The Body and Its Meaning

Every subject in this module, marriage and singleness, sexual ethics, men and women, gender, is a question about bodies. So the module begins with the body itself, and with a claim that much popular Christianity has quietly lost: the body is not a container for the real you. It is part of the real you, and God has committed himself to it at every point in the story of salvation.

Begin at creation. 'Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being' (Genesis 2:7). The human being is not a soul that has been given a body; he is dust that God has breathed into, and the two together are one living being. The whole of what God made, bodies included, he pronounced very good (Genesis 1:31). The body is not a mistake, a prison or a lower level of existence. It is a gift, and the first thing scripture says about it is that God likes what he has made.

Then the incarnation. 'The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us' (John 1:14). The eternal Son did not visit a body or appear to have one; he took one and kept it. John treats this as a test of true teaching: 'Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God' (1 John 4:2). The risen Jesus insisted on his body: 'Look at My hands and My feet. It is I Myself' (Luke 24:39). He ate fish in front of his disciples (Luke 24:42-43), and he ascended, according to the angels, to return 'in the same way you have seen Him go into heaven' (Acts 1:11). A human body is at the right hand of the Father now.

Then the end. Christian hope is not the soul's escape from the body but the body's redemption. Paul says that we 'groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies' (Romans 8:23), and that Christ 'will transform our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body' (Philippians 3:21). The body that is raised is changed, 'sown a natural body' and 'raised a spiritual body' (1 Corinthians 15:44), but it is still a body, and still recognisably ours. The church fathers saw how much hung on this. Tertullian, around the year 200, put it in a Latin phrase that is hard to improve: caro salutis cardo, the flesh is the hinge on which salvation turns (On the Resurrection of the Flesh, chapter 8).

Hold these four together, creation, incarnation, resurrection and the return of Christ, and the moral question changes shape. The question is no longer whether what I do with my body matters, as though that were an open question. It is what kind of honour is due to something God made, wore, raised and will raise again. That is the ground Paul stands on in the anchor, and it is the ground for everything else in this module.

The oldest rival to this teaching arrived in the church's first centuries and has never fully left. The movements usually grouped together as Gnosticism taught, in many different forms, that the material world was the work of a lesser or ignorant power, that the true self was a spark of light trapped in matter, and that salvation was knowledge that freed the spark from the body. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote his five books Against Heresies, around 180, largely to answer them, and his answer was the whole biblical story: one God made the world, the Son truly took flesh, and the flesh will truly be raised. Augustine spent about nine years as a hearer among the Manichees, another movement that treated matter as the realm of darkness, and his later insistence on the goodness of creation was hard won.

Contempt for the body has two faces, and they look like opposites. One is severity: the body is an enemy, so it must be starved, punished and despised. Paul names this in Colossians, where he says such rules have 'an appearance of wisdom, with their self-prescribed worship, their false humility, and their harsh treatment of the body; but they are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh' (Colossians 2:23). He warns Timothy of teachers who 'prohibit marriage and require abstinence from certain foods', and answers them with creation: 'every creation of God is good, and nothing that is received with thanksgiving should be rejected' (1 Timothy 4:3-4).

The other face is carelessness. If the body does not really count, then what it does does not really count either. This is the attitude Paul confronts in Corinth, and it is more common in churches than severity is. It shows up in a gospel that is all about souls and has nothing to say about hunger, sickness, disability or labour, as though James had never asked what good it is to wish a hungry brother well 'but does not provide for his physical needs' (James 2:16). It shows up when a church's care for the sick is only prayer and never a visit, a meal or a lift to the clinic. Jesus counted the visit: 'I was sick and you looked after Me' (Matthew 25:36).

Contempt for the body also shows itself in how a community regards certain bodies. Bodies that are disabled, old, scarred, diseased or simply poor are often treated as less worthy, and in some places as evidence of a curse. The Gospels do not let that stand. The woman who had suffered from bleeding for twelve years (Mark 5:25), and who by custom would have kept away from others, touched Jesus in a crowd; he did not rebuke her but called her 'Daughter' (Mark 5:34). Module 2 of this track set out the dignity of every person made in God's image, regardless of ability, age or status. That dignity is not the dignity of a soul only. It belongs to the body you can see.

A final form of contempt is subtler, and it is common in very devout churches. It is the assumption that spiritual seriousness means suspicion of every bodily pleasure: food, rest, beauty, music, laughter, touch within its proper bounds. Scripture is more generous. His critics said of Jesus, 'Look at this glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' (Matthew 11:19). The charge was false, but it was not a charge anyone ever brought against John the Baptist, and Jesus himself drew the contrast in the verse before. Gratitude, not suspicion, is the Christian posture toward the good things of the body, which is why 1 Timothy 4:4 makes thanksgiving the test.

The opposite mistake treats the body not as worthless but as ultimate. Paul's description of certain enemies of the cross is blunt: 'their god is their belly, and their glory is in their shame. Their minds are set on earthly things' (Philippians 3:19). The belly here is appetite of every kind. When a person's appetites decide what he does, he is serving them, whatever he says about God. Proverbs warns the guest at a rich man's table to 'put a knife to your throat if you possess a great appetite' (Proverbs 23:2), a vivid way of saying that appetite must be ruled, not obeyed.

In our generation the body is idolised in at least three ways. The first is appearance. Advertising across the world sells the idea that a person's worth lies in a certain shape, weight or skin. In much of Africa and Asia, skin-lightening products are sold widely, and some contain mercury or other substances that the World Health Organization has warned can cause serious harm. Behind the product is a lie about whose bodies are beautiful, and often an old colonial lie at that. Scripture's word is steady: 'Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised' (Proverbs 31:30), and 'man sees the outward appearance, but the LORD sees the heart' (1 Samuel 16:7).

The second is health and fitness as salvation. Care for the body is right; Paul says that 'physical exercise is of limited value, but godliness is valuable in every way' (1 Timothy 4:8). Notice that he does not call exercise worthless. He calls it limited. The idol appears when the body becomes a project that promises to keep death away, and when the disciplines of diet and fitness take the place, in time, money and hope, that belongs to God. Some prosperity preaching makes a version of this into doctrine, teaching that health is always God's will and that illness proves weak faith. That teaching wounds the sick, and it is answered elsewhere in this course.

The third, and the deepest, is ownership. The modern conviction that my body is mine to do with as I choose has real moral truth in it, and Christians should not miss it. No one else owns your body. That is why slavery is an abomination, why a husband who says his wife's body belongs to him in the sense of a possession has misread scripture (1 Corinthians 7:4 gives each spouse a claim on the other, mutually, not a property right to one), and why sexual coercion and abuse are always wrong and always to be reported. The Pastoral Care lesson Protecting the Vulnerable deals with what a church must do when it learns of abuse, and every pastor should know it.

But Paul says more than that no one else owns you. He says 'You are not your own; you were bought at a price' (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). The answer to the question of whose body this is, is neither the self nor another human being. It is God's, twice over: by creation and by redemption. That is the strongest possible protection for the vulnerable, because a body that belongs to God cannot be anyone's property. It is also the end of the idea that the self is the final authority over what the body is for.

Where faithful Christians differ in applying this, say so. Christians differ over cremation and burial: the early church buried its dead, partly as a witness to the resurrection, and the Catholic Church forbade cremation until 1963, now permits it, and in the 2016 instruction Ad resurgendum cum Christo still prefers burial and asks that ashes not be scattered; many Protestants regard the choice as free, since God raises the dead however their bodies were laid to rest. They differ over tattoos, where some apply Leviticus 19:28 directly and others read it as tied to mourning rites for the dead. They differ over many questions of cosmetic surgery, diet and fasting. These are matters for conscience, as Module 1 of this track discussed, and the two errors give a useful test: does this practice treat the body with contempt, or as an idol, or as a gift held in trust?

Corinth was a wealthy port city, and some members of the church had evidently decided that the gospel's freedom extended to the body in ways Paul found alarming. Commentators such as Gordon Fee, in his commentary on the letter (1987), read 6:12-20 as Paul quoting the church's own slogans and then qualifying them, and the BSB prints those lines in quotation marks. 'Everything is permissible for me', they said; 'but not everything is beneficial', Paul replies, and adds 'but I will not be mastered by anything' (1 Corinthians 6:12). The freedom they claimed was leading them into a new slavery.

The second slogan is the more revealing. Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, they said, and Paul agrees that 'God will destroy them both' (6:13). The logic of the slogan is that bodily appetites are temporary, so satisfying them is morally neutral, and they applied that logic to sexual conduct as well. Paul refuses the step: 'The body is not intended for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body' (6:13). Then he gives his first and decisive reason: 'By His power God raised the Lord from the dead, and He will raise us also' (6:14). The body is not temporary. The stomach may pass, but the body has a future, and what has a future with God has a meaning now.

Paul's second reason is union. 'Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?' (6:15). A believer is joined to Christ not only in his inner life but as a whole person, so that what he does with his body involves Christ. Paul then quotes Genesis 2:24, 'The two will become one flesh' (6:16), to show that sexual union is never merely physical; it joins persons, which is why it cannot be casual. Dale Martin's study The Corinthian Body (1995) set out how much ancient medical and philosophical thinking about the body lies behind this chapter, and readers who weigh his account differently still agree on the shape of Paul's argument: the body is the place where a person belongs to someone.

The third reason is the anchor. The body is a temple, naos, the sanctuary where God's presence dwells, 'of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God' (6:19). In 3:16 Paul called the whole church God's temple; here he applies the same image to the believer's body. In the Old Testament the presence of God sanctified a place, and what was holy was not to be used for common purposes. The Spirit now dwells in persons, in bodies, and so the old sanctity of the temple has moved into the ordinary life of every believer: eating, working, resting, touching.

The fourth reason is purchase. 'You were bought at a price' (6:20). The verb is the ordinary word for buying in the market, and in a city full of slaves no one could miss the image. A slave bought by a new master belongs to that master's household. The price, though Paul does not need to say it here, is the death of Christ. So the conclusion, 'Therefore glorify God with your body', is not a rule added to the gospel. It is what the gospel means for a person who has a body, which is everyone. Romans 12:1 makes the same move, calling believers to 'offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual service of worship'. Spiritual worship, in Paul, is bodily.

Chastity is a word many Christians use only of the unmarried, and then usually to mean not doing something. The tradition means much more. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, question 151), treats chastity as part of temperance, the virtue that rightly orders our desires for bodily goods. On that account, chastity is not the absence of sexual desire, nor contempt for it, but desire well ordered: given its proper place in a life directed toward God and neighbour. It is a habit, formed over time, as Module 1's lesson on virtue described, not a single decision made once.

Because it is a virtue rather than a state, chastity belongs to everyone. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says plainly that all the baptised are called to chastity, and adds that each should live it in the way suited to his or her state of life: the married in faithfulness to one another, the unmarried in continence. Protestant teaching has said the same in its own idiom. The Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), explaining the seventh commandment, lists among the duties it requires chastity in body, mind, affections, words and behaviour. A faithful husband of forty years is chaste; so is a single woman who has never married; so is a widower. Their circumstances differ and the virtue is one.

Paul's earliest letter puts it in a sentence that the module will return to: 'For it is God's will that you should be holy: You must abstain from sexual immorality; each of you must know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in lustful passion like the Gentiles who do not know God' (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5). Notice two things. Chastity is about holiness, which is the positive goal, not merely about avoiding sin. And it protects other people: the next verse says 'no one should ever violate or exploit his brother in this regard' (4:6). An unchaste act is never a private matter. Someone is always used.

Self-control, egkrateia, is the last item in the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:23), and that placing matters. It is fruit, grown by the Spirit, not a technique. Augustine knew how long it can take. In his Confessions (book 8) he remembers praying as a young man, give me chastity and continence, but not yet. He tells the story against himself to show that the will to be chaste is itself a gift, and that the struggle is ordinary rather than shameful. A pastor who speaks of chastity only as a rule, and never as a gift and a hope, has left out the gospel.

Chastity is also not shame. Before the fall, 'the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed' (Genesis 2:25). Shame about the body as such, as distinct from shame about sin, is not a Christian virtue, and churches that teach young people to fear or despise their bodies are teaching the first error, not the faith. Paul's word in 6:20 is glorify. A chaste person is not someone who has learned to dislike his body. He is someone who has learned whose it is. Later lessons in this track take up particular questions, pornography among them, in Module 5; this lesson's task is the foundation they all stand on.

Every lesson in this track ends with a page for your casebook, and by the end of the track the casebook becomes your capstone: one real moral question from your own church or community, worked through with the method you have learned. Buy or set aside a notebook for it now, or start a note on your phone that you will keep.

On the first page of this module's section, copy out 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 from the BSB. Under it, write the four facts from section 1 in your own words: God made the body, the Son took a body, God will raise the body, and Christ is coming back in a body. Then write the four reasons from section 4: resurrection, union with Christ, the temple of the Spirit, and purchase.

Now describe one real situation from your own setting where the meaning of the body is at stake. Choose something that is not sexual and does not identify anyone. It might be a funeral custom, the use of skin-lightening products among young women in your church, a teaching that refuses medicine as a lack of faith, the way people with a disability are treated, or the neglect of the sick. Write it as a composite case: a short paragraph describing what happens, with no names and no detail that would let anyone be recognised.

Under the case, write three short answers. Where, if anywhere, does this situation treat the body with contempt? Where, if anywhere, does it treat the body as an idol? And what would it look like for your church to treat the body here as a gift held in trust for God? Finish with one thing you could do, say or preach this month in response, and the role, not the name, of one person in your church you would talk to first.