Saving the Soul but Neglecting the Body

Us and our Platonic preaching, teaching, and thinking

Photo by Greyson Joralemon on Unsplash

(A six-minute read.)

Two lessons from history.

The first is from historian Jemar Tisby’s book, The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism.

Tisby discusses how some Christians in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries faced a dilemma. They felt convicted that they needed to save the “souls” of the enslaved without freeing their bodies. They wanted to lead them into eternal life without liberating them in this life.

In one such instance, Anglican missionary Francis Le Jau, evangelizing in South Carolina, created a vow he required the enslaved to affirm when they were baptized:

You declare in the presence of God and before this congregation that you do not ask for holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the Duty and Obedience you owe to your master while you live, but merely for the good of your soul and to partake of the Grace and Blessings promised to the Members of the Church of Jesus Christ.

Tragic, maddening, hypocritical.

As Tisby summarizes, many Christian missionaries in the southern United States thus “preached a message that said Christianity could save one’s soul but not break one’s chains,” teaching “African Christians in America to be content with their spiritual liberation and to obey their earthly masters.”

The second is from a book I read with my kids six or seven years ago—back when they still enjoyed snuggling with me—that has been very popular within my faith community. It details the story of a Seventh-day Adventist in 1940s Germany who was drafted to fight for the Germans during World War II, and the harrowing experiences he had to go through to remain faithful to his religious convictions.

And what were his religious convictions?

Keeping the seventh-day Sabbath and not eating “unclean” meats (for which he was “persecuted” by being called “carrot eater”).

Granted, there was an episode when he made a fake gun so he wouldn’t have to kill his Soviet opponents. And I vaguely recall one episode where he warned some Jews about the SS.

But the overwhelming sense I got from the book, especially as I read it through the eyes of my young children, is that the really important thing is remaining faithful to one’s practices of personal piety.

Which, to me, seemed to be a fairly large exercise in missing the point.

After all, what shall it profit a man if he avoids eating pork but remains largely silent in the face of a holocaust?

Or what shall it profit a man if he saves an enslaved person’s “soul” but refuses to fight for the liberation of his body?

All this has got me thinking.

Of souls and bodies

This last Saturday, I spoke on these themes (I would strongly urge you to watch the whole sermon here). The question I grappled with in my sermon was this:

Is the church called simply to “save souls”? Or are we also called to bring healing and justice to bodies?

I spoke on God’s heart for justice and mercy and faithfulness. I reviewed some of the biblical evidence that points to this unmistakable—at least to me—thesis:

The church exists to embody the love of Jesus by standing with the marginalized, advocating for the oppressed, welcoming the stranger, and embracing the other.

I know this probably sounds “woke.” I know this probably sounds like “liberation theology.” I know this probably sounds like I’m “virtue signaling.”

For others, of course, all this sounds obvious—and it causes them to wonder why I even have to state the obvious.

But lately I’ve just been feeling that too many Christian voices—including ones that I really love, respect, and appreciate—are spending way too much time pushing an eternal “gospel” that largely ignores embodied and social reality.

We’re so focused on pushing a spiritual message that we forget the gospel is also meant to take on flesh—to be lived, practiced, and felt in the real world, among real people, in real suffering.

Or we want to claim to be “apolitical” so as not to distract anyone from what we think is really important.

When we do this, however, we not only diminish the gospel’s fullness—we also erode our missional credibility.

Also, whether we like it or not, our silence is implicitly political, effectively endorsing the status quo (which tends to benefit us whether we realize it or not).

By failing to present the “fullness” of the gospel I mean that our “gospel”—quite ironically—becomes a Platonic construct. It addresses timeless abstractions, in the interest of saving “souls” for eternity, that divorces it from the Bible’s holistic anthropology.

The Bible doesn’t promote such a dualistic anthropology though. Scripture doesn’t separate the soul from the body, the spirit from the flesh.

This is evidenced by the fact, among other ways, that the word for “save” (sōzō) in the New Testament isn’t limited to some sort of eternal status of the “soul.”

Instead, it is more holistic, having the sense of “healing” or “wholeness.”

Thus, there are numerous examples of people in the Gospels who experience physical healing, and yet Jesus describes them as being “saved” or “made whole” (see, for example, Luke 8:48; 17:19; Mark 10:52), with the word the writers put in Jesus’ mouth being sōzō.

I’m not at all denying the reality of eternity and the hope of transcendence. We do ultimately seek an eternal home, recognizing that our present lives are just a blip on the eternal radar screen. And for this reason, suffering in this life is relativized.

But such a recognition energizes us to pursue present healing, justice, and compassion for others.

True, we can probably get carried away with our advocacy work, completely forgetting eternity.

But I feel like the danger of that is a long ways away from the religious communities I’ve historically been a part of.

Making it plain

I remember a number of years back what a Black brother said to me via Direct Message on Twitter.

I had amassed a modestly-sizable following on the platform—at least by my denomination’s standards—which numbered in the low thousands. I was able to speak with some influence to a wider audience, talking a lot about the gospel and its implications for life, which seemed to resonate with at least some people.

But in the wake of heightened racial tensions, as our Black brothers and sisters were once again feeling beat down and worn out, this brother sent me a Direct Message that simply said, “Aren’t you going to say something?”

It was then that I realized all my musings on the gospel were “white noise,” failing to acknowledge and reach down into the pain of so many people.

My “gospel” was Platonic and disembodied. It was abstract and irrelevant. It was focused on the “soul” to the neglect of the body—like trying to teach someone algebra when they’re drowning in the ocean.

What they need in that moment is a lifejacket, not a math lesson.

Again, can we take it too far and altogether neglect eternal truth?

Of course.

And we definitely need to make sure we’re grounding our advocacy and justice in the transcendent, lest we potentially wed ourselves to the whims of society (and thus soon become widowed).

But let us remember what the Apostle James said—in the light of his hypothetical scenario where a man said he’d pray for a hungry soul instead of feeding him—that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26).

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Shawn is a pastor and church planter in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational and embodied expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.