Gifted Bodies: A Lutheran Theology of the Body

By John W. Kleinig

I am fascinated by the slogans that people wear on their sweatshirts. They tell us a lot about them and their convictions. There are two that caught my eye at an airport some years ago. The first, which has since become quite common, was: “My body, my choice!” The second, which is far too long to become popular, was even more telling. It ran: “Your body may be a temple, but mine’s an amusement park!” These slogans show how many people regard their bodies in our society.

Both slogans are oddly defiant confessions of faith that deliberately contradict Christian teaching on the creation and redemption of the body. Their assertiveness masks the uncertainty of those who parade them. It is as if the wearers need to persuade themselves that they really own their bodies and can do as they please with them, like their car or their house. They speak as if their bodies somehow existed apart from them, like the clothes that they wear. They deny that their bodies are a vital part of who they are.

It seems to me that many people don’t know what to make of their bodies. On the one hand, they overrate their bodies and idolize them. They confuse the way they look with what they are and identify themselves with their appearance. Yet on the other hand, they also underrate their bodies and despise them for their apparent imperfections. Because they are in thrall to the image of an ideal human body (which is, in fact, a virtual fabrication), they do not rate their actual bodies highly enough. Their dream of bodily perfection coexists with contempt for their real bodies and the desire to remake them. They do not appreciate how amazing and wonderful their body actually is. They fail to see that the value of the body does not depend on its physical arrangement but on its creation in God’s image, to be like Him and put Him on display.

However troubling it may be, all this uncertainty and confusion about the human body provides us with a wonderful opportunity to present the Christian faith winsomely, relevantly and truly to our compatriots: our bodies’ creation in God’s image, their redemption by the incarnation of God’s Son, and our bodily sanctification by the Holy Spirit for eternal life with God.

Our Life in the Body

All human life on earth shares the same common condition: It is lived in the body. We are conceived with embryonic bodies in the body of our mother. We are born with bodies, grow up in them, and have them for as long as we live. We identify ourselves with our bodies. We use our bodies to associate with others and interact with our environment. We enjoy life and health with our bodies and suffer sickness and pain with them. Our bodies locate us geographically and socially here on earth. Like us, they cannot exist by themselves because they depend on the world and the people around them for their nourishment and growth, survival and safety. We mature and age and die with our bodies. Human life on earth is, always and only, life in the body.

Our bodily life comes from the living God. We have not made ourselves. Nor can we remake ourselves. Our parents did not make us. But He made us and every other human being through our parents. He made us as persons with male and female bodies. They are His gift to us. He made them and He keeps them alive.

Our spiritual life on earth is also, always and only, life in the body. It is the life that we live with the triune God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit. More correctly, it is the life of Jesus in us, our life of faith in Him, His eternal life that He shares with us, as we live for a short while with our bodies here on earth. That was how we were meant to live from the beginning when God made Adam and Eve in His image. He intended that we would not just resemble the animals and other human beings with our bodies, but would resemble Him in body and soul here on earth. He wanted us to receive His love and share it bodily with each other here on earth. He wanted us work with Him by having children and caring for the world that He had created as a home for us and the animals. He wanted our bodies to be temples, holy shrines for Him to show Himself to people on earth and bless them (1 Cor. 6:19–20).

So, even when we humans turn away from Him in disregard, He does not turn away from us. He continues to protect us and provide for us in our bodily journey from the womb to the tomb. Through what we experience with our bodies, He shows us how dependent we are on others for our livelihood and on Him for our existence.

Yet God is not satisfied with just keeping us physically alive for the enjoyment of a transitory life with His other creatures here on earth. He wants us to become fully alive forever with Him. God the Father therefore sent His one and only Son to live a full human life and die a human death, in order to rescue us from eternal death and to share His own divine life bodily with us. He raised His Son bodily from the dead in order to raise up our bodies for eternal life with Him. His incarnate Son now interacts with us physically by speaking to us, regenerating us by water and the Holy Spirit, and giving us His life-giving body and blood for our spiritual nourishment.

Through these physical means, He also sanctifies our bodies, so that they are now living temples for Him, holy shrines for His life-giving Holy Spirit. And the goal of all this is eternal life, which begins by faith now, here on earth, and is consummated in God’s new creation. So from its inauguration to its consummation, we have spiritual life in the body. It is the life of faith in Jesus who lives in us, as Paul explains in Galatians 2:20: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”

Divine Works of Art

Why does God expend so much effort in carefully creating and preserving our human bodies and pay such a great price to amazingly redeem and remake them? After all, they are of little value in themselves, in the grand scheme of things. They have such a short natural life and are so subject to decay; they are so fragile and vulnerable, limited and dependent, compared with the holy angels. No matter how long our bodies live and what they accomplish, they will die, and their deeds will be undone. Why, then, does He hold our mortal bodies in such high regard?

In my opinion, the greatest statue that has ever been crafted by any human sculptor is Michelangelo’s statue of David. It is a perfect depiction of a male body. Yet its origin was anything but perfect. It was made from a huge block of white marble that had been brought with much difficulty and great expense from Carrara to Florence to be made into a statue for the beautiful cathedral in the city. The sculptor, who had begun work on it, died before he got very far with it. He had shaped it rather roughly, leaving a misplaced, inverted, V-shaped gap between where he had intended to carve the legs. Two other sculptors were commissioned to complete the statue after his death. But they gave up on it because of the misplaced incision and the imperfections in the stone that threatened its stability. It lay unused for 25 years before Michelangelo took over. The all-too-apparent faults in the slab presented creative possibilities to him. He saw its potential and used its imperfections to sculpt a masterpiece.

God is like that with us and our human bodies. He takes them and turns them into masterpieces, works of His divine art (Eph. 2:10). Despite their apparent lack of worth, He makes them fit for eternal life with Him and all the angels. He created our male and female bodies in His image to resemble Him in their bodily existence. He made them, and He is remaking them into the image and likeness of His beloved Son. Even though they had been scarred and marred by their suicidal rebellion against Him, He redeemed and sanctified them through the incarnation of His Son, who loved us and gave Himself for us. Through Baptism, our earthly bodies are now one flesh with Jesus in this life, like a bride with her groom, just as our bodies will be united with His glorified body forever in the life to come (Eph. 5:29–32). Since we are one with Him in body and soul, He now presents us, with our holy, blameless bodies, to God the Father as we live by faith in Him (Eph. 5:25–27).

Three Perspectives

God the Father now sees our bodies from three different points of view. He sees them as they once were apart from His Son; He sees them as they now are in His Son; and He sees them as they will be together with His Son. But not in that order. His final vision of them comes from His purpose for them, which colors how He sees their current state.

First of all, He sees us as we will be when we are face to face with Him together with His Son in the life to come. He regards us already now, provisionally, as perfect people who will one day have resurrected and glorified bodies. He sees us in glory with Jesus and the angels, pure and holy, without spot or wrinkle or any such blemish. And as He considers us, He is pleased with what He sees, and that makes Him very proud of us.

Second, He also regards our present bodies as hidden in His Son, dressed up, as it were, with Him, and one flesh with Him in His glory. He considers us as people who have been covered with the righteousness and purity, the holiness and beauty, of Jesus. So when He looks at us and our bodies, He sees Jesus in us and us in Jesus. Our life is now hidden with Him in God (Col. 3:3). Our bodily union and communion with Jesus may be hidden from our eyes, but not from God. He is not ashamed to be called our God (Heb. 11:16), just as Jesus is not ashamed to call us His brothers and sisters (Heb. 2:11). He approves of us and is just as pleased with us as He is with Jesus. He therefore says to us and to each baptized believer, “You are My beloved son; you are My beloved daughter; I am well pleased with you.”

Third, even though our heavenly Father admires us as the beautiful bride of His Son, He does not overlook our sin and gloss over its gravity. He sees our sin much more clearly than we ever do. He notes all our misbehavior as well as the mistrustful hearts that motivate it. He regards our sin in the same way that Michelangelo regarded that damaged slab of marble. In Jesus, He does not reject us because we are sinful and unclean; rather, He uses the consequences of our sin to bring us back to Him and remake us in the image of His Son. He puts our sinful self to death together with Jesus, in order to raise us up as new people together with Jesus. He sees us as sinners whom He pardons and transforms more and more fully, so that we are fit for eternal life with Him; and He calls us to present our bodies as holy offerings to Him (Rom. 12:1).

Luther sums this all up rather memorably in this excerpt from a sermon on John 1:14:

Thus the most precious treasure and the strongest consolation we Christians have is this: that the Word, the true and natural Son of God, became man, with flesh and blood like that of any other human; that he became incarnate for our sakes in order that we might enter into great glory, that our flesh and blood, skin and hair, hands and feet, stomach and back might reside in heaven as God does, and in order that we might boldly defy the devil and whatever else assails us. We are convinced that all our members belong in heaven as heirs of heaven’s realm. (AE 22:110)