A Plea for the Body

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 21, 1878

A Plea for the Body.

We are told that the body is not of much account. It is called the "mortal coil," the "tenement of clay," and the "soul's house." It is condemned and abused, it is blamed for all the mischief done, and is to be deserted at death, while the soul is going forth on wings of light to realms of bliss, forever free from its cumbersome clay. Now all this will do for the poets who write much nonsense and for the theologians who wish to amuse the people with their theories of mysticism. But science and the Bible, nature and common sense, show us that all such notions about the body are mere fancies. All men have bodies, and the whole career of man in life depends upon his body. Without a sound nervous system there can be no mind. Without muscle there can be no endurance. The hand that writes, the tongue that talks, the lungs that breathe and the brain that thinks are all physical and belong to the body. During the ages of superstition certain philosophers vied with each other in torturing their bodies, claiming that the imprisoned souls rejoiced over their calamities, but as Christianity dawned upon these benighted men, they learned to respect the body as a necessary part of the real man.

When God made man he gave him a body. When rewards were promised or punishments threatened the body was included in the joy or the pain. Even the death of Christ was in body, and the resurrection contemplates the change of this "mortal body" to be made like unto the glorious body of our risen Lord. It is sown a natural body, and is to be raised a spiritual body. Indeed the Bible offers neither rewards nor punishments to men without bodies. All this talk so flippantly made about an immortal soul which has no eyes, no body, no parts, and which occupies neither space nor place, may do for those who deal in mere fancies, but when we talk about the crown of life, the kingdom of God, the inheritance, and the holy city, we must conclude that the Bible idea is the only rational one which treats man as a real being, and that he will have a real existence in the hereafter.

Let us then with Isaiah hope in the re-living of the dead, and rejoice with the same enthusiasm which placed him, in vision, amid the scenes and joys of immortality—"Thy dead men shall live, together with my DEAD BODY shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead." Isa. 26:19.

Our affections, our friendships, and indeed all our ideas, bounded by human experience, are connected with the human form, which was made in the image of God. Any theory, therefore, which ignores the body and offers man life and joy without it, is unfounded, and contrary to the true science of our being.—Sel.