Subject:  SJ: God Created Them? |
Author:
Eugene
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Date Posted: 18:19:51 01/16/03 Thu
Genesis 1:26-31
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them…. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning-the sixth day.
For those Christians who do not believe that there are no redemptive values in physical bodies, the passage of Genesis is very seldom spoken of (at least in any serious ways). Yet, it doesn’t take much reading into the Genesis to see that God was well pleased with his creation of the physical universe. Furthermore, men and women were both made in God’s very image, and clearly, even the “Christian curse words” – flesh and world – were well made by God. When we are talking about being redeemed by Christ, undoubtedly our physical bodies (and even the entire physical universe, see Romans 8:22) are also an important part of this act of restoration.
Again, as we are talking about these thoughts, a serious seeker must ask the essential question: So what?
And again, I have to re-state my belief that how a Christian community views the nature of human being will definitely affect how Christian living is taught in this community.
If one believes that the body and the physical mind are basically evil (or at least irrelevant), and there is only one part of us – the soul -- that is going to be saved, then he/she would more than likely become very “inward looking”. So what if people are starving? So what if they are ill? So what if they are going through emotional turmoil? All you need to do is to study your Bible. After all, we do not live by bread, but by God’s word.
I still remember watching a cartoon on TV: The people in Ethiopia are all starving and go to the Western missionaries for help. But the missionaries, instead of starting to pass out their piles of food, kept trying to give them Bible. To them, it is nobler to save souls. The bodies, after all, are just going to die anyway.
Even as I am typing this, I am fighting the inner whisper saying, “Why am I righting this? Of course the soul is more important!” Goes to show how hard it is for a person to believe in the holistic treatment of human beings taught in the Bible. But if we really don’t believe that our entire person – in every aspect – needs saving, then….
When teaching about how one should live, Gnostics (who believe in the superiority if the soul and loath the physical bodies) split into two extremely different schools. One group teaches that since the flesh is evil, we must enjoy nothing in the physical way at all; therefore, they live like hermits and deny themselves of marriage, arts that appeal to the senses, food unless it is absolutely coarse and tasteless, and any comfort in life. The other group realizes that since the body has nothing to do with our eternal destiny at all, and teaches that we can do whatever we want with the flesh in this life – eating, drinking, sex and comforts to excess are all permitted.
Are the churches today immune to this kind of teaching? Are there leaders who teach us that we are certain more holy when we do not enjoy life at all? Or are there shepherds who don’t really care about what we do outside of Sunday mornings?
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