Marginal Christianity

I’ve been looking at our life in Christ under the three heads below. -communication: hearing/obedience/Word/ear -communion: feeling/affections/Worship/heart -community: tasting/experiencing/World/body     The ear and heart , communication and communion, occupied us in first two posts in this series. Today it is the body, both our physical body and the body of Christ that call for comment. Life in Christ and the Body     We can almost say that life in Christ, the communication and communion we experience with God is kinesthetic. Our bodies are active in both listening to and being with God. This is why bodily postures in prayer are recommended in scripture and in the early church. And why in some traditions the congregation stands as the Bible is processed in for the reading of that day’s gospel passage. And why the practice of “Walking Prayer” is growing in popularity today. If our bodies are the face of our souls, then our inte...

12. Resurrection. Everything Christian comes down to this. Everything. Minus the bodily resurrection Christianity is either a moralistic religion or a gnostic-trending philosophy or spirituality. And before we can talk about meaning we have to talk about reality. Theologian Karl Barth once admonished his friend and student Thomas F. Torrance, “ Wohlverstanden , leibliche Auferstehung” (“Mark well, bodily resurrection”).      A. John Updike gives a writer’s take in his well-known poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter” : “Make no mistake: if he rose at all                                                                      It was as...

  The body matters. That God raised Jesus bodily from the dead says something powerful about the body. Jesus did not consist simply of spirit. What was important about Jesus was not simply spirit. Jesus was body, mind, and spirit. It all mattered, but without the body perhaps there was nothing worth keeping? Why else would God raise Jesus bodily from the dead? The brothers in 2 Maccabees 7 who courageously faced execution at the cruel hands of Antiochus confidently asserted that the God whom they trusted would restore physicality to them post-post-mortem. 2Mac. 7:10   After him, the third was the victim of their sport. When it was demanded, he quickly put out his tongue and courageously stretched forth his hands, 11 and said nobly, “I got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again.” The physical body, our bodies, my body; these are integral to resurrection. Without the physicality of our bodies resurrec...