What God Has to Say about Our Bodies
What God Has to Say about Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves
By: Sam Allberry
“Because we live in a created world, our bodies are a gift. But because we live in a fallen world, they might not be the gift we would have wanted.”
Are you thankful for your body?
Maybe our knee-jerk reaction is yes, but it’s a tricky question when we’re really honest with ourselves.
We all have parts of our bodies that we wish looked or functioned a little differently. Our bodies can cause us a lot of pain— physically or emotionally. They can be the source of shame or ongoing struggle. Our bodies have certain limitations, some more than others.
I think we can all agree that our bodies are not perfect in every way.
So, how then, should we view the body?
Something to be escaped? Something to be perfected? Something to be ignored?
Worthless? Pointless?
A hindrance? A trophy?
Sam Allberry has written this fantastic book sharing with us what God says about our bodies, helping us understand this necessary but at times uncomfortable thing. It is thoughtful, gospel-oriented and very pertinent to today.
To start- our bodies are not inconsequential.
Our bodies matter and what we do with our bodies matters.
Paul Tripp sums up the book pretty well in his foreword to this book:
“Your body––my body––is not just there, happening to exist. It means something to God. He knows it. He made it. He cares about it. And all that Christ has done in his death and resurrection is not in order for us one day to escape our body, but for him one day to redeem it.”
Allberry has appropriately split his book into three parts:
- Created Bodies (why our bodies are good)
- Broken Bodies (how our bodies feel bad)
- Redeemed Bodies (when/how our bodies will be perfected)
He broaches many topics in discussing our bodies including gender, identity, sex, self-harm, illness, aging, death, disability, dysphoria, and empathy. And he does it all gently, with both compassion and conviction. I believe his primary goal in this book is to lay out how important and purposeful our bodies are, how they can be used to glorify God, and how we have hope that all things will be made right.
We can think too little of our bodies, believing we can do whatever we want with them because it doesn’t matter. Or we can think too much of them, believing our worth and identity is wrapped up in our bodies’ appearances and capabilities.
But to think biblically about our bodies we must recognize that what God has created is good and so our bodies matter. Further, our bodies are broken and we need redemption. And so we live in this tension between two gardens— Eden before sin corrupted bringing pain and brokenness and Eden restored where we will finally walk unblemished with our Lord. We yearn for rightness but we must wrestle with wrongness until we are redeemed.
One of the more controversial claims of this book (though rooted in Scripture) is how gender and identity is shaped by our bodies, especially in terms of gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender roles. I venture to guess that his discussion of this might be a driving factor in your opinion of this book. It is not the primary focus of the book in message or in page real estate but let’s go ahead and address the elephant in the room.
Increasingly, our culture is separating our identity from our bodies. A body is merely the transportation or casing for our ‘selves’ or ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ or what have you. It cannot tell us anything about who we are and is a blank canvas on which we paint the version of ourselves that we feel is best. But is this thinking right?
“Theologian Tom Wright puts it this way: ‘The great controlling myth of our time has been the belief that within each one of us there is a real, inner, private “self,” long buried beneath layers of socialization and attempted cultural and religious control, and needing to be rediscovered if we are to live authentic lives.’”
Carl Trueman explores this in-depth in his must-read book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which tracks the historical influences that have led to the shift in how we view the self and how that change interacts with our culture. He says,
“Satisfaction and meaning—authenticity—are now found by an inward turn, and the culture is reconfigured to this end. Indeed, it must now serve the purpose of meeting my psychological needs; I must not tailor my psychological needs to the nature of society, for that would create anxiety and make me inauthentic… The era of psychological man therefore requires changes in the culture and its institutions, practices, and beliefs that affect everyone. They all need to adapt to reflect a therapeutic mentality that focuses on the psychological well-being of the individual.”
‘Authenticity’ is the mark of fulfillment. If our bodies don’t ‘match’ our authentic selves in appearance or practice, we must do what it takes to be in harmony with our ‘true self’ and that is deemed celebratory.
Allberry points out the shift in cultural and moral values that tags along with this concept:
“In our culture, the hero today is not the person who risks his body for the sake of others, but the person who lays aside anything and anyone for the sake of being authentic. We most esteem not self-sacrifice, but self-expression.”
Self-expression elevated over self-sacrifice and at the expense of our given biological bodies is a rejection of God’s design and his example in Jesus Christ. We are taking what the Creator made and deemed “very good” in Genesis and are telling Him, ‘No, you didn’t do this right. I know better than you.’
“…[but] if we have been created, then our body is not some arbitrary lump of matter. It means something. It is not peripheral to our understanding of who we are. For all the difficulties you may have with it, it is the body God wanted you to have.”
This can be a hard thing to bear. We’ve already established that our bodies can cause us physical and emotional pain. But we can be comforted that the bodies we were given are not worthless, pointless, or wrong. They are loved, purposed, and good.
“We’re not just the outcome of God’s activity; we are the product of God’s intention.”
And yet, we do experience brokenness. When sin entered the world, it affected our bodies. We get sick, we get hurt, we get old, we die. Our bodies don’t look or feel the way we want them to. Further, our bodies also experience pain that is caused by the sins of other bodies. This speaks to our inability to separate our bodies from our 'selves.’
“However much we might privilege the mind or soul over the body as the “real” us, we know deep down that the body is an essential part of who we truly are. When people hurt your body, you know that they have not just damaged some of your property; they have violated you. What you do to someone’s body, you do to a person.”
We cannot deny our God-given biological gender as it pertains to who we are and who God designed us to be.
To the question of gender roles, Allberry critiques the church for adding to Scripture by trying to define exactly what it means to be masculine or feminine too specifically. This is a long excerpt, but essential:
“We each have our own deep sense of what constitutes true masculinity and femininity, and we can all too easily assume that sense has come from the Bible, especially if we’re holding it in contrast to what a wider, secular culture around us might be saying. But what seems obvious and instinctive to us about the nature of men and women might reflect our own cultural prejudices more than what the Bible actually says…
…we must be careful about saying that all men or all women should be this way or that way, or that men should be interested in these things and women in those things. More often than not, we will not find these views in the Bible…
…And while we mustn’t overdefine what these differences are, neither must we deny they exist at all. This is especially important given that it is increasingly common to think that being equal must mean being the same in every respect––that equality cannot properly exist where there is any kind of difference.”
There is more to be said on this, and I would suggest Men and Women in the Church as a good starting place or a(typical) Woman if you’re a woman. (I’ll be reading more on this topic so check back regularly on my blog for more content).
But the main point on gender roles/differences is that, as Allberry says, men and women aren’t meant to be interchangeable. For example, there are differences in appearance and demeanor between men and women. God has designed us to be equal yet different in function.
There are some traits or tendencies that more typify men than women and vice versa. He gives the example of men being quarrelsome (1 Tim. 2:8) and emphasizes that it doesn’t mean we view this statement: “universally (all men, without exception), absolutely (all men to the same extent, with no variation), or exclusively (only men, as if women couldn’t be quarrelsome), but generally, typically.”
He reminds us that as men and women, we exhibit the fruits of the Spirit in “differing proportions between the sexes and within them.” We are not assigned 4 or 5 because we are women and the other ones get to be for the men.
Men and women both pursue godliness, and we must use wisdom when we teach how this is exhibited differently— as to not add nor take away from what the Bible tells us or prescribe where we merely see patterns.
[One thing I’ll add here: I wish Allberry would have addressed in this book the prevalent idea in the Western world that women’s bodies are empowering. He doesn’t talk at all about modesty, which gets tricky considering cultural differences, but this idea that if women reveal their bodies or use them in certain ways that it is empowering to women baffles me— I believe this idea to be damaging rather than empowering and I think it would have been beneficial to include in this book about our bodies.]
To the question of gender dysphoria- it is real. And I can’t imagine how it feels to feel like you’ve been assigned the wrong biological gender. It is not something we should sweep under the rug, shame, or gloss over with platitudes. There are really hard struggles with our bodies, like gender dysphoria, that may or may not get easier. That is a heavy weight to bear.
We don’t really have the answer to the question ‘why?’ but we are shown time and again in Scripture that Jesus sees you and he desires you to bring your bodily burden to him for rest.
I love the truth that Tim and Kathy Keller share with us about dysphoria: “To have your feelings sharply out of accord with your body is a life-dominating grief. As Christians, we of all people should be able to show understanding and compassion, knowing how the fall has twisted what God pronounced “good” when he made humanity into a binary-gendered reflection of his nature.”
When Jesus took on flesh “it was the ultimate experience of being in the wrong flesh. There was no greater dysphoria ever experienced. And he went through all of that for us… Only through being in Christ’s body—through the change in identity that comes from being a child in his family—does anyone find ultimate relief from their sense of dislocation in the world.”
There are burdens God has asked us to carry— physically and emotionally— with our broken bodies. But he has not asked us to do it alone. He beckons us to come to him and trust him with these burdens. We can trust him with our bodies—after all, he made them!
Katherine Elizabeth Clark, who experienced her own story of a broken body, says this in her book, Where I End, as she challenges us to stop asking ‘why?’ and instead ask ‘to what end?’:
“The question ‘To what end?’ however, turns our hearts back to our kindhearted Father who bids us come, to trust in Him, to rest in His promise that though sadness and grief, pain and hardship are ever with us now, He sees and is all the time working powerfully toward ends that are good, ends that are more beautiful and impossible than we could ever imagine… Rather than take the position of accuser, which leads us to discouragement and despair, we must set our eyes on Jesus and the ends for which He calls us.”
Again, I’ve focused on gender identity in my review of this book, but Allberry covers so much more. I wanted to also share what Allberry talks about in terms of how we, then, use our body to worship the Lord.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 says—”Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is a place of pilgrimage for Jews to go and mourn the loss of their temple, God’s dwelling place. But the Bible tells us our bodies are now temples because God has chosen to give us His Spirit to dwell within us. That is significant! We did nothing to earn this, but it is a gift. One that came at great cost. We don’t like the idea of ‘being bought’ but in this context it means freedom, dignity, and worth. Jesus died for us and to belong to him is a blessing.
So when Paul says in Romans 6:12-13…
“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.”
…we understand that to glorify God with our bodies means we turn away from sin. We don’t use our bodies (meaning all of ourselves) to sin. And we willingly do this out of love and gratitude for the unmerited grace and gift of life he has given us. Not to earn his love but because he loved us first.
Allberry goes through three ways shown in the New Testament of how we can honor God with our bodies: stewarding, consecrating, and disciplining them.
This includes mention of the expected sins that we need to avoid, but he also talks about food, sleep, self-harm, our words, and our posture in prayer. I think we often reduce our bodies’ sinfulness to sexual sin because it gets the most publicity but there are many other ways that we use or treat our bodies against God’s design.
“…we do have bodily wants and desires that need to be constantly resisted if we are to move forward with Christ. If we go with our physical instincts, without questioning and resisting them, we will drift away from the prize. Paul’s final words here are a sober warning: ‘I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.’ (1 Cor. 9:27)”
And of course,
I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up hope!
God is in the business of redemption.
We endure the bodily burdens we have. We push through the pain of our broken, disappointing, and hurting bodies. And we rejoice because God has promised to make all things right. If we are in Christ, we will be given new, glorified bodies.
“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:20)
Jesus was resurrected in bodily form and so will we. Just like a seed buried in dark soil dies in order to grow new life, we too will die an earthly death, be buried, and will rise to new life. “…growth can only happen because the plant first dies. Leaving the seed in its packaging leads to nothing. It has to die first.”
“Death used to be an executioner, but the Gospel makes him just a gardener.”— poet George Herbert
So yes, we can and should be thankful for our bodies, created with love and purposed for godly worship.
Our life on earth is not our best life; the best is yet to come. But that doesn’t render our life or body useless. We wait patiently and confidently knowing our bodily struggles will not be in vain. God will redeem our hearts, minds, souls, and bodies.
And this is, indeed, good news!
Some other quotes:
“Ultimately the pains and struggles we experience in our bodies are not a sign that our bodies have no value but that God hasn’t finished with them yet.”
“Color-blindness is not uncommon—you may in fact experience it… But just because some struggle to distinguish red from green doesn’t mean that the colors red and green do not actually exist. They clearly do. They are objective realities. [like binary genders] That some confuse one for the other does not change that. In fact, when we drive, our lives depend on the fact these two colors really do exist and are not subjectively determined.”
“We are not meant to be interchangeable, so that all one can do, the other must also do in exactly the same way. It is not always helpful to compare one with another, as though we are pitted against each other in a zero sum competition. G. K. Chesterton hits the nail on the head in this short poem: ‘If I set the sun beside the moon, And if I set the land beside the sea, And if I set the town beside the country, And if I set the man beside the woman, I suppose some fool would talk about one being better.’”
“A definition of maleness and femaleness that makes no reference to our physical bodies cannot be biblical.”
“Marriage is grounded on the union of two sexually different people. So however much sin has spoiled our understanding and experience of being male and female, it hasn’t obliterated the distinction between the two sexes.”
“Today we all collude in upholding an expectation of beauty that is virtually fantastical. No wonder we view our bodies as increasingly flawed. We’re not comparing them to the best of our species but to the best of our species’ imagination.”
“When we disparage people because of the way they are physically, we are not just disparaging them; we are disparaging the God in whose image they have been carefully made.”
“Sin is not just wrong in some abstract sense. It is wrong in that it contradicts how God has meant us to live. Not every sin is directly and immediately harmful in a way that is obvious to all. Many sins are more subtle. But they can set us on a course that we might never have intended to go, and now we’re doing things we never imagined doing and find ourselves feeling powerless to stop doing.”
“[Jesus] knows what it is to be thirsty, hungry, despised, rejected, scorned, shamed, embarrassed, abandoned, misunderstood, falsely accused, suffocated, tortured, and killed. He knows what it is to be lonely.”— Dane Ortlund
Books that he quoted in this book:
Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund
The Hole in Our Holiness by Kevin DeYoung
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
The Meaning of Marriage by Tim and Kathy Keller
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
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