Throughout the history of Christianity, alien strands of thought have invaded the church and tried to communicate the idea that there’s something evil about the physical, that it’s somehow beneath the dignity of God or foreign to the Christian religion to be concerned about man’s material welfare. But the Jesus who walked along the shores of Galilee and was clothed in a human body was very much concerned about people—that the hungry be fed, that those without shelter be covered, and that the thirsty be given something to drink. He was concerned about people’s eternal souls, and He was also concerned about their bodies. We must account for the physical, for from beginning to end, to be a creature made in the image of God includes having a body. For us to conform to the will of God and to display His character and holiness requires that our bodies be involved.
There are people who emphasize the intellectual or spiritual, thinking that if they pray or maintain a contemplative posture for six hours a day, then what they do with their bodies doesn’t matter, because all God cares about is the soul. But even a cursory reading of the New Testament reveals that much of the law of God concerns how we use our bodies. Thus, even though God does not have a body, we reflect His image by doing works of obedience with our bodies as well as with our souls. In that sense, the body is an integral part of what it means to be made in the image of God.
Often, the physical aspect suffers a severe devaluation among religious people. One of the most ancient of heresies, which predated Christianity, came in the form of Manichaeism and through various forms of Eastern thought. Plato, for example, developed a philosophy called the theory of ideas. He believed that the highest order of reality is not physical but ideal—that is, it is found in the realm of ideas or forms. These forms are the universal, abstract objects that underlie the kinds of objects and concepts that we interact with on a daily basis.
Imagine two different chairs. One is simple, with a metal frame and a seat and back made of plastic. The other is wooden, padded, and ornate. There are obviously differences between these chairs, but there are similarities, as well—both have four legs, for example. Each is identifiable as a chair; despite their differences, we use the same word for both. Plato said that’s because everyone has an idea of “chairness” in their minds. It may be that the beautiful wooden one comes closer to that ideal, but Plato said that in the physical manifestation—what he called the receptacle—of the idea, insofar as any imitation is less than perfect, there’s always something lacking.
For Plato and the Greeks, anything physical was seen as being less valuable, less perfect—indeed, intrinsically marred. This view had a profound influence in the early Christian church. Amalgamations of Eastern philosophy, Platonism, and Gnosticism married with Christianity, introducing into the church the idea that the body, as part of the physical realm, is bad.
The monastic movement has sometimes seen radical asceticism as a great virtue. In the Middle Ages, some would wear hair shirts or other coarse garments to inflict constant pain upon themselves or undergo disciplines such as self-flagellation. They would deny themselves any of life’s basic necessities to show how righteous they were. One danger in this is that it becomes a works-oriented salvation—we save ourselves by mortifying the physical body. In Greek antiphysical philosophy, redemption ultimately is redemption from the body. Plato called the body the prison house of the soul, and the highest hope for man would be the disintegration and destruction of the body, so that the soul could be released to live in pure contemplation, unencumbered by any physical influences. Christianity teaches redemption of the body, that in the new heavens and the new earth we will have glorified bodies and still be creatures who are body and soul.
Platonism is a form of dualism, meaning there are two equal and opposite forces—in this case, the spiritual and the physical—that are in constant conflict and that cannot be reconciled. Christianity does not teach this with respect to man. When we say that man is body and soul, we do not mean these are in competition or tension; rather, Christianity teaches a duality—that is, man is a harmonic unity composed of two aspects, the physical and the nonphysical. There is duality, but not dualism.
A very old error has made a comeback in recent generations, even among evangelical Christians, called the trichotomy view. It teaches that our humanity is composed of three distinct aspects: body, soul, and spirit. One of the vehicles through which this view has reemerged is Watchman Nee, a Chinese church leader who integrated Eastern thinking into Christian thought. Trichotomy was condemned in the fourth century. Its fundamental basis is that, because the body and the soul are in irreconcilable conflict, the only way they can be brought together is through a third party—a mediator, the spirit.
Biblical justification for this view was claimed to be in Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians, where he wrote, “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 Thess. 5:23). At other times, however, Paul talks about the heart, the mind, the spirit, and the bowels. These are simply terms for different aspects of the immaterial essence. In misinterpreting such passages, trichotomy leads to a distortion of redemption, suggesting that God has to redeem a person one step at a time: first the soul, then the spirit, then the body.
Theologically, we recognize that the Holy Spirit can distinguish between spirits, souls, minds, and consciences, but to simplify it, the church has said that there is a physical dimension to our lives and a nonphysical one. The term for the nonphysical in the Bible is the soul, which includes the mind, the will, the heart, and other aspects.
Ligonier Ministries