The Limits that Make Us: Embodiment, Creatureliness, and the Life to Come

Abstract

Embodiment and Incarnation lie at the heart of the Christian faith. Despite living in a culture that appears fixated on bodies, the intellectual tradition inherited by modern Reformed congregations perpetuates a mind-body dualism that, in failing to proclaim the radical goodness of bodies and the formative reality of embodiment, harms the bodies it seeks to redeem. In “The Limits that Make Us,” I explore the affirmation of the resurrection of the body in the Apostles’ Creed in hopes that doing so can help return Christians to the sanctity of their bodies. I mean to encourage those who sit in the church’s pews to locate radical hope in the Incarnate God and in their own God-formed bodies, which are honored, redeemed, and assumed in the life everlasting.My primary source for this thesis is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall, a theological commentary on Genesis 1-3. Bonhoeffer delivered the lectures from 1932-1933, as the Nazis, fueled by myths of the Übermensch and full of disdain for the Judaic faith, rose to power in Germany. The lectures construct an anthropology based on creatureliness, and affirm the goodness of materiality and limitation, each of which is a key theme in the thesis. I also rely on Mayra Rivera’s The Touch of Transcendence and Kenda Dean’s Almost Christian. The work is theological in scope, aimed to serve mainline congregations and to encourage preachers and church leaders to proclaim with joy the unity of bodies, the goodness of limitations, and the radical hope of bodily resurrection.