Themes of Broken Bonds: Physicality

The meaning of our bodies in an age without meaning

Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the Virtruvian Man, circa 1492. Credit: Luc Viatour / https://lucnix.be

I once spent a year as a student in London, a dizzying excitement of activity. Never in my life had I enjoyed so many opportunities to behold beauty, engage with humanity, and feed upon the accumulated stores of human knowledge. It was, in many ways, the greatest year I have ever known.

But in one chief way it was a trial. Though I had never been surrounded by so many people, I was deeply lonely. The new friendships I formed with fellow students could not fully soothe this ache, though they did help a bit. As Christmas drew nearer and the days grew dark, I listened to hours of carols while I worked in the city’s libraries, hoping to lift the gloom from my soul. Again, this was only a partial help. I once became so upset during a church service that I had to leave halfway through.

Then one day, it happened. Standing in my small student room, I asked myself, “When was the last time someone hugged you?” In vain, I searched my memories of the past few months. Surely, the last time such a thing had happened was when my parents said their farewells as the airport! And I realized in that moment that though I could live a mostly solitary existence, there was simply no replacement for physical affection.

Anyone who has cared for an infant knows the power of physical touch to cast out the darkness within. But perhaps because we are such people of the mind, we believe it has the power to overcome the physical; or alternatively, because we comprehend the damage caused by unwanted or inappropriate physical touch, we believe it is best not to seek touch of any kind. Like everything else humans do, touch can lie.

Yet, there is nothing like a crippling depression to reveal the depths of our embodiment. An anxiety attack showcases the ways in which our mind and body are bound. We may be no more than dust, but we are certainly that: the fiber of the universe runs deep in our veins. The Bible tells me so.

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To read the Holy Scriptures is to be struck in the face by physicality. Covenant after covenant cut in blood, the terrible penalty carried out in living flesh. The creation of a woman from the flesh of a man who is then rejoined to her in a marital union. “And they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24)¹ The Israelites are fed on manna as well as the divine Word. God himself must take on flesh to save flesh. It is our flesh that will be restored to life at the end of time.

But Christianity found itself from the beginning caught between flesh and spirit, for the old laws of ritual purity were over. The pagan religions had been cast in a heap for burning. God’s people would worship “in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:23) For “the flesh profits nothing” in the age of the spirit. (John 6:63)²

Yet, Christianity was equally a religion of the body. Believers gathered physically, kneeling side-by-side for prayer, consuming the elements of the Eucharist, witnessing the rebirth of sinners in water. They went on pilgrimage to sacred sites and prayed before the bones of saints. When a new monk accepted his tonsure or a priest placed his hand on a congregant’s head in absolution, they were declaring that physical things matter, even in the age of the spirit.

More than anything, it was the Church’s sacraments that connected believers through physical ritual. The sacraments could only be received in certain consecrated places from certain consecrated hands. Thus, from birth to death, a person’s body and soul were seen to be joined in a holy bond, so that to speak of “Gregory” was to speak of his spiritual and physical aspects, not a mind trapped inside a physical house. The Church existed to meet the needs of the whole human person.

Then came the great disenchantment which led to our present secular age. The scientific methods so prized by the Enlightenment were only capable of studying the material aspects of existence. This as much as anything led to a splitting of body and soul in the minds of many, so it was possible to think of human beings as “minds in a vat” who would leave their bodies behind upon death.

Combine that now with many aspects of modern life: living apart from family, entrusting one’s duties to machines, the all-consuming power of the internet, and even the creation of new human beings now taking place in laboratories. So many aspects of our present existence lead us away from physical relationships with physical human beings. No, I do not refer merely to sex, which has itself been outsourced through pornography, battery operated toys, and the like. I mean that many human beings can go through a day without experiencing any meaningful physical contact with another human being: not a hug, not a handshake, and certainly not a shared meal.

It is no surprise then to hear Christian thinkers going on and on about embodiment these days. The Covid pandemic was hardly the first time that congregants no longer felt a need to go to in-person church services, and there is now an urgency among Christian shepherds of all varieties to convince their sheep of the importance of bodily communion. But nowhere has our embodiment been seen as more crucial than in the debate over transgenderism.

“I am a woman trapped in a man’s body,” may seem a novel phrase (or at least one that was never taken seriously before), but in fact, human beings have been altering their bodies since time immemorial in ways that presage our current cultural moment.

Consider the following: For centuries upon centuries, young men and women were herded into ideological communities where they swore off their natural sexual functions and minimized all exterior signs of secondary sex characteristics. Furthermore, they pursued a lifestyle so punishing to the body that it is likely the women’s monthly cycles no longer properly functioned. Men and women may not have undergone surgery to alter their sexual organs, but they were essentially unsexed. I am, of course, talking about Christian monasticism.

My point here is not to demonize vows of celibacy but to demonstrate how human attitudes toward the body have gone through cycles. In some ways, our ancestors held a higher respect for the physical (and physical determinism), and in other ways not. Modern disenchantment seems like it should make us think of humans as material beings only, but instead we now live in an age when the body itself is considered practically a figment of the imagination, while the mind has a substantial weight beyond that accorded it by our fathers.

But the Christian Scriptures are clear: there is no salvation outside the body. As the man and wife are united and become one flesh, so those baptized into Christ by faith are now one with him in an even greater way. It is a spiritual union, yes, but that does not mean it is not physical. For when Christ took on a human nature, he was clothed in human flesh.

God is not only transcendent, high and exalted. He is here and now, in the things we find glorious and those we find humiliating. Martin Luther used to say you could find God in dung, but he also had as high a view of God’s majesty and glory as any theologian I have read. The God of glory, Luther argued, is not afraid to join himself to humanity, and his omnipresence means he is in every dark nook and cranny, never driven out by sin, but showering his grace upon humanity like the great deluge of old: grace upon grace. And that is why the body which bears his image is sacred, for Christ himself was willing to join himself to it.

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The physical body and blood of Jesus Christ is necessary for the salvation of souls. That is what Martin Luther believed, and it is why he was so adamant that the real body and blood are given in the Lord’s Supper. For if God does not give himself to us in every way, including physically, then it is not the full measure of love. Worse yet, the one who is not covered by that blood does not have eternal life.

Equally important to all orthodox Christian theologians has been the physical resurrection of the dead. Oh, how often one hears at a funeral, “That isn’t really them in that casket anymore,” or “they are a spiritual being now,” or “they will have a totally new body”! But Christian resurrection has always meant the restoration and glorification of the body, not the giving of a completely new one. For when Jesus Christ was raised, he did not leave one body in the grave and walk out in another: it was the same body transformed by the power of the Spirit. Therefore, the talk of a “new body” is meant to be figurative more than literal.

Yes, our bodies are a fundamental part of ourselves which will be carried into eternity. The dead in Christ are now “absent from the body” and present with the Lord, (2 Corinthians 5:6f) but it is only a temporary state. Their eternal state will be resurrection. That is why Christians treated the dead body with such reverence, burying it in consecrated ground. Because what God has joined himself to in the human body is as sacred as any temple in Christendom.

Moreover, as physical beings, we cannot expect to flourish in life without physical communion. While the sexual union between a husband and wife is the height of God’s physical design in this age, a communion so powerful that it can bring new human life into being, we ought not dismiss the need for other forms of physical contact. We are no different now than we were as infants: we need to be held.

And God himself has not left us as orphans, suffering through a world in which he is absent. On the contrary, he is more present with and among us than ever before, and because he knows we are physical creatures, he has given us physical rites: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. When the Word of God is combined with the physical objects of water, bread, and wine, it carries a power beyond our ability to fully grasp: a mysterious giving of God in which we are nourished and strengthened. The physical ministers to the spiritual as the spiritual ministers to the physical.

Martin Luther, Desiderius Erasmus, and Philip Melanchthon lived in an era when traditional physical forms of religion were being rejected. Equally, it was a time when people were reconsidering how they thought about sex and gender. How this mirrors our own moment! The ways in which they wrestled with these issues were a subject of great fascination for me as I wrote Broken Bonds and its follow-up, Face to Face. I hope that, should you read them, you too will be challenged to think about our physicality in new ways.

Click here to pre-order Broken Bonds for delivery on November 12.

1. Unless otherwise specified, all biblical quotations in my articles come from the 1995 New American Standard Bible, copyright The Lockman Foundation.

2. Interpreting John 6:63 in such a way as to negate the importance of physical things is a misunderstanding of the text, which uses a different biblical meaning of ‘flesh’ particularly favored in the New Testament: to contrast a person’s own works from the work accomplished by the Spirit of God.