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A friend of mine recalled the discomfort he felt when, while attending a Christian conference, a man in the restroom tried to make conversation with him at the urinal. He said: “He wanted to discuss the talk that had just been given, but the fact that we were in the restroom made it difficult for me. It felt wrong discussing all we’d learned about the faith while holding what seems to be the least faithful part of my body in my hand.”

In his book Tortured Wonders, Rodney Clapp describes the seeming paradox of talking about theology during a medical checkup:

[The doctor] asked me to stand up and lower my shorts for a hernia exam. It was then, as I tried in futility not to be self-conscious, that he chose to ask about my occupation. I told him I was an editor and writer. “So what do you write about” he said. “Please turn your head and cough.” “I write [cough] . . .” He moved his hand to the other side of my groin and interrupted—“Turn the other way and cough.”

“I write about [cough, cough] theology.” “Oh,” he said noncommittally, almost absentmindedly. “Now please bend over and put your elbows on the table, so I can check your prostate.” Theology, or thinking about God, who by definition has no physical body, usually is a highly disembodied practice. It links to textual artifacts (especially in the scriptures) and occasionally to archaeological artifacts. But it is not hard, when one is doing theology, to forget about the body. Maybe thinking and writing about theology, and spirituality, should be done in the course of physical examinations (although it would be hard to concentrate). That would keep us down to earth and aware of the bodies that we possess . . . There are, I learned that day in the doctor’s office, few pretensions to angelic, ethereal spirituality when your elbows are on the cold plastic of the examination table and you hear rubber gloves being snapped on behind you.1

While I couldn’t help laughing at both of these anecdotes, they represent a very serious chasm in Christian thought; that is, the underlying belief that the concepts of “body” and “spirit” are somehow opposites. Christopher West, who is known for his work popularizing Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, wrote, “Tragically, many Christians grow up thinking of their bodies (especially their sexuality) as inherent obstacles to the spiritual life.”2

In seeking to understand where such attitudes originated, it helps to have a grasp on how the body has been misunderstood within the framework of Christianity, both theologically and historically.

Biblical Ambivalence & Greek Influence

For Paul the human form is a “temple of the Holy Spirit”3 in one context, yet in another it hinders a more complete union with Christ.4 At one point Paul even refers to his physicality as a “body of death.”5 To the casual reader, it can be hard to distinguish between references to flesh as that which is sinful, and that which is physical. Multiple passages which posit the “flesh” against the purposes of God further contribute to a seeming duplicity in the way New Testament writers esteem the body.6

The ambivalence surrounding biblical references to the body has certainly contributed to its demoralization within traditional Christianity. Yet a far greater contribution has been made through the influence of early church fathers and Greek philosophers.

In her book The Unauthorized Guide to Sex and the Church, Carmen Renee Berry describes two interpretations of Christianity that competed with the apostles for control over the emerging church: the Judaizers and the Gnostics.

The Judaizers taught Christ as the only means of salvation; to them, Judaism was the only way to Christ. Gnosticism is a philosophy that creates a false division between the spiritual and physical dimensions of our existence. According to Berry:

Scripture was applied and misapplied in ways that separated the world into the material world containing the body, sexuality, and eventually women in the “bad” category and the spiritual world containing the mind, celibacy, and eventually men in the “good” one.7

In his essay “The Body and Spiritual Practice,” James Wiseman explains the influence Greek philosophy, and its trademark dualism, played in the development of religious Gnosticism:

Although it would be grossly unfair to portray Plato as unambiguously anti-corporeal, and although the major Christian authors who respected his thought did not appropriate it in an uncritical way, certain passages from Plato’s own works and from those of some of his disciples did influence the Christian understanding of the body.8

Wiseman cites a section from Plato’s Phaedo as an illustration of this influence:

So long as we keep to the body and our soul is contaminated with this imperfection, there is no chance of our ever attaining satisfactorily to our object, which we assert to be truth . . . It seems that so long as we are alive, we shall continue closest to knowledge if we avoid as much as we can all contact and association with the body, except when they are absolutely necessary, and instead of allowing ourselves to become infected with its nature, purify ourselves from it until God Himself gives us deliverance.9

According to Wiseman, this Platonic philosophy was embraced by Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish philosopher who lived during the time of Christ. Philo significantly influenced future Christian writers like Origen and Clement of Alexandria. Origen, who believed both his body and sexuality to be his enemy, reputedly castrated himself “for the sake of the kingdom”;10 and Clement taught that Christ didn’t even have a physical body.

One of the bestselling books in Christian history, The Life of Anthony, was written about Anthony of the Desert, who never bathed so as not to expose the surface of his body. In fact no one ever saw Anthony undressed until his clothes were removed to make for a proper burial after his death. Thirteenth-century friar St. Francis of Assisi neglected to properly care for his body in the most basic of ways to avoid “indulging the flesh.”

Gnostic Influence Continues

Despite Jesus’ frequent declarations that marriage is holy, Gnostic influence continued to infect culture with a negative view of sexuality long after his ascension. Gnostics regarded marriage as sinful, and singleness was equated with godliness.

Partly influenced by such attitudes, in the fourth century, Pope Siricius declared it a crime for priests to have sex with their own wives. Both Siricius and his contemporary St. Jerome believed Mary remained a virgin even after giving birth to Christ.

The Gnostics also devalued women, as it was their bodies that tempted men to sin. Ninth-century church father Theodore of Studius forbade monks from having even female animals, insisting that by becoming monks, they had “renounced the female sex altogether . . .”11 In the eleventh century Pope Gregory VII wrote, “The church cannot escape from the clutches of laity unless priests first escape the clutches of their wives.”12

Pope Urban II, a contemporary of Pope Gregory, ordered any priest who violated celibacy to be thrown into prison, and his wife and children sold into slavery.13

To Augustine, one of the most influential extra-biblical writers in Christian history, the body “presseth down the soul.”14 Augustine became the bishop of Hippo, and believed the penis was evil, semen was cursed, and intercourse was infected by sin even in the context of marriage.

To be fair, early Christians saw the body at its worst: the average life expectancy in the Roman world was less than thirty years, malnutrition was rampant, and crime rates exceeded those of modern-day cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, and Oakland. In Antioch so common were missing body parts that they wouldn’t draw much more attention than an untied shoelace would in modern times, and corpses were routinely dumped into the street. This all adds perspective to the contempt with which premodern Christians held their bodies, but certainly doesn’t justify it.

Third-century Platonic philosopher Plotinus was so dismissive of bodily existence that he wouldn’t admit to having parents or a birthday. Similarly, and a little closer to home, my great-grandmother Hattie refused to go out in public for the entire duration of her pregnancy to avoid the shame of strangers knowing that she had had sex.

From Plotinus to Grandma Hattie, the belief that the body and its accompanying sexuality is “bad,” has injected ambivalence into the way we esteem our bodies, our body parts, and our sexuality. Such ambivalence causes us to question the very nature of our embodiment. As Lauren Winner puts it:

We Christians get embarrassed about our bodies. We are not always sure that God likes them very much. We are not sure whether bodies are good or bad . . .15

Carmen Renee Berry writes:

A friend of mine, who is an excellent preacher, recently spoke on Christian sexuality. He said, “I was taught two contradictory things about sex. First, it’s dirty. Second, I should save it for the one I love.” No clearer statement could be made about the dichotomy presented to today’s Christians . . . Where did we get the idea that our bodies—and more specifically our sexuality—are unclean, perhaps even evil? With little clarity, we are often taught a mishmash of dismal decrees on our physical selves: that our “flesh” leads us away from God, and yet Jesus became “flesh” and dwelt among us; that our bodies are separate from our spirits, and yet, as orthodox believers, we hold tenaciously to the bodily resurrection of Jesus; the less sexual we are, the more spiritual we are, and yet God created both male and female with the declaration that it wasn’t good for us to be alone. Contradictions abound in Christian thinking. And we, as individuals trying to live our lives as God would desire, are flipped and flopped as these ideas collide.16

Does the body imprison the soul, or does it set it free? Is it holy, or is it “dirty”? Is it sacred, or is it shameful? Is the body an inherent obstacle to the spiritual life, or is it the very expression of it?

Spiritual “Stuff”

When I think of “spirits,” I think of things that go bump in the night—ghosts and goblins, angels and demons—none of which have bodies. So it makes sense that the word spiritual would seem distant from the body. Clapp plays devil’s advocate on this point: “Angels are bodiless, so we intuit that spirituality must not have anything to do with our physical bodies.”17

To the contrary! Because most of the spiritual realm is unseen, we’ve gotten used to using symbolism to convey spiritual truths; yet the body is the one outstanding exception. The body gives actual physical mass to the spirit. Flesh is the “stuff” that renders spirit visible. Without a spirit we are corpses, yet without a body we are mere ghosts.

Just as a completed ceramic sculpture gives material substance to what was previously only an idea in the molder’s mind, the human body gives substance to the character and creativity of God’s mind. According to Christopher West:

We aren’t spirits “trapped” in our bodies. The [Catholic] Church has always maintained that we are embodied spirits, or spiritualized bodies. Through the profound union of body and soul in each of us, our bodies reveal or “make visible” the invisible reality of our spirits. But the body does even more. Because we’re made in God’s image, our bodies also make visible something of God’s invisible mystery.18

Indeed God’s invisible attributes have been “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made . . .”19 As Pope John Paul II stated, “The body, in fact, and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God.”20

The body reveals these mysteries by demonstrating the attributes of God in both form and function, design and behavior. The body teaches us who God is.

The Unknown Masterpiece

In his book The Cells Design: How Chemistry Reveals the Creators Artistry, biochemist Fazale Rana probes the cells’ biochemical systems looking for attributes of God. He compares this to the process by which the identity of painters is determined by the characteristics of their paintings:

Sometime in the early 1970s, a junk dealer came across five ink drawings while clearing out a deceased woman’s apartment in London. He hung onto them for several years, after which time one of them wound up in the hands of a Brighton art dealer. Eventually, that dealer showed the mysterious drawing to Mark Harris, an art aficionado, who concluded that the piece might well be an unknown work by Picasso.21

When Picasso’s estate refused to confirm the authenticity of the drawing, which became known as “The Unknown Masterpiece,” Mark Harris was charged with a difficult task: authenticating the artwork based solely on its attributes.

Harris began by pointing out hallmark features of Picasso’s work, such as the fingerprint rolled into the wet ink at the bottom of the drawing, and by comparing the drawing to authenticated works by the artist. By identifying stylistic attributes that had been associated with Picasso, and discovering similarities between “The Unknown Masterpiece” and other paintings by Picasso (such as “The Three Dancers” and “Guernica”), Harris was able to amass a large body of evidence to support the claim that Picasso, indeed, painted the picture. In other words, Harris was able to identify the designer by looking at the design.

If it is true that God’s divine nature is “understood by the things that are made,” then examination of the body God created reveals not only the beauty and elegance of his design, but also unveils countless truths about his nature and his goodness.

The Body as a Teacher

The body is a miracle. The mere act of waking up in the morning involves more complexity than all the technologies NASA has ever designed. The outer ear captures fluctuations in air pressure that are created by the noise of an alarm clock, translating these fluctuations into an electrical signal that the brain can understand. The eyelids are extended upwards to reveal a fusion of light and color, which the brain weaves into visual information that can be recognized by the mind. Then thought activates the brain’s cortex, creating an electromagnetic storm that sends a nerve impulse down through the spinal cord into the muscles, which animate the bones and joints of the body. All of this happens so that the arm can reach, and the finger can extend, to nudge the highly coveted snooze button.

For these three simple movements to occur, trillions of cells must fire over a quadrillion signals to each other simultaneously, and each cell must understand what the other is doing. Even when the body is in a state of rest, each cell is completing a few million processes per second just to keep us alive: creating proteins, absorbing nutrients, transporting oxygen, and fighting infections.

In his book The Greatest Miracle in the World, Og Mandino wrote a “memorandum from God,” in which he unravels the marvel of our biology:

Your brain is the most complex structure in the universe. I know. Within its three pounds are thirteen billion nerve cells, more than three times as many cells as there are people on your earth. To help you file away every perception, every sound, every taste, every smell, every action you have experienced since the day of your birth . . . And, to assist your brain in the control of your body I have dispersed, throughout your form, four million pain-sensitive structures, five hundred thousand touch detectors, and more than two hundred thousand temperature detectors. No nation’s gold is better protected than you. None of your ancient wonders are greater than you . . . Within you is enough atomic energy to destroy any of the world’s great cities . . . and rebuild it.22

Zoom in on any one system in the body and you’ll be fascinated at all that has to take place to make the plan work. Geoffrey Simmons, in his book What Darwin Didn’t Know, describes the inner workings of the digestive system:

Look at how we transfer sugar, minerals, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and vitamins from our dinner plates to our mouths, down to the gastrointestinal tract, through the walls of the small bowel, into the bloodstream, through the liver, and ultimately to every cell in the body. Millions of macroscopic and microscopic processes are utilized. How does the body even know which sugar (and there are many types) to absorb, or which protein (and there are hundreds) goes where, when, and in what quantity? How does it know which substances are safe to absorb, and which should be ignored, quickly eliminated, or destroyed? How does the small bowel know how to cooperate with the 500 different kinds of bacteria that live in it? These are incredibly complex functions that work together—and only together—to maintain the health of an individual.23

Words that could be used to describe the inventor of this process might include artistic, imaginative, original, inventive, beautiful, clever, magnificent—even stunning. C. S. Lewis wrote “We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art . . .”24

If such a cursory look at the body’s design warrants such adjectives, what might an even closer look reveal?

Cell Theology

Advances in biochemical technique have made it possible for researchers to get a closer look at the cell than ever before, revealing biochemical processes that mirror God’s character attributes at the molecular level.

The bacterial flagellum, for example, is a biomolecular machine that reveals his intelligence. It reflects careful planning, purposeful design, and complex engineering. This mechanism is made up of over forty different kinds of proteins that function in concert exactly like a rotary motor would. According to Rana, its “components stand as direct analogs to the parts of a man-made motor, including a rotor, stator, drive shaft, bushing, universal joint, and propeller.”25

When harmful breaks occur on strands of DNA, they don’t die; they are instead repaired and given new life. Damaged DNA is removed and then resynthesized. The technical name for this repair mechanism is Homologous recombination, but in spiritual terms it’s called grace.

Homologous recombination is just one of many cellular mechanisms that demonstrate that forgiveness isn’t just an ethereal concept that occurs in our spiritual “hearts,” forgiveness is hardwired into our cells. The process of death and resurrection plays itself out millions of times each hour within the biomolecular systems of the body.

The resilience of the body demonstrates God’s grace; the complexity of the body demonstrates his creativity; and the quality control systems that govern cell reproduction demonstrate his reliability.

Indeed, the designer can be known by the design.

The Body as a Symbol

Just as the physiological processes that govern bodily function have much to teach us about God, so also does the symbolic nature of the body. In his book Reclaiming the Body in Christian Spirituality, Father Thomas Ryan wrote about the spiritual significance of male circumcision:

In Jewish mystical practice the covering of the phallus with foreskin symbolized humanity’s tendency to cover over or to forget that our origins are in the loins of God. Thus the foreskin of the male child is cut away from the phallus, “and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you” (Gen 17:11).26

The penis as a symbol of being in covenant with the living God? What a far cry this is from the way most Christian men view their penises! Through circumcision, the penis actually becomes a prayer. J. Phillip Newell wrote:

At different points in Christian history, if there had been a religious ritual in relation to the male genitals, it might well have taken the form not of circumcision, but of emasculation. Again and again the Christian tradition has failed to make a profound connection between our spirituality and our humanity, between the mystery of God on the one hand, and the mystery of the human body on the other.27

As a static participant in our sexual sin, the penis often makes us men feel “unholy.” It is usually excluded from our spiritual life. Yet, realizing how often my penis is involved in sin reminds me that I need to pray over it at least as often as I pray over the other parts of my body. I also do this because I need to be reminded that my genitals, just like the rest of me, were crafted by God.

Christian blogger Ethan Renoe wrote:

One of my theology professors would always say we postmodern people do theology like this: And then he would crouch and cover up his crotch, like an embarrassed child who had jumped out of the bath and been caught by the babysitter. We will talk about God in relation to anything but our genitals.28

Minister David Hatton points out the symbolism of the female body: “The woman’s body has breasts for a physical reason: to feed babies; but also for a spiritual reason: to display our Maker’s own nurturing nature (Isaiah 66:11,13).”29

In his book The Names of God, Nathan Stone makes a relevant observation about the Hebrew root of the name El Shaddai:

It is quite likely that there is some connection between the name Shaddai and the root from which some modern scholars think it is derived, but in view of the circumstances under which it is often used and in view of the translation of another word almost exactly like it, we believe it has another derivation and a more significant meaning than that of special power. Shaddai itself occurs forty-eight times in the Old Testament and is translated “almighty.” The other word so like it, and from which we believe it to be derived, occurs twenty-four times and is translated “breast.” As connected with the word breast, the title Shaddai signifies one who nourishes, supplies, satisfies. Connected with the word for God, El, it then becomes the “One mighty to nourish, satisfy, supply.” Naturally with God the idea would be intensified, and it comes to mean the One who “sheds forth” and “pours” out sustenance and blessing. In this sense, then, God is the all-sufficient, the all-bountiful.30

Stone goes on to provide an example:

Jacob upon his deathbed, blessing his sons and forecasting their future, says in Genesis 49:24–25, concerning Joseph: “His strong arms stayed limber, because of the hand of the Mighty One of Jacob . . . because of your father’s God [El], who helps you, because of the Almighty [Shaddai], who blesses you with blessings of the heavens above, blessings of the deep that lies below, blessings of the breast and womb.” The distinction and significance of names here is quite striking and obvious. It is God as El who helps, but it is God as Shaddai who abundantly blesses with all manner of blessings, and blessings of the breast . . . The point is that the word translated “breast” in these passages is the Hebrew shad from which is derived Shaddai, the name of God translated “almighty” in our Bibles.31

Affirming the symbolic intention of the female breast, the prophet Isaiah had this to say about Israel’s future restoration:

Whereas you have been forsaken and hated, So that no one went through you, I will make you an eternal excellence, a joy of many generations. You shall drink the milk of the Gentiles, and milk the breast of kings; you shall know that I, the Lord, am your Savior and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.32

Isaiah goes on to call upon the people to stop mourning Jerusalem, but instead rejoice in its’ redemption:

That you may feed and be satisfied with the consolation of her bosom,

That you may drink deeply and be delighted with the abundance of her glory.

For thus says the Lord: “Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river,

And the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream. Then you shall feed;

On her sides shall you be carried, and be dandled on her knees. As one whom his mother comforts, So I will comfort you; and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.33

Even the Apostle Peter instructs, “as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious.”34

All this spiritual inference about the body, and I haven’t even started talking about sex yet.