Review: What God Has to Say About Our Bodies

 

            When I was thirteen, the church we attended split.  In the minister’s last sermon before the split, he preached on the Shema – to love the Lord Thy God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.  Strength meaning “the body.”  He preached, it’s time that the body come back into the Church. He was reflecting what is still a common error – that the material world – including our bodies – doesn’t matter – what matters is the spiritual.

            Part of Sam Allberry’s What God Has to Say About Our Bodies:  How the Gospel is Good News for Our Physical Selves is a corrective to this and the laying out of a biblical understanding of the body.

            Allberry divides his book into three sections:  created bodies, broken bodies, and redeemed bodies.

            Allberry begins by drawing our attention to the fact that in the Incarnation, the Son of God became a body; He did not merely inhabit one for a time (20).

            Our body is us, but we are not merely our body (46). The modern view is more that we are not our body, but this is not biblical.  God made us personally and purposefully.

            He goes on to explain that – normally – and originally, people are born as God created humans, male and female, and this being male, and female are both created in the Image of God and image God complementarily (65).  Men and women are different and not interchangeable.  We need and complement each other (76).

            In the second section, Allberry looks at how our bodies have been broken due to sin.

            In the Fall, he notes, there is a parallel brokenness in humans and in nature (90).  Pain, suffering, and varieties of body shame are the results of sin (97).

            Allberry turns to Corinthians to look at sexual sin and how it is the most detrimental sin to the body (108).

            And death is the final enemy (116).

            The ways in which we suffer should make us compassionate to others who suffer and have pain in any aspect of the body (the body also being shorthand for the totality of the self) (120). In this we can understand how, since Jesus was tempted according to every “species of trial,” He is about to sympathize with us – and be our example in sympathizing with others (123). This culminates in the suffering and death of Jesus (126).

            In the final section, Allberry explains that our bodies will be restore because they belong to Jesus (138).  “Not being our own means our body does not exist solely for our pleasure and agenda.  We are to glorify God with it, not ourselves.  And this is good news.  Only a body can glorify God” (150, italics in the original).

            Allberry explains that we are to offer up ourselves – our bodies as living sacrifices to God because He loved us first (166).

            Finally, we look forward to the resurrection of the body – assured by Jesus’ bodily resurrection – because “the life to come is going to be more real than our lives here” (177).

            The book contains endnotes, a general index, and a Scripture index.

            This book is thorough on the one hand, and very comprehensible on the other.  Pretty much anyone will understand and follow Allberry’s writing.  It is a book that sets out what the Bible teaches about the body – very good as God created it – and very God when God restores it.

            This is a book that ought to be read by ministers, seminary students, and members of the congregation to help dispel wrong ideas about the body and to embrace what the Bible truly says.  Which is Good News.

            [This review appears on my blog, Amazon.com, and Goodreads.com.]