Since God made us as embodied souls and ensouled bodies, we can be sure that our bodies have just as much a future as our souls. So, let us make our bodies neither more nor less than God intended. We were formed for bodily communion with God in Christ. And we will see him with resurrected bodily eyes.

What is the body for?

The body is for the beatific vision. This may come as a surprise to many. For all its preoccupation with the human body, our age is particularly confused on this question of what the body is for. The godless among us somehow manage to think too high and too low of the body.

On the one hand, many put otherworldly pressure on the body, insisting that making it look or feel a particular way is the sum and substance of the good life. Such preoccupation is manifest among the anxiously health-obsessed no less than the gender-dysphoric teenager, the fastidious fashionista no less than the “body positivist.” It’s what lies behind the willingness to invest a small fortune in injections and tucks and tattoos and surgical alterations. The body, in these cases, bears the burden of determining one’s identity—a burden it was never intended to bear.

On the other hand, the same trends ironically betray an expendable view of the human body as it is. The liberty exercised to make inordinately expensive and invasive alterations presupposes that there is no natural givenness to the human body. We wouldn’t call the attempt to beat a screwdriver into the shape of a wrench a respect for the screwdriver’s nature.

Evangelical Confusion

Unfortunately, evangelical Christians have also struggled at times to make sense of the goodness of the body. Operating with a deficient anthropology, many Christians have replaced the hylomorphism of Thomas Aquinas and so much of the Christian tradition with a Cartesian dualism. (Hylomorphism views the human as a composite of body and soul, such that the soul is the substantial form of the body, and the body is the matter of the soul. Cartesian dualism, coined after the philosopher René Descartes, conceives of the human being as something like a ghost in the machine: The soul is the person, whereas the body is a mere husk.) For most, this shift was unintentional—we made no conscious decision to replace Aquinas with Descartes—but it does have consequences.

One such consequence is a depreciated view of the body. The body, we are tempted to think, is at best a useful tool for the soul; at worst it is an inconvenience to bear throughout this life. Might the all-too-common cliché of the overweight pastor, the popular conceptions of heaven as a bodiless cloud-palace, and exclusively cerebral approaches to battling habitual sin have this impoverished view of the body as a common source?

Thankfully, Holy Scripture offers a corrective to our errors. The body is neither the foundation of all meaning and value, nor the expendable canvas upon which to paint one’s true self, nor the inconvenient mark of our fallen state—a burdensome exoskeleton we will one day shed. Rather, the body is essential to our humanity. The body is so essential, in fact, that we creatures will not experience the fullness of the beatific vision without it!

What Kind of Vision?

The mention of the beatific vision in this context calls to mind a longstanding theological debate: Will the beatific vision be ocular (i.e., involving the eyes and, by consequence, the human body) or intellectual (i.e., occupying the intellect, a faculty of the soul that does not require the body to exist)? Not a few theologians throughout the years have appealed to Thomas Aquinas in defense of the latter position. This, however, is misleading.

Granted, Aquinas does argue that the essence of the beatific vision is intellectual—the vision is the soulish apprehension, in perfect creaturely knowledge, of God’s essence. Such an apprehension is what the soul has ever longed for, and the satiation of this basic craving in the beatific vision is the very definition of happiness, the final repose and rest of the soul’s communion with God. In fact, since we humans were formed for such fellowship by God, the beatific vision is the telos—the realization of the fundamental goal—for humanity. It is also the highest point of God’s glorification in us: Climactically, in the beatific vision, he is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

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