How Your Body Became Secular

Chapter 2

How Your Body Became Secular

“But [the body is] for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” — 1 Corinthians 6:13

“You cannot devalue the body and value the soul or value anything else.” — Wendell Berry

I’m certainly not naturally athletic. While my dad played college football and my brother was a talented varsity pitcher, by some strange leap of genetics, I ended up almost six inches shorter than both and, much to my father’s confusion, couldn’t find a single sport for which I had any talent. I did play baseball, usually first base, the position with the lowest probability of actually having to throw the ball. But I couldn’t hit. When the time came for high school tryouts, I had enough self-awareness not to try.

It wasn’t any kind of crisis. I simply concluded that my talents were not physical. I assumed that physicality was a talent you either possessed or didn’t. If you can’t sing, you feel no pressure to sing. If you can’t hit a baseball or sink a jump shot, it’s easy to give up trying. I gave up on running, never really got into weightlifting, and certainly spent no time in the gym. I found my talents elsewhere and quickly gave up thinking about most physical pursuits.

It’s not that my body didn’t matter; I just felt no real obligation to think about it. Teenage hormones and youthful metabolism make up for an amazing amount of neglect. And feeling called to the ministry, there was absolutely no fitness test required to become a pastor. Increasingly, I focused my attention on what I thought was sacred, not what was physical.

I married my wife while in seminary. I was studying to preach, and she was finishing a nursing degree. We would often study together, she with her anatomy textbooks and me with my stack of biblical commentaries. Occasionally, we would quiz one another or volunteer to check each other’s flashcards. She couldn’t pronounce Greek or Hebrew, and I couldn’t pronounce the Latin common to her biology and medicine. While her interests were in anatomy, her nursing degree at a local Christian university required her also to take classes in Bible and Theology. Alternatively, I don’t remember a single conversation about human biology, anatomy, or nutrition from bible college through completing a doctoral degree in ministry. I was under no obligation to be interested in her studies, but how could she not be interested in mine? Interest in the soul is necessary for everyone. Interest in the body is a specialization that we’re happy to outsource to medical professionals and fitness influencers.

As a Christian, no one will fault you for not knowing your triceps from your traps, but you should know your eschatology from your ecclesiology. Most Christian men feel guilty for not knowing enough about the bible, not the body. Forced to decide between the two, I’m the first to acknowledge the Bible’s priority, but study the Bible thoroughly, and it won’t take you long to end up back at the topic of the body. The bible does not share our hard distinction between the body and the soul. This divide seems most pronounced amongst Protestants, where our emphasis on faith alone often takes our attention away from physical life. We begin to associate Christianity with the right theological affirmations and, if not careful, detach faith from how we actually live. How many Christian men carefully guard against the lusts of the heart but demonstrate little self-control at night in front of the fridge? One danger seems spiritually significant, the other mostly irrelevant to matters of faith.

There are real consequences to dividing our faith from our physicality. Our lack of Christian responsibility for the body is having a much greater impact on us than most recognize. What you think about your body has a way of revealing itself in your body. Your body often reflects your beliefs about it. Faith always becomes physical. Your faith shapes your habits, and your habits reveal your faith.

Having written extensively on habits, author James Clear concludes, “It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.” Nowhere is that truer than in your body. Your body becomes a reflection of what you believe about it. Sadly, the bodies of many Christian men often seem to suggest that we don’t really believe the body matters all that much.

When it comes to less visible qualities of health, like mental health, stress management, and addiction avoidance, Christians seem to fare well. Being a Christian makes you less likely to drink, smoke, or do drugs. Christians also tend to report higher levels of positive mental health and even report a 20% increased sense of life satisfaction. Researchers are increasingly positive about the role faith plays in overall well-being and significance. But things get more complicated when it comes to physical health and our bodies.

In 2013, the National Library of Medicine published the first longitudinal study to look at how religious practice impacts the long-term health and fitness of adherents. Over 2,000 men and women between the ages of twenty and thirty-two were followed for eighteen years. After controlling for factors such as the participant’s race, sex, income, and baseline body mass index, of those who attended religious services most often, thirty-two percent became obese by middle age. That’s compared to just twenty-two percent of those who attended church less frequently. The most religious were fifty-seven percent more likely to become obese than those with no religious participation. The findings led researcher Mathew Feinstein to conclude, “High frequency of religious participation was associated with a significantly greater incidence of obesity.”

Many have also made less scientific, but still intriguing, observations about Christian health. As an example, the states with the highest population of self-identifying Christians are Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Let’s call them our most Christian states. Forbes recently published a list of the sickest states based primarily on chronic disease. Mississippi ranked at number two, while Alabama and Louisiana landed at numbers six and seven. Seven of the top ten most Christian states are also on the top ten list for disease. When it comes to obesity, our most Christian states rank second, fourth, and fifth. For cancer, they rank first, ninth, and twelfth. Most concerning, Mississippi has the lowest life expectancy of any state. Louisiana and Alabama also rank third and fourth on that list. Are these lists connected? It’s hard to say, but the associations are striking.

What makes us sick is complicated. Income, genetics, food sources, traditions, and geography all play roles. I hear the voice of my high school statistics teacher reminding me that correlation, as compelling as it may appear, does not mean causation. Still, it’s hard to ignore what many have observed; being a Christian may not make you sick, but something about our Christian culture sure isn’t helping us be healthy. As one journalist concluded, “Church might be good for the soul, but it can be bad for one’s waistline.”

How is it possible that being a part of a church might be worsening your physical condition? If your theology deteriorates your health, maybe you’ve misunderstood what Christianity really says about your body. Maybe there is a deficiency in your theology, not just your diet.

The physical consequences of our neglect would be a good enough reason to read this book, but the consequences of our neglect are not just physical and not just impacting our own bodies. Failing to think theologically about our bodies has left us unable to answer many of our culture’s most pressing questions, and how we treat our bodies may even risk blunting the effectiveness of our Christian witness. Let me give you a few controversial examples.

The most pressing cultural questions we face today are, in fact, all questions about the body. Consider the question of pornography. Once a taboo, pornography has now become mainstream. Some even claim it as a form of empowerment. A person should be free to use their body for their own gain, and we assume that the impulses of physical desire are merely biological. Increasingly, what happens in the bedroom or the private tab of an internet browser is completely separated from what happens at church and in prayer. Too many men have given up integrating their faith into their sexual lives, accepting pornography as normal. But understanding the Christian view of sexuality first depends on a Christian view of the body.

The Christian sexual ethic is not opposed to pornography by arbitrary piety. Christians are not anti-sex nor unrealistic about biological impulses. The Christian sexual ethic makes a unique claim about the body, which is expressed in how Christians live sexually. While our culture objectifies and commercializes the body, Christians have long embraced a concept of human sexuality that seeks to give dignity to the physical body, recognizing it as a part of a person’s spiritual self. Sex involves the body, which cannot be separated from the soul. This is a topic we’ll need to return to in the coming chapters. But pornography is hardly the only cultural question related to the body.

Also consider our ongoing conversation about transgenderism. Our culture is convinced that there is a true and authentic self that is entirely separate from the body. A person must be willing to embrace their true self, even if it contradicts the body they are in. The body is reduced to nothing more than material, which can be indiscriminately reworked and changed.

Christians have struggled to articulate a compelling answer to transgender ideas, partly because too many Christians also live as if their bodies are of lesser value. If we neglect taking responsibility for our own bodies, how do we demand that others should take responsibility for theirs?

One more example: while most biologists now admit that life begins at conception, our culture has decided that a body is insufficient for conferring rights. Modern abortionists attempt to reframe the debate around personhood, which they detach from the unborn body. The abortion issue is fundamentally a question of the body's inherent value and how the body relates to the person. Therefore, the Christian objection to abortion also depends on a clear articulation of the body's inherent worth. We can’t rationally argue for the dignity of the unborn body while denigrating our own bodies.

Addressing each of these issues is beyond the scope of this book, but I hope you can see that what you think about your body impacts how you engage many of the most pressing issues of our day. The church has hardly been unified in responding to these issues. We haven’t recognized that the real issues are theological questions about physicality. Having thought so little about our own bodies, we’ve been caught unprepared for the questions of our culture. How can we take the questions seriously if we can’t take our own bodies seriously? And how did our faith end up mirroring the confusion of the culture? How did our bodies become separated from our faith?

How Our Bodies Became Secular

Writing in her book, Love Thy Body, author and philosopher Nancy Pearcey argues that we’ve embraced a two-tiered system of truth, what Francis Schaeffer called the upper and lower stories. We’ve divided our lives into sacred and secular, imagining the higher spiritual pursuits and values on the top floor and the mundane realities of the body and its facts on the lower. We’ve divided ourselves into two parts: our soul and our body. The soul resides in the sphere of faith, while the body resides in the sphere of science, medicine, and technology.

In its most basic form, it’s not hard to see how Christians divide their lives between sacred and secular. Church, prayer, and Bible reading are sacred, while our work, hobbies, and entertainment are secular. It’s increasingly true of our bodies as well. The body is secular while the soul is sacred.

As a pastor, people expect me to offer spiritual advice. I pray at events, lead weddings and funerals, and speak about the heart, faith, and sin. What does a pastor know about the body? That isn’t my field. Similarly, you expect your medical doctor to read test results and prescribe medication. Your doctor doesn’t speak of sin or the spirit. The doctor operates by fact and the pastor by moral principles. They have almost nothing to say to one another because we view their work as operating in two separate domains, as Schaeffer described them—separate floors of the building. Your soul belongs to the sacred space, and your body resides in the secular.

Our culture has adopted a similar split. There are two kinds of truth: facts, which are the domain of science, and values, which are left to individual conviction and preference. Our culture now sees the self as the highest truth and the material world as possessing no inherent moral value or order. So, the body is reduced to a material fact, and the inner self is elevated to the highest meaning. We bear no responsibility for the physical body; we only bear responsibility for the inner self and the pursuit of our own truth.

Explaining this divide, Pearcey writes:

The key to understanding all the controversial issues of our day is that the concept of the human being has likewise been fragmented into an upper and lower story. Secular thought today assumes a body/person split, with the body defined in the “fact” realm by empirical science (lower story) and the person defined in the “values” realm as the basis for rights (upper story). This dualism has created a fractured, fragmented view of the human being, in which the body is treated as separate from the authentic self.

Unfortunately, Christians have slipped into their own body and soul divide. Without realizing it, our theological disinterest in the body has paralleled the world’s devaluing of it. We’ve made ourselves inarticulate on the most pressing questions of our day. We may embrace Christianity with our minds, but when it comes to our bodies, we live out the world’s logic. Secular bodies mean bodies disconnected from the truth of God. Our bodies show no sign of our belief.

What we need is a theology that unites faith and physicality. We need a truly Christian perspective to help us think more deeply about our own bodies. We need a theology that will help us collapse these two stories and articulate to the world that in Christ, there is no sacred and secular, but all things, our bodies included, are being redeemed. Or as Charles Spurgeon wrote, “To a man who lives unto God nothing is secular, everything is sacred. He puts on his workday garment and it is a vestment to him. He sits down to his meal and it is a sacrament. To draw a hard and fast line and say, ‘This is sacred and this is secular,’ is, to my mind, diametrically opposed to the teaching of Christ and the spirit of the gospel.”

What I hope you’re beginning to recognize is that this book is about a lot more than just losing weight, getting in shape, or eating healthier. Though I believe this book will have a positive impact on your actual body, understanding how to treat your body as a Christian is about more than just your body. It’s also about your witness to the world. Nancy Pearcey puts it well in concluding, “Biblical morality asks us to be consistent in what we say with our bodies and what we say with the rest of our lives.” She concludes that Christians must learn “to tell the truth with our bodies.”

If Christianity values the body, then Christians should bear witness to that truth in valuing their own bodies. If the Christian faith is physical, then we must bear witness to it in our own physicality. How you care for your body is a witness to the relationship you have with the creator who gave you your body. That’s true in sickness and health. It’s true in the hard work and accomplishments you make in fitness, but it’s also true as your body faces sickness and death. We bear Christian responsibility for our bodies when they are working and also when they fail us. Both are opportunities to articulate a Christian theology of the body. The goal is not merely physique. Like all the talents we’ve been given, they are not always equal to others, but we are responsible for what is ours. Our bodies may never reach perfection, you may never end up on the cover of a fitness magazine, but you still bear responsibility.

You don’t need to bench press three plates or get a shredded six-pack to reflect the image of God. You won’t win people to Christ by your superior physique. But how you care for your body communicates what you think about your body. What you think about your body is deeply connected to what you think about the God who created it and the God who has promised to keep it for all eternity. And recognizing what the Bible teaches about the body is key to avoiding one of the church’s oldest and most prolific heresies, a heresy that is once again sabotaging the health and faith of many Christian men.

Gnosticism and Our Excarnation

The church has consistently faced a temptation to separate faith from physicality. It was one of the earliest heresies to disrupt the church. Ancient philosophers and then Christian teachers began to dismiss the role of the body, turning believers’ attention instead to a life of pure spiritual pursuit. They taught that the body did not matter since death would destroy it. The body was, in fact, a restraint on the soul that would one day be set free from the material world. The church gave this false teaching the name Gnosticism.

Less of a unified theology, Gnosticism represented a wide range of teachings, many of which seemed to have also existed in earlier Greek and Jewish thought. At its core was a skepticism and hostility toward the physical world, along with a preference for purely spiritual pursuits. Ancient philosophers had long debated what they called the mind-body problem. What is the relationship between the soul and the body? Many Greek philosophers adopted a dualistic view of the person, seeing the mind and body as fundamentally different substances. Many, including philosophers such as Plato, viewed the soul as eternal, while the body was seen as finite.

Plato ultimately described the body as a constraint and an obstacle to man’s higher pursuits of knowledge or truth. It became a common pun amongst these philosophers to compare the body, in Greek called the soma, to a tomb, sema. Their pun reduced the human body to a prison of the soul. In describing what he saw as the higher pursuits of men, Plato wrote in his Phaedo, “The philosopher more than other men frees the soul from association with the body as much as possible.” According to Plato, the mark of a true philosopher was a healthy skepticism about the body and all physical experience. Neglecting the body could even be a mark of spiritual superiority.

By the second century, these ideas had spread from Greek philosophy to a form of Gnosticism that had infiltrated the Christian church and begun to rework the message of Christ. The Gnostics derived their name from the Greek word gnosis, meaning "knowledge." They believed they possessed secret knowledge and were the true interpreters of Jesus’s life and teaching. The Gnostics taught that the god of creation was not the true or highest god, but a lower god who had wrongfully imprisoned souls in bodies and the physical world. For the Gnostics, the goal of spiritual knowledge was to liberate humanity from the body, allowing the pure soul to ascend to a higher reality. Salvation was reworked into a pursuit of self-knowledge and escape. Each person possessed an inner light, a sacred truth, to which they were responsible for cultivating and pursuing. The body was reduced to the enemy of that pure spiritual faith.

Jesus, having lived in an actual human body, posed a problem for the Gnostics and many Greek thinkers, so some Christian teachers began to teach that Jesus had only appeared to be human. The gnostic gospels often depict Jesus changing appearance and even age, having his spirit inhabit the form of various humans without ever actually reducing himself to real bodily flesh. In the Gnostic Acts of John, the disciples are surprised to find that Jesus leaves no footprints in the sand. In another passage, they notice that he never blinked his eyes. The text also records that they often encountered Jesus, “as if he did not exist at all.”

The Gnostics often rewrote Jesus’s story under the pseudonyms of his first disciples. They used these disembodied details to reinterpret Jesus’s story and message, consistently distancing Jesus from an actual physical body. One of their accounts also reworked the story of Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus before his crucifixion. Known as The Gospel of Judas, the text most likely dates from the Third Century. Instead of Judas being led by Satan into betrayal, this gnostic gospel suggests that Jesus taught Judas secret knowledge, and that Judas actually became the story's hero.

In the gospel of Judas, Jesus tells Judas, “You shall be cursed for generations,” but then adds, “You will come to rule over them,” referring to the other disciples. Jesus continued, “You will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” For the Gnostics, the man who clothed Jesus was his own human flesh. Judas, who profited from helping plot Jesus’ death, is instead praised for freeing Jesus from his body. In The Gospel of Judas, the body held Jesus back from his higher self, and Judas was the only disciple with the secret knowledge and courage to aid Jesus in his escape.

While the Gospel of Judas is believed to have been written much later than the New Testament, traces of these Gnostic ideas can already be seen forming in the time of the New Testament. In the First Epistle of John, John emphasizes that Jesus came in the flesh and that his disciples had touched his very real body. The physicality of Jesus is a topic we’ll explore more in the pages to come, but John made believing in the physical body of Jesus a test of genuine orthodox faith, writing, “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist.” John must have already been encountering false teachers who rejected Christ having come in a physical body.

I don’t know any Christians today who are reading the gospel of Judas or who would knowingly align themselves with gnostic teaching, but gnostic ideas have a way of reemerging in the church, and many Christians today unknowingly pick up gnostic ideas.

I recently visited Turkey with a group of Christians, exploring many of the ancient biblical cities. We visited an ancient theatre that had been used for gladiatorial games and was likely also used for the martyrdom of early Christians. That city is known for a period of Christian persecution. Archaeologists have uncovered several human remains buried around the theatre, some of which are still visible in the ground to visitors. Standing over one of the human skulls, I couldn’t help thinking about how these were real people. How their whole lives had been forgotten, but there we stood looking at what was left of their bodies. I was struck by how personal it felt and how almost irreverent our gawking was. I made the comment, “Imagine one day when these bones will be resurrected.” A Christian doctor on our trip objected, “They won’t need these bodies in heaven. God has already given them better ones.” She felt nothing of the humanity in their bones; she instead imagined them already complete above.

I couldn’t help thinking how her words sounded like the men in Corinth, who claimed that since food was for the stomach and that the stomach would one day be destroyed, it didn’t matter what they ate or what they did with their physical bodies. The Corinthian men showed little interest in the body, as they saw their physical future as irrelevant to their spiritual future. Their faith had also become detached from their physicality. The whole Corinthian church suffered the consequences.

The Corinthian men, disdaining the body and prioritizing “spiritual” experiences, drew two wrong conclusions. If the body didn’t matter, some men took it as license to indulge their bodily desires. If the body was going to be destroyed, why did it matter what a man did with his body? Others channeled their negative opinions about the body into a radical form of asceticism that led to extreme fasting and total sexual abstinence even in marriage. They sought to starve the body by neglect. Neither group knew what the body was for, nor how to bear responsibility for it as a Christian, and so neither could enjoy the body as God intended.

Gnosticism, both the ancient Corinthian version and our own modern version, shares a disinterest in the physical. It’s a faith that can only imagine spiritual things and puts its hope in one day being done with these bodies. To be clear, heaven is a reward, but even there we wait for the resurrection of our bodies. God’s work is not complete until the physical world is made new and we are reunited with our real physical bodies again. Many religions promise spiritual bliss or a heavenly future, and some even promise reincarnation, but it’s Christianity that promised and demonstrated through Christ a future for not just our souls but also our bodies. I often remind people that Jesus did not receive a new body; it was his physical body that was resurrected, apparently with the scars still visible. And it’s that same physical body that walked the roads of Galilee and Judea that is now with God in heaven, awaiting a return. Many Christians do not think about the future of their own bodies. They think of God’s future plans as some other spiritual dimension. Some Christians even long to escape this physical world, also imagining creation as a limitation. But that’s a gnostic idea and not the hope of scripture.

Without a real hope in a future physicality, our attention shifts away from the importance of our present physicality as well. Many pastors have reworked the Christian life into psychological self-help, offering the church as a spiritual escape from the ordinary. We want sermons that offer clever and insightful new ideas. We gauge the success of a church service by how it makes us feel. Discipleship is about discovering and embracing a sense of your true self. Faith becomes abstract, self-focused, and internal. Christianity becomes merely a matter of belief. Is it any surprise that many claim to believe in Christianity but show no evidence of it in their actual lives?

In one of his most poignant phrases, Paul explained to the Corinthians that “[the body is] for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” His words are key to understanding our own physical responsibilities. We bear responsibility for our bodies, but God is also for our bodies. Our bodies are a part of our faith and a part of our relationship with God. Your body is sacred because God is interested in it.

Writing on the physicality of the Apostle Paul’s theology, New Testament Scholar John A.T. Robinson concludes,

“One could say without exaggeration that the concept of the body forms the keystone of Paul’s theology… It is from the body of sin and death that we are delivered; it is through the body of Christ on the Cross that we are saved; it is into His body the Church that we are incorporated; it is by His body in the Eucharist that this Community sustained; it is in our body that its new life has to be manifested; it is to a resurrection of this body to the likeness of His glorious body that we are destined. Here, with the exception of the doctrine of God, are represented all the main tenets of the Christian Faith—the doctrines of Man, Sin, the Incarnation and Atonement, the Church, the Sacraments, Sanctification and Eschatology.”

There is no biblical Christian theology that does not take the body seriously, both of Christ and the believer. Put most simply, you cannot be a Christian and ignore your body.

Physical faith teaches us to live in the world, not escape it, and it teaches us to value the ordinary physical life of our own bodies. Biblical faith connects this physical existence with the promise of a resurrected physical existence to come, one free from death and sin but still experienced in these physical bodies. And Paul kept reminding them that it was here in the world of physical bodies that Christ came to meet us. And the scriptures make the body a central responsibility of genuine faith. If that was a truth even the early church could lose, it shouldn’t surprise us that many Christians in our own day have also forgotten it.

The pastor and writer, Eugene Peterson, warned, “Gnosticism is a virus in the bloodstream of religion and keeps resurfacing every generation.” Bishop Robert Barron has called Gnosticism the “enduring heresy.” And the modern philosopher Charles Taylor has labeled our form of Gnostic modern faith an excarnation. If the incarnation describes God taking on flesh, the perfect union of spiritual and physical, then excarnation describes our flesh dissociated from God, the separating of the spiritual from the physical. Taylor defines this shift as “the steady disembodying of spiritual life, so that it is less and less carried in deeply meaningful bodily forms, and lies more and more in the head.” We may not recognize it as Gnosticism, but many Christians live this excarnated faith.

Physical Habits of Faith

Over the coming chapters, we will take a closer look at what the men of Corinth misunderstood about the body and how those early gnostic ideas were distorting the Christian faith. We’ll see how the Apostle Paul responded, offering the church a thoroughly Christian perspective on the body that places the body at the center of spiritual life.

As you learn to think about your body through the lens of your faith, you will see how that faith can form better habits. We’ll work to reunite the body and soul and learn to practice a more physical spirituality. In each of the coming chapters, I will offer you a habit by which you can put this physical faith into practice. It’s through better habits that you live out your faith and take responsibility for your body.

But these habits are not like the previous New Year’s resolutions you’ve inevitably made and probably broken. To cultivate new and lasting habits, you’ll have to learn to think differently about who you are. As author James Clear writes, “The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.”

If you think of yourself as weak, you’ll probably stay weak. If you think of yourself as unhealthy, you’ll stay unhealthy. Think you’re not physical, and you’ll struggle to do anything physical. But if you come to think of your body as a part of a physical faith, you will put yourself on the path toward a better body and a fuller faith. To be clear, improving your body takes more than just good intentions, but how you think about your body is where we must start.

“Our bodies are not raw material that we may use ‘as we see fit.’ Nature has an order, a plan, a purpose, a design. And we are happier and healthier when we live in accord with that design.” — Nancy Pearcey