Salvation

of the Flesh, Not Salvation from the Flesh

Christopher West
__________

“‘The flesh is the hinge of salvation.’ We believe in God who is creator of the flesh; we believe
in the Word made flesh in order to redeem the flesh; we believe in the resurrection of the flesh,
the fulfillment of both the creation and the redemption of the flesh” (CCC 1015).

• While religion is generally held to be a flight from the body to reach God, Christianity
presents the exact opposite movement: God taking on a body to reach us!

• When we are intent on divorcing ourselves from the body, we can make zero sense of a
God who is intent on wedding himself to the body. “A body you have prepared for me”
(Heb 10:5). The future Pope Benedict XVI wrote that this brief sentence “contains the
entire Gospel” and “the whole fulness of Sacred Scripture” (MCS, p. 91).

• It’s true that “the corruptible body burdens the soul” (Wis 9:15). But our hope lies not
in redemption from the body, but in “the redemption of the body” (Rom 8:23) when
“that which is corruptible will clothe itself with incorruptibility” (1 Cor 15:53).

1. When we cut the body off from the hope of redemption, licentiousness follows, then self-mutilation. Acts
of self-mutilation (from absurd tattoos and piercings to cuttings, trans-gender surgeries, and suicides) are in
fact part of the whole creation groaning in the Spirit for the redemption of the body (see Rom 8:19-23). They
are a kind of proto-repentance, a cry going up to heaven that is honest and direct and will be answered with
mercy for all who join in the cry and accept the mercy that God cannot not pour out in superabundance (see
Patitsas CE, p. 35).

2. “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body: ...
spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature” (CCC 365).

3. When a person rejects his bodily identity, he “thereby strikes a blow against his deepest being. He holds
himself in contempt, because the truth is that he is human only insofar as he is bodily, only insofar as he is
man or woman.” Hence, the question of the body and sexuality “has high stakes: nothing less than the reality
of the creature [of what it means to be human]” (Ratzinger, MCS, pp. 32-33).

4. The truth about man’s destiny “cannot be understood as a state of the soul alone, separated (according to
Plato, liberated) from the body, but must be understood as the definitively and perfectly ‘integrated’ state of
man brought about by a [perfect] union of the soul with the body” (John Paul II, TOB 66:6).

5. “A soul without a body is exactly the opposite of what Plato thought it is. It is not free but bound. It is in an
extreme form of paralysis. …When death separates the two we have a freak, a monster, an obscenity. That is
why we are terrified of ghosts and corpses, though both are harmless: they are the obscenely separated
aspects of what belongs together as one” (Kreeft, EH, p. 93).

6. “‘On no point does the Christian faith meet with more opposition than on the resurrection of the body.’ It is
very commonly accepted that the life of the human person continues in a spiritual fashion after death. But
how can we believe that this body, so clearly mortal, could rise to everlasting life?” (CCC 996).

7. Manichaeism sprang from dualism and “saw the source of evil in matter, in the body, and therefore
condemned all that is bodily in man. And since in man bodiliness manifests itself mainly through sex, the
condemnation was extended to marriage and to conjugal life.” This “way of understanding and evaluating
man’s body and sexuality is essentially foreign to the Gospel. ...Anyone who wants to see a Manichaean
perspective in [Christ’s teaching] would be committing an essential error” (TOB 44:5; 45:5).

8. “While for the Manichaean mentality, the body and sexuality constitute ... an ‘anti-value,’ for Christianity …
they always remain a ‘value not sufficiently appreciated.’” In fact, the Manichaean condemnation of the body
and sex “might – and may always be – a loophole to avoid the requirements set in the Gospel” (TOB 45:3;
44:6).

9. While the Manichaean approach is characterized by the “negation of the value of [the body and] sex,” the
Christian approach “is characterized by a transformation of the human person’s conscience and attitudes ...
such as to express and realize the value of the body and sex according to the Creator’s original plan” (TOB
45:3).

10. “The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the
divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden from eternity in
God, and thus to be a sign of it” (TOB 19:4).


REFLECTION QUESTIONS:

1. Have you conceived of yourself as a spirit “trapped” in a body? Have you
conceived of your body as a “shell” in which your “spiritual self” dwells or have
you understood your body as something integral to your self?

2. Why are “spiritually minded people” so often uncomfortable with their bodies?
Where does this attitude come from and why do you think it is so easy even for
Christians to forget the significance of God taking on flesh?

3. What are two practical ways I can implement what I’ve learned in this session in
my life?



CCC Catechism of the Catholic Church (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997)
CE “Chastity & Empathy,” an interview with Dr. Timothy Patitsas; Road to Emmaus Journal (Winter, 2015)
EH Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Heaven, Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press, 1990)
MCS Mary: The Church at the Source, Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs Von Balthasar (Ignatius Press, 2005)
TOB Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, Pope John Paul II (Pauline 2006)