseproben

1

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

The Body and Its Creator

Whenever American friends and I engage in friendly discussion about the relative advantages of life in our respective countries (I am British), I tend to feel I’m on the losing side. Sure, life in Britain has lots going for it. We have cream teas, country pubs, moderate weather, chocolate that doesn’t taste like wax, and castles that aren’t made of plastic. But America has a lot going for it too: optimism, proper lemonade, customer service, better dentistry, and the Grand Canyon. But when it looks like all is lost for dear old Britain, Boxing Day becomes the clincher. In Britain, December 26 is a public holiday, and it’s one of my favorites. After all the hype and gastronomic overexertion of Christmas Day, Boxing Day (so called because it was when you’d box up gifts for the poor) is a day to exhale a little. You can rest a bit, pick up and start to enjoy the gifts received the day before, join the cousins, and take the dogs for a walk. In short, you can retain the Christmas vibe but at a more genteel pace. There’s lots to do but nothing much that urgently needs to be done.

As I write, it is Boxing Day. Yesterday was Christmas. At church, we heard the apostle John’s iconic summary of what happened in Bethlehem so many years ago: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). That’s the claim behind Christmas: God became man. For many, the scandal is the claim that there is a God at all. But even more electrifying—both when John first wrote those words and for us today—is the claim about what this God did. He became flesh. Theologians call it the “incarnation.”

At the center of the Christian faith is the belief that by coming to earth as one of us, Christ could die for our sins, rise to new life, bring us into fellowship with God, and begin the process of putting right all that’s gone wrong. But at the center of that claim, tucked away where we don’t always see it, is the notion that to become one of us, Jesus had to become flesh. To become a human person, he needed to become a human body.

Become a body, not simply don one for a few years. He could, in theory, have turned up as a ready-made thirty-year-old male, prepared to immediately gather his disciples, teach about God’s kingdom, and head to the cross. But really becoming one of us took more. To truly become human, Jesus needed to become a fetus in the womb, a baby in a cot, a toddler stumbling about as he learned to walk, a teenager going through puberty, a fully grown man. It wasn’t enough to have a body. He needed to truly be one.

Jesus’s incarnation is the highest compliment the human body has ever been paid. God not only thought our bodies up and enjoyed putting several billion of them together; he made one for himself. And not just for the Christmas season. The body of Jesus was not like my Christmas pullover, little more than just a festive novelty. No. His body was for life. And for far more than that. After his death he was raised bodily. And after his resurrection he returned to his Father in heaven, also bodily. When he ascended into heaven he didn’t ditch his humanity like a space shuttle ditches its booster rockets (to borrow a phrase from N. T. Wright). Becoming human at Christmas was not meant to be reversible. It was permanent. There is now a human body sitting at the right hand of God the Father at the very center of heaven.

Bodies matter. Jesus couldn’t become a real human person without one. And we can’t hope to enjoy authentic life without one either. That his body matters is proof that mine and yours do too. He became what he valued enough to redeem. He couldn’t come for people without coming for their flesh and without coming as flesh.

C. S. Lewis sums it up neatly:

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.1

This is part of what makes Christianity stand out. It has been common among other religious (and nonreligious) belief systems to demean the body, along with our physicality––to see it as something unspiritual or in need of escaping.

In contrast, the Bible sees our body as a good (if imperfect) creation of God. It is a gift.

We’re not used to thinking of our body as a gift. Perhaps one reason is that when we think of our body, we tend to think of the frustrating limitations it places on us. This is true even when it is working well. At the peak of our strength and fitness, our energies and capacities are still finite. As the prophet Isaiah reminds us, “Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted” (Isa. 40:30). We can’t be and do all that we would want. We’re constrained. Physical life is, by definition, one of being contingent when perhaps we would rather be free. I’m sure this is one of the reasons behind our fascination with the idea of life unconstrainted by our physicality. It is a popular trope in science fiction.

In C. S. Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength a secretive scientific lab is attempting to establish a form of human existence that is not dependent on our bodies. It is presented as a great leap forward; our bodies as nothing but an unfortunate constraint that needs to be escaped. As one of the characters puts it:

In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould––all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body.2

Needless to say, in the novel it is this pursuit that leads to all kinds of evil. And, in any case, most of us wouldn’t put it in such a mad-scientist sort of way. But we can nevertheless come to resent the hindrances our body brings, and it is easy for us to see the ways in which our body is a limitation rather than an opportunity.

In the novel (and subsequent movie) Ready Player One, humanity in the near future does most of its living in a virtual reality world called the OASIS where we can choose our own appearance. It is not hard to see the appeal:

In the OASIS the fat could become thin, the ugly could become beautiful, and the shy, extroverted. Or vice versa. You could change your name, age, sex, race, height, weight, voice, hair color, and bone structure. Or you could cease being human altogether, and become an elf, ogre, alien, or any other creature from literature, movies, or mythology.3

We’re not ditching the body altogether, but we’re able to make it take whatever form we could ever want. We exchange what we were born with for something more idealized; something that really feels exactly as we would want ourselves to be.

In one case the body is escaped; in the other, exchanged. But in Christianity neither of those is what we need. The body is intrinsically good, not bad. So it doesn’t need to be abandoned or changed into some completely different form. In the words of the apostle Paul, it needs to be redeemed: “We wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23). It is a gift. In a sense, right now, a broken gift in some ways as we’ll come to see. But a gift nonetheless.

Handmade

Only one of the presents I got for Christmas yesterday is truly unique. It’s not a slight on any of the other gifts, but this one has a property that sets it apart: it was handmade. A friend made me a beautiful, framed, artistic rendering of a favorite Bible verse. To my knowledge it is the only gift I received this year that was not mass-produced. That’s not to say it is intrinsically more valuable than the other gifts, but it does make it unusually meaningful.

The Bible shows that our bodies have been very carefully made by God. King David put it famously in the following prayer to God:

For you formed my inward parts;

you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. (Ps. 139:13–14)

God’s craftsmanship is not just restricted to David’s outside but includes his inward parts. All that he is, both the inner and outer aspects of his being.

David speaks of being made with great care and attention. He has been individually handcrafted. That is not to say his body is perfect. As we’ll see later, our body is actually broken; it’s not entirely as it was meant to be, and we have all sorts of issues with it. But David can say even of his imperfect and fallen body that it has been “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Fearfully Made

Just think about that language. I think of my friend making that Christmas gift for me. I imagine her lips pursed as she drew the words of the passage and then colored and illustrated them....