Podcast: Why Your Physical Body Matters to God (Sam Allberry)

August 02, 2021 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Eternally Significant

In this episode, Sam Allberry talks about the eternal significance of our physical bodies, how it relates to our identity, and why our bodies matter here and now, especially in relation to the brokenness that we all feel because of sin.

What God Has to Say about Our Bodies

What God Has to Say about Our Bodies

Sam Allberry

The Bible has a lot to say about the body. Organized around three categories—creation, fall, redemption—this book by Sam Allberry provides readers with a balanced theology of the body as they seek to glorify God in everything they do.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:51 - Our Bodies and the Current Cultural Moment

Matt Tully
Sam, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Sam Allberry
I’m glad to be with you.

Matt Tully
A book about the importance of our physical bodies—it just seems so incredibly relevant right now in our culture today. It seems to me like so many of the most important—and often controversial—issues in our culture today connect in some way, usually a pretty direct way, to our embodied selves and our embodied lives. Do you resonate with that feeling? Was that in your mind as you started to work on this book?

Sam Allberry
Yes, very much so. It’s a perennial issue in the sense that we all have bodies and we all need to think about our bodies. But you’re right; there are so many areas of cultural life—and particularly within the church—of confusion where what we think about the body seems upstream of a lot of the things we’re talking about. It seems to be a thread in a lot of the issues that we’re discussing, and I was finding this pastorally as well—everything from gender identity to eating disorders to sexual ethics. All of it has to do with the question, What is our body for? How do we even know what our body is for? How do we know whether or not we are using it in the right way? How should we think about our body? It does seem particularly important given our cultural setting.

Matt Tully
I wonder if you could put on your cultural analysis, and maybe even your historian's hat for a moment: What do you think it is about this moment right now that has brought this issue of our physical bodies to the fore of so many of our conversations as a society?

Sam Allberry
Our understanding of what makes us who we are has shifted. This has taken a long time, but we’re sort of really reaching the fruits of it now. Increasingly, who you are is who you feel yourself to be deep down inside. That’s the real you. Friends who have to watch more Disney movies than I do tell me that’s the plot of every Disney movie in the last ten years—you’ve got to be true to yourself. You have to figure out who you are and be true to that. If that is the case, if we’re prioritizing an inner sense of who we are, then it really means that our bodies are incidental to our identity. They don’t give us any kind of guidance in and of themselves. We can override them, we can change them, we can switch them out. They are seen as malleable, and they are simply the blank canvas on which we paint our true inner sense of self identity, and often literally paint that true inner sense of self identity. So it seems to be the culmination of a very long process. We’ve gone from a very communal to an individual sense of the self, and we’ve now gone into a very internal sense of who we are.

Matt Tully
I want to dig into that a little bit more as we go, but taking more of a broad look, it seems like our broader culture today that we all live in is constantly pushing, in many different ways, conflicting messages about our bodies. On the one hand, we live in a world where physical beauty, physical health, and athletic prowess are all held in high esteem and are incredibly influential in our culture on things like entertainment, what we buy and how we spend our money, what we spend our time on. Yet, at the same time, as you’re saying now, we live in a culture that increasingly seems to deemphasize the significance of our physical bodies as core to who we are. They’re viewed as something that we can infinitely change and adjust depending on what we feel on the inside. What do you make of that contradictory emphases in our culture?

Sam Allberry
I think more than one thing is happening at the same time. That internalization of identity and self-hood means that our body is the place where we express that. So we’re attentive to our bodies because that’s how we externalize our internal sense of identity. It’s interesting that men’s grooming products in the last ten years have just exploded. We’re far more attentive to appearance and to body image because I think it’s one of the ways we express our identity. I think one of the other things that’s happening at the same time is with media becoming more global and, obviously, the Internet has really accelerated this. The standards of beauty that we are being given in the media are more and more unattainable and unrealistic. Technology has enabled this. You see an image of a movie star or a model or something, and it might not be them. I remember when Pretty Woman first came out it was Julia Roberts’s head but somebody else’s body on the poster. So, it may not even be the same person. Or, assuming it hasn't been photoshopped, it may be a body that is itself the fruit of an exercise or dietary regimen that is just not sustainable. So, in other words, they half-starved themselves or they beefed themselves up to an unhealthy proportion just for the photo shoot. But it wouldn’t be healthy to have a body that shape. All of these things mean that the standard of what you think is beauty is becoming evermore remote. I’m sure that is a massive contributing factor to the ever-escalating instances of body image issues, and that’s the case with men as well as women. People are only feeling worse and worse about themselves physically, and I think that’s part of it.

Matt Tully
How does that fit with this deemphasizing of our physical bodies as core to who we are? Is it just that they then become primarily viewed as a canvas, so to speak, for expressing our individuality, our identity as internal beings?

Sam Allberry
I think that’s exactly right. The real contradiction here is that on the one hand we culturally think we’re secularists and materialists, but on the other hand we’re putting all of our focus on the non-material understanding of who we are. We’ve come up with this concept of an autonomous self that is separate from our physical bodies, and the point of our bodies for many people is simply to make them reflective of our inner self in some way. So, inasmuch as we’re attentive to our bodies, it’s not because they have any intrinsic value and meaning in themselves, but we need to attend to our bodies so that people can see who we are and what kind of person we really are.

Matt Tully
And as you were saying, sometimes even because we want our bodies to be this finely-tuned expression of who we feel we are, we’re even willing to do things to our bodies that aren’t actually in our best interest and aren’t actually healthy for our body.

Sam Allberry
We’re not the first generation to have that issue, but I think we’re the first generation where it’s built on these particular anthropological foundations and with the kind of cultural, technological ways in which these things are being done today.

Matt Tully
In your book you give some examples of things in our culture that sort of illustrate our society’s view of our bodies. One example is the movie Avatar. I wonder if you could explain how that film conveys a certain view of our bodies that we might not even notice.

Sam Allberry
Avatar came out in 2009. At that time it was the highest grossing movie ever, and there’s more of them on the way. The premise behind Avatar was it was set in the future. There’s this distant moon where this race lives, and there’s a way for some humans to infiltrate that race by adopting avatars so that they don the physical bodies of that species. It’s fascinating in and of itself, but I think one of the things it reflects is an idea that you can be yourself even if you have the body of a different species. Switching out your body, not just for another human body but even for another humanoid species, doesn’t change who you are. It shows how incidental our physical bodies are in our understanding of who we are. I could just as easily be me with some other kind of body. It’s a similar thing with Ready Player One—the idea that you live in a virtual reality where you can pick whatever appearance and form you want to take, whether humanoid or non-humanoid, and it doesn’t change who you are. But we know from the Bible that our physical bodies are not incidental. I can’t understand fully who I am apart from the physical body God has given me.

Matt Tully
One of the interesting things about Avatar is that the main character, if I’m not mistaken, is a paraplegic—he can’t walk. At the least he can’t walk; I’m not sure if he could use his arms or not. I think there was this subtext of him then getting this avatar that allows him to do more than he actually could do in his own body. So there’s a sense in which it was almost viewed as an upgrade to his actual body.

Sam Allberry
Yeah. He might say something along the lines of, I can be more me with this body than I could have been with the old body. That’s how many people are tempted to think today.

11:38 - Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

Matt Tully
How do you think about that when it comes to many of the things that often feel broken or maybe even dysfunctional about our bodies? I think that’s a common experience that maybe we’ve all had to different extents. There are things about our physical bodies that either don’t work the way that they should work or they don’t work the way that we wished they worked. How do we balance that recognition with an appreciation for the body that God has given us?

Sam Allberry
The Bible helps us usually with these things because it doesn’t give us a diminished view of the human body, but it also doesn’t give us a naive and idealized view either. We have both the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the fall. The doctrine of creation shows me that my body is a gift and a calling. The doctrine of the fall shows me that it may not be the gift I would have chosen or the calling I would have wanted. The Bible shows us that there is a brokenness to the physical creation. Paul talks about creation being subjected to futility and frustration; that includes our physical bodies. The Bible can account for the fact that our bodies experience brokenness. We experience affliction, and we experience a lack of harmony between how we think about our body and ourselves. It’s important to remember that the Bible doesn’t only show us the brokenness; it shows us the glorious createdness as well. But we have to hold both of those together; otherwise, we’ll have a very skewed understanding of what it means to be human. I’m struck that in Psalm 139 David can say, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” He’s saying that of a fallen body. He’s not saying that of a perfect body. So even with our aches and pains and heartaches, we can still say we have been fearfully and wonderfully made.

Matt Tully
What are some ways that—within the church in particular among Christians—that you’ve noticed that people can subtly devalue their physical bodies, perhaps without even knowing it?

Sam Allberry
I think in a whole host of ways. One way is just to think our bodies are spiritually irrelevant and therefore, we don’t look after them and we don’t value them.

Matt Tully
It seems like it’s actually pretty common, and people probably wouldn’t say it, but to view our bodies as sort of like a vehicle—a suit—for our souls that sort of gets us around, helps us live in a physical world, but the real core of us—the important part of us—is our spiritual selves.

Sam Allberry
I think a lot of people feel that way—that the body is not much more than a kind of rental. You drive it around for a bit and then you get rid of it. It’s not there as a permanent thing. Don’t get too attached to it. I think that is a very prevalent and deeply unbiblical view of the body, and we see that reflected in lots of ways. For example, from the Christian who thinks, What I do with my body isn’t spiritually relevant, so therefore, it doesn’t matter if I sleep around or something else. That’s not the spiritual part of me. God’s not interested in my physicality. Or you think of the pastor who so overworks that he does his own health in because he’s thinking, The only spiritual thing going on here is the ministry. He will do that even at the expense of his physical health.

Matt Tully
On that particular point, how do you fit that together with some of what Paul says in the New Testament where he talks about exerting himself, even in some ways, spending his physical body and being willing to sacrifice his body in many ways for the sake of the gospel and for the sake of his ministry calling? How do we understand that? That’s probably a response that many pastors, or people who are in some kind of full-time ministry, will say: I know I’m running at a crazy pace, but I feel like I’m called to do this. I need to do this. It’s worth it.

Sam Allberry
I think the answer is Paul is the one who talks to us the most in the New Testament about stewarding our bodies. He talks about that in Ephesians 5 where he says that our natural and correct impulse is to feed and care for our bodies. In 1 Timothy he talks about physical training being a value. The sacrifices Paul ends up making for the gospel are not because he’s got a low view of the body. He knows he has one life to live and it’s more that he’s willing to sacrifice comfort and even safety. That’s different than someone who has a low view of their physical self and just can’t be bothered to look after themselves properly, either with a work/rest pattern or in what they eat or in exercise and that kind of thing. It’s not an equivalent thing.

17:05 - Christian Gnosticism?

Matt Tully
In the foreword to your book Paul Tripp notes something concerning that he’s seen within the church for years. He writes, “I have been bothered that an overspiritualization of the gospel would leave us with a Christian culture that is body ignoring, if not body negative. . . . A church that doesn’t have a robust gospel theology of the body will be unprepared to meet this generation’s philosophical, psychological, sociological, scientific, and media challenges.” You’ve already mentioned that you do see this as a somewhat common issue today. Unpack that. Is there something akin to a Christian Gnosticism at work in our churches that we are often unaware of?

Sam Allberry
I think there probably is. We’ve so relativized the significance of our bodies. We’ve assumed God is only interested in a spiritual aspect of me that we call the soul. We kind of can be aloof to our physical needs and the physical stewardship of our bodies. There are Christians who think it’s unspiritual to think about being careful with what you eat or careful about exercise and those kinds of things. They would say that’s a very worldly concern. But actually, God is interested in the flesh. The fact that Jesus became flesh himself shows us just how much our physicality is valued by God and how fundamental it is. I think in the guise of being spiritual we end up being unspiritual because we’re unspiritual about the things that are physical.

Matt Tully
I want to dig into that. You write in your book that “Jesus’s incarnation is the highest compliment the human body has ever been paid.” I wonder if you could unpack that. That’s a really big, profound statement. Help us understand what you’re getting at there.

Sam Allberry
The very fact that Jesus would become flesh—”the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14)—Jesus was willing to become a physical human being. And not as a temporary expedient, but as a permanent arrangement, if you like; a permanent decision. He didn’t just appear human, he didn’t just borrow some flesh for three years of ministry, he didn’t just beam down aged thirty. He coded himself into human DNA. He was a baby in a womb, a baby in arms being nursed, he was a toddler who would have fallen over, and a teenager who would have gone through puberty. He has entered into the fullness of physical human experience because he can’t save us without that. So it’s foolish for us to think our salvation can be less than that. To become one of us Jesus had to become flesh. He had to become human from the very first moment through to his eventual death and eventually his resurrection.

Matt Tully
What do you make of the resurrection? Is there even more to the story when we see that Christ is raised from the dead and has a physical body?

Sam Allberry
Absolutely. It shows us that his becoming flesh wasn’t just a temporary necessity. His resurrection is not just a stunt by which God can say, Jesus won! His resurrection, we find out, is the first fruits of what is going to be an entirely renewed physical creation. He’s the first resurrection among many. His resurrection body is the kind of prototype of what ours are going to be like. Paul says in Philippians 3 that our lowly bodies will be transformed into the likeness of his glorious body. We will be raised in the future as he has been raised, to the same kind of resurrection life. He’s shown where God is going to be taking us, and it is a physical future. Similarly, when Jesus ascended, he didn’t ditch his body on the way. At the right hand of God the Father on high there is now a human body. Again, it’s an extraordinary compliment to pay the human body, and it shows us something of the physical future God has for us. At the end of time, God is not going to just snatch our inner soul and we’re going to then live in some floaty existence forevermore. No, God is going to give us a new creation in the age to come with resurrected bodies to enjoy it.

Matt Tully
As you think about the doctrine of the incarnation—this idea that God the Son took on a human body just like ours—does that ever just stop you in your tracks as you think about that?

Sam Allberry
Not as much as it should, but it does. We’re so used to the language of John 1:14: “the Word became flesh.”

Matt Tully
It’s so basic to Christianity—

Sam Allberry
But when you stop and actually imagine it, and you think about what it involved, it really does stop us in our tracks. There’s that woman who cried out to Jesus, Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you! There was a woman who had God nursing at her breasts. It’s just astonishing to think about. But I think it becomes familiar to us and we lose the surprise of it. And not least in the cultural world that the Christian message was first shared in. There was no contemporary worldview that had a high view of the physical self. Everyone seemed to think the body was this gross, disgusting thing you’ve got to eventually escape from, so the idea of God not just becoming flesh but being raised to new physical life after death, it’s extraordinary.

24:07 - The Importance of Physical Touch

Matt Tully
Let’s dig into another one of those specific applications of this. One of the most provocative, interesting things that you talked about in your book was that you argue that we are a sex-obsessed culture, and yet we’re also touch deprived. And that connects in some way to how we think about our bodies and the importance of our bodies. What are you getting at with that?

Sam Allberry
We have so sexualized our understanding of intimacy that we’ve forgotten how to have appropriate touch. In much of our lives today touch has become a sexual category, which means that it’s very easy for people who are not in a romantic relationship to go through lots of their life without receiving appropriate physical contact. We know that we’re made for physical touch. Psychologists are now far more alert to the mental health implications of going without appropriate physical touch. So, by putting all our eggs in that romantic and sexual basket, we’ve actually worsened all the other aspects of life. You think of a widow who maybe her family lives far away and she no longer has her husband around, she could go many, many days and weeks without receiving appropriate physical touch. It’s in that context I then begin to reexamine that instruction that Paul gives on more than one occasion where he says, “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” I’m not saying that we should—

Matt Tully
We often like to take that verse metaphorically.

Sam Allberry
We do. And obviously, each culture has it’s own physical grammar, and a kiss isn’t normally the natural, standard greeting for most of us today. But the fact that Paul is saying to physically greet each other, there is a holy form of touch that is appropriate as you greet one another. It should be the case that churches are places where you can have healthy physical touch and healthy physical contact where you’re not literally an untouchable human being, but where the touch is thoroughly appropriate and spiritually edifying even. Paul says, “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” There’s something set apart about that physical greeting as Christians use it to welcome each other. It’s familial, it’s physical, it’s healthy, it’s what we need.

Matt Tully
And there’s something fitting about it being physical as it reflects the fact that we are physical beings.

Sam Allberry
Yeah. Absolutely.

Matt Tully
Do you think our experience as a culture—honestly, as the world—of the COVID-19 pandemic is going to help us recover a little bit of a realization of the importance of our embodied selves, and in particular our embodied lives in community with others? We’ve sort of gotten a taste of what it would look like to really go the other direction to the extreme, and we’re seeing the effects of that. We’re seeing it in psychology, and we’re seeing it in our relationships. As we come back to church together more and more in the coming weeks and months, it seems like maybe there’s a new awareness of the importance of that. Do you resonate with that?

Sam Allberry
I do, yes. I think we’ve seen the convenience of virtual meetings and Zoom and all the rest of it—there’s something nice about being able to just click a button and you’re out of meeting and you’re immediately at home in your living room or something. But at the same time, we’re sick of it. It’s just interesting watching some of the restrictions when they get eased, just that desperate desire to be physically back together again. We are aware that we’ve missed something—something fundamental. We see this even in the New Testament. John writes in 2 John: I’ve got more to write, but I don’t want to use pen and ink. I want to see you face to face so that our joy may be complete. There’s something incomplete about only relating to someone, in his case, through pen and ink, and in our case through pixels on a screen. It’s great. It’s way better than nothing and it’s not without merit, but it’s just not enough. I was grateful during the pandemic for our church’s live stream. It was amazing to have that, but in one sense it just made me want to be physically there even more. So I hope it has meant we don’t take that for granted.

29:23 - Dealing with Shame

Matt Tully
I think for even those who would affirm and embrace the Bible’s teaching about our bodies—our bodies being good gifts from God and that they’re central to who we are as people and as Christians—nevertheless, our bodies are often associated with negative feelings that can really be difficult to deal with. I think one of the most common negative feelings that we all to different extents have struggled with at times related to our physical values is shame—and for a whole host of reasons. Is that something that you can resonate with, and what word would you give to the person who struggles with shame for some reason?

Sam Allberry
It’s very, very common. In fact, there’s almost no one who hasn’t experienced that in some degree. It could be for any number of reasons. It may be shame having to do with appearance, it may be shame having to do with what we’ve done with our bodies, or shame about what has been done to our bodies by others. I think that the most important thing to know in that context is, in the language of Hebrews 4, we have a high priest who is not unable to sympathize, but who has been tested in every way, yet without sin. When Jesus came into this world he experienced the fullness, not just of being a human being, but he experienced the fullness of human suffering. Where I come from it’s sometimes joked that wherever the Queen goes, she only smells fresh paint. She would have a really unrealistic sense of what the real world smells like if that was the case. There’s none of that with Jesus. He experienced the worst of human life on this planet, and that verse in Hebrews is telling us there’s something comprehensive about the sufferings of Christ that means there’s no kind of pain we can go through that Jesus doesn’t know more about than we do. And that’s true of shame. Not that Jesus had reason to be ashamed of himself, but Isaiah 52 tells us that he was someone men hid their faces from. His suffering and crucifixion was so horrific that people would turn away from it; people couldn’t bare to look at it. So for someone who is feeling intense shame about how they look, I think it’s a comfort for them to know that Jesus knows what it’s like to have people actually really not want to look at you. He was physically abused by others. He was stripped naked, so there was an element of sexual humiliation going on there. We know that he was mocked and tortured, and so people who bear the same of how they’ve been treated by others, again, have in Jesus someone who truly and deeply understands that. One of the pains of this life is sometimes going through hardship and you feel as though no one really understands what you’re going through. And that can be true, sadly. But it’s never true when it comes to Jesus. He really does know. He experienced the fullness of the pains and griefs of this world.

Matt Tully
Have you ever struggled to feel gratitude for your physical body?

Sam Allberry
I think a lot of the time it never occurred to me to. You just assume your physicality. It’s actually working on this book that has really made me realize that I need to thank God for my body—with it’s quirks, frailties, and imperfections. I keep coming back to Psalm 139 when David says, “I praise you for I have been fearfully and wonderfully made.” My physical life is a gift from God. My physical body is a gift from God. Even if it’s causing me pain, it is still, as a body, a gift from God. Thankfulness is, I think, something that just doesn’t occur to us in many respects, and particularly for those who suffer either because of physical affliction or who just hate some aspect of their body. It can be very counterintuitive to be thankful for it, but it actually, by the same token, is a very spiritually healthy thing to do, to thank God for our bodies.

34:32 - Our Hope and Future for Our Bodies

Matt Tully
As we look to the future, what is our ultimate hope? What is our future hope when it comes to our physical bodies?

Sam Allberry
In Romans 8 Paul says we await our adoptions as sons, the redemption of our bodies. There is a physical redemption that is yet to come. Particularly as we pass our physical peak in this life—whatever age that is—

Matt Tully
I was doing some gardening the other day and stood up from a crouching position and I was like, Wow! My knees hurt a lot more than I remember this happening even a few years ago!

Sam Allberry
I remember a friend of mine coming to church one day kind of bent over. He was not an old man at all; he was in his early forties. But he was bent over in visible pain. I asked, What on earth have you done to yourself? He said, This happened while I was asleep. All I did was just get out of bed and this happened! Something about the way I slept injured me. When you’re in your forties—

Matt Tully
Sleeping is dangerous.

Sam Allberry
It is! It’s an extreme sport. So even as we pass our physical best, we can know that our best physical days are ahead of us and not behind us. I think particularly for Christians with long-term health issues and afflictions and pains, it is such a comfort to think this is not the only experience of physical life you’re going to have. This is not the only experience of a body you’re going to have. There will be a resurrection body that will be without those pains and afflictions and shames—bodies that will be perfectly suited for us to glorify God and enjoy him forever. We all have that to look forward to.

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