Our inaugural Foundations Conference in Lethbridge is fast approaching! One of our two speakers there will be Nancy Pearcey, who is a professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University and, according to The Economist, is “America’s pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual.” Her lecture will flow from her book, Love Thy Body, which provides an overview of issues of life and sexuality that are at the heart of ARPA’s political advocacy. Love Thy Body takes a bird’s-eye view of these issues to see the common anti-biblical worldview behind all of them.
The Thesis
The foundational thesis of Love Thy Body is that “the unified concept of truth has been exploded, split into two separate domains.” Pearcey explains how “theologian Francis Schaeffer illustrated the division using the metaphor of two stories in a building. In the lower story is empirical science, which is held to be objectively true and testable. This is the realm of public truths-things that everyone is expected to accept, regardless of private beliefs.”
This materialist worldview arose during the Enlightenment and matured into a philosophy that today we call modernism. Modernism emphasized the lower half of the two-story split, the story of matter, science, and reason. It led to movements like the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.
By contrast, “the upper story is the realm of morality and theology, which are treated as private, subjective, and relative. This is where we hear people say, ‘that can be true for you but not true for me.’” This philosophy arose through the Romantic tradition in reaction to modernism’s dismissal of the “upper story”. We now call this philosophy postmodernism, which focuses on emotion, values, and experience.
These two traditions remain at loggerheads today, with each movement claiming that its view of the world better represents reality. The modernists insist that facts and science are the foundation of reality – that there is nothing real beyond the physical. Everything can be explained by science. The post-modernists, on the other hand, claim that values and experience are more important; indeed, to them, every fact is a mental construct, an illusion ordered by our human experience.
Pearcey’s contention in Love Thy Body is that our modern society’s perspectives on abortion, euthanasia, sexuality, gender, and family are all examples of the upper story – the post-modern emphasis on emotion, values, and experience – triumphing over the lower story. As the body has been devalued, human life and sexuality have been degraded. Part of her solution is for us to regain a proper appreciation for the body. As per the title of her book, we need to love thy body.
A Correct Anthropology
We need a proper theology of the body, a correct anthropology, in part because societies throughout history have tended to not only split apart the human body and the human soul, but further to devalue the body and elevate the soul.
For example, the ancient Greeks split the human person between the body and the soul. Not only are they separable, but the Greeks believed the body, our physical existence, and all matter are the source of evil and something to be escaped. The good and right were outside the physical realm and in the spiritual realm or the realm of ideals.
A few centuries later, Gnosticism was an early Christian heresy that also fell into the mind-over-matter fallacy. Among other things, Gnosticism denied the humanity of Christ because it couldn’t reconcile their negative view of the material world with the Incarnation.
Fifteen hundred years later, the French Catholic philosopher and mathematician René Descartes again re-prioritized the mind over the body. He famously stated, “I think, therefore I am.” He proved human existence through the activity of the mind and ignored the reality of the body. In thinking this way, Descartes elevated the mind above the body.
Some philosophers like Immanuel Kant went even further. Kant insisted that the lower story of reality is merely a creation of the mind. It isn’t based in anything objective or scientific at all. After all, he would argue, how do we know anything about nature or science except what is filtered through our mind? To Kant and philosophers like him, we do not observe the natural world and give subjective interpretations of it. Instead, our perception creates the world. We give order and meaning to the world, and there is no objective meaning to the world at all.
In contrast, as we read the creation account and the rest of the biblical story, we learn that human beings are body-soul composites. Embodied souls. Ensouled bodies. Both are equally you. Thus, contrary to the Greek dualists and the Gnostics, the Bible affirms the goodness of our bodies. The name for the first man is Adam. (The same word is used as the general word for man). But that isn’t some random name. The Hebrew word for the ground, the earth, the dust out of which Adam was formed is adamah. Thus, in the original Hebrew, the link between the dust, the first man, and all mankind is clear.
The incarnation of Christ affirms both the body-soul integralism of the human person and the goodness of our physical existence. We know that God is a spirit and has no human form, and yet Jesus took on human flesh in the incarnation, the enfleshing of the Divine. He suffered in the flesh. He died in the flesh. He rose again in the flesh. He ascended into heaven in the flesh. He is still seated at the right hand of God the Father in the flesh. And He will return in the flesh.
At that time, the bodies of the dead will be reunited with their souls. We often talk about our souls going to heaven when we die, and that is true. But we don’t remain disembodied souls for the rest of our lives. We will receive glorified bodies that we will enjoy for eternity.
Now, Christians believe that, because God created everything, everything has a purpose. In philosophy, we say that everything has a telos. The telos of eyes is for seeing, ears for hearing, fins for swimming, and wings for flying.
Human beings have a telos too that Reformed Christians confess in the first question and answer of the Westminster Catechism: what is the chief and highest end (e.g. telos) of man? Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy Him forever.
The Implications
All of this is standard fare for Bible-believing Christians. But these are radical ideas in the twenty-first century world. The more we look for it, the more we can see our culture dividing the body from the soul, elevating the “inner you” or the “true you” over the body. And we see a rejection of the telos of humanity, even as it pertains to the function of our bodies.
We see this in abortion, where pre-born human beings are not counted as legal persons. We see this in medical gender transitions, where our internal gender identity triumphs over our sexed bodies. We see this in family policy, where the mere intention to become a parent overrides any biological connection to the child.
Nancy Pearcey will talk about all of this – and more – at our Foundations Conference in Lethbridge on November 14th. To attend, you need to register by the end of October. Our aim with this conference is to equip Christians of all ages, denominations, and backgrounds with the foundational truths on which society must be based on and how we, with the aid of the Spirit, can rebuild these foundations.
See you there!
