Our Bodies, Ourselves and Our Lord: Christians reject the Gnostic view that our ‘true selves’ are immaterial.

Wall Street Journal ^ | April 6, 2023 | Robert Barron

[karpov]

The popular British historian Tom Holland recently commented that Christianity should preserve its “weirdness.” He meant that Christians should resist the temptation to turn the faith into one bland mythic or mystic system among many. At the heart of the strangeness of Christianity, of course, is the cross of Jesus. It is surpassingly odd that the first devotees of Jesus enthusiastically held up the cross as a sign of their faith. In the Greco-Roman culture of that time, there was nothing more objectionable, shameful or pathetic than the victim of a crucifixion—and yet Peter, Paul, John, Thomas, Mary Magdalene and their companions announced none other than a crucified Messiah.

From a strictly historical perspective, this anomaly is hard to explain. The only finally satisfying rationale is the event that is celebrated on Easter Sunday around the Christian world: the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Attempts over the past two centuries to present the resurrection as a vague symbol or literary device or imaginative indicator that the cause of Christ goes on are comically inadequate. None of these accounts, largely dreamed up in Western universities, could begin to compensate for the shame and folly of the cross, or to make sense of the missionary enthusiasm of the first disciples of Jesus.

That God the Father raised Jesus from the dead is the ground for Christianity’s consistent valorization of the body. One of the most important church fathers, St. Irenaeus of Lyon, took it as axiomatic that salvation is concerned not merely with the soul but with the body as well. Thus the sacraments of the church, he taught, involve the mind and the body through oil, bread, wine, water and physical touch.

[karpov]

full article

[No name given]

If you trust Jesus Christ as your lord and savior, you’ll get a new redeemed physical body when you get to Heaven!

[Wuli]

I read it this morning. I thought it gave a good analysis of the insertions of gnosticism into western culture and how gnosticism differs from Christianity in the understanding of who we are, body and soul/spirit. In gnosticism the two can be understood as not necessarily a part of each other and the body as totally alterable by our will (as if “trangenderism is totally natural), where no such premise is supported by Christianity. God made us whole, not separate within.

[SaveFerris]

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