“I know I’m somebody,” reads the sign over the secretary’s desk, “cause God don’t make no trash.”
The sign says a lot. The affirmation is true. And it is as true of my body as it is of my soul. Body and soul belong together, as aspects of the total person, and Scripture actually uses both words on occasion to refer to the whole psychophysical reality of the human being. It would be wrong to view the soul without the body as the essence of me, just as it would be wrong to view my body without my soul as the essence of me. You may call me an ensouled body or an embodied soul—both are correct. My body is as truly me as my spirit is.
But the sign also betrays a terror. We can be reduced to trash. Our civilization is in crisis, and the crisis, in part, has to do with the estimate and treatment of the human body. The crisis is worldwide because we live in a day of universal history. We have been drawn into one oikumene—one inhabited world: one ecological, ecumenical body. Each exultation, each degradation of the human person is seen by all.
Moreover, we live in an age of unprecedented adoration of, and attack on, the human body. Our ultimate understandings of the human body are therefore at stake. Is the body an end in itself? Does its value lie in expedient usefulness, or does it proceed from, belong to, and return to its Maker? Is the body holy or expendable? Is it destined to extinction or to eternity?
I, for one, believe that the body is holy and, in some transmuted form, is destined to eternity. Accordingly, I am concerned about the degradations of the human body that masquerade as fulfillments, degradations embodied in the four idolatrous cults of Nimrod, Narcissus, Natura, and Nephilim.
Like all heresy, these cults take threads of truth and exaggerate them into demonic powers. What do each of these cults mean, and how can their degradation of the body be transformed into that image fit for the presence of God?
Nimrod
Nimrod was a Babylonian war deity of the second millennium (Gen. 10:8–12). He was the Semitic precursor of the Greek and Roman gods Neptune and Mercury, the warrior gods of sea and sky. And he lives on in our Star Wars culture (with talk of limited, survivable nuclear war as incense to his nostrils). He seeks to defend, but also to subjugate and destroy human bodies.
When we refer to people as product consumers, unemployment statistics, sex objects, fodder for war games, deportable populations, or educable masses, we are worshiping Nimrod. When we make somebodies into anybodies or nobodies, we recite Nimrod’s creed. When we relocate South Africans, liquidate Polish priests, or passively tolerate these abuses, we are sacrificing to the Nimrod cult.
Through sheer exercise of power, Nimrod bends or breaks another’s body to feed, fuel, or gratify oneself, one’s clan or cause or nation. He is the god of violence and terrorism, the god of unwarranted aggression on another. He is the god served by acts of indiscriminate abortion—and by bombing abortion clinics. And needless to say, Nimrod is an omnipresent deity. His cult is alive and well.
Nimrod’s warriors are self-destructive. By defining and construing the world in that way—by exploiting others—they render themselves exploitable. Spilling blood, they insure the spilling of their own. In contrast, in the community of Christ, strength is perfected in weakness. We ascend in condecension. We present our bodies as living sacrifices. We live not by might but by spirit.
Narcissus
Narcissus is a ubiquitous mythic figure found on the Greek islands and elsewhere. Absorbed in self-fascination, he worships himself—alone. All that is needed is closet and mirror, a hot tub or reflecting pool.
Narcissism is personal self-adoration and discomfort with others. (I am my body, goes the modern narcissistic litany. I possess my body.) Consequently,
Narcissus seeks proper grooming, subtle hues of appropriate cloth and tint: the body beautiful—coiffed, manicured, dieted carefully into the equipoise between anorexia and obesity, with light beer in hand.
Have you noticed how natural and wholesome narcissism has become? Consider the advertisements. It takes a real man to quit the rat race and start his own deep-sea diving enterprise. Natural fibers make good clothes and good eating, if you can afford them. A ten-speed bike, $800 in jogging velvets and Adidas shoes, a 40-minute walk each day, All-Bran for breakfast—all are wonderful recreation for a leisured, rural elite. “I love my wife. She takes care of herself; exercises every day, eats sensibly, and takes Geritol every morning.”
What’s wrong with this, you ask. Is it not extolling and revelling in this good creation?
No; it is destructive because it destroys true personhood. And true personhood means being for others, not for our solitary self. The cults of humanistic psychology, transactional analysis, winning friends and influencing people, composing impressive dossiers and interview demeanor—indeed, all fascinations with my own being—are depersonalizing because they intensify self-concentration.
The redemption of narcissism is togetherness. Jesus, a true Jew, joins us to solidarity in community. Just as, in contrast to Nimrod, expended power replenishes, so here sacrificial caring revitalizes. Mirror man is reduced to endless abstractions and refractions; reflector man glorifies. Calvin compared human glory to the moon’s haunting beauty, reflecting the radiant source of life. “Through thee,” wrote the theologian Gogarten, “I become myself.”
Natura
Natura is neither a god nor a mythological figure. It is, instead, the substance of natural reality itself. For that reason, nature is the most alluring deity. Through it we seek health and happiness.
At a fundamental level, natura is served by the god of athleticism: the icon officiating at that grotesque ritual where each season we gleefully cheer as serious injury is done to professional football players.
On Super Sunday, the high holy day, our entire society ascends to the sacred place, unveils the small ark that glows and speaks, and watches the forces of light and darkness contend. When the dust last cleared, the Forty-niners, not the Dolphins (Mercury, not Neptune), received the garlands, shoes, cars, and jeweled rings such as those first left in Egyptian tombs for the sun god Ra.
Jesus claimed that one who would be well (whole, saved) must give over (not cling to) this life. Surely health is an instrumental value. But we discipline our bodies and minds in order that these bodies may be instrumental to the achievement of divine harmony in this discordant world. The phrase “in order that” becomes the key. A body magnificent, I would argue in the words of a medical colleague, is the person “who can help ameliorate the pain and tragedy of this present age.”
Nephilim
This leads us to consider the final heretical cult that is smoking in our modern pantheon: the cult of the Nephilim. Once again, these gods, or giants in the earth, are of Semitic origin, although they appear in other cosmologies. Genesis speaks of giants in the earth, the sons of God and daughters of men (6:4). The Nephilim cult is the cult of bodily perfection: humans seeking to be as gods.
This most insidious body theology of our time is expressed blatantly in the words of two brilliant medical scientists, William DeVries, the surgeon; and Robert Jarvik, the biomedical engineer. Alluding to “Steve” in “The Six Million Dollar Man,” DeVries encouraged his patient, Bill Schroeder: “Don’t worry, Bill, we’ll make you better than you are.”
“This is a matter of national defense,” cried Jarvik, defending the implant in Mr. Schroeder of his Jarvik 7 artificial heart, “defense of our country, defense of lives, defense of our technology.”
For Nephilim, scientia (knowledge) plus technique (or technology) is the highest initiation into the mysteries of reality and deity. Here biological substances become the elixirs of life and the antidotes to sin. Genetic medicine, fetal therapy, amniocentesis, and perinatal interventions give us power to save, salvage, or scrap formative bodies.
Eugenic medicine seeks to perfect the nativity body. Eupsychics and euphenics seek to make good minds and bodies. “You’d better get in to a doctor and have your heart checked,” said Bill Schroeder as, with Coors in hand, he fulfilled his public relations covenant with Humana Corporation. “You don’t want this body to let you down.” The body magnificent becomes the body tremulous, the body vulnerable, the body fixable, with interchangeable parts from the body shop of modern medicine.
The nature and destiny of our body is to raise up a person fit for the presence of God. When the notion of instrumentality is fragmented into divisibility and biomechanical perfectibility, the body becomes a spare parts exchange or a burdensome carcass. Only metamorphosis into selves as servants of God and people can save our bodies for their intention.
Against Seduction
These, then, are the four body cults that today seduce (with terrible force) our true worship. They lure us because, like all heresy, they contain a filament of truth.
Nimrod, Narcissus, Natura, and Nephilim are all worthy of slight respect, but if—and only if—they fall as sequins and stars in the robe of our Savior, the Lord of body and soul, life and death, heaven and earth.
The Body Spiritual
As society continues its headlong pursuit of the body perfect, the role of its physicians will increasingly become that of body mechanic—further separating humanity from its spiritual identity. Commenting on this changing role, and its impact on both physician and patient, is a former student of Vaux, Dr. Thomas Elkins.
On the way to surgery, we found ourselves discussing the cause of the problem we had before us.
An adhesion. A simple strand of tissue, part of the normal healing process. Only now it had gone awry. The healing was causing a serious internal obstruction that could lead to further infection. Even death.
It would seem the likelihood of such a complication would have been eliminated long ago by our highly sophisticated, scientific society. But the problem of adhesion formation swelling into a maze of biochemical reactions has baffled medicine’s best thinkers for centuries.
The story of the postoperative adhesion closely parallels contemporary views of the human body. Surely it is a body that is “fearfully and wonderfully made.” However, as Dr. Kenneth Vaux has stated here, contemporary Americans tend to view the body in extreme fashions—overly emphasizing its cosmetic simplicities while overlooking its cosmic beauty.
This beauty is most apparent in the simplest acts of meaningfulness, acts in which the body serves as a vessel of servanthood, a transporter of joy, a bridge to fellowship—and thus becomes a truer image of the Creator himself. Such an eternal view eclipses the functional beauty of the body and of the medical profession’s obsession with objectifying, separating, and analyzing every millimeter of cell layers until the personhood within those layers is lost.
There are those who see the physician as little more than a mechanic “in the body shop of modern medicine,” in which the “magnificent” body is so scientifically controlled and chemically predestined that it becomes, as Vaux states, “the body tremulous, the body vulnerable, the body fixable, with interchangeable parts from the body shop of modern medicine.”
Much of this is true. The physician becomes part of such thinking long before medical school, when grade points in biology become more treasured than excellence in the humanities; when family activities are eclipsed by laboratory tests; when nonobjectifiable values such as faith and hope become embarrassing adult topics.
The “body shop mentality” becomes more solidified in medical school where a new vocabulary becomes a new view of life, and where the solving of body mysteries is but the reason for some researcher’s grant. Internships and residencies follow, in which procedures are put on a pedestal and the “body scientist” struggles to become the “body mechanic.” The desire “to know” is replaced by the demand “to do.”
It does not require a recollection of ancient cults for physician and patient to recognize what has happened in technological America. In the office of one of the founders of in vitro fertilization, a plaque reads: “Some say life is created in heaven, But we know better.” Such comments speak both of the magnificent achievement of contemporary medicine and the inability to receive the gift of life today with traditional humility.
This perceived control over life begets an inordinate amount of responsibility, which has become a curse for physicians in a society that continues to display a nonacceptance of any bodily imperfection, any surgical noncorrection or therapeutic failure.
Our world has been slowly creeping into a form of “naturalism” in which we cannot see beyond the physical body in our understanding of life. As Reinhold Niebuhr states, “[T]he nature of man is that he exists in both the environments of time and eternity.” Such an existence creates both wonder and confusion about our bodily creatureliness.
The power of the Christian faith is that we are free to affirm the body, to struggle to meet its needs, and yet still free to worship the eternal Creator. Thus the greatest challenge for the Christian physician in America, and for all Christians, is rediscovering the character and motivation of Christ in a technological world that seems no longer to recognize a need for him.
The Christian sees human beings as gifts to be cherished. The eyes of the malnourished child with malaria in the tropics, the agonized face of a mother hemorrhaging in labor, the tears of the elderly woman told of her cancer—all become my motivating forces, even today, in secular America. In those persons I see—and we as believers should see—the image of “the Nazarene” most clearly.
By Thomas Elkins, chief of the division of benign gynecology in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor.
