For as long as I’ve been paying attention, some 20 years, I’ve heard Christians complain that we need more attention on the body. I’ve heard that Catholics have much deeper, more comprehensive theology of the body. I’ve seen Protestant evangelicals try to make the case, but for some reason or another their arguments don’t land.
I don’t know how to explain the disconnect. We worship the God who became flesh in the incarnation of Jesus. We live in a time that esteems self-expression, mind over matter, not self-sacrifice of the type that engages the body. But Sam Allberry aims to help us in his new book, What God Has to Say about Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves (Crossway).
In this book Allberry encourages Christians to look forward, but not to a time when we’ll have a full head of hair and flat stomachs. Instead, we anticipate resurrected bodies that glorify and serve Jesus perfectly. And what good news that is for our broken bodies. Sam writes:
The problems we experience with our body were never ultimately going to be solved by our body. We may be able to ameliorate some aspects of our bodily brokenness—we can cure some ills and ease some pains. But we cannot fix what has been broken. The only hope for us is the body of Jesus, broken fully and finally for us. And by looking to his broken body we find true hope for our own.
Sam joined me on Gospelbound to discuss intimacy, technology, Avatar, masculinity and femininity, and much more.