Paul’s Flesh: A Disabled Reading of Flesh/Spirit Dualism

To Paul,

the apostle/the evangelist/the one Karl Barth called “a queer saint”

—though I suspect most queers disagree—

Do you know how much harm your words have done?

Do you know how much hate has been encoded in your metaphors,

  how many misguided cosmologies,

  how many programs of disgust papered over with pious mumblings?

You said flesh = sin

(or at least that’s what we read)

and sin congealed itself into daggers,

little knives that planted themselves in my flesh

thrown by otherworldly preachers

by the bodiless abstraction of theory and rhetoric and endless academic debate

by the doctors who taught me how to walk/to speak/to pass again

  but who never thought I might want to remember how to love or trust or feel

  again.

Why did you do it, Paul?

Did you hate your own flesh so much

that you made it into a weapon,

letting it stand in for everything that resisted God, or whatever you meant by spirit,

throwing your thorn-in-the-flesh back in the faces of the ones who said

  your body isn’t good enough

  (contemptible, weak, shameful)

“Well sinful flesh doesn’t matter in the end. What’s inside is what counts!”

And in your vehemence you set a ball rolling that pulled strings

back to Plato

up through Enlightenment and rationalism

all the way to cybernetic immortality and beyond

not to mention which birthed those hate-filled pulpits

each one filled by a nice Christian boy who has learned to despise his fleshiness so much

that he rips it whole from his bones

arteries bursting and tendons snapping

and flings his flesh away,

trying to make it stick to any non-white non-male non-able non-Christian

(not him)

people who walk by

leaving his blood to run down their faces

staining their Sunday best with his so-called sin.

(Meanwhile he moves to the table

consecrates the broken Body of Christ

and keeps it all to himself,

not even noticing the wound in his side,

because he lives according to the spirit.)

(or so he tells himself.)

Is that what you meant to happen

when you took the good news across the sea?

People whose bodies are marked negatively in the society in which they live intentionally seek to produce alternative models for being a body and create communities guided by them.

—Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh

As a part of the larger project of revaluing the body within Christian thought, some scholars have argued that it is the unpredictability, ambiguity, and vulnerability that have traditionally been associated with flesh that have made “the body” a contested category to begin with. That is, for Sharon Betcher, Mayra Rivera, and myself, if theoretical work on embodiment fails to consider flesh—and with it the less pleasant realities of bodies, such as pain, illness, and aging—it will effectively perpetuate the abstraction of bodies and reinscribe the dualism of body and flesh. This leaves disabled bodies out of the conversation entirely, as well as other racially or sexually minoritized groups who have been made to carry the cultural weight of fleshiness, of being considered “more bodily” than dominant groups (Rivera, 2015: 154). Particularly from the perspective of disability studies, we cannot speak of an idealized or theoretical human body which excludes the fundamental reality of bodies that they have limits: they get sick, they get injured, and eventually they die.

The need to consider these undesirable aspects of bodies points us, perhaps, toward “flesh” rather than “body,” and yet particularly from a Christian perspective, if we are to consider the place of flesh in relation to God, we must at some point reckon with the work of Paul and his emphatic statements that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 15:50) and “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8). Most scholars agree that Paul is not attempting to construct a bodily ontology in this literature, nor even really talking about embodiment itself, and yet this flesh/spirit dualism endures in pervasive cultural and academic assumptions that flesh has no place in Christian thought.

I am intrigued by the suggestion of biblical interpreters through the years—most recently Amos Yong (2011) and Martin Albl (2007)—that Paul may also have lived with a condition that would make him disabled by today’s definition. In this article, I consider Paul’s construction of a “spiritual body” and his flesh/spirit dualism more generally in light of this reading of Paul’s own flesh: what difference might it make if Paul is speaking as someone for whom “flesh” has meant pain or social discrimination? Does this change the tone of his dualism? How might it help contemporary theologians to retrieve flesh for today? Or not?

Interpreters have long debated the nature of the “physical infirmity” Paul mentions in Galatians 4:13, usually assuming that it refers to the same cause as the “thorn in the flesh” of 2 Corinthians 12:7 (Plummer, 1915: 351). Based on a few textual hints—“had it been possible, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me” (Gal. 4:15), “See what large letters I make when I am writing with my own hand!” (Gal. 6:11)—some have speculated that his condition affected his eyesight. Adela Yarbro Collins (2011), on the contrary, draws on the research of Max Krenkel in order to argue that Paul’s “thorn” was epilepsy or another condition which involved seizures (pp. 173–176). Amos Yong (2011) considers the possibility of Paul’s disablement in some depth, using a fairly conservative definition of disability, and ultimately concludes that Paul was “physically troubled” in some way for extended periods of his life, and perhaps permanently (pp. 83–87).

But beyond the specific details of his embodiment, I am most interested in the way Paul speaks of his communities’ reactions to his body: “though my condition put you to the test, you did not scorn or despise me” (Gal. 4:14), “They say, ‘His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible’” (2 Cor. 10:10). He speaks defensively at times (particularly in the Corinthian correspondence) of his right to claim authority in spite of his perceived bodily weakness, contradicting the presumptions of the Greek rhetorical tradition which closely linked a strong physical presence with social power and influence (Martin, 1995: 53–55). As Yong (2011) puts it, “if Paul did have to deal with physical impairment or disability, . . . that isn’t only an individualized or biomedical experience but also a social one, which no doubt threatened to stigmatize and ostracize Paul,” as these texts suggest (p. 88). While we do not have a clear picture in the scriptural sources of what Paul’s body might have looked like or what his particular impairments might have been, it seems clear that Paul, at least in certain contexts, experienced the shape or functions of his body as socially stigmatized and therefore culturally disabled.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul tackles the nature of the body most directly by addressing the question of the resurrection of the dead. It seems that there is some controversy in the Corinthian community about what this might look like, and in formulating his answer, Paul is caught between his commitment to the radical eschatology he preaches, and the low opinion of the body within the Corinthian culture. Dale Martin (1995) summarizes the way Paul navigates that relationship:

For both Paul and his ideological opponents at Corinth, the body is a microcosm structured as a continuous physiological hierarchy . . . [H]e insists on the future resurrection of the body, thereby denying the lowly status attributed to the body by Greco-Roman elite culture. At the same time he admits that the resurrected body will have to be thoroughly reconstituted so as to be able to rise from the earth to a new luminous home in the heavens. The eschatological body must be one without earth, flesh, blood, or even psyche (soul). (p. 135)

He capitulates to the educated Greek philosophical belief that the stuff of the earth, with its low status, can never hope to reach the high status of the celestial elements (Martin, 1995: 113–114), and so concedes that the “body” which will be resurrected is stripped of flesh and blood as well as soul, and is constituted only of the lighter element of spirit (Martin, 1995: 128). He does not challenge the division of creation into substances of higher and lower status, nor the underlying assumption that it is the weakness and mortality of the body—precisely its nature as unpredictable and not entirely under conscious control—which mark it as low status. In this way, he creates an entirely new concept of the “spiritual body” (sōma pneumatikon), made up entirely of the most honorable substance and yet still somehow considered a “body”—introducing the conceptual possibility of a body entirely free from the realm of death, illness, or pain.

Reading this passage through the lens of Paul’s disability introduces the possibility that, along with physiological hierarchies and proto-Christian apocalypticism, Paul’s ideas about the makeup of eschatological bodies are shaped by his personal navigation of what it means to have a particular kind of body on this side of the end times. As Mayra Rivera (2015) puts it, “People whose bodies are marked negatively in the society in which they live intentionally seek to produce alternative models for being a body and create communities guided by them” (p. 148, emphasis mine). Read in this light, I suggest that Paul’s “spiritual body” reflects the way that Paul found social power in the Greco-Roman context—through his spiritual presence—and then used the Christian gospel to articulate an eschatological body which supported his claims to authority. That is, because his audiences in Rome and in Corinth devalued the weakness of his physical body, he emphasized rhetorical mastery and spiritual strength in the present life, and spirit to the exclusion of all other aspects of the body in the resurrection life—even conceding to the Greek cosmology that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” The weakness of Paul’s own flesh was devalued in his society, and rather than challenging the cultural worship of strength and wholeness, he shifted the theological emphasis from the visible to the invisible, from an aspect in which he was “weak” to one where he was “strong,” in the process redefining “bodies” entirely for the Christian framework. As Arthur Dewey and Anna Miller (2017) put it, Paul depicts all earthly, physical bodies as essentially impaired—and therefore rightly marked negatively—and “constructs resurrection as a ‘cure’” (p. 398) which will raise them as “perfectly abled” spiritual bodies (p. 382).

As we read in Paul’s repeated references to his own weakness, and the ineffectiveness of his physical presence when compared with his written work, Paul experienced his body as a significant challenge for his attempts to be persuasive in his ministry. But conversely, his letters were strong, and clearly persuasive enough to be copied and preserved in the Christian canon. Paul clearly understood the interpretations of his body, and so he would be conscious also of the disparity between the ways he was received in person and in writing. In his preaching, Paul then used his embodiment as a rhetorical device, emphasizing God’s power which is “made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9)—not challenging the idea that his body represented shame or low status, but rather, shifting the focus from his present weakness to his (and God’s) future power. In this world, Paul’s body was a source of conflict and dishonor. Is it any surprise that he might envision an eschaton in which his body was freed not only from what caused him pain but also from what marked his low status?

Complicating this analysis, of course, is the need both in antiquity and today to resist reducing a person’s worth to their appearance, health, or visible social status. Just as Paul needed to locate his self-worth other than in his immediate physical body (because of the social situations which denied his flesh’s worthiness), so today do all marginalized people need to be able to find self-worth in a framework beyond the one which oppresses them. If flesh itself causes pain or discomfort (as it so often does), the ability to put that pain in a larger context can be the key to resisting cycles of depression and maintaining a sense of self-worth, whether that affirmation is “this pain will pass,” or “I am more than my pain.” The key in both cases is that we are never only flesh. Reducing a person to their bodily presence can never be adequate to capture the complex interior worlds and interpersonal relations that humanity is capable of, nor can such reductionism avoid pathologizing and marginalizing according to race, gender, disability, and other bodily difference.

And yet resisting such reductionism and creating counter-narratives which create holistic conceptions of a person’s value is very difficult to do in isolation. We can only speculate about whether any of Paul’s communities might have had more positive concepts of his disability that would have allowed him to envision his embodiment as anything other than a burden or a paradoxical display of God’s power, but in the absence of such affirmation it is hard to imagine that he could have reacted differently. ¹ I do not begrudge Paul in his insistence that his bodily weakness was not the only thing that mattered about him, nor even the most important thing. But in the rhetorical vigor of his attempts to throw the focus off his own flesh, Paul set the stage for centuries of theological hatred of flesh, providing the vocabulary for social ideologies casting marginalized groups as “more fleshly” than the dominant class, and giving a theological sanction for discrimination to which he himself would have been subject.

The dualism which Paul sets up between “spirit” and “flesh” is a theme throughout his letters, and it comes to a particular fevered pitch in Romans 7–8. Taking the book of Romans (or even the Pauline corpus) by itself, the word “flesh” (sarx) would seem to have very little to do with the human body. Rather it describes a way of life that is opposed to God’s way, a tendency toward sin, an internal struggle, “a universal symbol for the crippling competition for honor that distorts every human endeavor,” as Robert Jewett tellingly puts it (Jewett, 2007: 483). ² With this definition, it fits neatly into Paul’s frequent elaborations of the difference between life in Christ and life outside the church, for which he uses a variety of terms even as he keeps returning to similar themes of inside/outside. For most ancient writers, though, sarx was used to designate bodies both human and animal, material reality, and humanness itself, generally without a moral judgment attached (Danker, 2000: 914–916). Flesh was simply one of the various substances which made up the body, and did not itself carry a status valence, although the body as a whole was low on the hierarchy of substances (Martin, 1995: 128). In Paul, however, about half of his uses carry some sort of negative tone, often of resistance to God or of susceptibility to sin (Erickson, 1993: 305). For him, flesh became a doctrinal shorthand for the temptation to seek glory in the things of this world.

Most often, interpreters will emphasize that Paul is not talking about actual bodies, and certainly not physicality in our contemporary sense (Wright, 2004: 140), but rather that his construction of flesh represents an attitude or a way of living that is outside of or opposed to God’s way. In Romans, as the most developed elaboration of Paul’s theology, he strives to specify that he is preaching against “living according to the flesh” (kata sarka) or “setting the mind on flesh” (to phronēma tēs sarkos) rather than against flesh itself. But even as it is clear that he is not intentionally proposing a theory of bodies, in his exhortation, flesh stands for all the qualities of human existence which are “weak . . . [and] prone to sin” (Byrne, 1996: 212)—which should be avoided or actively suppressed as much as possible—and frequently carries a sense of opposition or struggle, describing the human person as, in John Robinson’s (1979) words, “a battlefield in which he is divided against himself” [sic] (p. 90). If Jewett’s (1971) hypothesis for the origin of Paul’s doctrine of the flesh in the Letter to the Galatians is correct (pp. 108–114), then for Paul, this sense of confrontation is built into the very definition of the concept: “For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want” (Gal. 5:17).

Paul may not have intended to make a claim about the nature of human bodies, but by choosing such an inescapably bodily term and linking it with concepts of mortality, weakness, and destructibility, as well as passion and desire, he succeeded in constructing Christian bodies as inherently conflicted and divided, urging believers to crucify their own flesh and distrust its urges. He may not have meant for literal human flesh to be implicated when he tied sarx so closely with “the law of sin,” but when his rhetorical use is so consistent that the New International Version, for instance, frequently translates sarx and related forms as “sinful (human) nature” (Kohlenberger et al., 1997: 680–681), it is hardly a surprise that so many have read in Paul a simplistic equation of flesh = sin.

I have argued that Paul’s new construction of the “spiritual body” in 1 Corinthians 15, read through the lens of Paul’s own disability, represents something of a theological coping mechanism for life in a society which valued strength and physical presence so highly. But this imagined ideal body, stripped of the flesh which was a source of Paul’s dishonor, also appears throughout the Pauline literature as the implied eschatological destination of “life according to the spirit,” strictly opposed to all things of the flesh. The rhetorical opposition of “flesh” and “spirit” bears the marks of Paul’s own search for social power by the very words he chose to represent the old life in the world as distinct from the new life in Christ, which was then carried into the realm of morality by his apocalyptic fervor. Before Paul got to the word sarx, it seems to have been a fairly neutral word: just another aspect of bodies. But if Paul experienced his own body as a source of shame and discrimination, trying to throw the focus off his own flesh by creating the possibility of a future life without physical bodies at all—clearly without disability—may have been an appealing option for a passionate new convert.

Two thousand years later, when we don’t feel the apocalyptic expectation quite so closely on the horizon, language about eschatological bodies has come to function in large part to pass judgment on our present bodies and lives. Paul gave us vocabulary to imagine the possibility of living outside of the vulnerability and malleability of flesh, and now—with the help of all these years of interpretation, misplaced emphasis, and the (almost infinite) capacity of humans to oppress one another—for some, his words have come to function less as a liberatory vision and more as condemnation: a sign that our physical pains and imperfections, or perhaps even sexual and gender identity, mark us as inescapably fleshly and therefore unavoidably sinful.

One of the enduring challenges for the Christian tradition has been reconciling the essential goodness of our bodies as God’s creations with the experience of suffering located in the body, such that illness, injury, pain, and even death have been signs of our “fallenness” from God’s original intentions. It is no wonder, perhaps, that the very vulnerability and permeability of human bodies that now haunts constructions of the independent Western subject would find itself pinned to one slippery concept, which can more easily be rejected (theoretically) and weaponized against insufficiently independent bodies. It seems that Paul did not intend his role in this process, but he succeeded in providing the framework which would define “flesh” as the lusty, uncontrolled, shameful aspects of bodies, in contrast to the ethereal qualities of “spirit” which suddenly emerged as a future for bodies themselves. That is, in constructing the notion of a “spiritual body,” along with the possibility of suppressing the influence of “flesh,” Paul’s words created the possibility for what Mayra Rivera (2015) calls a “dream of glorious bodies freed from the weight of earthy substances and the menace of death” (p. 41).

The category of flesh as somehow different from “body” has functioned discursively for centuries to locate the flux and vulnerability of human bodies in something other than embodiment itself, allowing Christian thought to imagine primordial bodies with neither desire nor suffering, and eschatological bodies freed from all traces of earthiness (e.g. Robinson, 1977: 34). Our present bodies, then, are only changeable, vulnerable, and interdependent as a result of sin. The experience of illness, disability, or pain, rather than being integrated into a full understanding of what it means to be human, is seen theologically as a residue of sinfulness: an intolerable state of affairs that must be corrected at all costs, or else that life is not worth living (Betcher, 2007: 23). Theological anthropology, in turn, has become trapped by this vision of the imagined ideal body, painless and invulnerable, leaving us unable to conceive of pain and vulnerability except as aberrations, as anomalies which cause us to question God’s very nature.

A re-evaluation and a reclamation of the flesh are essential for theological anthropology. Unless we can begin to imagine human bodies as flesh, simultaneously infused with spirit, we will be unable to reconcile the sometimes-frustrating reality of those bodies with their centrality to personal identity, nor will mainstream Christian theology overcome the tradition of projecting fleshiness onto marginalized others, coding flesh as feminized and racialized while leaving dominant groups pathologically unable to acknowledge the needs of their own bodies. Flesh, too, can open up opportunities for rethinking the body: where “the body” can tend toward abstraction and individuality, flesh, in Sharon Betcher’s (2010) words, points to

the dynamic and fluid physics of embodiment, [which] cannot as easily as the body submit to transcendentalist metaphysics. . . Flesh, in other words, makes alterity central, and might also, therefore, allow us to talk about that which metaphysics has often hidden from the sociocultural agenda . . . pain, difficulty, disease, . . . and corporeal limit. (p. 108)

I have argued in this article that the vehemence with which Paul differentiated and opposed flesh from spirit bears the marks, not only of the hierarchy of substances in the Greco-Roman context, but also of his own personal search for meaning and authority. While, in his time, he may have felt the need to downplay the importance of his own fleshly body, in the very different context of our own day, we have the opportunity to ask what purpose this construct now serves: whether it adds anything to our theological reflection, or whether it has outlived its usefulness for the project of understanding Christian bodies.

Dear Paul,

I still don’t quite know what to make of you

and your internal conflict.

I hope that you can find / have found

some peace

in your mystical/spiritual/eschatological body

however that happens.

But here it is 2020

and the kingdom of God hasn’t come yet.

We still have bodies made of flesh

that still hurt sometimes and suffer sometimes

and we still find God in these bodies anyway.

Every week I sit my broken/whole body

down on my mat

together with my fluttering happy/sad crazy mind

and breathe the pneuma of God

with the peace of God

into my lungs

and guts and flesh and blood and bones.

  (I am in the yoga studio

  because the church still thinks you taught us

  this flesh doesn’t matter)

Whether I am strong today

or I wobble and fall today

(or probably both, let’s face it),

I am here,

I am okay,

and with God’s help

I will summon up Spirit in my imperfect words and in my presence

and in my whole fleshy/spirited/rational/irrational self

to tell a story of a God who is broken yet whole

wounded and victorious

dead but alive.