Body

Body, in Scripture, is the concrete, embodied existence of a creature before God — the person as physically and historically real rather than as a soul temporarily housed in matter. The Hebrew vocabulary of the Old Testament works largely with flesh (bāśār) and living being (nepeš), and the Greek of the New Testament with sōma (body) and sarx (flesh); the two are related but not identical, and Scripture nowhere treats the body as evil in itself. The text says that the first man Adam "became a living soul" and the last Adam "a life-giving spirit" (1 Corinthians 15:45), a contrast between two representative human beings and the order of life they head, not a rejection of bodily existence.

Scripture uses the temple as its central image for the body's dignity. Paul tells the congregation, "Don't you know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16), and later tells individuals, "your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own" (1 Corinthians 6:19). Linguistically, the first address is plural and corporate, the second singular in its reference to the body — so the image carries both a communal and a personal sense — and both rest on the claim that the Spirit's indwelling makes the body the property and dwelling of God rather than of the person who inhabits it.

The body is also the subject of Christian hope. The text says Christ "has been raised from the dead. He became the first fruit of those who are asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:20), that "as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22), and that each rises "in his own order" at his coming (1 Corinthians 15:23), until he has put all his enemies under his feet (1 Corinthians 15:25). The expectation is not escape from the body but its transformation: "when this perishable body will have become imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then what is written will happen: 'Death is swallowed up in victory'" (1 Corinthians 15:54). The same confidence speaks of the present body as "the earthly house of our tent" that may be dissolved, and of "a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens" (2 Corinthians 5:1) — imagery of continuity and replacement held together, as the passage itself does, without resolving every question about the interval between death and resurrection.

Christian traditions read this material differently at several points. Traditions with a strong sacramental and ascetical life — Catholic, Orthodox, and monastic strands especially — stress the body as the medium of grace and therefore value bodily discipline, fasting, and physical acts of worship; Reformed and evangelical traditions more often speak of the body in terms of stewardship, purity, and embodied obedience, and some read "spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15:44) as implying a resurrection existence quite unlike present physicality, while others insist on a genuinely reconstituted material body. Readings of 2 Corinthians 5:1 also diverge over whether the "building from God" describes an intermediate state, the resurrection body, or the corporate dwelling of God's people. These are confessional and interpretive differences rather than disagreements about the plain wording of the texts.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.