Body (theology)

“ THE SOUND BODY. Consideration has been given, in the preceding chapters, to the pre-existent life, the course of the Gospel on the earth, and man's relationship to God, to the Church and to his fellowman. Man must, also, give respectful consideration to himself, as an individual.
**The Importance of the Body.** Attention has already been called to the fact that the condition of the body limits, largely, the expression of the spirit. The spirit shines through the body only as the body permits. The body is essentially of the earth ”

“ While man has been created in the image and likeness of God, yet our bodies in their present state of imperfection—sometimes stunted in growth, diseased, subject to sickness, wasting, decay and death—cannot be said to be like God's glorious, perfect physical body; yet we have the Divine word that our bodies shall be like His:
"For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself." ”

“ Thus does the holy blessed God: he first buries our bodies under the earth, where they putrefy and corrupt, that nothing remains but that one bone: from this a new body is produced, which is indeed a body, but not a perfect body. But in that great day, when all bodies are hidden in the earth, and the soul departs, then even that bone decays, and the body which was formed out of it remains, and is as the light of the sun, and the splendor of heaven. ”

“ She actually saw God enfolding all things. "For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God, and enclosed." ”

“ And yet it may be admitted that there is a certain loose sense in which man is "God manifest in the flesh." As may be afterwards shown, he is God's image manifested in the flesh; and an image or likeness is a manifestation or making evident of that which it represents, whether it be an image or likeness of body or of mind. ”

“ To have every appetite of the body under the rule and regulation of the Holy Spirit appears to some needless, to others too difficult. And yet it must be, if the body is to be holy, as God’s temple, and we are to glorify Him in our body and our spirit. The first approaches of sin are made through the body: in the body the complete victory will be gained. ”

“ In the first place, this exposition being granted, it follows, as a present-day lesson of great moment, that the holiness which God requires has to do with the body as well as the soul, even with such commonplace matters as our eating and drinking. This is so, because the body is the instrument and organ of the soul, with which it must do all its work on earth for God, and because, as such, the body, no less than the soul, has been redeemed unto God by the blood of His Son. ”

“ The natural is visible in nature, but the spiritual is always existing, for "there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body." "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God," hence the soul-form, without the material body, but in its spiritual organized body, will do so. ”

“ It will be remembered that Paul is explicit about the difference in kind between the natural body and the spiritual body, using many comparisons. In speaking of the resurrection he says: "It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption; it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." ”

“ The angels were created in a corporeal place, not as if depending upon a body either as to their existence or as to their being made; because God could have created them before all corporeal creation, as many holy Doctors hold. They were made in a corporeal place in order to show their relationship to corporeal nature, and that they are by their power in touch with bodies. ”

“ After the body and spirit are separated by death, what, pertaining to this earth, shall we receive first? The body; that is the first object of a divine affection beyond the grave. We first come in possession of the body. The spirit has overcome the body, and the body is made subject in every respect to that divine principle God has planted in the person. ”

“ It would seem that corporeal matter obeys the mere will of an angel. For the power of an angel excels the power of the soul. But corporeal matter obeys a conception of the soul; for the body of man is changed by a conception of the soul as regards heat and cold, and sometimes even as regards health and sickness. ”

“ Again He saith,—‘He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, dwelleth in Me, and I in him.’ Now, if the eating be after a literal manner, so also must be the dwelling. Our bodies, therefore, must be withinside the body of Christ in Heaven, and His body must be withinside every one of ours on earth. ”

“ For it is His body that is there given, His flesh that is divided for the salvation of the people, His blood that is poured, no longer into the hands of unbelievers, but into the mouths of the faithful. ”

“ He believed also that the spiritual body was connected with, and had its birthplace in, the natural body, so that the body we now wear is to be represented by that finer and more spiritual organism we are hereafter to be clothed in. ”

“ It is the flesh, and the minding of the flesh, that is to be crucified. On the other hand, just because life for us is life in the body, therefore the body with its members must be brought into the service of Christ, and must fulfil the will of God. "Yield your bodies a [311] living sacrifice." "Your bodies are temples of the Holy Ghost." ”

“ If the present body hinders rather than helps the growth of the spirit, if at last all Christians are to have a spiritual body, why might we not have had this body to begin with? What need of this mysterious process of passing from life to life and from body to body? If it is true that we are here only for a few years and in the future life for ever, why should we be here at all? Why might we not at birth have been ushered into our eternal state? ”

“ In the flesh, not after the flesh,—that is, in the natural functions which the body exercises, to such life is He dead: so that this life has now ceased with Him, and He is now removed to another life and quickened after the spirit, passed into a spiritual and supernatural life, that comprises in itself the whole life that Christ now has in soul and body. ”

“ The more we abstract ourselves from all corporeal things the more fit we are for communion with God; the body is a veil, a cloud, and clog to the mind in its transactions with God. We should as it were forget it when we go in before the Lord in duty, and be willing to drop it, that we may go up to him in heaven. This was the apparatus to the vision. ”

“ It is not Christ’s natural Body, subsisting according to the ordinary operation of what we call the Laws of Nature, but it is His glorified Body, that Body, which came suddenly, and stood in the midst of his disciples when the doors were shut ”

“ Our wrappings are our bodies, but we do not begin to understand Theosophy if we think of body in the ordinary sense; our physical body is only one and that the coarsest of the seven veils, for there are seven here also, in which the true soul is enmeshed. ”

“ Birth by the Spirit is necessary, because that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and the kingdom of God is spiritual. Of course our Lord does not mean by flesh the mere tangible substance of the body; He does not mean that our first and natural birth puts us in possession of nothing but a material frame. By the word “flesh” He signifies the appetites, desires, faculties, which animate and govern the body, as well as the body itself—the whole equipment with which nature furnishes a man for life in this world. ”

“ Being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the spirit. The word flesh is common in Scripture, as is also the word spirit, and the Apostles usually present the two in contrast. The sense is this: that Christ, through His sufferings, is taken out of this life that consists in flesh and blood, as a man on earth who lives by flesh and blood,—walks and stands, eats, drinks, sleeps, wakes, sees, hears, grasps, and feels,—and, in brief, whatever the body does while it is sensible; to all this Christ has died. This is what St. Paul calls a natural body,—that is, the animal life. ”

“ The Godhead was united with Christ's flesh after death by personal union, but not by natural union; thus the soul is united with the body as its form, so as to constitute human nature. Consequently, by the union of the body and soul, the body was uplifted to a higher condition of nature, but not to a higher personal state. ”

“ For the flesh (I mean outward flesh, even such as was that wherein Christ lived and walked when upon earth; and not flesh, when transformed by a metaphor, to be understood spiritually) can only partake of flesh, as spirit of spirit: as the body cannot feed upon spirit, neither can the spirit feed upon flesh. ”

“ Just as we listen with our bodily ears to physical words and understand spiritual things, so, through corporeal vision, we come to the spiritual. On this account Christ took a body and a soul, as man has both one and the other. ”

“ To another class he comes and says, `You are religious; but it is your soul with which you can serve God; all you can do with your body is to punish it, and destroy it by slow degree.' Many look upon this as religious heroism; but it is as much a lie to the truth of God as is the grosser misuse of the body for lust or appetite. God comes with his glorious claim, `the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. ”

“ And as the natural ideas are stirred up in us by outward and natural bodies, so those divine and supernatural ideas are stirred up in us by a certain principle, which is a body in naturals, in relation to the spiritual world, and therefore may be called a divine body; not as if it were a part of God, who is a most pure spirit; but the organ, or instrument of God, by which he worketh in us, and stirreth up in us these ideas of divine things. This is that flesh and blood of Christ, by which the saints are nourished ”

“ But if any one were to think that the earthy image is the flesh itself, but the heavenly image some other spiritual body besides the flesh; let him first consider that Christ, the heavenly man, when He appeared, bore the same form of limbs and the same image of flesh as ours, through which also He, who was not man, became man, that “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” ”

“ And besides, man may progressively augment his little body, causing it to articulate with the whole body of nature. Moreover, the human body is primarily God's, the flower of all His works in the vast unfolding universe. ”

“ Now as the soul and mind closely adjoin themselves to the flesh of the body, in order that they may operate and produce their effects, it follows that the unition of the soul and mind with the consort is felt, even in the body, as one flesh. ”

“ The word flesh refers in Scripture not only outwardly to the body, but includes all that is derived from Adam. As when God says, in Gen. vi.: "My Spirit shall not always strive with men, for they also are flesh;" and Isaiah, chap. xl., "All flesh shall see the Salvation of God,"—that is, it shall be revealed for all men. So we also make confession in our own form of faith, "I believe in the resurrection of the flesh," that is, that men shall rise again. So man uniformly throughout is called flesh, as he lives here in this state of being. ”

“ We have seen that there is some reason for believing that, simultaneously with the birth or coming to consciousness of what we have called the divine soul, there occurs within us the formation of a ‘spiritual’ or very subtly material body. ”

“ Most of us, for example, reasoning justly that, since all the minds we know are connected with bodies, therefore God's mind should be connected with a body, proceed to suppose that that body must be just an animal body over again, and paint an altogether human picture of God. But all that the analogy comports is a body—the particular features of our body are adaptations to a habitat so different from God's that if God have a physical body at all, it must be utterly different from ours in structure. ”

“ Similarly, the Holy One, blessed be He, established the world and created for it one body, and with this body, He sustains all the bodies, and with this body, the senses of the body within him, comprise four levels, and this body is bound to that exalted city above it. ”

“ Do you want the natural gratification of the body? Keligion bids you seek it in the natural and legitimate way, not in a manner unnatural and against the body's law. It counts the body sacred, as well as the soul, and knows that a holy spirit demands a holy flesh. Thus it enhances even the delights of the body, by keeping every sense in its place. ”

“ I say this to your shame. 35 But someone will say, "How are the dead raised?" and, "With what kind of body do they come?" 36 You foolish one, that which you yourself sow is not made alive unless it dies. 37 That which you sow, you don't sow the body that will be, but a bare grain, maybe of wheat, or of some other kind. 38 But God gives it a body even as it pleased him, and to each seed a body of its own. 39 All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, and another of birds. 40 There are also celestial bodies, and terrestrial bodies ”

“ It was the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless organization could begin again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at all. ”