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?

Going to the Gym with God (Part 8): Training for Christian Discipleship

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There is an extended discussion of Christian discipleship in 1 Corinthians 9, where Paul compares our life in the Lord to the life of an athlete competing in the ancient Olympic games. He starts by describing the freedom that is ours in the Gospel. We are no longer bound by the regulations of the Jewish law, he says (9:20-21), but the consequence of that freedom is that we have become “slaves of the Gospel,” bound by the love of Christ to be “all things to all people” (v. 19).

To help us understand this paradox—that the call of Christian freedom is really a call of servitude to Christ—he asks us to picture an athlete in training. “In order to win the prize,” he says, “the athlete must put his body through a strict regime of rigorous training.” He then compares it to a boxer, “beating his body into submission” so as to win the prize in the ring (v. 26b-27). Athletes, in other words, are free to compete, but in order to compete well, they must submit to exacting disciplines of physical training.

It’s all metaphorical, of course, using the rigors of athletic training to help us more fully to appreciate the demands of Christian discipleship, both what’s required of us as the Lord’s followers (“beating our bodies into submission”), and also why it's required (“in order to get a crown [of glory] that will last forever”). It’s a metaphor the New Testament uses repeatedly. In Hebrews 12:1, we’re to run our race with perseverance, in Philippians 2:16, we’re to “press on towards the finish line,” in Galatians 5:7 we’re to take pains to ensure no one “cuts in on us” in the race, and in 2 Timothy 4:7 Paul talks about his life as an apostle in terms of “finishing the race.”

So this metaphor is all over the New Testament. And the more I explore the “theology of exercise,” the more I wonder if it's more than just a metaphor. At the very least, it’s no wonder to me, that when the authors of the New Testament wanted a fail-safe image for what the disciplined life of a follower of Jesus really looks like, they reached for, of all things, athletic metaphors to make their point.

There is, after all, something character-forming that happens inside us when we undertake some exercise routine or other and then discipline ourselves to stick to it, regardless the screaming in our brains to give it up when the going gets tough, and never mind all the distractions trying to tempt us away from keeping at it.

I have found this to be true, at any rate. Disciplining myself to exercise a little bit every day, even when I would rather do anything but exercise, benefits my heart, soul and mind, as much as it does my strength. It develops determination. It forms mental toughness. It strengthens my resolve in other areas of life. It shows me that my limits are actually further past where I always assumed they were.

I’m not the only one who has found this, by the way. I read a fascinating and very practical guide to life-coaching a few years ago by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, called The Power of Full Engagement. They argue that, contrary to received wisdom, the key to being effective in life is not so much time management as it is energy management. They suggest that if we really want to be successful across all the domains of life—from our relationships to our work to our families to our hobbies—we need to put disciplined routines in place that help us manage our spiritual, emotional, and physical energy well. That energy then becomes the fuel for attaining goals and achieving success.

It’s an interesting read, and I’ve found it helpful to put some of their ideas into practice; but here’s where it goes from “hmmmm….” to “whoah….” Because Loehr and Schwartz argue that the key to energy management is the intricate connection between our physical energy and our spiritual energy.

On an on-going basis, the most important source of energy for our daily effectiveness is our physical energy. This is maintained by things like regular exercise, healthy eating, restful sleep, and so on. Our physical energy is the “fundamental source of fuel” that energizes all the others, from our emotional, to our mental, to our spiritual energy levels. If we are not stewarding our physical energy well, then the energy required for difficult emotional tasks, or tough mental exertion, or meaningful spiritual practices just won’t be there when we need it.

There’s a flip-side to the coin, though, because Loehr and Schwartz have also found that the energy we use to make the kind significant changes necessary for us to get better at stewarding our physical energy well—to give up the video games that are interfering with our sleep patterns, maybe, or to quit the smoking habit that’s slowly killing us, perhaps, to start eating better, or to figure out how to work an exercise routine into our schedule—the energy needed for these kinds of life-overhauls, they argue, is actually spiritual, not physical.

It is our spiritual energy—the deep-down commitments we make to higher causes and important principles—the Christian commitment to things like stewardship and discipleship, for instance—that motivates us for the changes needed to become more disciplined at managing our physical energy well.

In other words, they found that there was a positive feedback loop between spiritual and physical energy. Spiritual energy is the motivator for positive change, which leads to better management of our physical energy, which deepens the wells that our spiritual energy has to draw on, which improves our physical energy, and so on.

I found this concept profoundly helpful in my own understanding of the interplay between physical exercise and spiritual formation. Physical energy provides the fuel for deeper spiritual formation, and our spiritual commitments provide the motivation for getting better at stewarding our physical energy well.

Of course, Paul had never read The Power of Full Engagement when he talked about Christian discipleship in terms of the rigorous training an athlete undergoes, but it may be that he recognized this principle, even if he wouldn’t have put it in quite those words back in the first century AD. The words he did put it in are perhaps less technical but no less true: “Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training," he claims. "They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it get a crown that will last forever.”

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Going to the Gym with God (Part 7): On Exercise and Koinonia

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In a passing scene in the classic 1989 film, Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating leads a group of young men out onto the soccer pitch for their first practice. If you’ve never seen it or perhaps forget this gem of a film, Mr. Keating is the larger-than-life English teacher whose “seize the day” philosophy is lighting fires among the students and wreaking havoc with the administration at a stuffy New England prep school called Welton Academy. Played by Robin Williams, Mr. Keating does not strike an imposing figure as an athlete, but as he leads his team out onto the field, he shares with them his philosophy of sport.

“Now devotees may argue that one sport is inherently better than another. For me, sport is actually a chance for us to have other human beings push us to excel.”

He then leads his team through one of the most unorthodox soccer practices they’ve every experienced, reciting lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Joys,” while they kick soccer balls to the strains of Handel’s “Water Music Suite No 2, in D Major.”

I have shared in a previous post how fraught my own journey with athletics has been over the years. As a child, I never felt I belonged on the ice, the court, or the field. I was rather clumsy as a kid, and never had enough interest in sports to take the time to learn how to do a proper lay-up. I broke my arm at the start of my grade 7 year, and so I missed almost 3 months of gym class in that formative season of my life. In my high school years—I confess this now to my chagrin—attendance in gym class was not closely monitored and I skipped more classes than I attended. The result of all this was a growing narrative that I lived by, that sports were not for me. I was an artist (I told myself), not the athlete.

Of course, as Mr. Keating so powerfully reminds us, those two fields of human endeavor—the arts and athletics—are hardly at odds with one another. Properly understood, at least, they need not be.

When I started my teaching career, back in 1997, I was tapped to coach the senior girls high school basketball team. In those days, they might as well have tapped me to coach the open-heart-surgery-society, I knew so little about the sport. But what I found, as I poured myself into the task, was that Keating’s philosophy rang true. Coaching basketball became an opportunity to have other human beings (in this case, a team of 14 teenaged human beings) push me to excel.

I would get to work around 6:30 in the morning and practice my three-point shot for a full hour, almost every morning. This was because I knew that however well I avoided it, a time would come when I would be required to make a shot, as the team’s coach. And I didn’t want that time to be a dead give-away that I had no clue what I was doing.

The time came, by the way. It was the exhibition game between the senior basketball teams, boys and girls, versus the teachers; the whole school had turned out to cheer their classmates on, and that’s when it happened. I dropped down low on the post, and then moved back behind the three-point line, ready for a pass. The head of the phys-ed department was bringing the ball down the court and feed it to me. And like I had practiced every morning since November, I put up the ball, with a prayer on my lips, and before the entire assembled student body of our school, the most satisfying “swoosh” I’ve ever heard rang out over the gym.

That may have been the day I started to rethink the artist/athlete dichotomy I had been living by.

Not long after that I discovered the sport of squash, which is now adays my game of choice. For almost a decade now, I’ve had a standing Thursday morning squash match with a good friend (one of the losses I’m grieving during Covid is not having been able to play for almost a year).

When I started squash, I was all heart and little skill on the court, but once again, Keating’s dictum proved true. Playing once a week with a great partner has pushed me to excel. It’s built my endurance, my determination, my mental toughness, all of which are qualities that carry over into other domains of my life. More importantly, it’s given me the kind of friendship in my life that you can only form when you are pushing another human being to test their limits, while they, in turn, push you in the same way.

All of this is a round-about way of getting at my topic for today’s addition to the “theology of exercise” we’ve been working on here at terra incognita for the last few months. Besides its health benefits, exercise builds community. It certainly does when it’s done together, and even when your exercise of choice is a solo sport, to pursue it well, you have to step into a community of like-minded afficionados of the sport, who can help you to grow as you go.

There is something about physically exerting ourselves with other human beings—having them push us to excel—that binds us to them in a unique way.

In this, I think, exercising together is a helpful metaphor for church life. The Bible often uses the term koinonia to describe the mysterious spiritual bond that binds people together in the community of the church. Koinonia means “fellowship,” or “partnership” (originally it was a term that referred to business partners in the ancient world). When I think of times I’ve experienced real koinonia in the church, however, the bond was not unlike that connection I feel with my squash partner, when we step out onto the court to push each other to the limit for an hour or so.

Maybe there’s even more than a metaphor in there. Given the argument I’ve been making in this series, that our bodies and our spirits are intricately interwoven, and that what happens to us physical affects us spiritually and vice versa, perhaps one way to build koinonia in the church is just to encourage the community to do physical activity together every once in a while.

Kononia, mind you, is a gift of the Holy Spirit, that comes to us only if and as we are focused on Christ, serving and worshiping him together; so I don’t want that last paragraph to suggest that “exercise” could ever serve as a replacement to that. But even so, when I look back over times when I felt most bonded to the other Christians in my life, there was usually some sort of physical activity happening together, as part of our community life: setting up and tearing down a school gym for our church plant to use in its worship—playing games together with the campers at Bible camp—volunteering together at the church to fix, renovate, or construct something.

These things are all, to borrow from Mr. Keating, opportunities to have other human beings push us to excel. And to borrow a term from the New Testament, if it’s done in the Lord, and for the joy of knowing him, these things are also opportunities to form rich bonds of koinonia between us as we do them together.

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On Going to the Gym with God (Part 6): The Dark Side of Exercise

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In the 5th Century BC, a Greek sculptor known as Polyclitus wrote a now-lost treatise about sculpture in which he described his innovative approach to the artform. Polyclitus designed his nudes using an intricate theory of ideal proportions, based on a principle of symmetria, which expressed both balance (isonomia) and rhythm (rhythmos) together. His treatise has been lost to the sands of time, but other ancient writers have quoted him as saying, “Perfection (in the human form) comes about little by little, through many numbers (i.e. on the basis of carefully designed mathematical ratios).” Polyclitus’s most enduring contribution to the world of art is the famous “contrapposto” pose which we see in so many Greek statues from the 5th Century onwards, the well-known pose of an athlete balanced between movement and repose, with the hips tilted and the weight poised.

It wasn’t just Polyclitus, of course, who believed back then that the human form could be used to represent an idealized vision of divine beauty. The ancient Greeks in general held this thought dear. They were “fixated with the human body,” and believed that “the perfect body was an athletic body.”[1] The gods of ancient Greece came in human form, after all, and so the temples of ancient Greece—where you went to worship the divine—were filled with life-sized, life-like representations of human bodies, all of them carefully proportioned, beautifully sculpted, and perfectly balanced.

Some historians refer to this the “cult of the body,” the prevailing idea in ancient Greece that a beautifully-formed human body—or at least a representation of it—could be an object of worship. The worship of the body didn’t stop when you left the temple, either. The Greeks were the ones who invented the gymnasium, after all, where you went to keep your own body perfectly proportioned. They also invented the Olympics, where you worshipped the gods through a festival of athletic endeavors designed to push the human body to its limits.

In the Greek view of the body we glimpse something we might think of as “the dark side” of exercise, the idealization, the fixation, even obsession with the body that sometimes accompanies it. Those of us who have spent any consistent amount of time going to the gym will probably be nodding along at this point. It is possible—and this is especially true if our exercise is detached from a healthy self-image and a satisfying world-view that keeps it in perspective—for exercise to become a neurotic form of self-worship.

I had a friend a few years back who had become so obsessed with going to the gym that it began to negatively affect their mental well-being, their relationships, their family, and their health. He had come through that dark season, by the time I met him, and he used the term “big-ism” to describe it. “It’s like reverse anorexia,” is how he explained it to me, “where you are so obsessed with your body-size that you always look ‘too small’ when you look in the mirror and are driven to continually ‘bulk-up.’”

It turns out “bigism” is an actual disorder, known in the literature as “muscle dysmorphia,” and defined as “the delusional or exaggerated belief is that one's own body is … insufficiently muscular" [2]. It may be unfair or inaccurate to connect this modern psychological disorder to the ancient Greek cult of the body, but if there is a connection between the two, it is probably this: a distorted belief that the body itself is a source of ultimate meaning, which leads to an obsessive quest to perfect its shape.

We have been exploring the “theology of exercise” over the last few weeks here at terra incognita. We’ve looked at themes of incarnation, stewardship, embodiment, and the exercise routines of Jesus himself. Any honest theology of exercise, however, will have to face squarely this “dark side” of the topic, the dangers of narcissism, body-worship, neuroticism and even muscle dysmorphia that an unhealthy view of exercise can lead us into.

This isn’t to say that there’s not something theologically rich to be discovered in physical exercise. If anything, I would say it’s the opposite. The reason it’s crucial to take a theological view of exercise is the same reason it’s crucial to take a theological view of any aspect of human life: because when we look at something theologically, we put it in its proper place in relation to God.

I said earlier that exercise can become a neurotic form of self-worship, if it is detached from a healthy self-image and a robust world-view that gives it meaning. That “if” was the crucial word in that sentence. A Christian’s self-image is based, or at least it should be based on the fact that her or she is the fearfully-made child of God, unconditionally affirmed as his beloved, regardless their weight, their BMI, or how much they can bench-press. A Christian world-view is one where God is at the centre, giving joy and delight to his creatures, who in turn do all things for his glory.

This worldview has the power, I think, to transform how we think of physically exercise, and why we do it in the first place. When we are truly able to see ourselves as God’s beloved creatures, living in and though and for his glory alone, we are set free to enjoy all aspects of a good, godly life, including the joy of using our body to move and lift and run and play. A theological perspective on exercise, in other words, has the power to deliver us from any “cult of the body” that might distort or corrupt it for us, and frees us instead to do it for God’s glory, as creatures delighting in the body he gave us, however it may look and whatever its shape.

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On Going to the Gym with God (Part 5): A Brief History of Muscular Christianity

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In 1844, a London draper named George Williams was concerned by the influx of young men he saw moving to the city of London, looking for work at the height of the Industrial Revolution. There were not many healthy activities for these young men to spend their time on in those days, and many were turning to the taverns and brothels for entertainment. Williams wanted to provide a healthy, wholesome alternative, a place where young men could develop their “body, mind, and spirit” together. As a result—and as a concrete expression of his faith—he founded the Young Men’s Christian Association.

Today the YMCA is so closely associated with that catchy tune by the Village People that few realize it was actually founded on Christian principles, and grew out of Williams’s conviction that having a healthy body is just as important as having a healthy spirit for a thriving Christian life. 

Whether you share that conviction or not, its notable how quickly Williams’s idea caught on. It was part of a growing cultural trend that started in the mid-1850s known today as “Muscular Christianity.”  Muscular Christianity marked a move away from the asceticism that characterized the traditional Christian view of the body, the idea that the flesh was a distraction from the things of God and ought to be denied or suppressed. Proponents of muscular Christianity argued instead that a physically fit body could be an expression of one’s faith in God.

Thomas Hughes, one of the early advocates of muscular Christianity, argued that:

The Muscular Christians have hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man's body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. 

There’s a lot in there to make a woke Christian of the 21st Century cringe, I suppose. The idea of “subduing the earth,” though biblical, needs a lot more nuance than Thomas gives it there; and the sentence simply smacks of machoism and sexism though out.  That said, the core tenet—that our bodies are not shameful “prison-houses” for the soul, but are in fact gifts of God which we need in order to serve him—has at least a glimmer of truth to it. Perhaps even a full ray of light.

Whatever the case, the idea grew pretty rapidly through the early decades of the 20th Century. Other clergy men started following Williams’s lead and built gymnasiums and boxing rings in the basements of their churches. Meanwhile the YMCA itself started planting chapters all over the world.

In America, Muscular Christianity would find its way into the preaching of evangelists like D. L. Moody (ca. 1850-90) and others. President Roosevelt (ca. 1909)—who held that “there is only a very circumscribed sphere of usefulness for the timid good man”—was also a strong proponent of the concept. Even today we see the vestiges of the movement in the work of organizations like Athletes in Action (founded 1966) and the Promise Keepers (founded 1990).

I suppose any “theology of exercise,” like the one I’ve been trying to assemble in this blog series, will have to wrestle with the tenets of the “muscular Christianity movement,” at one point or another. Though it's over 150 years old now, its influence still lingers in the church, both for the good and the bad.  It’s there whenever a well-meaning but misinformed preacher decries the so-called “feminization of the church” (which, to be clear, I find to be a deeply offensive term).  It’s there in the worst of “men’s ministries,” that make “being a Christian guy” all about a narrowly-defined set of supposedly “masculine” interests, tastes, roles and abilities (which, again to be clear, I often find offensive). It’s there in the worst of the theology coming out of neo-conservative organizations like “The Counsel of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” (which I also find offensive, on the whole).

Because here’s the thing: men come in all shapes and sizes, with all kinds of interests, predilections,  aptitudes and body-types. When I was growing up, I often felt like I did not fit in among the other “Christian guys” in church, because I had so little interest in the traditional “guy things” that advocates for muscular Christianity seem to want to use as their litmus test. I was artistic, not athletic, into books not body-building, played music not hockey. 

Any version of Christianity, muscular or otherwise, that makes its definition of “a Christian man” so narrow that only a handful of guys really fit the bill and the rest are left wondering where they belong, is not Christianity at all, in my view.  

That said, in the ten years since I first started going to the Y—an organization, remember, that began as an expression of one man’s Christian faith—I have found that my spirit has grown healthier, on the whole, along with my body. 

I have learned how to push myself spiritually to do things I’m not naturally inclined to do, by pushing myself physically to do exercises I'm not inclined to do. I’ve discovered that the limits of what my physical body is capable of are often far higher than I ever assumed before I started pushing them. This, in turn, has inspired me to explore the spiritual limits of what I might attempt for God in other areas of my life, too.

These things are also part of the legacy of the muscular Christianity movement, I think, and it's one of the reasons why, even though as a young man and growing up, athleticism was the last thing I ever felt any interest in, these days I very much look forward to my trip to the gym, or my hour on the squash court, or my 20 minute exercise routine in the basement of our home (which is all I can manage in these days of pandemic).

Because when I put my body to work like that, I find, among other things, my spirit is being stretched and grown in ways I never could have imagined.

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Going to the Gym with God (Part 4): Holding our Health in Trust

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A 2011 study of the relationship between physical exercise and brain health published in Neuroscientist magazine found that “decreased brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is associated with age-related hippocampal dysfunction, memory impairment, and increased risk for depression, whereas increasing BDNF through aerobic exercise appears to ameliorate hippocampal atrophy, improve memory function, and reduce depression."*

Translation: physical exercise can reduce the negative effects of aging on the brain, helping us to maintain our minds, our memories, and our moods well into old age. Among other things, the researchers found that 

aerobic fitness has also been associated with hippocampal volume in both children and older adults. For example, in one study with 165 older adults without dementia, greater aerobic fitness levels were associated with larger hippocampal volumes even after controlling for potentially confounding factors including age, sex, and years of education. Furthermore, hippocampal volume mediated fitness-related performance on a spatial memory task. These results … suggest that aerobic exercise might be an effective method for enhancing or reversing hippocampal volume in late adulthood.

Loads of other scientific studies that have found a similar connection between physical fitness and healthy brain function. The positive effects of regular physical exercise on our grey matter include: “improvements in certain cognitive functions, beneficial forms of neuroplasticity, … increased neuron growth, increased neurological activity, … improved stress coping, enhanced cognitive control of behavior, improved declarative, spatial, and working memory…”*

The list goes on. It turns out there is a deeply-wired link between our body’s fitness and our brain’s health, and taking care of the first seems naturally to improve the later.

I find this theologically fascinating.

On the one hand, it bears out everything I said in previous posts about the indivisible link between the mind, body, and spirit that we find in the Bible’s description of the human being. On the other hand, though, and more to the point for today, it suggests a crucial theme for building a “theology of exercise.” 

I’m thinking here about the biblical concept of “stewardship.” It’s an idea woven into the creation story right at from the start, and it shows up again and again whenever the Bible wants to speak about the way human beings are related tot he rest of creation.  

We were created to be good stewards of God’s creation.

In Genesis 1:28, it says it like this: 

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

It’s a foundational text for all sorts of things that will come later in Scripture. It explains why the environment presently is groaning in agony (because humans have fallen short in this calling; see Genesis 3). It explains why Christ’s work on the cross brings about New Creation (because it restores human beings back to this calling; see Romans 8). It explains why God rightly pronounces judgement on those who “destroy the earth” at the end of all things (because the earth is not ours to destroy, it is Gods, and we are simply stewards of it; see Revelation 11).

Many biblical scholars have taken pains to show that the idea in Genesis 1 of “subduing” the creation, and “ruling” the animals, and so on, is meant to communicate not a self-interested, tyrannical reign over the earth (as humans often have exercised it), but rather a loving, brotherly care of the creation, on God’s behalf.  I don’t have time to review all the arguments, but suffice it to say that this is certainly how I read Genesis 1.

As we acknowledge our role as God’s stewards, suddenly all that talk about exercise and brain function a second ago comes into sharp focus. In his book The Stewart Leader, Scott Rodin argues that the theme of “stewardship” applies not just in our relationship to the rest of the creation, but to all aspects of human life.  If it’s true that all we have and all we are comes from God, then we are called, actually, to hold everything in life as though we were simply stewards of it.

This is true of our money, of course. This is the classic Christian perspective on money. All our money is really God’s and everything we do with it ought to be done as his stewards. But it doesn’t stop with money. It’s also true of our talents.  Whatever we “have” that we “do well,” is not really our talent in the end; rather it’s God’s “talent,” and it’s given us simply to use for his glory.

It’s true of our relationships. It’s true of our resources.  It’s true of our time.  None of these things are really “ours”; they’re God’s. We are simply holding them in trust and we'll give an account to their true owner, for how we used them and what we did with them.

Maybe you can see where all of this is pointing us, as we try to build a “theology of exercise.” Because we’re not just stewards of our money, possessions, resources, talents, time, and relationships.

We are stewards, too, of our very bodies.  This bit of flesh and bone that I "possess” is not really “mine” after all.  It is God’s. I am simply a steward of it; and as God’s steward, I find I am called to “use my body,” and “care for my body,” and “maintain the health of my body,” as though it were actually the Lord's body.

This isn’t just a theological leap in the dark here, from Genesis 1 to stewarding our health; this is specifically what the Scriptures say. In 1 Corinthians 6:20, Paul is reviewing the reasons why Christians ought to flee any kind of sexual activity outside the bounds of the Creator’s intent for us, and he makes this mysterious claim. It’s because (among other things), “you are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”

More on that in a later post. Today just notice that Paul insists that even our bodies are the rightful property of God, and as such we ought to “use” our bodies as though we were holding them in trust.

This brings me, at last to the point of this post. When I take care of my physical health through exercise, I am being a good steward.  Not because God necessarily cares about our physiques per se; again, we all have different body types and different constitutions, and the diversity of the human form is one of God’s great gifts to us.  It’s not that God only has one ideal physical form and it’s up to us to get into “that shape” specifically.

Far from it.

Rather it’s because when I exercise, I benefit not only my physical health, but also my mental health, my emotional health, my spiritual health. This is true even if my exercise of choice is a simple ten-minute stroll at the end of the day (see my previous post for that).  It is still good exercise with all kinds of health benefits. And the plain fact is that I will be able to serve God more fully, more effectively, and for longer than I could do if I weren’t stewarding my physical health in this way.

And as we do, whether it's though a leisurely stroll or a 10k run, a simple stretching routine or a P90X workout regime—whatever your stewardship method of choice—we'll may discover the joy of taking care of a body that belongs to the Lord.

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Going to the Gym with God (Part 3): On Walking with the Lord

<<<previous post

One time as part of some research I was doing for a sermon, I spent some time calculating how much walking Jesus did during one of his usual ministry trips. The distance from the Sea of Galilee to Jerusalem, for instance, is approximately 123 kilometres. If we assume a healthy walking pace of 5 kilometres per hour, and further assume that Jesus walked for 8 hours each day (leaving lots of time for preaching stops, rest, meals, and what not), then a trip from Galilee to Jerusalem would have taken him about 3 full days of walking.

In the three years of his public ministry Jesus visited Jerusalem at least four times, and perhaps as many as seven. Assuming these were round trips, this could mean that he logged as many as 984 kilometres on the road, by foot, in three years. And that’s just counting his trips between Galilee and Jerusalem. He also travelled from town to town in the region of Galilee while he was ministering there.

He did a lot of walking, is my point.  

Living as we do in the automobile age, we tend to forget the fact that every time one of the Gospel writers tells us Jesus journeyed up to Jerusalem, it would have taken him 3 straight days of walking to get there. And from what we can tell, he did this as naturally as you or I might nip on down to the corner store for a carton of milk on a Saturday morning.

During the covid-19 pandemic, I’ve been doing far more walking than I’ve ever done before. This is partly because there’s not much else to do, but mostly because, what with all the gyms being closed, I’ve needed to find some other way to get exercise and stay healthy. 

Walking, incidentally, is a great way to do both these things. Even at a mere 30 minutes a day, it will boost your immune system, increase your levels of vitamin D, reduce your risk of cancer, alleviate symptoms of depression, lower your blood pressure, tone your abdominal muscles, strengthen your back, and improve your blood circulation.  The list of walking's health benefits, in fact, is so long that you’d almost think our bodies were especially designed to do it.

If Jesus’s ministry is anything to judge by, it looks like they were.

This is certainly what I’ve been learning as I’ve increased the amount of time I spend on foot these days, anyways. Sometimes I can almost sense the joy in my muscles as I put them to this particular use, as if they were each individually happy to be doing the thing they were so clearly made to do. 

And for all I know, they are. They say that heavy muscle work (like walking) releases serotonin into your system, a feel-good hormone that boosts your mood and reduces your stress levels. Not only this, but I’ve also noticed I’m far more aware of my neighbors than I ever was when I just zipped past them in the car; I’m more in tune to the trees and birds and bunnies I share the neighborhood with (we have a lot of wild bunnies in my neighborhood); and I’m generally more at peace inside whenever I get back from a long walk.  Add to this the fact that it’s about as cheap a workout as you can possibly get, and it may be that walking is, in fact, the perfect exercise.

It certainly was in Jesus’s day; and this brings me at last to the real point of this post. Jesus couldn’t have covered as much ground as he did in the three short years he had to proclaim the Kingdom of God, unless he was in relatively good physical condition.  And the flipside of that point is equally true, that all the walking he did would have had to have kept him that way.

Centuries of seeing Jesus depicted as a “Swedish Supermodel” has maybe influenced the way we think of him so strongly that it’s hard to imagine him like this, but the Gospels suggest that whatever else was true of him, Christ must have had calloused feet and strong sinews.

He was physically fit, I mean. He would have had to have been to do the ministry God had called him to do. I don’t mean, in making this point, that there is something intrinsically Christ-like in physical exercise, or that if you’re not physically fit then you’re not Christ-like. Far from it. As I’ve said in previous posts, everyone has different temperaments and constitutions, with different body types and different movement needs.

But that’s why it’s so wonderful that Jesus’s exercise of choice, it seems, was walking. Except for those of us in very specific situations that make walking impossible (and the Gospel reminds us, too, that Christ had boundless compassion for people in such circumstances), we can all do it. Regardless our present level of fitness, regardless our athleticism, regardless our body-type, a 10-minute stroll out of doors is in reach of us all.

We could start today. If we did, who knows, but we might find ourselves getting in shape for the ministry God has called us to do; and we may just discover that it was no accident the Bible chose the metaphor of “walking,” in particular, to describe a life lived fully for Jesus, when it told us that we should “walk in the light, as he is in the light.”

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Going to the Gym with God (Part 2): On Being Some Body

<<<previous post

As a child growing up they used to tease me by calling me “fat.” Today I weigh all of 175 lbs, so this might strike some you as odd, but it’s true. Apparently I was chubbier than your average baby and it took a bit longer than usual for me to lose all that padding. Add to that the fact that, as I mentioned in a previous post, I was never especially interested in sports as a kid, and suffice it to say I had a "pudgy" reputation that dogged me well into my middle school years. 

In every photo of my childhood I've ever come across, it's clear I was actually just an average kid with a normal BMI. Even so, back in those days everyone knew that if you wanted to set  Dale off, all you had to do was call him fat.

It’s interesting for me to realize how the slings and arrows of early childhood stick deep and linger long. As I young adult, I never really felt at peace in my own body. I always had this lurking fear that there was something fundamentally unacceptable about it. As a result, I never felt at home in the gym, at the ball diamond, on the basketball court. 

It was probably both a blessing and a burden, this distorted self-image. Looking back, I expect one of the reasons I’ve learned to enjoy sports, and movement, and exercise the way I do today, is precisely because I was haunted by this desire to prove all the name-calling ghosts in my past that they were wrong. Whatever may have been true of my body type as a baby (I probably thought subconsciously) that didn’t have to be true of me now.

Of course, this is a blog post about the theology of exercise, not a therapy session. The only reason I’m sharing all this here is that, if we’re going to talk about the theology of exercise we’re going to have to talk at some point about the bodies we exercise with. And truth be told, I grew up with a sort of love-hate relationship with my body. I loved it, in so far as I fed it, took care of it, kept it from harm.  But I hated it, to the extent that it never seemed to look or feel the way I thought it should. 

I have a sense that I am not alone in this experience. We live in a world where idealized images of beautiful bodies are flung at us from every corner. From the click-bait on our newsfeed, to the magazine rack in the grocery store, from the posters in the shop windows down at the mall, to the billboards lining the freeway, we are bombarded with messages about what a body “should” look like, and continually asked to measure our own bodies against that ideal.

No wonder if we find it hard to be at ease in our bodies, what with the world screaming at us that they don’t measure up.

This is probably why struck me so profoundly the day I realized that I don’t have a body; I am a body.

That sentence may sound strange to some readers. Indeed, throughout this post I’ve described my body as a “thing” that was other than me. I said that I’ve never been at ease “in my body,” as though the body were just the casing for my “self,” and I described myself “taking care of my body,” as though it were something distinct from who I actually was.  This is how we usually speak about the body. It’s a vessel that “contains us” in some way, but whatever else it is, it’s not “us.”

So imagine my surprise when, a number of years back while studying for my Masters of Divinity, I came across this line in a book by theologian Marianne Hicks, in which she argues that theologically, our embodiment is essential to our human nature. 

“My physical reality is both the matrix and communicator of my psychic life,” she writes. “I do not have a body; I am one.  I do not have a soul or psyche, I am one. ‘I’ come into being and live and grow in the process we call life, in the inextricable interconnection of matter and spirit.” 

Hicks is touching here on a deeply biblical idea.  When Genesis 2:6-7 describes the creation of human beings, it uses the Hebrew word nephesh: “the man became a living being (nephesh).” Genesis uses the same word to describe sea life (1:20), the great sea creatures (1:21), land animals (1:24), birds (1:30), and human beings. What all these things share in common is that they are all living bodies brought to life by the creator. Unfortunately, the closest Greek term we have to nephesh is psyche, which often translates as “soul,” and so nephesh is often misread as though it only referred to the “spiritual” aspect of human life. When read in context, however, it’s pretty clear that the word actually denotes both the living matter that is your body, and the spirit that animates it.  

The point here is that, from a biblical perspective, we are not just “souls” contained “in a body.” Rather we are the very flesh and bone that stares back at us when we look in the mirror. We are more than just bodies, to be sure, but we whatever else we are, we are those bodies.

There is potential healing here, I think, for those of us who, like me, have struggled with a vague dis-ease about our bodies. A biblical understanding of the body assures us that the creator actually intended for us to be embodied like this. More than that, it reminds us that when we say “God loves you,” we mean he loves your stubby toes, too (if you happen to have stubby toes), and your gangly arms (if they happen to be gangly), your knobby knees (mine are particularly knobby), or whatever it is that makes your body so distinctly you. 

Like it does for all our relationships, the love of God has life-giving power to heal even our relationship with our own bodies.

And in that healing, we can take our next step towards a robust theology of exercise, which is, after all, why I started this blog post in the first place. Because you don’t have a body, you are a body. And as bodies, all the movement and play, the stretching and lifting, the sweating and running and breathing hard—all the things our bodies do when we’re exercising well—these things remind us of this fundamental fact of our human nature. We are the bodies we use to do those things. In that remembrance we may start to discover (at least in part), what God had in mind when he made us of the dust of the earth in the first place and breathed into us the breath of life. 

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Going to the Gym with God (Part 1): An Introduction to the Theology of Exercise

Sometime back in 2010, when our kids were young and we needed as many opportunities to keep them active as we could find, my wife and I signed up for a family membership at the local YMCA. I had never had a gym membership before that. Although I would occasionally make New Year’s resolutions to start each day with a 100 push-ups (which generally only lasted till February), I never really thought about myself as particularly athletic. As kids, my two brothers were into every sport imaginable, whereas I gravitated more towards the arts.  Shane and Scott are the jocks, Dale’s the artist; that was the story on the three of us. 

All this is to say that signing up for a membership at the Y was about as unlikely a thing I could have imagined myself doing back in 2010.  However, besides the fact that my kids needed the recreational activities it provided, I had just completed a 5-year intensive masters program in theology, which involved a lot of sedentary reading and writing, and I had just started an intense job as a new pastor at an up-and-coming church plant, which involved a lot of mental and emotional energy. Whether I realized it or not, I really needed the regular workout and low-key social interaction I got each week at the gym. 

Some ten years later, I have come to see how important it is for me as a pastor, as a Christian, and as a growing disciple, to maintain a regular routine of weekly exercise. I try to start and end each weekday with a good half hour of physical exercise and try to fit in a 5 mile run on the weekend. If my schedule is disrupted and I happen to go more than a week or two without a good workout, it doesn’t take long before I start to feel it mentally, emotionally and spiritually. The YMCA has taught me, in other words, that for me there is a mysterious connection between getting physical exercise and staying spiritually healthy.

It may strike some readers as odd, connecting my growth as a Christian to a regular discipline of physical exercise the way I did just now. Certainly, in the pre-YMCA days, I would have found it an odd combination. Christianity is something that happens in the head and the heart, isn’t it? What does Gold’s Gym to do with Jerusalem?

I want to be careful in what I say here. There’s a danger I might be misunderstood as saying that unless you’re shredded like Arnie you’re not a good Christian; or that pumping iron somehow makes you a better one. If it sounds like I’m saying that, I’m not communicating well here at all.  God in his wisdom gave us all unique body types, unique constitutions, and unique temperaments. Throughout this post, you can feel free to substitute whatever form of physical exercise works for your constitution and body type—whether it’s running a Tough Mudder race or taking the dog on a leisurely walk through the park.

When I say there’s a connection between getting regular exercise and growing as a Christian, I don’t really have any specific kind of exercise in mind.  It could be tossing a soft ball with the kids; it could be tossing a 90-pound medicine ball at the gym.  The point is just that there is something about physical movement and heavy muscle work that’s good for you, and the “good” it does you is spiritual as well as physical. 

In saying this I don’t’ think I’m saying anything radical, or new, or unbiblical. There’s a verse I think about often when I’m exercising. In 1 Timothy 4:8, Paul is giving his young protégé Timothy some advice for being an effective pastor, and he says, “Train yourself to be godly, for physical training is of some value, but goodliness has value for all things.”

Paul’s point here, of course, is that godliness is the preeminent goal of the Christian life, and he uses physical training as an analogy for what it takes to grow in godliness (i.e. just like you have to work out to get buff, so too you have to work at it to get “buff” in holiness….). Because of this, it’s common to gloss over what Paul actually says about “physical training” here; or even to misread it, as though he is suggesting that physical exercise doesn’t matter, because godliness is the most important thing.

But that’s not, strictly speaking, what he says.  Strictly speaking, he says that physical training is of some value. Presumably, he means that it has intrinsic value—it’s better to be in good shape physically than not to be—but it also has analogical value, in that it reminds us of the importance of godliness (which, unlike physical fitness, has value both for this life and the life to come).

That’s my quick Coles notes on the verse, anyways.  

And if my reading holds water, then notice two things.  A) 1 Timothy 4:8 affirms the value of physical exercise (though it places a clear limit on that value. It’s very possible to be a thriving, growing, holy Christian without being in physical shape); and B) the primary value physical exercise has is in helping us understand, on an analogical level, what it means to get ourselves into spiritual shape. In a mysterious way, physical exercise can serve as a “lived object lesson” in spiritual formation, helping us to grasp and to grow in the disciplines necessary for a thriving spiritual life.

I grew up in a “read-your-Bible-pray-every-day” evangelical tradition; so even as I write this, I have to admit that it all feels a bit strange. Does physical exercise really have something to do with spiritual formation? 

Of course, there are branches of Christian tradition where there is nothing at all radical about connecting these two dots, where the link between physical training and spiritual growth is self evident. The YMCA itself was founded by a Christian, a guy named Sir George Williams, who believed, among other things, that developing a healthy body was an important part of the Christian life.

If you grew up in a faith tradition something like mine, however, where the connection between the physical and the spiritual were minimized—or if you grew up with no faith tradition, and never really considered the possibility that physical exercise might have something to do with your spirituality—I hope you will join me here at terra incognita over the next few weeks. We will be taking some time to develop a theology of physical exercise, so to speak, in a blog series that I’m calling, “Going to the Gym with God.” 

This post is, after all, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the myriad connections between physical training and training in godliness, and my hope is that, when it’s all said and done, we’ll all find that next stroll through the park, or that next session of jazzercise, or that next game of golf—or whatever your exercise of choice—more spiritually edifying than we ever would have imagined.

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The Thursday Review: 5 Ways Riding Your Bike is a Spiritual Act

first posted September 21, 2012

My older brother inspires me in a number of ways, but lately it's been to cycle more.  He recently completed a cycling tour of epic (by my definition of epic, anyways) proportions.  So inspired was I that a few weeks ago I lowered my bike from the rafters of my garage, replaced an inner tube or two (yes it's been that long), and made a personal commitment to start biking to work.  ("I'm a cyclist now!" is how I announced this decision to my wife, to which she lovingly replied:  "Why is it always all or nothing with you?"  I was sporting a bright red cycling jersey and an aerodynamic helmet at the time.)

Anyways, on the ride to work this morning I was mulling all this over and it occurred to me that, even though we don't normally group it with the regular spiritual disciplines, there are a number of ways in which cycling is actually spiritual act.  Consider the following:

1.  Spirit-Body Connectedness.  I know this sounds a bit new-age-y, but hear me out.  Most biblical scholars would agree that biblical anthropology tends to eschew dualism when it comes to the body/spirit relationship.  In other words, the way the Bible sees you, you don't have a body, you are a body; neither do you have a spirit, you are a spirit.  One of the curious things about the technological world we inhabit, I think, is that this unity has become obscured-- reality has become "virtual," communication disembodied, and travel (hint, hint) disconnected from the body we once used to get there.  But because we are embodied spirits and en-spirited bodies, this disconnect has significant, (though often unnoticed) implications for our spiritual health.  By requiring the body to do the actual work of getting around again, cycling helps to re-connect that disconnect, reminding the spirit that the body is far more than just the disposable cup it got poured into.

2.  Stewardship.  Stewardship is the theological word we use to underline the fact that all we have and all we are really belongs to God, and we will give an account to him in the end for what we did with it.  Usually it's used in reference to our money, not cycling, but again, hear me out.  A) cycling is good exercise and B) regular exercise keeps us healthy and C) as a rule you tend to be more productive with your time and energy when you're healthy.  Ergo, cycling is good stewardship.

3.  Social De-fragmentation.  We don't always notice it in the individualistic west, but the Bible places a premium value on healthy, well-connected community.  Car culture, by contrast, places a low value on healthy well-connected community.  Garages that gobble up front-porches and highways crammed with single-passenger vehicles all roaring along at break-neck speeds by themselves together make for fragmented communities.  But I noticed on the ride to work today:  the kids waiting for the school bus with mom waved at me, the other cyclist I passed gave me a nod, I was going slow enough to notice the senior out walking her dog, and in all this I felt like the disk-drive of my soul was being defragmented.  Community starts, it occurred to me, when we're going slow enough to notice each other.

4.  Green footprints.  I won't save the planet by cycling.  I know this.  But biblical scholar or not, you'd have to agree that a cyclist creates far less pollution than a motorist going the same distance.  If you've read terra incognita enough, you'll know I've said a lot about the way Christianity should translate into a healed and healing relationship with the earth, but lately I've felt deeply convicted that I'm not actually walking the talk.  Cycling is a small start, and if nothing else it renews my convictions.

5.  Simplicity.  Un-business, I'm beginning to believe, could become the radical new spiritual discipline of the 21st Century.  Everyone is so maxed out with calendar-debt that items1-4 seem next to impossible to achieve.  Who's got the time for healthy, connected, green community that stewards God's resources well?  Cycling, I'm learning, requires me to slow down, and in this, too, it is a spiritual discipline.

It's Fun to Stay at the...

This summer my family signed up for a membership at the local Y. Nothing intentionally spiritual in this decision, we just wanted a bit of motivation to do some more active things together as a family. And that's primarily what it's been: the kids have signed up for karate, junior life-guarding club, swimming lessons; we've spent a few Saturdays together climbing on the climbing wall; we've made it down to the gym on a relatively frequent basis.

Like I say: there was nothing explicitly spiritual in this decision, we just wanted a bit of motivation.

But yesterday I was walking out of the gym after an early morning workout, aching arms and a vivid awareness that I was alive burning in my chest, and it struck me that the "C" in YMCA has always stood for "Christian." The roots are buried pretty deep now, but the YMCA was actually founded as a Christian movement, with the goal of improving the spiritual condition of young men in London England. Back in 1844, a London draper named George Williams was watching people flock to the cities looking for work, and seeing the effect of the Industrial Revolution on their spiritual well being. He was particularly concerned over the lack of healthy activities for young men, and their tendency to turn to unhealthy alternatives like gambling, brothels and taverns instead. So on June 6 he founded the first ever YMCA, with the Christian goal of helping young men develop a healthy "spirit, mind and body."

Again, those roots are buried deep now, but one hundred and sixty six years later, the YMCA still maintains its commitment to the three principles of healthy spirits/minds/bodies; and, while there is nothing explicitly Christian in its four core values, I doubt any Christian would take issue with a movement that encouraged caring, honesty, responsibility and respect.

I wonder, though, if there isn't something even more biblical to the three principles of healthy spirits, minds and bodies than meets the eye. Often the Christian understanding of the human being is coloured more by Greek philosophical categories than biblical ones, and so we tend to assume the physical body is somehow less important than the immaterial "soul," which, we hasten to add, constitutes the "true self."

This is a more complex theological issue than a 600 word blog post could ever unpack, but let me at least suggest here, in concert with a general consensus among contemporary biblical scholars and theologians, that such a dualism is foreign to the biblical understanding of the "self." If Genesis 2:7 can at all be our guide on these matters, then whatever else we are, we are nephesh-- living creatures made of matter-animated-with-the-divine-breath-of-God.

Put differently: I don't "have a body," biblically speaking, I "am a body." Or, as Marrianne Hicks puts it: "'I' come into being and live and grow ... in the inextricable interconnection of matter and spirit” Or as Stan Grenz puts it: "We must follow the lead of ... the Bible... and adopt a holistic view of the human person. ... The human person is by design one indivisible reality."

What does all this have to do with the Christian life? I'm not exactly sure, but if these readings of biblical anthropology are right, then I am, by design, a "psychosomatic unity," mind, body and soul. And walking out of the gym, or off the squash court, or away from the climbing wall with aching arms and vivid breath burning in my chest, at the very least these moments are small, helpful reminders of that indivisible reality.