A Brief Book Notice from Books At a Glance
Gregg Allison presents a holistic theology of the human body from conception through eternity, shedding light on pressing contemporary issues such as sexuality and gender. Theology applied to contemporary culture. Highly recommended.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1 The Created Body
2 The Gendered Body
3 The Particular Body
4 The Social Body
5 The Sexual Body
6 The Son’s Body
7 The Sanctified Body
8 The Blessed and Disciplined Body
9 The Worshiping Body
10 The Clothed Body
11 The Suffering and Healed Body
12 The Dead Body
13 The Future Body
Conclusion
Selected Quotes
- “As part of the doctrine of creation, a theology of human embodiment helps us understand God’s creation of human beings and his design for human flourishing.”
- “The triune God’s design was for the eternal Son of the Father to become the God-man by virtue of the Holy Spirit’s uniting him to a human nature just like ours.”
- “God’s design for his embodied image bearers is that we are holistically sanctified, which includes growing in holiness in our body. Such progressive embodied sanctification fights against “deadly” sins of the body—lust, gluttony, and sloth. It also pursues physical wellness through sleep and rest.”
- “…through the physical senses, human embodiment brings blessings that are too numerous to count. At the same time, it also demands bodily discipline.”
- “By particularity I mean that each person is an individual. God explicitly designs and creates each human being to be a particular gendered embodied individual. Specifically, each person is a particularity in terms of their ethnicity/race, family/kinship, temporality, spatiality, context, and story.”
- “In their pre-fall state, Adam and Eve were naked not because they removed their clothes, but because they had never been clothed. Startlingly, this absence of clothing is joined with an absence of shame.”
- “Against such attempts to deny and avoid death, the truth is that all people face an engagement with death: ‘It is appointed for people to die once—and after this, judgment’ (Heb. 9:27).”
- “As God the Son was embodied and is re-embodied, so too we are embodied and will be re-embodied. The proper state of human existence—both now and then—is embodiment.”