Bodies, are they saved? Will they ever be? Does it matter anyway? Most of us reading this have heard a saying that we are spirits with souls that live in bodies.
Does that statement not seem to drip with disdain for dust? And honestly, have you ever wondered from where such a thought stems?
To answer this last question we must travel back in time, to Plato and Socrates, two great 5th-century Greek philosophers.
Socrates (in his discourse with Simmias that is scripted by his student Plato in Phaedo) insisted that logic and experience inevitably lead us to conclude that souls existed from eternity. Accordingly, a soul enters the human body at birth and will escape it back into eternity at death.
Plato posited a sphere of the universals that exists beyond this physical planet. This is the immaterial/spiritual realm of the gods to which those who purify themselves would return upon death. Death, dreaded by fleshy mortals, is an escape from the body for the sages like Socrates.
Accordingly, only the realm of the universals is real and good, the rest is illusory and misleading.
In this framework, bodies are at best prison cells and, at worst, sworn enemies of souls. This dualistic division of man into good and not-so-good departments has had far-reaching consequences than we can conceive.
By the time of the New Testament, it was a given in Greek thought that matter, as a matter of fact, is evil. Salvation is an escape from shapes. Thus, Paul’s address at the Areopagus went well as long as he spoke of God’s immaterial existence. But they mocked him the moment he mentioned Christ’s bodily resurrection (Acts 17:32)!
Meanwhile, John the Evangelist battled this sort of heresy in the church (1 John 4:1-6). Docetists, whom John calls ‘anti-Christs,’ denied that God, in Christ, donned flesh. Docetism, from the Greek dokesis, means “appearance” or “semblance.”
Docetists insisted that Jesus’ humanity was a mere semblance, a mirage. Apparently, God, the ultimate good (who dwells in the realm of the universals), could never identify with a material form as to be united to it, for material existence is beneath Him.
Marcion and the Gnostics will later emphasize this thinking to the point of postulating a different god for the Old Testament, the ‘wicked’ creator of this material existence which they considered evil.
In a sense, the distaste for matter will play a role in the Roman Catholic’s decision to bar its priests from marriage, as well as the early ascetic monastic movements.
Docetism and the Early Church
It is in this environment that we must view the incarnation of God the Son. Incarnation refers to God becoming Man in Christ.
The early Church, aware of the dominant disdain for the body, insisted that Christ was in truth God in flesh. These Church Fathers saw an inextricable link between Christ’s true humanity and the redemption of all things, visible and invisible.
For them, all Christological conceptions have soteriological ramifications. To deny that Christ was human in every way, including having a body, was to deny that He can save us as we are, with our bodies.
Docetism did not see Christ as God-Man. They couldn’t believe that in Christ, God came down for our salvation. To them, Christ was one of the ‘eons’ (emanations from the ultimate good, ‘The One’) who descended to trailblaze the way for us to transcend towards God by following His example.
In this framework, Christ is our big brother who blows open the route back to God.
But for the early Church, unless Christ is both God and Man, united in one Person, there is no salvation. And they defined salvation as communion in the trinitarian life of God. To save us as we are— physical beings— it matters that God is joined to matter.
If salvation was only for our spirits/souls, God would not have needed to be born of a woman. A god who only emphasises spiritual existence would not need to bodily appear among men.
Indeed, the Church rejected a half-incarnation because man is not half. Man is a unity of the material and immaterial— an ensouled body or an embodied soul. His material body is not immaterial, for a bodiless soul/spirit is incomplete— subhuman.
Modern Docetism
This sort of thinking is prevalent in our modern days. Try to think of ways and teachings that tend to demean the body and consider it as less important. Consider, for example, the statement we started with, that ‘man is a spirit, has a soul, and lives in a body.’
That ideology does away with the work of Christ. It also creates a division and hierarchy within man’s perceived constitution and is built on the Docetic deception that matter is less significant and an encumbrance to an encounter with God.
Close to home, consider the teaching by Grace Lubega of Phaneroo in His Depths and Heights:
You can never have an experience of the presence of almighty God until you are absent from the body.
‘Absent from the body’ he clarifies, is not just about death. He refers to ‘out of body’ experiences. Elsewhere in You are More than a Vessel devotional he writes:
We have treasure in earthen vessels, however, we are not the vessels. Like you have a body, you are not your body. The union between you and God could not have been possible if He was uniting with merely a vessel. He did not shed His blood for a vessel.
Surely such is not so. He did shed His blood for a vessel! “Do you not know,” asks Paul, “that your bodies are members of Christ?” Notice how Scripture insists that the body, not the ‘spirit’, is where God dwells. And again,
do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore, glorify God in your body. (See 1 Cor 6:12-20)
For Paul, our bodies were bought by Christ and belong to Him. Which is why Paul insists that our bodily actions reflect our spiritual state. We cannot, for instance, live in sexual impurity without in a sense joining Christ to a harlot! (1 Cor 6:15).
To be sure, our bodies have not yet been fully redeemed. That will take place in the future resurrection. Yet, even now, Paul does not see the body as a hindrance to experiencing the presence of God, but as the very habitation of the Spirit of God. Of all places, God dwells in our bodies!
What drives Grace Lubega to this conclusion is that he, like Socrates and Docetism, believes that the human soul/spirit existed in eternity before entering this body, which makes the body the spirit/soul’s prison.
In his devotion Predestination (July 28, 2017) he states:
As a child of God, you existed in eternity, live for a particular time span on the earth, and will return to eternity.
Compare this with Socrates’ statement to Simmias in Plato’s Phaedo:
Then Simmias, our souls existed formerly, apart from our bodies, and possessed intelligence before they came into man’s shape.
But also, as we saw with Docetism, Lubega views Christ as an example, our ‘big brother’ who trailblazes the way for us upwards. He says in The Man from Above:
The superstar (Jesus) returned above, and the moment he reached heaven, he said ‘Apostle Grace, go down on earth and show them.’ I came the day I got Born Again. The moment I entered the tabernacle, the angels told me, ‘welcome to the world of men.’ I am not ordinary. I am from above.
That statement alone has many misconceptions that I may not unpack here and now. We will return to it in my next article.
Why Matter Matters
We must see the significance of the human body in the Bible’s insistence that it was in and through the body that the redemption of all things was accomplished. Matter matters because in it and through it, we are saved.
When God sought to save all things, He became fully human with a body. The ‘Word became flesh’ (John 1:14). Notice how the whole perfect human life of the Son of God was summarized in one word— flesh!
It was in His body, the physical body of God the Son, that God abolished death (Rom 8:3).
As a result, our union with God happens when we are united to the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:13). Not only this but also the ultimate Christian hope is the resurrection of our physical bodies (1 Cor 15).
All this shows that material existence is not immaterial to God. God, who is Spirit, paid the highest compliment to the human body by being united to it forever. Therefore, to disdain your body is to despise God.
If God insists that matter ultimately matters, then our view of His physical creation reveals our love for Him who made it.
For more reading, please see John Piper’s Article here.