You are not a soul trapped in a leftover body.
That sentence is the door. Sit with it before we climb. A great deal of religious talk treats the body as a problem to be endured until the real you escapes. Scripture will not let you live there. “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The dust was not a regret. The dust was a gift. The Word did not become an idea. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Flesh. Dwelt. Among us.
If you have been taught that the body is the sinner, you have been taught too little, and in the wrong place. The body is not the sinner. The person sins. When you lie, it is not your mouth acting as a separate villain. When you lust, it is not your eyes on trial while you, the “real you,” watch from a safe inner balcony. You sin. That is more severe than blaming the flesh as flesh, and it is more hopeful, because the gospel does not offer to extract a spark from a ruined machine. It offers to heal a man.
Augustine drew that line against the old habit of blaming the body for what the will has done. “It was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful, but the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible” (City of God 14.3). Sin lives in the will. The body’s present weakness is not the first cause; it is among the wounds. The devil, Augustine notes in the same chapter, has no flesh and is still proud. So you cannot clear yourself by accusing your skin.
That leftover-body instinct is not new, and it did not start with bad preaching. Christopher Hall, walking readers through Irenaeus, points out that Irenaeus formed his whole insistence on the goodness of creation in a fight with teaching “that denied the goodness of matter and found freedom only in an escape from the natural, created world” (Hall, Learning Theology with the Church Fathers, 129). Irenaeus had heard your story before. He answered it with a question worth letting land on you: “How can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal, which [flesh] is nourished from the body and blood of the Lord, and is a member of Him?” (Against Heresies, quoted in Hall, 128). Salvation, Hall writes of Irenaeus, “is communicated to all that a human being is, soul and body” (128).
John Chrysostom will not let you treat the body as an enemy camp either. The flesh, he says, “is not contrary, or in opposition to it, or evil,” but is “placed beneath the soul as a harp beneath a harper, and as a ship under the pilot” (Homilies on Romans 13). A harp can be badly played. That does not make the harp wicked. A ship can be wrecked. That does not mean the ship was the storm. The person is the player. The person is the pilot. The whole man is the one who must come home.
Now we have to talk about Jesus, because Christian talk about the body is never first a wellness lecture. It is Christology. In the fourth century a teacher named Apollinaris wanted to protect the Lord’s divinity by giving Him a human body without a human mind. It sounded reverent. It was a shrinking. If the Son took bones and blood but not a rational soul, then the part of you that thinks, chooses, and loves was left outside the healing.
Gregory of Nazianzus would not have it. Writing to Cledonius around 382 AD, he said: “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” If only half of Adam fell, half would be enough. But if the whole of his nature fell, “it must be united to the whole nature of Him that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole” (Epistle 101). Keep the whole man. The Son assumed a complete human nature — body and rational soul — so that the whole man is healed. Not a costume. Not a body with God where the mind should be. One Person, truly God, truly man, mind included.
That is why later fights about how close the Word got to a womb and a death were never side issues. When Cyril of Alexandria argued the point in the fifth century, Hall says his rationale was not nitpicking but this: “we cannot be saved if the Word did not become what we are” (88). The Word did not rent a human shell. He assumed us. If He did not take what you are, He did not heal what you are.
Paul already prayed this way, without the later vocabulary. “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Completely. Spirit and soul and body. Not a soul smuggled out while the body is left on the curb. And he pleads with you, by the mercies of God, “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1). Bodies. Living. Acceptable. The altar is not an escape from flesh. It is flesh offered because flesh was assumed, and flesh will be raised. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Romans 8:11). Mortal bodies. His Spirit. The same Lord who assumed a body will not leave yours in the ground.
The Spirit still does that sanctifying work. He does not despise the creature He made. He does not baptize a secret inner spark and then ignore the hands, the mouth, the tired frame that will one day stand. Reformed people insist the work is God’s from first to last. Continuationist people insist He has not finished speaking to the whole man He indwells. Both hands belong on the same gift: you are a person, body and soul, and Christ did not save a fragment of you.
So put down the leftover-body story. You are not a ghost in a borrowed coat. You are a man, or a woman, made good, fallen in the will, assumed in the Son, and being sanctified through and through. Present the whole of you. He already has.
Do you treat your body as leftover — or as something the Son assumed, the Spirit is sanctifying, and the Father will raise?
NewGrapes Ministries. Making disciples, not pew-fillers. Soli Deo Gloria.
Sources
- Genesis 1:31; John 1:14; Romans 12:1; Romans 8:11; 1 Thessalonians 5:23
- Augustine, City of God 14.3 (NPNF 1.2, trans. Marcus Dods)
- John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 13 (NPNF 1.11)
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101, to Cledonius (NPNF 2.7, trans. Browne and Swallow), c. 382 AD — “that which He has not assumed He has not healed”
- Apollinaris of Laodicea (fourth century): denied that Christ assumed a rational human soul; named as the error Gregory is answering, not quoted
- Christopher A. Hall, Learning Theology with the Church Fathers (InterVarsity Press), 128–129 (Irenaeus on the goodness of matter; salvation of soul and body) and 88 (Cyril’s rationale)
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies, as quoted by Hall, 128
— ElCapitanGrok