Going to the Gym with God (Part 9): On Being a Temple

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The other day I was watching some random sit-com on Netflix, and one of the characters made some passing comment about their body being a temple. I think it was in relation to eating junk-food, the reference in question. Someone offered them a bag of chips or some such thing, and they declined, explaining that they weren’t willing to “desecrate this temple” by eating junk.

As a pastor my theological radar started pinging like made when I heard the reference. The character in the show had only meant it as a throw-away line, but of course, there is a profound theological truth underlying the sentiment—and apparently it’s a popular enough sentiment to have made it into the script of a Netflix sitcom—that our bodies are “temples.”

For the secular person, I expect, the idea of the body being a “temple” points to the belief that we are actually spiritual creatures; and inasmuch as the human body “houses” the human spirit—and to the degree that the human spirit is in fact “sacred”—in that sense, and to that degree—our bodies are “temples” for the human spirit.

But I’m not a secular person, of course. As a Christian, when I heard this passing reference to the idea that the body is a “temple,” my mind went immediately to the place this idea originated from, the writings of St. Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 6, verse 19: “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?”

In the New Testament, it’s not the fact that the body houses a “sacred human spirit,” that makes it a temple, but the fact that, for the Christian, their flash-and-blood bodies are indwelt by God’s own Holy Spirit, and in that sense, and only that sense, it’s fitting to discuss it as a “temple” of God.

This idea is often mentioned in church circles—that the Christian body is a temple of God’s Spirit—and it’s often used as a basis for ethical reflection. Inasmuch as the body is God’s temple, any immoral actions or unethical activities that you might do in your body, or with your body, or as your body, have the inevitable consequence of desecrating the temple.

Paul himself makes this argument in the passage in question. He uses the fact that the Christian body is God’s temple, primarily, as a basis for arguing against sexual immorality—fornication, adultery, prostitution, and so on. The underlying logic of the passage is that sexually immoral practices like these are “misuses of the body” that result in the body itself being joined with the “sexually immoral”; and to the extent that this is true, they constitute a spiritual “desecration of God’s temple” (the body itself) and are therefore especially egregious for Christians to participate in.

Because we are temples of the Holy Spirit, in other words, we ought not to defile the temple by using our bodies in sexually immoral ways.

It’s natural to extrapolate other ethical implications from this passage (though it’s equally easy to slip into all kinds of non-sequitur arguments, too). Since smoking, for instance, is deleterious to the body’s health, it constitutes a “defilement of the temple,” too; so too does drinking, over-eating, or what have you.

At a certain point, I think it’s possible to take this logic in a direction Paul never intended. His main point in 1 Corinthians 6:19 is about immoral practices specifically, and how using our bodies to do things contrary to God’s will is an offense against the Holy Spirit who indwells the Christian body. Whether smoking, or drinking, or indulging in that bag of chips makes one a “temple-desecrator” in Paul’s mind is a bit of an open question.

It’s even possible to take this logic in a direction entirely contrary to Paul’s point. It is possible to get so hung up on the notion that the body is a temple and therefore it must be kept in pristine condition, that we actually start to worship it, itself, instead of worshiping the Holy Spirit, whose indwelling presence is the only thing that makes it a temple in the first place. It’s like going to church and instead of worshipping God, spending all your time adoring the building…

On top of all that, I think a completely honest handling of the "temple of God" talk in 1 Corinthians has to acknowledge that this reference to individual believers being temples of the Holy Spirit is the odd man out in Paul's writing.  Predominantly, he prefers to talk about the entire community of faith being "the temple of God" together. We are only temples individually if and as we are connected to a Spirit-filled community of Faith, which is corporately the temple of God. Fundamentally, the teaching that the individually believer is a "temple of God" personally, I think, is meant to speak to their place and involvement in the community. You ought not do anything that desecrate your "temple" personally, because you are part of a community of faith that corporately has to function together as God's holy temple, and how can you be part of that if your own "temple" is filthy?

So I don’t want to take the Christian belief that the body is a temple any further than the text allows, but in principle, I wonder if there is something to this idea that can help us in our effort to outline a “theology of exercise.” It’s not that because the body is a temple for the Holy Spirit, we better keep it in shape for fear of desecrating it (as though my lack of cardio-vascular fitness was somehow an “abomination that causes desolation); if that’s what you hear when I say that the Christian teaching about the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is a building block for a robust theology of exercise, then I’m not communicating well here at all.

But what if we took it in a different direction than that? What if we let this profound truth really touch our imagination: that the Holy Spirit of the Creator God truly did deign to make these finite, fragile, somewhat measly human vessels of blood and bone his home—that he really did dwell with in. How profound an affirmation of our bodies—as weak and given to breaking down as they are—would we hear if we heard that let that truth hit us with perfect clarity: your body—yes that fearfully-made assemblage of bone and skin and flesh and blood and cells and tissue—as strange as it may sound to hear and incredible to believe—yours and my bodies are actually dwelling places for the Spirit of God.

With what joy would you take your next run? With what delight would you sweat it out over your next afternoon at the gym? With what pleasure might you plunge into the pool the next time you’re there? With what grace might you take that next long stroll through the park? What if you really believed it, I mean: that the Holy Spirit of the Living God himself was with you, within you, as you did these wholesome things, and that he was actually delighting to be with you, as you put this, his temple, to such good use?