This will initially seem like an odd claim to make, and a particularly odd claim to read on your phone, the most disembodying and dislocating device you own.
Wisdom doesn’t feel embodied, wisdom is about ideas, surely? Ideas are immaterial if anything is, right? Your body isn’t relevant to things that we think, or so the narrative goes. This is a thought that can be thought easily in the digital age: everything is disembodied. It is natural that gender ideology would rise to prominence in a disembodied age, the devices that train us in how to approach the world also train us to think that ‘I’ and ‘my body’ are not intrinsically the same thing.
Wisdom is not, primarily, about ideas. To be wise is to understand reality and live in alignment with it. Reality is not only ideas. Reality is even not primarily ideas (it might be primarily symbols, but that’s—literally—another story). Even the ideas are not disembodied because they are thought by people who are embodied. We cannot divorce ourselves from our physicality.
Even more so, wisdom in the Bible is the domain of kings (Proverbs 25.2), associated with wine (Proverbs 9), and has therefore to do with ruling. To rule wisely is first a matter of ruling yourself wisely, which includes ruling your body wisely. That wise rule starts with recognising the good gift that your frame is, as well as the painful effects of the fall.
We could go a step further: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The examples we have of people in the Bible ‘fearing the Lord’ include a removal of footwear to stand on holy ground. Our bodies, and their posturing towards Jesus, matter.
These claims have some fairly obvious applications to ideologies that claim we should adapt our bodies to suit our minds rather than disciplining our minds to live within the limits of our bodies. Transgenderism might be obvious enough, but this also goes for transhumanism. Tech bros long to transcend our bodily limits with various technological ideas. They are, largely, the product of science fiction for now. Except, are they? Your smartphone feels like an extension of your hand. Your smartwatch or fitbit is monitoring your vital signs so you can carefully maintain your body in a particular way. An entire exercise industry is designed to teach us to ‘hack’ our bodies as though they were hardware that we are trying to improve and upgrade.
The Bible is for the training of the body (1 Timothy 4), that isn’t what I mean and people have been doing that as long as there have been people, rather the modern approach to it requires that we see our limits as bad constraints rather than healthy boundaries.
Even more so the recent ‘Don’t Die’ movement, which is hilarious and deeply sad all at once, thinks that we can transcend death if we just try hard enough. Perhaps if we just reach and grasp we will not surely die. As if that hadn’t been tried. I do enjoy the raft of memes under all of their social media posts claiming that someone alive today will be the first human not to die, the memes mostly amount to images of the resurrection saying ‘already been done.’ There’s a human longing for a better body, to not die, to not feel the wrack of pain or dysmorphia: all of these are met in Christ because we’re promised resurrected (not new but glorified) bodies on a resurrected earth.
I think this is also where the modern evangelical sense that ‘we go to heaven when we die’ as a final destination rather than a pit stop on the journey is also unhelpful. We imagine the future as disembodied and so continue to think about human flourishing in disembodied ways.
Rather, if we understand that the joy of being with Jesus in the garden upon death (Luke 23) is a temporary waiting for the resurrection of the dead (1 Corinthians 15) we think about life now differently. The bliss of the beatific vision, of face-to-face encounters with the risen Lord, is itself not the end goal. Instead, the resurrection of all things is the end goal.
The future is embodied. Your future is embodied. This is why wisdom is embodied, because wisdom is to understand and live in accordance with reality. Reality is embodied and is pointed towards resurrection. Death and resurrection is the grammar of the cosmos, the story hardcoded into everything from the path of the sun across the sky, the shape of Hebrew poetry, and the apparent source of the building blocks of life in the death of ancient stars. The story was ‘life, then death’; upon the resurrection of Lord Jesus the Christ the story changed, it is now ‘death, then life.’
Understanding the future, the telos, of humanity changes what our sense of a flourishing life looks like now. Human flourishing is a theological question. We live towards a goal, the thing we desire most. Those should be wise goals and wise desires, which is the same as saying they should be true goals and true desires.
Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash
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