“My Body is a Cage and My Heart is in Heaven”

(Image belongs to Codex Anatomicus at CodexAnatomy.com)

Let me start by disavowing the bad theology suggested by the title there.

Growing up in a home with a clinically depressed, morbidly obese mother (who was my favorite person in the world) and a dyed-in-the-wool Left Behind-believing father left me very predisposed to think in the evangelical “it’s all gonna burn anyway” strain of thinking. The hallmarks of this ideology are: a strong emphasis on Pre-Millenial eschatology, anti-intellectual/anti- aesthetical world views, and a guttural, guilt-ridden drive towards evangelism. Also, it has as its end-state church buildings that look like this one:

*Note: Not actually a church. But I’ve seen some almost this ugly.

This kind of thinking was attractive to my mother because it allows a devaluation of the importance of the body (her body was largely a source of misery for her). For my father… well, his fiercely individualistic upbringing in a low socio-economic, poorly educated home meant that he was going to get to say a massive, “I told you so” to all of his peers investing in fancy educations and furnishing beautiful homes and churches who he always felt were looking down their noses at him.

And certainly, there’s no denying that Jesus is very critical of people who put their hope solely in the things of this world. But the same Jesus recognizes that Solomon in all of his splendor was the epitome of human glory (pre-Christ that is!). The lilies of the field were more beautifully arrayed than Solomon, sure, but that doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing! Solomon was participating in the beauty of the created world by building a wonderful and glorious kingdom. He certainly got carried away with the trappings of earthly wealth and pleasure, but his works are being favorably compared to the very works of God there in Matthew 6!

While the Bible tells us that our hope is not solely in this world, we are never told to have hope in some sort of ethereal “heaven.” The new heavens and the new earth, the earthly New Jerusalem which unites heaven and earth is what we are awaiting. We will not be disembodied, but will be given new bodies that never wear out or die.

Interesting Representation by Clarence Larkin… just recently heard the idea that the image of New Jerusalem described by John in Revelation could be pyramidal as the descriptions of “a city foursquare” apparently only refer to the “base” or footprint of the city. A pyramidal or ziggurat style construction could be NJ as a “true” Tower of Babel (the meaning of the name is disputed but, “Gate of Heaven” is one translation). If the original tower of Babel was some sort of man-made, false mountain seeking to unite heaven and earth, then the Heavenly New Jerusalem as the “true” Gateway to Heaven would seem to have building regulations similar to the altar prescribed in Exodus 20:25 which could not be built from human-chiseled stones.

“Our bodies are buried in brokenness, but they will be raised in glory. They are buried in weakness, but they will be raised in strength.” (1 Corinthians 15:43)

There is a continuity between the old body and the new. The things that we use our bodies to do in this world will affect the bodies we spend eternity future in.

This is an incredibly roughshod statement of what has come to be my working understanding of a “theology of the body,” and is really just precursor to what I want to talk about a “theology of place.” As Americans, we live in a country that was founded on an idea, and I think that that sometimes negatively affects our willingness to be attached to a place. The fact that most young Americans now have never lived in one place for more than 5 years only contributes to this sense of rootlessness and lack of a sense of place.

Godspeed,

-Jonathan