Incarnational Implications
When I graduated from high school in 1991, I was given a leather bookmark with an inscription in Spanish. It read, "Las almas son fuegos cuyas cenizas son los cuerpos." Souls are fires whose ashes are bodies. It is poetic, evocative, and memorable. It is also, at least from a biblical Christian perspective, profoundly mistaken.
The sentiment reflects a view of humanity that owes far more to Greek philosophy than to the Bible. In this view, the soul is the true self, eternal and alive, while the body is merely a temporary shell, a husk to be shed. Matter is lesser. Spirit is higher. Salvation, then, becomes escape from the physical world rather than its renewal. This way of thinking has deeply shaped popular Christian imagination, even among believers who would never consciously endorse it.
Scripture tells a different story. From the opening chapters of Genesis, humanity is presented as an integrated unity of body and spirit. God forms Adam from the dust of the ground and breathes life into him. The result is not a soul trapped in a body, but a living being. Throughout the Old Testament, the human person is consistently treated as an indivisible whole. Death is not liberation of the soul but a tragic rupture, a tearing apart of what was meant to be united.
The New Testament does not correct this vision. It intensifies it. The central event of Christian faith is the incarnation. The eternal Son of God does not merely appear human. He becomes human. He takes on flesh, not as a temporary costume, but permanently. The risen Christ is not a disembodied spirit. He eats, speaks, bears scars, and remains recognizably human. Even now, Christ is both fully God and fully human.
Christian hope, therefore, is not an eternal escape into a purely spiritual heaven. It is the resurrection of the body and the renewal of all creation. Heaven and earth are not meant to remain separate realms forever. The biblical story ends with their reunion, with God dwelling with his people in a restored, physical world. Eternity is not less embodied than the present. It is more so.
It is striking how many Christians, shaped by cultural assumptions rather than Scripture, imagine salvation as floating souls and abandoned bodies. The bookmark I received was well intentioned, even beautiful in its phrasing. But Christianity does not teach that bodies are ashes left behind by eternal flames. It teaches that bodies matter so much that God himself took one, redeemed it, and promised to raise ours as well.
That, to me, is a far more hopeful and far more human vision.
The sentiment reflects a view of humanity that owes far more to Greek philosophy than to the Bible. In this view, the soul is the true self, eternal and alive, while the body is merely a temporary shell, a husk to be shed. Matter is lesser. Spirit is higher. Salvation, then, becomes escape from the physical world rather than its renewal. This way of thinking has deeply shaped popular Christian imagination, even among believers who would never consciously endorse it.
Scripture tells a different story. From the opening chapters of Genesis, humanity is presented as an integrated unity of body and spirit. God forms Adam from the dust of the ground and breathes life into him. The result is not a soul trapped in a body, but a living being. Throughout the Old Testament, the human person is consistently treated as an indivisible whole. Death is not liberation of the soul but a tragic rupture, a tearing apart of what was meant to be united.
The New Testament does not correct this vision. It intensifies it. The central event of Christian faith is the incarnation. The eternal Son of God does not merely appear human. He becomes human. He takes on flesh, not as a temporary costume, but permanently. The risen Christ is not a disembodied spirit. He eats, speaks, bears scars, and remains recognizably human. Even now, Christ is both fully God and fully human.
Christian hope, therefore, is not an eternal escape into a purely spiritual heaven. It is the resurrection of the body and the renewal of all creation. Heaven and earth are not meant to remain separate realms forever. The biblical story ends with their reunion, with God dwelling with his people in a restored, physical world. Eternity is not less embodied than the present. It is more so.
It is striking how many Christians, shaped by cultural assumptions rather than Scripture, imagine salvation as floating souls and abandoned bodies. The bookmark I received was well intentioned, even beautiful in its phrasing. But Christianity does not teach that bodies are ashes left behind by eternal flames. It teaches that bodies matter so much that God himself took one, redeemed it, and promised to raise ours as well.
That, to me, is a far more hopeful and far more human vision.
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