JESUS' RESURRECTION BODY

'Once incarnate, always incarnate, we might say...'
Wesley Hill, Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus, p.85.

THE CHRISTIAN AS A HOLY OBJECT

'...If you wish to boast of a holy object, why do you not praise the holy object that Jesus Christ, God's Son, has touched with His own body? What does He touch? My living and dying; my walking, standing; my suffering, misfortune, and trials - all of which He experienced, bore, and passed through.'

Martin Luther in John W Kleinig, Wonderfully Made, p.68.

AN UNSHAKABLE CONVICTION

'...if I were trapped in that cage again nothing would keep me from my goal, however fearful its prospects, however hopeless the odds, I would search the earth for surgeons, I would bribe barbers or abortionists, I would take a knife and do it myself, without fear, without qualms, without a second thought.' 

Jan Morris, Conundrum, p.142. 

BODILY PRESENCE MATTERS

'The believer feels no shame, as though he were still living too much in the flesh, when he yearns for the physical presence of other Christians. Man was created a body, the Son of God appeared on earth in the body, he was raised in the body, in the sacrament receives the Lord Jesus in the body, and the resurrection of the dead will bring about the perfected fellowship of God's spiritual-physical creatures. The believer therefore lauds the Creator, the Redeemer, God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for the bodily presence of a brother.' 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p.9. 

DEEPER SPIRITUALITY

'If we accept Paul's view of "spiritual", as that which pertains to the Spirit of God, then such a view includes our bodies, since God's Spirit gives life to them. This challenges us to think again about what we count as "spirituality." It certainly suggests that we should include physical well-being under the heading of spirituality. Taking time to care for our bodies is a spiritual discipline and needs to be placed alongside prayer and worship in our thoughts about spirituality: sleep, exercise, pampering in a spa, having a well-cooked meal with friends are all part of spirituality and we should take care to ensure we do them regularly. They are not an indulgence, they are life giving.

It might also mean that we learn to listen to our bodies in order to discover the state of our spiritual well-being. Extreme exhaustion or regular illness may have nothing to do with our spiritual well-being but they might do. Taking the time to listen to our bodies, to feel how they really are in more than a merely cursory way might tell us something important about our life with God in the Spirit.' 

Paula Gooder, Body, p.129.

GOD'S SPIRIT IS NOT AN OPTIONAL EXTRA

'...we cannot see the Spirit as an additional extra to our life that we engage with if we feel like it; the Spirit is vital to the very breath of the Church and the gifts of the Spirit are the means by which the body breathes full life-giving breaths. More importantly, without the gifts of the Spirit, the Church pants for breath and struggles to function as it should. The body of Christ, just like each one of our bodies, needs the Spirit to live.'

Paula Gooder, Body, p.128. 

CHRISTIAN IDENTITY IS A CORPORATE IDENTITY

'One of the reasons why Christianity struggles to find a natural home in the modern Western world is because Christianity is underpinned by an understanding of corporate identity, in which who you really are can only be understood together rather than apart. The Western world has departed so far from this understanding of identity that this crucial piece of theology appears irrelevant and arcane. The challenge is that it may appear to be irrelevant but it is not. There remains much for us to understand about ourselves and our communities in the view that we are bound together in Christ, but it is something we must become better at expressing, both in word and deed. True lived community in which our identity is embedded in Christ-like love is the most valuable gift we can offer a world fractured by suspicion and loneliness, but it only works if we believe it and live it ourselves.' 

Paula Gooder, Body, p.109. 

THE MUSIC OF 1 CORINTHIANS

'...much of 1 Corinthians is a fugue on the body. In music a fugue is a composition in which a theme is introduced, imitated, in different ways and with different instruments, before being recapitulated one or more times. In other words it plays with a theme, developing it, leaving it silent for a while and then bringing it back in a recognizable but slightly different form.' 

Paula Gooder, Body, p.107. 

PAUL'S THEOLOGY OF THE BODY

'...in Paul, bodies are to be found in both the old age and the age to come, in the old creation and in the new creation. There is, then, simply no room in Paul's theology for bodies to be automatically and universally evil. Bodies per se are not evil, imprisoning or corrupting, there are the gift of God to be cherished and nurtured.' 

Paula Gooder, Body, p.46. 

SOUL-MAKING

'Soul-making implies a deliberate intention on our part to pay attention to who we are called to be and to seek regular refreshment so that we can grow more and more into the people God yearns for us to be. There is and should be an emphasis on the regularity of this refreshment. Just as we cannot give up breathing, so we should not give up deliberate and intentional soul-making.

This soul-making is something that includes our bodies - that active seeking out of refreshment that animates us and brings new life only makes sense if it includes our bodies as well as "inner" beings. Intentional soul-making involves paying attention to those events, activities, and relationships that animate us and seeking to engage in something that brings life to as many aspects of our being as possible, as regularly as possible. Then we will begin to see that we are not "just" keeping body and soul together but living out of a richly animated, integrated existence that brings life and refreshment.' 

Paula Gooder, Body: Biblical spirituality for the whole person, p.42. 

THE BODILY INCARNATION

'One of the central Christian doctrines, the incarnation, is itself an endorsement of our sexual humanity. For Jesus had a body, Jesus was a body. Jesus touched the bodies of others, the disease-ridden and deformed as well as the beautiful. He was kissed, stroked, and anointed in return, even by a woman of doubtful sexual reputation. Jesus' body needed food, drink, sleep, comfort and exercise, and when he washed or swam he was probably naked. Nothing could be more convincing of ultimate honor of human sinews, skin and bone than the reality of Emmanuel, God bodily with us.' 

Elaine Storkey, The Search for Intimacy, p.192. 

JESUS & WOMEN

'The depth and breadth of the robust embodiment with which Jesus related to women in highly significant for cultures obsessed with sex. The Gospel stories offer a rich embodied distinction between sex and sexuality. These stories highlight Jesus' freedom and authority to live and practice an enfleshed, physical, concrete, nonromantic nearness with women in a culture that had no place to put such physical nearness and touch with one's female neighbor.' 

Dan Brennan, Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions, p.120. 

SOME GOOD QUESTIONS

'What would our marriages, our friendships, our churches, and our communities look like if men and women were not afraid of connecting with each other in deep ways? What if men and women could really know each other without sex getting in the way? What if we did not have to be so afraid of own own and other's bodies that we cannot trust ourselves with them?' 

Dan Brennan, Sacred Unions,. Sacred Passions: Engaging the Mystery of Friendship Between Men and Women, p.17. 

CALVIN THE CHARISMATIC

'We are cold when it comes to rejoicing in God! Hence, we need to exercise ourselves in it and employ all our senses in it - our feet, our hands, our arms and all the rest - that they all might serve in the worship of God and so magnify him.' 

John Calvin in Beldon C Lane, Ravished by Beauty, p.69 

THE VALUE OF OUR BODIES

'If indeed the flesh possesses no useful function, why did Christ heal it?' 

Justin Martyr in Charlie Cleverly, The Song of Songs, p.222.  

INCARNATION, RESURRECTION & CREATION

'The incarnation and resurrection are the ultimate affirmation of creation.'

Craig G Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, p.245. 

WHAT THE INCARNATION SAYS ABOUT CREATION

'...like as when a great king has entered into such large city and taken up his abode in one of the houses there, such city is at all events held worth of high honour, nor does any enemy or bandit any longer descend upon it and subject it; but, on the contrary, it is though entitled to all care, because of the king's having taken up his residence in a single home there: so, too, has it been with the Monarch of all.' 

Athanasius in Craig G Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, p.241. 

WHY BODIES MATTER

'It is my body that separates me in space from other men and that presents me as a man to other men.' 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Craig G Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, p.213. 

WHY BODIES MATTER

'For if the flesh were not in a position to be saved, the Word of God would in no wise have become flesh.' 

Irenaeus in Craig G Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, p.195. 

THE BLASPHEMY OF IGNORING THE PHYSICAL

'The dominant religious view, for a long time, has been that the body is a kind of scrip issued by the Great Company Store in the Sky, which can be cashed in to redeem the soul but is otherwise worthless. And the predictable result has been a human creature able to appreciate or tolerate only the "spiritual" (or mental) part of Creation and full of semiconscious hatred of the "physical" or "natural" part, which is ready and willing to destroy for "salvation," for profit, for "victory," or for fun. This madness constitutes the norm of modern humanity and of modern Christianity. 

But to despise the body or mistreat it for the sake of the "soul" is not just to burn one's house for the insurance, nor is it just self-hatred of the most deep and dangerous sort. It is yet another blasphemy. It is to make nothing - and worse than nothing - of the great Something in which we live and move and have our being.'

Wendell Berry, 'Christianity and the Survival of Creation' in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, p.107.