Lutheran Witness: September 2025

The September issue provides a Lutheran view of the theology of the body.

From the President: Our Bodies: Created Good, Redeemed for Eternity

Life in the Church Year: Holy Cross Day & St. Michael and All Angels: Home Altars and Blackberry Crumble

Features:

Gifted Bodies: A Lutheran Theology of the Body — John W. Kleinig

A New Creation: The Image of God in a Broken World — Christopher S. Esget

A GPS for Difficult Conversations: Speaking Out With Compassion and With God’s Word — Beverly Yahnke

IRL (In Real Life): Christ’s Living Body in a Digital World — Joshua Pauling

The Theology of the Disabled Body: The Hope of Christ Amid Disability — Lauren Schaidt

Jesus, Healer of Human Bodies: The Body in God’s Plan of Salvation — Kendall Davis

Departments:

Snippets: News from around the LCMS and the world

Worship: Baptism, Baptism Everywhere

Formula of Concord Reading Plan: September — Christ’s Descent into Hell

Searching Scripture: Opening the Old Testament: Sacramental Shadows

From the editor:

“Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven,” writes St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15.

Life in the human body is riddled with tensions. We are descendants of the man created by God in His own image. Yet we are also inheritors of Adam’s sin and of the death and corruption it wrought. We are bodies of dust, corrupted by the fall. And yet we are still God’s creation, with His Law written on our hearts.

This reality leads to a great tension within the heart of every man. In a culture no longer shaped by Christianity, which has exchanged the truth of God for a lie, we find confusion about the human body on a mass scale. We are told that our bodies are our own to do with as we please, that “bodily autonomy” is a first-order good, and that to tell someone what they should or should not do with their body is an evil worthy of public condemnation. Those outside of the church are left with no understanding of what their bodies were made for, beyond the dim nudging of atrophied consciences. Without the gift of God’s Word to guide them, they do not find the fulfillment they seek, but only confusion, debasement and, ultimately, separation from their Creator.

However, this is not the end of the story — a created image dimmed over long ages until it is snuffed out. We do not only bear resemblance to God through distant ancestry. God did something a couple of thousand years ago that has united man to Him more closely even than at creation: He became man. As our Lutheran Confessions say, “[Christ] did not receive a foreign nature, but our own flesh. … In this way He has become our true Brother” (Ep I 5). In this wonderful mystery, we have salvation: Jesus Christ has come to restore the image of God in us. “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” Those in Christ — any who repent and believe in His Gospel — can have confidence that a day is coming when “we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor. 15:51).

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Pope John Paul II gave a widely influential series of lectures on “The Theology of the Body” in response to the “sexual revolution” that had wrought widespread confusion.

Inspired by Lutheran theologian John W. Kleinig’s 2021 Wonderfully Made: A Protestant Theology of the Body, this issue looks at the theology of the human body from a Lutheran and biblical perspective. Kleinig writes about how our bodies are divine works of art created for the purpose of eternal life with Him (p. 8). Christopher Esget takes up liberal “transgender theology” and its misunderstanding of the image of God (p. 12). Beverly Yahnke guides us on navigating difficult conversations around these issues with loved ones (p. 17). Joshua Pauling explores the implications of the internet and AI on our embodied life (p. 18). Lauren Schaidt gives a word of comfort in Christ to those with bodies that are ill or disabled (p. 21). And Kendall Davis explores what Jesus’ healing ministry in the Gospels teaches us about God’s plan for our bodies (p. 22).

As you wade through our culture’s murky waters, may you find your hope and point others to hope in one place alone: Christ’s death and resurrection, and His promises for you.

In Christ,

Stacey Eising

Managing Editor, The Lutheran Witness