God Saves Us In Our Bodies, Not From Them
Our Christian faith becomes real in the imperfect and beautiful lives we’re already living.
Christianity has always had a complex relationship to the human body. Far too many of us have experienced religiously induced shame about the skin we’re in, so it makes sense that many Christians subscribe to a theology where the primary goal is to escape the body entirely to spend eternity with God in some distant, ethereal place. What’s more, our bodies will inevitably disappoint us. They get sick and wear down; they experience harm and endure trauma.
So, it’s natural to think that salvation, which is just the theological term for true healing and restoration, requires being freed from our human existence. Yet the entire arc of the Christian story resists this idea. From creation and the incarnation of God in Jesus all the way to our final hope in resurrection, Christianity declares God’s good intentions for our bodies.
In the Beginning
It begins with creation — or perhaps just a moment before, when God chooses to create anything at all.
Whatever one makes of angels, archangels, and all that, the very idea of spiritual beings suggests that God could easily make disembodied creatures for company. (And maybe God has! Such topics are above my pay grade.) Moreover, as the Holy Trinity — the triune community of persons — God already enjoys boundless loving fellowship with Godself. In short, in no way does God need to create a messy and frail humanity. And yet God does. And God calls this creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31)!
It’s even clear that some of the grittier parts of our human existence are no mistake. God’s immediate instruction to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) suggests that sex has always been in the picture. And while work is corrupted into toilsome labor (Genesis 3:17–19), God always intends for human beings to till soil and tend gardens (Genesis 2:5). Nowadays, work and sex are some of the most complicated parts of our lives, but God means them to be good gifts.
We catch glimpses of God’s embodiment too. In the narrative, God reaches into “the dust of the ground” and draws out a person, breathes “the breath of life” into humanity, and plants the first garden (Genesis 2:7–8). Apparently, it was even God’s habit to walk in that garden “at the time of the evening breeze” (Genesis 3:8).
From the very beginning, then, this story resists the notion of a God who disdains our human embodied experience — and it presages the decisive moment when Christians believe God comes to our mortal world in the person of Jesus.
God Becomes Human
Christians believe that, in Jesus Christ, God enters into every part of human existence — that is the very meaning of incarnation. But Jesus’s life makes clear that his body is not a less-than-desirable means to spiritual salvation, defined entirely by his eventual death on the cross. Rather, Jesus enjoys being a person.
Theologian Sam Wells points out that the vast majority of Jesus’s earthly life is neither the dramatic week leading up to the crucifixion nor his three years of active ministry, but the utterly mundane first 30 years he spends growing, living, and working. When he is about ready to begin his public career, Jesus’s ministry begins at a party (John 2:1–11). And, by Jesus’s own telling, he soon develops quite the reputation for “eating and drinking” (Matthew 11:19). In the life he shares with his friends, Jesus affirms the goodness of bodily existence.
Jesus’s life makes clear that his body is not a less-than-desirable means to spiritual salvation . . . Jesus enjoys being a person.
Jesus outright says he’s come so all people might experience embodied life abundantly (John 10:10), not merely to promise some far-off spiritual deliverance. In his first sermon, Jesus reiterates the prophet Isaiah’s mission “to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18). We see this carried out in his ministry, which is defined equally by protests against those making life unbearably difficult for others (Matthew 23:4) and by miraculous moments when people find healing and liberation in their bodies, not apart from them. These moments provide fleeting insights into the kind of earthly existence God intends for all people.
Nevertheless, sometimes our bodies disappoint us. Jesus experiences this too. He knows hunger and thirst. He feels the loss of a close friend (John 11). He undergoes some of the cruelest forms of injustice, is tortured, and finally dies. That’s why early Christians found consolation in the knowledge that, through Jesus, God can “sympathize with our weaknesses” because God has experienced bodily pain as well (Hebrews 4:15).
Raised to New Life
The good news is our bodies’ inevitable limitations don’t have the last word. This is what Christians mean by resurrection.
There is surely much about resurrection that we simply cannot comprehend at present. Just read through some of the Apostle Paul’s best efforts to muddle through these mysteries — especially First Corinthians 15 — and you will soon realize how little we understand. But we can find a little clarity in two places.
The first is the resurrected body of Jesus. While it’s clearly transformed, such that many people have trouble recognizing him at first, it is most definitely the same body that savored the good and suffered the bad leading up to that moment. Even brought back to life, Jesus’s body keeps its scars (John 20:27), but he’s also capable of sharing breakfast with his friends (John 21:12–13).
In Jesus, we see hope for a body that remembers and gives new meaning to our suffering while making possible continued enjoyment of the goodness God intends for us.
A second moment of clarity comes when the Bible envisions the end of all things. In fact, the end is rather like the beginning, just, well, more. Once again, there is a garden with a tree at its center, but there is also a city (Revelation 21:1–22:5). God’s original intention for human beings to work the soil returns, but it’s now enriched with the sociality of human community. And time may change but does not cease to exist; there is no more night, yet trees still grow and bear fruit (Revelation 22:2). That is to say, we will not cease to be the temporal, embodied creatures that we are. Like Jesus, we will still have our bodies to experience community with our neighbors, to cultivate the earth, and to relish the fruits of our labor together.
In the end, Christians do not hope to be saved from earth in heaven. Rather, we hope for a new heaven and a new earth. We do not aim to escape our bodies. Rather, we watch our bodies become all that God intends — created and restored in and through Jesus.
Patrick Haley, PhD, teaches at Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary. He’s currently writing a book on what Christians mean when they say humans being are created in “the image of God” — and how this theology influences our ethics and politics.