The YMCA Way: Body

When I was younger, I remember going to the YMCA in my home town and seeing their logo which read: "Spirit, Mind, Body."  During this brief series, I am going to look at these three different aspects of the human soul and how they relate to the Holy Trinity.  In essence, I am taking a look at how the Trinity plays into our conception of the Imago Dei, that is, the idea that we are made in the likeness (or the "image") of God.  The posts in this series are not necessarily Christian doctrine, but I do feel like they are helpful, both to Christians who are considering the implications of being children of God and to non-Christians who are wondering how the Trinity works and what it means to be "created in God's image."

"Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs." -Aldous Huxley

This week marks the conclusion of my series on the interesting connections between the persons of the Holy Trinity and the elements which comprise individual humans: body, mind, and heart.  It is my belief that if we as humans are created in God's image (as Christian doctrine asserts), then the many aspects of His personality should be reflected in humanity, even if only in small ways.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have entertained the idea that humans, like God, are possessed of a sort of trinitarian nature, which in many ways behaves like the three aspects of the Holy Trinity.  We have hearts (figurative, not literal) which roughly correspond to the person of the Holy Spirit.  This provides us with emotions and desires, those irrational impulses that drive us toward empathy and compassion, but also to jealousy and rage.  Similarly, our minds tend to more accurately parallel God the Father.  My mind works through logic and "wants" which can lead me toward or away from wisdom, depending on the quality of information presented to me.

Last but not Least

You have probably realized by now that the final components of each trinity are the human body and Jesus Christ.  This is likely the most obvious of the three comparisons, and I would have written this post first, except that I decided to stick to the order in which they appear in the YMCA motto.

Jesus is not the only member of the Holy Trinity to utilize a physical body in scripture.  In the Garden of Eden, God traverses the landscape in much the same way as His creations (Genesis 3:8).  He also appears to "Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel" after the confirmation of the Covenant (Exodus 24:9-11).  While the Holy Spirit is never explicitly seen anthropomorphically, He shows up every now and then as fire (e.g. Acts 2:3), clouds (Numbers 11:25) and other physical phenomena.

That being said, Jesus is still the best comparison in the Holy Trinity for the human body.  He comes into the world in the same way as other humans, grows up (i.e. experiences the effects of time), suffers, and eventually dies.  None of these activities are exhibited in the other members of the Trinity, at least in the Bible.  Therefore, this is a reasonable comparison.

"Flesh"

Certain terms in the Bible are troublesome to explain, and have been known to cause some confusion over the years.  One such example of this confusion has arisen from the term "flesh" as it is used in the New Testament, especially pertaining to the letters of Paul.  Paul often talks about the flesh in negative terms, such as in his message in Galatians 5: "Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires." (5:24)  In fact, Galatians 5 and 6 are full of such language, condemning the flesh and declaring its motives as being contrary to that of the Spirit.

The wording of these sections of scripture has led some to believe that our physical bodies are completely corrupt.  It is an understandable misinterpretation, but it is all the more dangerous because of this.  This line of thought has actually been around for centuries.  In fact, a group called the gnostics produced a very similar teaching not long after Jesus died.  The problem with this doctrine, which has since been deemed heresy, is that it leads to problems in the understanding of the person of Jesus Christ and His existence here on earth.  For if the physical world has been completely and irrevocably tainted by the Fall, then surely God could not become a man in the literal sense.  His perfection could not be fused with the implicit sinfulness of the physical world.  This is what the gnostics claimed.

For several reasons, these teachings have been judged inaccurate.  I do not have time to explore all this theology in detail in this post, but I will hit a couple of the simpler points.  First, if Jesus was not completely human, then He could not in a literal sense die, and therefore His "death" would mean nothing for the forgiveness of sins.  Also, there are plenty of passages in scripture which deal with the reality of Jesus' earthly body.  It is clear that Jesus was completely human.  Therefore, the physical world is not completely evil.  I believe it is more correct to say that the concept of "flesh" in these letters of Paul refers more precisely to the corrupted, sinful nature possessed by each of us.  This is the nature which needs to be crucified—not the physical world as a whole, but corrupt parts of it.

Remade

The last topic I wanted to discuss today is the difference between the human body and the other two components of our souls.  Unlike the mind and the heart, the body interacts with our physical surroundings, and it can also affect those surroundings.  It is the medium through which we view the world and through which the world views us.  And much like the desires of the heart and the wants of the mind, the body has appetites.  These are typically cravings driven originally by necessity.

However, appetites have a way of changing depending on our consumption.  As we consume more and more of one thing, we begin to have a more robust appetite for that item, and depending on the severity of the appetite, it can easily develop into an addiction.  At any rate, we are all prone to creating and sustaining appetites which we were never meant to have.  This is often caused by the broken world around us and our broken views of it.

Nevertheless, God has not given up on our bodies.  Rather, He has decided to give us new ones in the End.  Indeed, it seems that a whole new Creation will come forth, separate from sin and blemish.  This is the exciting news that John wrote down in Revelation 21.  "Then I saw 'a new heaven and a new earth,' for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away." (21:1)  This new body is called the "resurrection body," and not a lot is known about it.  Paul does describe these new bodies as being "imperishable" (1 Cor. 15:42).  It seems that when sin has been eradicated, death will leave with it.  This makes perfect sense in relationship to the other teachings of the New Testament.

One thing is clear, however.  The physical world does not cease to exist at the End.  Instead, it is replaced with a new sort of physicality: one which is not tarnished by sin.  Jesus Himself, after rising from the dead still had a physical body (John 20:24-29).  And, as many people have pointed out over the years, His post-resurrection body still had the scars from His life on earth.  I am very excited to see what the New Creation has in store for us.

In the mean time, suffice it to say that bodies are important.  They allow us to experience God's creation in a very real and vicarious way.  But our sinful physical appetites, just like all sin, must be done away with so that we can inherit the new bodies God has prepared for us.  I leave you this week with Paul's statement to Timothy, which sums up some of the more straight-forward theology on Jesus Christ.

"Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great: 

He appeared in the flesh,
was vindicated by the Spirit,
was seen by angels,
was preached among the nations,
was believed on in the world,
was taken up in glory." -1 Timothy 3:16