It’s disorienting to live in Christian community in the United States today. Those who agree on Jesus, read the same Scriptures, and confess the same creeds diverge sharply on the weightiest moral questions of our time, especially around sexuality, racial injustice, and care for the created world. The issue is not just that Christians arrive at different conclusions, but that we often seem to be navigating the world by different maps.
What is particularly disconcerting is the sense that often conversations around sexuality, racial injustice, and care for the created world betray one’s political affiliation more than one’s biblical and theological reasoning. For example, the Pew Research Center shows Christian attitudes about climate change align more closely with partisan identity than with confessional commitments. Over time, partisan identity (with its bundling of priorities) increasingly shapes not only individual judgments but also our sense of which moral conclusions naturally belong together.
I want to propose a different map, one that recovers an ancient, biblical understanding of the body and its relation to the world. Scripture consistently speaks of bodies as participatory—both formed by what they share in and shaped by the powers they yield to. Bodies are how people are bound to one another, to the world they inhabit, and to whichever lord they serve. Seen this way, the body provides a unifying framework for Christian moral reasoning.
Much of our moral confusion begins with a way of understanding the body that feels obvious to us but sits uneasily with how Scripture speaks about embodied life. We tend to treat bodies as private and self-contained. Bodies are something we have, rather than something that situates us within relations we did not choose and cannot escape.
This way of imagining the body is not natural or inevitable. Modern Western life trains us to see ourselves as autonomous individuals, sealed off from one another and from the world we inhabit. Our instincts about freedom, responsibility, and harm are shaped by this inheritance, so that bodily life appears fundamentally private.
Paul assumes something very different. Repeatedly he describes human existence as participatory—lived in Christ or in Adam, within the old creation or the new (1 Cor. 15:35–50). Bodies are how people are joined to one another, embedded in the created world, and drawn under competing forms of rule.
In the ancient world, bodies scaled outward. A person could be a body, but so could a household, a city, a people, even a planet—each a living whole ordered within a larger created reality. Paul assumes that human bodies are caught up in these larger networks of relationships—these “bodies.” Human bodies are porous and connected, shaped by shared practices, social bonds, and spiritual powers. To belong to a body is not a metaphor for association; it is an acceptance of how combinatorial life is and a description of how life actually functions.
So Paul speaks about ordinary practices—like eating, worshiping, and gathering—in ways that reject modern assumptions. When he writes, “We, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf,” he assumes that bodies gathered around a table become one body through what they share (1 Cor. 10:17). Christians cannot “have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons,” because to give oneself bodily to a practice is to be bound to and shaped by the power that stands behind it (v. 21). Bodies, then, are not only sites of connection but also the places where loyalty is formed and enacted.
Given these ancient assumptions, Paul’s frequent talk of “bodies” no longer sounds like loose metaphor but like a coherent way of seeing the world. He can speak of a “body of Christ,” a “body of sin,” or a “body of death” because bodies are where lives are bound together under a shared rule—Christ, or sin and death (Rom. 6:6, 7:24 ESV).
This is the world presupposed by Paul’s stark declaration that “you are not your own” (1 Cor. 6:19). The phrase is often heard as a moral restriction. In fact, it names a prior Scriptural reality: Bodies always already belong somewhere and to someone. The only question is not whether our bodies are claimed, but by whom. Neutral bodies do not exist.
The resurrection of Jesus gives Paul’s vision of the body its full ethical weight. God has raised Jesus bodily from the dead and united believers’ bodies to his glorified body, establishing a new lordship that reaches into embodied life now (Rom. 6:1–14). What happens in and through the body now bears witness to which power truly rules, and where the world itself is headed.
This vision gives Christian ethics its map. The question is no longer simply “What should I do?” Instead, it is “What am I being joined to? What kind of life is shaping me? And what story is my body being trained to tell?”
If the biblical vision of the body can feel abstract, sexual practice makes it concrete. Paul applies the same participatory logic to sex that he applies to eating, worship, and communal life. Addressing the practice of visiting temple prostitutes, he reminds believers that their “bodies are members of Christ himself” (1 Cor. 6:15). To join one’s body to another is to become “one flesh” (v. 16), binding what belongs to Christ to a rival allegiance. Similarly, the only reason a believing spouse may remain sexually united to an unbelieving spouse is that the unbelieving spouse has been sanctified through the marriage (7:14). Sexual union is never merely physical or private.
Contemporary Christian debates about sexual behavior often miss this starting point. In some settings—especially those shaped by abstinence movements—sexual practice becomes a visible marker of personal holiness. In others, it is treated as a private matter of identity or desire, best addressed through affirmation and personal discretion. Despite their differences, both approaches tend to assume that sex is about the individual—how desire is ordered, expressed, or affirmed.
Paul begins elsewhere. When he addresses sexual behavior, he does not start with desire, identity, or social boundaries. He begins with what bodies are and whose they are. Sexual acts are not self-contained choices but forms of participation that shape the life of the community.
This is why Paul responds so sharply to the man sleeping with his father’s wife (1 Cor. 5). What concerns him is not scandal management but communal formation: “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (v. 6, ESV). What one body participates in does not remain private; it works its way through the whole.
The question, then, is not whether an act feels right, but whether it yields the church more fully to Christ or leaves it exposed to powers that traffic in sin and death. In Paul’s vision, sexual ethics are not about managing desire or signaling virtue. They concern how bodies participate in shared life—and which powers that participation serves.
Once bodies are understood as participatory realities, the implications cannot be confined to sexual ethics alone. They extend outward to the world that bodies inhabit and depend upon. To speak of embodied life is to speak of creation.
Paul’s language makes this connection unavoidable. The bodies that now belong to Christ—our mortal bodies—are still formed from the dust of the earth (1 Cor. 15:47), subject to decay and sustained by the same material conditions. This is why Paul can speak of creation itself as groaning alongside human bodies, awaiting liberation together (Rom. 8:22–23). The fate of embodied human life and the fate of the world are bound together because, for now, they share the same condition of corruption and hope.
If bodies are participatory realities embedded within God’s creation, then care for the created world is not an abstract cause. It is a question of how embodied life is sustained and shared. What happens to the land, the air, and the water inevitably shapes the bodies that depend upon them—especially the bodies of the poor, the vulnerable, and those with the least power to shield themselves from environmental harm.
Seen this way, disregard for the created world is not merely a failure of stewardship. It is a contradiction of Christian confession. To affirm the resurrection of the body while treating the material world as expendable is to live as though decay, not Christ, has the final claim on embodied life.
Creation care, then, is not a matter of moral signaling or political alignment. It is a matter of allegiance and witness. It asks whether our embodied practices yield the world we inhabit to the life-giving rule of Christ or leave it captive to patterns of extraction and neglect that belong to the old creation. The question is not whether Christians should “care about the environment” but whether our bodily life bears witness to the lordship of the risen Christ over the world that sustains us all.
The implications for race are immediate. Racism is not first an idea but is a practice that manipulates, controls, and violates bodies. Ta-Nehisi Coates makes this plain when he frames life as a Black man in America as a struggle over how one should live within a Black body. He returns to the body as the site of vulnerability and threat in his writing. Racism, he insists, is not merely social or symbolic. It is visceral. It “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones.” However we name it—justice, privilege, relations—the reality lands, with force, on the body.
Coates exposes something that resonates deeply with how Paul speaks about sin and salvation. Paul does not treat captivity as an abstraction. He locates it in embodied life. Sin reigns in bodies. Death works through members. And redemption, when it comes, takes root in the same place bondage was endured.
This is why Paul speaks so urgently about division within the church. When communities fracture along lines of status, ethnicity, or power, the problem is not merely social or political. In Christ, Jew and Gentile have been made one body, their hostility put to death through the cross (Eph. 2:14–16). This unity is a public affront to the powers that thrive on domination and exclusion. To tolerate embodied division is not simply to fail at justice; it is to deny the lordship of Christ over his body.
Paul’s claim does not stop at the church’s boundary. Christ’s reign extends to every human body. How bodies are treated—protected or exposed, welcomed or constrained—bears witness to who truly rules. To dishonor a body is, in practice, to deny Christ’s claim upon it.
Christians are not simply caught between political left and right or struggling to locate a sensible middle. More often, we are navigating by the wrong map altogether. Paul does not ask us to refine our positions within the present order. He announces that a new world has already been revealed in Christ and that our bodies are being claimed by it now.
When that vision comes back into view, questions of sexuality, race, and creation no longer appear as disconnected debates. They come into focus as intertwined expressions of a single, embodied life. What we do with our bodies—how we join them, protect them, and situate them within the world—bears witness to who we believe truly reigns.
The work of Christian ethics, then, is about learning to live, together, as bodies gathered under the lordship of the risen Christ—bearing witness, in the most ordinary and physical ways, to the life of the world that is already breaking in.
Kyle Wells is lead pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Santa Barbara, California. He writes on biblical theology and Christian ethics for both the church and the academy.
