Barry posted a comment on my post on heaven expressing his ongoing surprise that “the whole immortal soul/heaven idea has become such an immovable foundation of the faith of most Christians when there’s no evidence for it in the Bible.” I agree, and I think it’s unfortunate, but I can understand it. Gnostic and quasi-Gnostic ideas of spirituality and the body are just very natural to us, I think, going all the way back to Genesis 3 (it would be a stretch to call Gnosticism the original temptation, but I think it’s a very close descendant); it just seems obvious to us that if we’re going to have eternal life, we must be immortal, and if any part of us is immortal, it must be our spirits. Throw in that a lot of folks don’t want to have to take the body seriously (either because they want to transcend it and become “more than human,” or because they want to be free to do whatever they like), and you have a pretty strong pull to this sort of thinking. It’s easy for people to drift into it (since that tends to be the way the times go) without ever really realizing that it’s less than what God promises us.
Whether people realize it or not, though, it is less, because our bodies aren’t unimportant, and they aren’t incidental to who we are. We exist as body and spirit together, and our bodies, though fallen and subject to sin, are beautiful and precious; certainly, to live forever in bodies that aged and fell ill and broke down would be no good thing, but to leave them behind forever would be no good thing either, for it would make us less than ourselves. That’s why God promises to raise us, whole, from the dead, in imperishable, incorruptible bodies, because our bodies are part of us, and every part of us matters to God, in every aspect of who we are and what we do.
This means that what we do with our bodies matters, because our bodies are sites of God’s redemption; his Spirit is alive and at work in our bodies as well as in our spirits, for they are inseparably woven together, to remake us into the people he created us to be. This is why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6 that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and why he tells the Corinthians that they need to watch what they do with their bodies, because there are no merely physical acts. Every act is spiritual, because every act that affects our bodies—food, sex, exercise, sleep, slipping and falling, getting back up—every act affects our spirits, and we won’t be leaving these bodies behind. They’ll be transformed when God makes all things new, but they’ll still be our bodies, and what we do with them matters, to us and to God.
To some, this might not seem like good news, but I think it is; it’s the good news that because Jesus ascended into heaven in the body, as a human being, there is room for us in our full humanity in the presence of God. There is no part of us God will not redeem—no good thing he will not purify, no bad thing he will not transform. There is room for us in the kingdom of God as whole people, scars and all, because he has redeemed us as whole people, scars and all; when the kingdom comes, even our scars will no longer bring us pain, or shame, for they, too, will be the marks of the redemptive work of Jesus in our lives.
Given the rather nasty abuse many people, Christians certainly included, have put their bodies through, I rather prefer the whole immortal soul thing myself.
Leaving the battered hulk of my much-abused body behind when I pass on has a certain comfort level to it.
I understand where you’re coming from on that; I simply affirm that God is bigger than all that, and will not let the effects of that abuse stand, but will redeem all of it. All things will be made new.
I can’t fault the theology or the reasoning of what you affirm.
Speaking reasonably, having a newly perfected and incorruptible body makes absolute sense.
It’s just a hard way to go, perceptually, from what you might see in the mirror each day, to really getting the mind around the glorious idea that someday, this mess is going to look good, and be what God always wanted you to have.
I hear you there . . .