A Christian View of the Body
Are we imprisoned by our bodies? Is my body an evil thing, properly viewed as something to be loathed and cast off at the earliest opportunity? In reading The Resurrection of the Son of God, by N. T. Wright, I was compelled to think anew about the relationship of my material body to my immaterial soul. Recently, I listened to a series of lectures by Phillip Cary, of Eastern University. These lectures were titled, Philosophy and Religion in the West. Dr. Cary also made comments that made me rethink or at least better define my views on this subject.
Wright, on page 346, makes the following comments:
“Nor is the problem he (Paul) faces the same one as the one Plato and Cicero dealt with in their exposition of ‘astral immortality’. They were eager to escape the prison-house of the body; but for Paul the problem was not the body itself, but sin and death which had taken up residence in it, producing corruption, dishonour, and weakness. Being human is good; being an embodied human is good…â€
I had never really considered this fleshy existence as a “good†thing. For whatever reason, through years of hearing sermons and Bible studies, I had come to think of my flesh as a prison which was to be escaped. There was a yearning to be set free from my body. I’m not quite sure if this concept was explicitly taught, or if it was a concept I somehow erroneously inferred from what I had heard. It was enlightening to find instruction to the contrary. To a Christian, our bodies are not to be considered bad or evil. After all, after God had created man on the sixth day, Gen 1:31 states:
God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
God called his creation of man, which included their physical bodies, very good! It was good that our souls inhabited flesh. Next, the origins of my error.