Abstract
Bodies: we all have them, and most of us have hang-ups about them. Paula Gooder’s latest book (based on her 2013 Sarum Lectures) starts with the beauty industry and a general sense of unhappiness with our bodies. Gooder argues that the quest for a genuinely Christian understanding of the body is fatally hampered by ‘popular Christian tradition’, with its emphasis on leaving the body behind at death, on ‘subjugating’ the body, and on the importance of ‘spirit’ over ‘flesh’ (p. 5). What she offers, as a first step to building up a positive Christian theology of the body, is an analysis of St Paul’s attitude to the body and a laudable attempt to disentangle his sometimes confusing language of flesh and body, spirit, soul and mind. If with Paul we believe in the resurrection of the body, what difference does that make to our living in the body here and now?
For Paul, soul and body are not opposed: ‘Our “soul” is the entirety of who we are, including our body’ (p. 41) The traditional Jewish and Christian belief in the resurrection of the body ‘immediately unravels any assumptions … about our bodies being unimportant or inherently bad’ (p. 57). But how does this square with Paul’s duality between flesh and spirit? Following N. T. Wright, Gooder argues that ‘Paul’s condemnation of the flesh arises in places where power is given to human mortality that it should not have’ (p. 66) – as for example in the battle against ageing. ‘We do not look forward to redemption from our bodies but to the redemption of our bodies’ (p. 69).
But what happens after death to the ‘me’ that is ‘me’? This is where (as Gooder freely admits) she has encountered hurt and disbelief in reactions to her previous book on Heaven (p. 43). Paul is not in fact completely consistent in his views on what happens when we die. Even from a purely Pauline viewpoint, it is not unreasonable to hold the traditional Christian hope that ‘those who have died are in the loving embrace of God’ (p. 92). But for Paul ‘the me-ness of me’ always includes the body, and that in its turn involves relationships: our relationships with others in the body of Christ, and our relationship with Christ: ‘The real ‘me’ is to be found in the entirety of my being rooted and grounded in the love of and in relationship with Christ’ (pp. 95–6).
Gooder’s book raises profoundly important issues, and would make a good (if challenging) basis for group discussion. But we cannot leave it there. There is more to doing Christian theology than working what ‘what Paul appears to believe’ and then leaving it to the reader ‘to decide how you make sense of this in your own life’ (p. 43). A mature Christian theology of the body will of course begin with the Bible, but it will also engage with the great tradition of theological thinkers who have wrestled with the Bible over the centuries; with incarnation as well as resurrection; with issues of sexuality and gender – and, yes, with those troubling neuroscientists.