We learn something else from the creation story, something which is the key to this attitude.  In the Old Testament, there is none of the division of body and soul which we find in Christianity.  Man is pictured as a unitary being, dust animated by God.  In the classic formulation by Dr. Wheeler Robinson (The People and the Book, p. 362), "The Hebrew idea of the personality is an animated body, not an embodied soul." Man does not have a body; he is a body; when life departs, he literally returns to dust, and ceases to exist in any meaningful sense.  The soul, or spirit, as we wish, is merely the life-force, the animation of the body, not an entity which exists separate from it. 

     Despite poetic references such as Jeremiah 1:5, or Psalm 139:13-16, which actually refer to God's omniscience and knowledge of our fate, there is no indication in the Old Testament of the pre-existence of the soul (i.e., God knows our fate before we exist, not us). Nor is there any conception of the existence of the soul after death.  Sheol, the abode of the dead, is a place where the dead dwell as shadows, in a state of being forgotten (Psalm 31:12), of weariness (Job 3:17), of insubstantiality (Psalm 88:4; Is. 14:10). 

     Initially, for the Hebrews, immortality is found in memory, in the opportunity for one's descendants to remember their forefathers; thus Job's ultimate loss is the death of his sons and daughters and the threat he will be utterly forgotten, and his ultimate restoration, the gift of his children back (see also Ecclesiasticus 44: "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us...; and there be some which have no memorial, who are perished as though they had never been, and are become as they had never been born...").  This dynamic survives to this day in Judaism in the importance of having someone remaining to say Kaddish for the deceased.  Later immortality would be found in a resurrection, in which a new body would again be animated by God, but there was never any conception that immortality was to be found in a soul dwelling after death with God.  Paul, with his observations about those who "sleep in death" while awaiting the resurrection (I Thes. 4:14), is wholly consistent with Hebrew thought on this matter.

     Thus the body simply could not be degraded or devalued; it was an absolutely essential component of human life and being.  As such, it made no sense at all to be hostile to it.

This article is the first of a two-part piece, the second part of which will be published in the next issue of Paraklesis.  The entire article was first presented in Dutch as the keynote lecture at a theological reflection afternoon on the topic "Is Christianity hostile to physical appetites?", held at the Pauluskerk (St. Paul's Church) in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 1996.  The article was also printed in Dutch in Onbegrepen Intimiteiten (Rotterdam: KSA, 1996, pp. 78-90). For its first English appearance here it has been lightly revised, taking into account ensuing responses.

Donald H. Mader, M.Div., is assistant pastor at the Pauluskerk, and is a doctoral candidate in Literature at the University of Amsterdam.  He has written numerous articles on Christianity and sexuality, and is a regular contributor to Paraklesis.