Science Can’t Tell Us the Most Amazing Things About the Human Body

After receiving the Templeton Prize in 2020, world renowned physician-geneticist Francis Collins wrote in a prepared statement, “The elegant complexity of human biology constantly creates in me a sense of awe.”

Collins’s reflection captures the wonder felt by so many in the scientific-medical community who give their lives to studying the human body. Because of the amazing insight furnished by modern research, it’s natural to assume that the key to discerning the most profound truths about the body’s design and capabilities lies in scientific inquiry.

Intuitive as it might seem, I believe this assumption is mistaken.

Recall that according to the Scriptures, humans are not merely sophisticated things, but embodied persons comprised of both a material body and an immaterial soul. John Owen summarizes: “The union of the soul and the body doth constitute that nature which is made essentially complete thereby—a new individual person, with a subsistence of its own which neither of them was or had before that union.”

Perhaps we might respond, “Fair enough—let the Bible teach us about the soul and leave it to science to teach us about the body.” But this won’t work for a simple reason: the body and soul exist in a relationship of reciprocal interaction. The soul’s ability to act upon the body (and vice versa) means that the body possesses design elements and capabilities that natural science is inept to confirm, much less analyze.

What does biology teach us about the body’s capability to be influenced by the soul? What is the ultimate purpose of the human body—why did God create it? What does it signify in the visible world? What makes the human body ethically distinct from other (e.g., animal) bodies?

While these questions don’t diminish the value of modern science’s contributions to our knowledge of the body, they do frame the conviction at the core of this article: the most profound things we can say about the human body are not biological, but theological in nature.

If conceiving of the body theologically sounds strange, it’s largely because evangelicals are only recently beginning to develop a more robust theological anthropology. While Catholics have been well served by JPII’s magisterial Theology of the Body (TOB)—a work I critically analyzed for Protestant use in my dissertation—evangelical anthropology has largely remained tethered to sexual ethics.

Ask a churchgoing believer, “What is a human body, biologically speaking?” and they’ll likely say something about DNA and chromosomes. Ask the same person, “What is a human body, theologically speaking?” and they’ll look at you with confusion; not simply because they don’t know the answer, but because they lack the theological framework to make sense of the question.

What does it even mean to describe a human body theologically?

In what follows, my goal is to give specific examples of what it looks like to think theologically about the human body. Far from being comprehensive, these observations are mere sketches aimed at clarifying a concept that for many remains abstract.

While I’ve written elsewhere on the innumerable ethical applications of these truths, here I focus narrowly on the truths themselves in an effort to show that, far from being a fad, thinking theologically about embodiment is a fruitful enterprise, ripe for assimilation into the evangelical consciousness.

So then, what is a human body, theologically speaking?

A human body is a body oriented toward union with a rational soul.

While theologians recognize that animals have souls in a qualified sense (e.g., consciousness, motion, sensation etc.), only humans have “rational souls,” viz., souls that have a voluntary will, moral agency, the capacity for relationship with God, and the ability to subsist apart from the body.

Crucially, rational souls are by nature oriented to a dynamic union with a body, the union of the two constituting the human person.

Millard Erikson helpfully likens the body-soul relationship to salt understood as a chemical compound (i.e., Sodium Chloride). Neither sodium nor chlorine is salt. When the elements are united, they become something they are not by themselves.

Similarly, human beings can’t be reduced to either their material or immaterial component (body or soul). Far from being Descartes’s “ghost in a machine,” the human person (“salt”) is constituted in the union of a specific body and soul. While the person can subsist as their soul apart from their body in the intermediate state, they remain oriented to their body and will be reunited to it at Christ’s return.

It’s because the human person is a body-soul union that when I kiss my wife, I kiss her, not merely her body. It’s why sex is a communion of persons, not simply a connection of bodies. It’s why harming someone’s body does damage that long outlasts a bruise.

What we do to a body, we do to a person.

A human body manifests a person.

When Adam sees Eve for the first time, he doesn’t merely perceive a similarly structured body. He discerns that somebody—another “self”—is standing before him, the physical body visibly manifesting the person who would otherwise be invisible.

The incarnation confirms that human bodies are designed by God to function in this way. How did the eternal Logos manifest himself on earth: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Jesus visibly manifested the Word. How? Because he had a human body—the kind of body designed by God to reveal a person.

Stated plainly, my body is how you see “me.”

As my material component, my body is also the God-designed structure by which I act in and experience the world. For example, my eardrums have never heard anything—I have, by means of my eardrums. If my eardrums are broken, I won’t be able to hear. If they work fine, but I am not paying attention, my eardrums will register noise when someone speaks, but I won’t hear what was said (marriage struggles, anyone?).

As Herman Bavinck observes, “The nature of the union of the soul with the body … is so intimate that one nature, one person, one self is the subject of both and of all their activities. It is always the same soul that peers through the eyes, thinks through the brain, grasps with the hands, and walks with the feet.”

A human body visibly manifests a person and serves as the structure by which they act in and experience the world.

A human body is an intermediary through which a person makes a gift of self to God and the world.

Why does the Lord say, “It is not good that the man should be alone…” (Gen. 2:18)? Without reducing God’s negative evaluation of the man’s solitude to a single reason, the fact that Adam was made in the image of a God who exists as a Being-in-Communion is instructive: “As the Father, Son and Spirit have always known fellowship with each other, so we in the image of God are made for fellowship.”

At his core, Adam is wired for self-giving communion; designed to exist in a relationship of “reciprocal for,” something he’s unable to fully realize in his solitude.

As Derek Kidner observes, “The naming of the animals, a scene which portrays man as monarch of all he surveys, poignantly reveals him as a social being, made for fellowship, not power: he will not live until he loves, giving himself away to another on his own level.”

And how will Adam give himself away in love to God and others? How will he serve the Lord by taking dominion, cultivating the garden, and caring for his bride?—by means of his body, the physical intermediary that enables him to offer a gift of self.

The second Adam will serve as the exemplar of self-giving through the body. On the night he was betrayed, the Lord described his own total gift of self in one of the most insightful statements ever made about the human body: “This is my body which is given for you” (Luke 22:19).

Having already commanded his disciples to imitate his life-laying-down love (John 15:12–13), Jesus’ statement doesn’t simply describe how he conceived of his own body; it establishes the ethical norm by which each Christian should conceive of theirs.

A human body is a structure designed by God to facilitate self-giving—in friendship, marriage, parenting, work, and worship. Thus, using the body to oppress, manipulate or take from others in self-interest fundamentally distorts its purpose. Unlike all the other bodies in the visible world, human bodies are those over which “taking dominion” (Gen. 1:28) is categorically forbidden.

A human body is a body oriented toward visibly dramatizing God’s plan to unite the church to Christ.

Adam and Eve’s uniquely sexed bodies enable them to enjoy a specific kind of communion, viz., one-flesh conjugal union (Gen. 2:24). Interestingly, in Ephesians 5, Paul mentions that we are members of Christ’s body (Eph. 5:30) and then immediately quotes Genesis 2:24 to justify marriage: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Eph. 5:31).

People get married because of … union with Christ? What’s the logic here?

Alexander and Rosner summarize: “Christ's union with the church as his body is the reason why a man should become one flesh with his wife. It is the heavenly marriage that warrants and dignifies an earthly marriage.”

According to Paul, God created marriage in the visible world to signify a bigger plan that eternally preexisted both marriage (and sin!)—his plan to unite Christ with the church. Humans’ sexually distinct bodies don’t simply make procreation possible. They enable them to participate in a visible depiction of God’s plan from eternity past to unite Christ to his bride. It’s for this reason that one-flesh conjugal union is objectively a “profound mystery” that “refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32).

Whether married or single, the external exigency of the human body in its masculinity and femininity was designed to signify from the beginning, “I was made to live with and for Someone.”

A human body is a body with the potential for glorified immortality.

From the perspective of theological anthropology, death refers to the separation of the soul from the body. To say a human person is “dead” is to say that they currently subsist only as their soul apart from their body.

However, like Christ, humans will forever exist as body-soul unities. At the return of Christ, “there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust” (Acts 24:25). In what theologians call the “general resurrection,” all the dead will “be raised up with the self-same bodies, and none other, although with different qualities, which shall be united again to their souls forever” (WCF 32.2).

The resurrection of both the just and the unjust means a dead body that won’t eventually be raised isn’t a human body.

Furthermore, while unbelievers will suffer eternal punishment (2 Thess. 1:9), believers “will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality” (1 Cor. 15:52–53).

The implications here are manifold.

Because of sin’s effects, it’s difficult to look at a body and “see” a person. However, with our glorified humanity, we will look at every human body and seamlessly perceive the person it manifests. With no impulse to use our bodies to take from or manipulate others, “This is my body given for you” will remain our permanent instinct as we offer a sincere gift of self in love to God and his people.

Here, image bearers’ fundamental orientation toward communion—written on the human body in its masculinity and femininity from the beginning—will find its fulfillment in consummate union and communion with Christ.

To Be Wonderfully Made

While we should celebrate the insights of modern science, we should do so understanding that the Scriptures disclose the most profound truths about the human body, viz., its unique capabilities, purpose, and significance. While the sketches above simply offer examples of what it looks like to conceive of the body theologically, the practical insights of doing so are innumerable and directly connected to important issues like sex, lust, purity, modesty, marriage, gender, understanding trauma/abuse, work, worship, medicine, and physical fitness.

With this in mind, evangelicals would do well to continue thinking theologically about human embodiment in a disciplined effort to further discern what it means to be fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps. 139:14).