Hello, God? Is Any BODY Out There?

If you are just joining, this is the second installment of a series of thoughts concerning John Eldridge's book, "Wild at Heart." To begin with the first discussion, scroll down to the May 11 post entitled "On To John."

The previous post I made on the book, "Wild at Heart" was intended to begin a discussion over the fundamental premise used to support the role of the genders as per Mr. Eldridge. I noted that he used the conjunction "or" when discussing men and women, while the biblical account uses the word "and." My intention in pointing this out is to show that Eldridge is creating a dichotomy between the sexes, while the author of Genesis is creating unity.

From this point, Eldridge goes forward with the assumption that God divided his image in half and put the two pieces into the two different sexes. I am suggesting this is not the case. Instead, I would argue that the author of Genesis is looking across the sea of humanity and saying, "Humanity - every last one of us - is made in his image."

What it means to be made in the image of God is something more to be experienced and less to be spoken, but even so, I am contending that Eldridge makes a fundamental mistake when he suggest that Genesis divides God's image into male and female. Instead, Genesis unites the sexes as both made in the one image of God.

As a side note, I have often heard people discuss how the man is like the sun and the woman like the moon (Eldridge does this later in the book). They often draw this from Genesis 1 as well. But look closely at the pattern of the biblical author. God divides the day and the night, land and the sea, sky above and the sky below. He divides the moon and sun, yes, that is true. But on the sixth day, he does not divide the woman and the man. Instead he divides the livestock and the humans. It does not correspond to say that men are like the sun and women are like the moon. John Milton messed that up in Paradise Lost, but the author of Genesis does not.

But alas, I was hoping to move on to the next part of the discussion without making this an incredibly long post. Too late, huh?

I'll just briefly sketch out this next part. I know that it will not be complete. Feel free to disagree or agree and flesh it out.

The next part of Eldridge is the following statement. "Now we know God doesn't have a body so the uniqueness can't be physical (p.8). This statement is utterly fascinating to me. I'm slightly blown away that this book sold over 1 million copies and no one stop and said, "Did John Eldridge just deny the deity of the incarnate Christ?" Whether he meant to or not, that is, in fact, just what he did.

Not only did Jesus have a physical body before the cross, but he had some kind of physical body after the cross. He ate and was touched (at least he offered). Yes, he also did some weird things like just show up in locked rooms and things like that - clearly we don't understand his risen physical body, but he had one. I suppose you could assume that his physical body fell off like the rocket boosters on the space shuttle when he went to heaven... If you'd been watching you would have seen a rag doll body falling from the sky - don't worry! It's not Jesus, it's just his physical body! My friends, this is gnosticism.

I know someone out there is thinking of the verses in John 4, where Jesus says God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. There are really smart people in this world who have figured out really interesting things about the word spirit. I won't go into it all now (mostly because I don't understand it all). For now, suffice it to say, that we also are spirit, but not to the exclusion of our physical bodies.

Am I saying God has a physical body? Well, Jesus does. What about the other members of the Trinity? Who knows.

The point of all of this is that Eldridge starts by dividing the sexes, while the author of Genesis unites them. Then Eldridge claims that God isn't physical, but we know that at least part of God is, and who knows about the other parts.

Where I am I going next?! :-)

posted by Headless-in-GR @ 5/11/2004 08:32:00 PM