Christianity holds the highest view of the human body of any worldview on offer, including (and maybe especially) the ones that market themselves as body-positive. Hedonism says the highest good is physical pleasure. Atheism says matter is all there is, so all that matters is matter. Postmodernism reduces the body to my body, my choice. As body-affirming as these sound, none comes close to the dignity Scripture assigns to the human body.
How do you feel about yours? Most people fall into one of three camps: those who quietly dislike their bodies, those obsessed with their bodies as tools for self-glorification; and those who hardly think about their bodies unless something hurts.
What does Scripture want us to think about our bodies?
The body is a topic like holding two sticks of dynamite. On one end, it is intensely personal. Most of us carry insecurity, frustration, and sometimes shame about our bodies and how we have used them. On the other end, the public conversation is explosive. Some of the sharpest moral and political conflicts of our time (abortion, euthanasia, marriage, genetic engineering, gender ideology) all trace back to what we think the human body is.
A common Christian assumption is that the body is religiously meaningless, and the soul is what counts. This view, called dualism, is old. The ancient Greeks held a version of it: the soul endures into eternity, but the body is temporary and irrelevant in the life to come. The consequence showed up in their sexuality. Since the body would perish along with whatever sins were committed in it, you could do whatever you wanted with it.
Some early Christian heresies pitted the soul against the body in the same way. Gnosticism held that matter was evil and spirit was good, which produced disdain for the body, a definition of salvation as escape from the body, and a rejection of the incarnation.
That ancient dualism wears modern clothes today. Much of our culture quietly subscribes to what bioethicists call Personhood Theory, which splits a human being into two realms. The bottom realm is the physical body, a biological organism with no intrinsic value. The upper realm is the person (personality, reason, values, awareness), which is what carries intrinsic worth. The implication is that being a living, breathing human isn’t enough. Personhood has to be earned by meeting an arbitrary set of criteria, such as moral agency, self-awareness, and acceptable cognitive capacity. Fall short, and you are demoted to a ‘human non-person’. Parts of the conversation around abortion and assisted dying run on this logic. So does much of the modern conversation around sex (the body is fragmented from the person, so what you do with your body has nothing to do with who you are) and gender (if your body says one thing and your psychological state says another, the body is irrelevant).
The Bible’s account is radically different, and far more dignifying.
Genesis 1 records God speaking the world into existence, including humanity: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them … God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:27, 31).
God made matter, and it matters to God. The same God who made the Great Barrier Reef and Victoria Falls also made your kneecaps, your thumbs, and your earlobes, and called you very good. If God had wanted to make you like the angels, He would have. If only the soul mattered, you would be a ghost. He made you body and soul.
God did not only create human bodies. He took one on. In the incarnation, God in the person of Jesus Christ became flesh: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
In a world that assumed the spiritual was good and the material was evil, God becoming man was a protest against the entire premise. The incarnation is a declaration that matter matters.
It gets more striking. Jesus, in the flesh, was crucified, died, and was buried. When He rose, He did not return as a disembodied spirit. He came back with a body.
“They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.’ When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, ‘Do you have anything here to eat?’” (Luke 24:37–41)
One of the first things the resurrected Jesus does is ask for a snack.
What happened to Jesus is what will happen to His people. Paul writes, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). And again, “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep … For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:20–22).
The resurrection carries a single message: our bodies matter. C.S. Lewis put it this way: “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. He likes matter. He invented it.”
Every human body, no matter how plain, disabled, or weakened by chronic pain, is destined for an embodied, eternal glory. For anyone walking through illness or a body that feels alien, this is the hope: one day, there will be no pain that the resurrection cannot cure. The Christian hope is not redemption from our bodies, but the redemption of our bodies.
If Scripture has the highest possible view of the body, what difference does that make? Paul takes up the question in 1 Corinthians 6, in a passage on sexual purity. He is writing into a Greek world that already assumed the body was largely irrelevant.
“‘I have the right to do anything,’ you say, but not everything is beneficial. ‘I have the right to do anything,’ but I will not be mastered by anything. You say, ‘Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.’” (1 Corinthians 6:12–13)
The Corinthian slogan was that sex is just an appetite of the body. When you are hungry, eat. When you want sex, have it. God will destroy them both, so what you do with the material world does not really matter. Paul dismantles this.
“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your bodies.” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20)
Imagine your car is stolen off your driveway, then recovered five days later: bumper falling off, passenger side scratched, interior trashed with garbage and cigarette butts. It is just a car, but the violation stings. It was yours. You bought it. Someone took what wasn’t theirs and did whatever they wanted with it.
That is the picture Paul is using for our bodies. You are not your own. His argument is not merely that the body was given to us as a gift, though it was. The argument is that you are not your own because you were bought at a price.
What was the price? “It was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18–19).
All sin requires payment. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Sin is rebellion against God, cutting ourselves off from the source of life. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Cut off from the author of life, the result is both spiritual and physical death. Jesus paid the price of our sin with His own blood so that we don’t have to. That is why we are not our own. He bought us back from the grip of death with His own life.
And as a mark of ownership on this redeemed life, He gives us His Holy Spirit: “When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit” (Ephesians 1:13). The Holy Spirit is God’s mark of ownership.
Paul’s metaphor is that our bodies are temples of the Spirit. In the Old Testament, the temple was a physical structure where God’s presence dwelt. In the New Testament, the focus shifts from a structure to a body. The Holy Spirit’s role is to glorify Jesus, so if my body is a temple of the Spirit, my body’s role is to glorify Jesus.
This reframes everything about physical health.
The goal of physical health is not to love your body. That sells the Bible short. Just as the goal of financial health is not to love your money, the goal of physical health is not to love your body. Loving your body is the assumed starting place in Christian theology, not the end, and it is not a Narcissus-style love. It is a properly ordered love for the body as a good gift from a loving God, even the parts we don’t particularly like.
The goal of physical health is to love God with your body.
A few concrete areas to consider, not as a checklist to generate guilt, but as a list to choose from. The question is not whether you can do all of them. Instead, which one of God is prompting you to lean in to?
Sleep is the foundation of physical health. You cannot out-nutrition or out-exercise poor sleep.
Nutrition. Are you overeating? Don’t be mastered by anything. Are you under-eating? The body functions better when properly fed. None of these rules out the chocolate cake. The Bible promises a feast in heaven, and a feast requires dessert
Substance use. What goes into the body matters because the body matters. Over-reliance on alcohol or any other substance must be surrendered.
Exercise. The body was designed to move. Potatoes don’t have joints because they aren’t supposed to. Find something you love, or at least don’t hate, and move.
Sex was designed by God to be enjoyed in its proper setting: whole-body commitment within whole-life commitment. Honour God with your body by pursuing purity.
Hygiene. If your body is a temple, be a good priest. Brushing your teeth can be an act of gratitude.
Work. Sloth is a dishonourable use of the gift of your body. Come into agreement with God’s design and learn to enjoy productive work.
Rest. If you are overworking and ignoring the body’s limits, rest may be the most worshipful act available to you this week.
Which one is God prompting?
You are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, and He loves what He has made. The best way to show gratitude for the gift of your body is not to take it for a joyride and leave it smashed up and abandoned. It is to care for it and honour it, because it belongs to the Lord.