A Protestant Theology of the Body
E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-68359-468-0
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
John W. Kleinig (PhD, University of Cambridge) is a retired lecturer at Australian Lutheran College and an ordained pastor in the Lutheran Church of Australia. He is author of numerous books, including Grace upon Grace: Spirituality for Today and commentaries on Hebrews and Leviticus.
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2 THE CREATED BODY As a human being a person is a whole, not a body without a spirit or a spirit without a body.… Thus, the whole unitary person is the object of all God’s acts from the bestowal of dominion over the earth to the resurrection of the dead and the end of the world … nobody acts with just one part of the self. When somebody thinks, that person actually thinks with the body, and every bodily function is also at the same time a function of the soul and the spirit. —A. F. C. Vilmar We cannot appreciate the complexity, beauty, and mystery of the human body unless we realize that it is given to us. We do not make bodies; they are made for us. They are provided for us with all their main characteristics. We receive them as a gift. But from whom, or what? Our bodies are obviously made from the physical and biological material that is provided for them in the natural world. In that respect our bodies do not differ in kind from the animals that live on earth with us. Yet we do not actually get our bodies from the natural world; we inherit them from our parents, our mother and father, together with the unique genetic codes that determine so much of what we are and what we can be. We receive our bodies from our ancestors. But the mystery remains! Who, or what, gives me my body through my parents? While our bodies could perhaps have just been developed, long ago, by an impersonal natural process in an amazing series of unlikely accidents, the most likely and satisfactory answer is that they, like the whole world, were created by some supernatural being. By rational reflection we may then infer that our bodies were created, but we cannot infer who made them. That can only be disclosed by our bodies’ supernatural creator or by other supernatural beings who witnessed their creation. Jesus teaches that this is so! Paraphrasing Genesis 1:27 and 2:24, he asserts this momentous truth about a husband and his wife in Mark 10:6–8: “From the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh.” When Jesus speaks of the beginning, he alludes to Genesis 1:1 and its declaration that God created the whole cosmos. We therefore receive our male or female bodies from God through our parents and ancestors, going all the way back to the creation of the first man and woman. Their creation is both an initial act in primordial time and a foundational act that lasts for all time. Their creation is also our creation. Here is how Luther explains it: God divided mankind into two classes, namely, male and female, or a he and a she.… Therefore each of us must have the kind of body God has created for us. I cannot make myself a woman, nor can you make yourself a man; we do not have that power. But we are exactly as he created us; I am a man and you a woman. Moreover, he wills to have his excellent handiwork honored as his divine creation, and not despised. The man is not to despise or scoff at the woman or her body, nor the woman the man. But each should honor the other’s image and body as a divine and good creation that is well pleasing unto God himself.1 Our vision of the human body cannot be separated from what God himself tells us about its creation. And that is what I would now like to explore by looking at how God’s creation of the body is depicted from two different perspectives in Genesis: a universal, cosmic perspective in 1:1–2:3 and an earthly, social perspective in 2:4–3:24. THE COSMIC HABITAT FOR THE HUMAN BODY Before God created Adam and Eve with their bodies, he built a home for them to live, an ordered cosmic habitat for the body that provided what was needed for its survival and prosperity. In broad outline, Genesis 1:1–2:3 sketches out the cosmic order for it in two main ways. First, in a series of ten decrees, God the Creator of heaven and earth establishes the order of dependence in it; he provides what is needed for the body to live physically on earth. The human body occupies its own niche in the much larger physical order that encompasses and sustains it. That niche is the dry land on earth, which human beings share with the other land animals akin to them. The habitat for animal and human life on earth stands at the apex of a set of orders within a larger cosmic order in which each consecutive order depends on what was before it for its existence. There is the order of light that keeps the darkness in its place, the order of sky as a separate domain from the earth, the order of earth with its oceans and continents, the order of vegetation that is produced by the land, the order of the sun, moon, and stars that move in the sky above the earth, the orders of fish in the sea and of birds in the sky, and, last, the order of animals and human beings on earth. Each higher order depends on what is under it for its existence, like vegetation that needs dry land for its growth, while the complete order has been designed to support all life on earth, whether it be the life of plants, fish, birds, animals, or humanity. Second, the same divine utterances also establish the order of government in this cosmic order. While the sun, moon, and stars rule over the sky and the earth, humankind was created as God’s regent to rule over the fish, the birds, and the animals on earth. By means of these agents, God governs the whole of his created order. Thus, the human body has its own allotted place and receives its proper function in that cosmic order, its God-given ecosystem. The human body depends on it for its survival and exercises dominion on earth. With the human body properly placed within it, the cosmic order receives God’s full approval, his unabashed appreciation and delight. Six times in Genesis 1 we hear that when God sees what he has created, he recognizes that it is “good”—the light (1:3), the dry land (1:10), the vegetation on earth (1:12), the constellations in the sky (1:18), the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea (1:21), and all the animals on dry land (1:25); each of these is indeed lovely to behold.2 But when he has made Adam and Eve and housed them in their proper habitat, he is even more pleased. He recognizes that they, together with the whole physical life-support system for them, are “very good” (1:31). Excellent, perfect, and utterly splendid! In 1 Timothy 4:4, Paul sums up God’s approval of his physical creation with the assertion that “everything created by God is good.” So, too, the human body. All that follows in the rest of the Bible and its account of God’s dealings with humanity presupposes God’s approval of the human body. Thus, any disparagement of it as something bad, or contempt for it as unfit for God, is ruled out of order by the first chapter of the Bible. THE MYSTERY OF THE BODY Besides the depiction of the visible cosmic support system for human beings with their bodies, Genesis 1:1–2:3 alludes, rather briefly and enigmatically, to the invisible mystery of the human body by mentioning its eternal orientation and its likeness to God, two themes that are merely introduced without any elaboration. That comes later in the Bible. We get a hint about the human body’s eternal destination when God rests on the seventh day, the culmination of his creative acts. At first the seventh day seems out of place; it does not fit in with what precedes, for on this day God says nothing and creates nothing. He merely “rests” from his completed work of creation. After blessing the fish and the birds and man, he “blesses” this day and “sanctifies” it by resting on it. Yet despite its apparent misfit, it is the climax of the whole account, and it touches on three mysteries. First, the culmination of God’s creative work for six days in his rest on the seventh sets the weekly rhythm and pattern for the human body: work and rest. For six days, man and woman were to work with God on earth; on the seventh day they were to rest with God in order to receive his blessing. Second, God sanctifies the seventh day so that by resting bodily with God on that day, which was later called the Sabbath, they could share in his holiness (Exod 20:8–11; 31:12–17). Third, unlike every other day, there is no mention of the beginning and end of the seventh day. Since it is God’s day, it is eternal. While it is set in the time for human life on earth, it transcends all time; it belongs to eternity. It shows that the human body had been created for eternal life by resting with God in heaven rather than just for temporal life on earth with care for its plants and animals. Genesis 1 discloses another aspect of the mystery of the human body by saying that it was created in God’s image. That’s what makes humans theologically different from the animals, which, like them, also received physical bodies and the power to procreate. In simple terms, human beings are the only physical creatures made to resemble God. Thus, God announces what he proposes for human bodies with the very words by which he creates humankind: “Let us make man (Hebrew ’adam) in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26). Then follows this poetic description of man’s creation: So God created man (Hebrew ha’adam) in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27)3 These three step-like lines, with their repetition and...
