The Christian message is often a message about sin, with an angry, disappointed God and a crucified Jesus. It can seem like sin and shameful repentance is the message. What is the place of beauty in the Christian life and in the Christian story? Today we sit down with Wheaton President to explore a theology of beauty!
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Check out Dr. Ryken's book on Beauty: Beauty is Your Destiny: How the Promise of Splendor Changes Everything
Philip Graham Ryken (DPhil, University of Oxford) is the eighth president of Wheaton College. He preached at Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1995 until his appointment at Wheaton in 2010. Ryken has published more than fifty books, including When Trouble Comes and expository commentaries on Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah. He serves as a board member for the Gospel Coalition and the Lausanne Movement.
The Christian message is often a message about sin, with an angry, disappointed God and a crucified Jesus. It can seem like sin and shameful repentance is the message. What is the place of beauty in the Christian life and in the Christian story? Today we sit down with Wheaton President to explore a theology of beauty!
Become a Disruptor and help support this show! https://www.provenmen.org/disruptors/
Check out Dr. Ryken's book on Beauty: Beauty is Your Destiny: How the Promise of Splendor Changes Everything
Philip Graham Ryken (DPhil, University of Oxford) is the eighth president of Wheaton College. He preached at Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1995 until his appointment at Wheaton in 2010. Ryken has published more than fifty books, including When Trouble Comes and expository commentaries on Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah. He serves as a board member for the Gospel Coalition and the Lausanne Movement.
Hello everyone, happy New Year, welcome to 2024. This is our first conversation of the New Year and it is with Wheaton President, dr Philip Reichen. He's recently done some work on the theology of beauty and I wanted to have him on to discuss that, because, whether it's the clothes we wear, hygiene, the shows and movies we like to watch, the music we listen to, even ideas or the friends we make, it all has to do with attraction. Attraction, well, yeah, I mean we're not going to move towards things that we find disgusting, we move towards the things that we find attractive, and I wanted to know how beauty is at play when it comes to sin and the cross. So, at practical levels, experiential levels or theological levels, just wanted to process beauty, because attraction is certainly at play in all these ways, and not least when it comes to sexuality. So, yeah, that's what this conversation is going to be about. Truth be told, it was between this or a conversation that I had with Cynthia Sam on sexual fetishes, so be on the lookout for that one. I didn't think it would be a very strong point to start out the new year with a conversation on sexual fetishes. I thought it would be a little bit more acceptable to talk with Wheaton's current president. I thought it would help our credibility. Truth be told. Then again, fetishes are about what we're sexually attracted to, so perhaps a conversation about the theology of beauty and attraction is a perfect precursor to a conversation on fetishes. I hope you enjoy this conversation and, as always, share it with those around you. And if you're interested in joining the Disruptor community that helps to shape this podcast and the conversations and topics we engage a link to that is down below. I'm excited for this year and the upcoming conversations and explorations that we're going to have together.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome to the Naked Gospel, where we have conversations about sex, singleness, marriage, pornography and everything in between. We bring on cultural thinkers, parents, important folk and normal folk alike. I am your host, shane O'Neill. All of these episodes are available on every major podcast platform. Whether you're listening or watching, do subscribe and continue to track with us. Thank you for tuning in and enjoy the episode. Hello folks, welcome back to another episode of the Naked Gospel. Today we have a really cool conversation. I am looking forward to exploring this. Our guest is Dr Philip Graham Reichen, a D Phil from University of Oxford, which already just sounds really cool. He's the eighth president of Wheaton College. He's published more than 50 books, which is that's pretty cool. He serves as a board member for the Gospel Coalition, the Luzon Movement and the National Association of Evangelicals. He's recently written on beauty Particularly. The book is called Beauty Is your Destiny how the Promise of Spender Changes Everything. A link to that will be down in the show notes. Dr Reichen, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Shane. I really appreciate the invitation.
Speaker 1:Dr Reichen, my dad. When I was growing up, my dad held a lot of what would be regarded as like high privilege positions within Christian organizations. One thing he always struggled with was in the midst of the administration and the fundraising was getting to do his own research and just hang out with Jesus and explore topics that just to be a kid, just to be childlike in that way. When I look at your bio it's like commentary on Ecclesiastes and Exodus and this new book on beauty. How do you pull it off, can you? Maybe, for those of us who don't appreciate the difficulty maybe of that, just how important is it to you to be able to do that and to engage Jesus on that level?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so great, great question, Shane. First of all, it's great to be on a college campus because I'm on a campus where we're thinking about literature and philosophy and we're practicing the visual arts and I'm excited to go to a concert that features Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony on Friday night and we're doing athletics and the sciences, and so I'm a lifelong learner. I'm just super curious about all kinds of things, love to ask people lots of questions. I actually like to be on the other side of the microphone in a conversation like this. So I'm curious about a lot of things and a college campus is a good place for that, and I'm more.
Speaker 2:What's a bigger reality in my daily life is all the things I don't have time to read and don't get time to think about. That's super tough. Like I've accepted the fact I'm not going to be able to learn in this lifetime all the things I want to learn. But I can enjoy the things that I do have an opportunity to learn, enjoy the book that I am reading and try to be a bit content with that. But God's blessed me with opportunities to go deeper in some subjects and I love to do that when I can.
Speaker 1:I like that. It's whatever the portion is, it's a non-negotiable. I respect that a lot, because there's always something seemingly important to do, and for you to say no, like this is a sort of nutrient that I need.
Speaker 2:It's harder to quantify, but you need it, so thanks for yeah, no and a lot of the reading I do tends to be just the reading I want to do, rather than I do have to do a lot of the reading I have to do just in my daily work. There's a huge amount of reading, but if I get any discretionary time I'm not necessarily looking for to read something I think will be good for me although usually it will be but things that I really am just interested in. I also I try to. You know, sometimes I don't get the rest or time for reflection, but if I've got these 15 minutes I want to take advantage of those 15 minutes and try to enjoy them as much as I can and be all in for whatever the experience is that's ready to hand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's cool, that plays. So when I was reading NT Wright's Evil and the Justice of God years ago. Nt Wright, he starts out the book, he frames the book in a particular way. He says he's not an ethicist, this is not his area of expertise, but he's engaging in an ancient practice that used to be prominent in the church, something like theologizing in public, where he's taking a matter that maybe he doesn't know a lot about but he's doing his best to engage it and he's willing. He's willing to let people see that he is still trying to figure it out, he's still wrestling with it. You do that in this book with beauty and you're pretty explicit about it in the beginning and I really appreciate that because I don't often get those examples of you know we have such values around mastery and possession and being polished. You know it's kind of just a cultural value. So can you tell us how, what your journey with beauty has been like and why you ended up writing into it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, first of all, when NT Wright tells you he's not an expert on something, he probably is. So also, I value expertise and the people that truly have a scholarly credential around something. I try to be careful about that in a college context I'm just always reminding people hey, I'm not a Bible scholar the way our Bible scholars are. I'm certainly not an esthetician the way that people in our philosophy department that really think about the philosophy of the arts and I'm a bit of a generalist. I think as a pastor I can get away with that a bit because you know you want your preachers to be reading and thinking and sharing what they're thinking about and there's a place for more popular level engagement. I just think there's a place for it and I always feel like I'm covered a little bit if I say, like this isn't my area of expertise, like if you really want to talk to a specialist, there's a whole another level of expertise here. I just think it's good to acknowledge that.
Speaker 2:With regard to beauty, you know these this beauty is your destiny is a book that came out of chapel talks I gave on Wheaton's campus and I do different things in my chapel talks every year. I speak about 10 times a year in our campus context, you know, speaking primarily to 18 to 22 year olds, and I usually try to choose a topic that is focused but has a breadth to it. So, particularly coming out of COVID, I was thinking about beauty, maybe more so than usual, partly because I was more attentive. I was spending more time birding, which is something I really enjoy doing. I was much more aware, being home day after day, to how things were growing in my garden and I raised my game a little bit in the gardening category. But I think a lot of us were just. We were starved for human interaction, but starved for deeper experiences of beauty as well. So it's something I had been thinking about. But I also realized beauty is a topic.
Speaker 2:There's so many things that you can talk about. It's really a way into, I think, almost anything that you wanna talk about in the Christian faith. It's a way into the doctrine of God. It's a way into the doctrine of humanity. It's a way of understanding the Trinity. It gives you questions to wrestle with in thinking about the atoning work of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of Christ and the glory that is to be revealed Like. It's everything from the origins of the universe to the consummation of the kingdom. Beauty is a perspective on all of that, and so that's a great theme for me to explore in a chapel series.
Speaker 2:On the one hand, I'm talking about beauty every time I talk, but I'm exploring different dimensions of it, so there's a freshness to it. The other thing I'll just one other common chain. I don't hesitate, personally, to write about things I don't understand that well, that I'm wanting to understand, and I sometimes say, if you look at some of the books that I've written, don't think to yourself oh, he must be an expert on that. No, I write about a lot of things that I'm not good at, like loving people, like a prayer, just a lot of things. So, but it's good to lean into the things that we don't understand and share what we're learning, particularly if some of us are blessed with good books to read and we're in a context where we can talk to people to get ideas. So I'm blessed that way and I'm happy to share.
Speaker 1:Yeah, last question on this point is there a threshold? You? So what is stewardship like when you're functioning at that level, when it's over 50 books and like, as you say, you're just like, okay, I wanna go this direction and this direction and then wrestling with being an expert or hitting some sort of like standard or whatever it might be. But what does stewardship look like in the midst, Because anybody listening is, I mean, we are our short-term memory with like just jumping from thing to thing to thing and stimulation and new fads, and just like the spark of novelty and the addiction of it. So for you, what does it look like for you to find something steward, explore it and be okay with moving on to other things, but not doing it for novelty's sake?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's another great question. I think it really comes down to calling, and I think some of us are called to really go deep into mastery and not everybody is gonna have the time or the interest or the ability to do that in this subject or that subject or the next subject. We need in the church and in society. We need some people that really have a true depth of expertise. I just know that's not my calling.
Speaker 2:What I'm good at doing is explaining things to people, and I'm good at going deep enough to understand things at a deeper level and then emerge for air and say like here's what you need to know or here's something that can help you out of the exploration that I've done. So I'm a bit of a generalist. I'm also really a variety person. I'm wired for variety, so you can't always predict what I'm gonna wanna eat or different things like that. That's right. I like four seasons, I like, and so I think it's partly just how I'm wired as well.
Speaker 2:But having said all of that, most of the writing I do, most of the thinking I do, most of the speaking I do is related to a particular community of people that I am called to serve, and so I'm thinking about, okay, what's healthy for them? What do they need? Where do I need to explore more deeply in ways that can be beneficial to them? So I'm, you know, in the context of Wheaton College. I'm thinking about, okay, what's good for my students? Okay, you know, I'd like to do a whole year on the doubts that we have in the Christian faith, because I know my students really need this and they need this encouragement or an exploration of beauty or you know, whatever it happens to be.
Speaker 2:And I think a lot of the best work that you see in the history of the church is just faithful pastors and sometimes theologians and missionaries and laypeople just, or Sunday school teachers just trying to care for the people right in front of them. And because they're doing that well, it has a wider impact on the body of Christ and on the work of the kingdom in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. So, looking at the community, knowing your capacity as seeing what's needed and seeing how Jesus would lead you in what's needed, and then feeling the freedom to explore that and to share the wealth as you do, is that fair? Yeah, that's good, cool. So this is like almost a non-sequitur. Now going to like the book of. I want you to speak to the cross first. You talk in your book. You argue that the cross is beautiful. The cross is also. The cross is ugly. It's the ugliest thing in human history. It is where we physically butchered God's son, you know, and then tacked him on a tree, mocked him for all the world to see naked and shamed. Can you speak to how something that is the ugliest scene in human history is saturated with beauty?
Speaker 2:So to me it's a real tension point and, I think, a paradox. I think the cross is both ugly and beautiful and I think but just then being precise, about ugly in which respect? Beautiful in which respect? And you've mentioned some of the ways it's ugly I mean physical torture is one of the ugliest things in the world. The desecration of a human body, the deforming of a human body, physical abuse, I mean. Even just thinking about in the bigger context, not just of the crucifixion itself but of everything that Jesus suffered in the run up to the cross. There are a few uglier things that you can do to another human being than to spit upon them. It's why, just to use a contemporary example, there have been some instances of Christians being spit upon in the city of Jerusalem, in the old city, and the Israeli government has just been very clear we will not tolerate this kind of just abusive behavior. As just an example.
Speaker 2:So it's as ugly a thing as it can be and in one sense, you know, isaiah, in those prophecies about the suffering servant, makes it really clear Is the suffering servant beautiful? No, not in a way that attracts you by sheer physical beauty. On the other hand, put that next to see the tension, see the paradox, the beauty of one person laying down a life for the salvation of others in a life-giving way. The beauty of someone doing that and at the same time exercising forgiveness for enemies. The beauty of someone, in that suffering and torment, reflecting deeply on the Word of God and speaking it in ways that are life-giving to those who are at the cross. I mean all of these things that Jesus did, how he went about his sufferings on the cross. There is beauty in that and of course there's beauty in the impact of the cross and the forgiveness it brings to the world.
Speaker 2:So there's a tension point that we really wrestle with. One of the main pieces of evidence I would give for the beauty of the cross is the way that that beauty is reflected in poetry, in hymnody, in works of art, in people struggling to find the best way to use their human words to express the beauty of the cross. The sufferings and death of Jesus Christ are the most celebrated things in the history of the world and they're not celebrated simply for their ugliness but for their beauty in the context of that ugliness. That's the paradox and I do wrestle with it a bit in the book, and it's one of many mysteries about God and about the way of salvation. We'll never fully understand it, but we can wrestle with it and we can try to see what Jesus was doing and the beauty of it and the power of it.
Speaker 1:I watched the passion in theaters. I was in middle school. I was not a Christian at that point, I did not like God, I wouldn't watch it and I don't know at the time where I was on the historicity of Jesus. But even as a thought experiment, a man like this existing and then going through this willingly, I wept for like two hours because I kept on saying stop doing that for me. I was just floored, just so humbled. I think that speaks to how, like Jesus talks about right, like a seed being buried, right, there's death there. But man did it pierce deep. You know it pierced deep and that's how we have flowers, everyone. That's how we have flowers.
Speaker 1:So I want to ask your Protestants you're talking about beauty. Can you help us appreciate what you are trying? Because there's a rich inheritance of beauty that a lot of Protestants don't touch, don't tap into. You are, and I think in some ways you are trying to help us appreciate the inheritance of the gospel and of embodiment, church community. Can you just speak to that? What are you trying to give?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so let me try to get into the topic this way. I feel like beauty is a neglected topic in Christian thought and here's just a simple way to think about it. When you look at most lists of the attributes of God, if you pick up a systematic theology or even a book that's on the character of God, most of the time beauty is not mentioned. And I was just looking, I just happened. I won't mention the book now, but recent book very comprehensive in all the different aspects of the character of God, but there's no separate section on beauty as a topic to think about in its own right, and that's just a way of saying I think it is a topic that we neglect, but experientially we are deeply drawn to things that are beautiful. There's a reason and it's in a way it's mysterious why we are drawn to people who are physically attractive. There's a reason why we're drawn to certain experiences of nature and there's a deep hunger in the human heart for the beautiful, to see the beautiful, to become the beautiful, to participate in beauty. It's just a very deep part of the way that God has hardwired human beings. So it's important for us to think about it, to recognize it and to put it in its fuller biblical context, and I think beauty is one way of telling the story of salvation. Beauty is one way of telling the story of the gospel. Beauty is one way of thinking about what God is doing in the world. It's not the only way, not necessarily the most important topic, but it is one very important topic and you know there's so much that could be said about ways that we have neglected the topic, not just in terms of the doctrine of God, but thinking more deeply about human bodies.
Speaker 2:And I think I don't know all the reasons why beauty has been neglected, but I think people think of it as kind of an extra topic, not core, kind of a leisure time topic, something that's a little more superficial, something that's I don't know for whatever reason. It doesn't seem to be right at the core and at the heart of things. I think, in a biblical perspective, when you really look at everything the Bible says about beauty, it is at the core and you know, I tried to express that a bit in the title of this book. The subtitle is how the Promise of Splendor Changes Everything, and the first few times I saw that title again I, you know, saw it on a manuscript that landed on my desk, pulled out a first copy and looked at the cover, I'm like, oh, that's bold.
Speaker 2:Do I really think that I really do actually so, but anyway, I don't know if I'm really answering your question, but I do think it's something that we neglected and you know it's. It's not just in its beauty is not a topic that Christians only have recognized? You go to the ancient Greeks and how they were thinking about human thought and what we need to recognize as human beings. You know truth, goodness, beauty it's on the short list of important topics.
Speaker 1:Do you think that that cavity is trying to be filled, that there's a cavity there, right? I mean, like pornography is rampant, you know, it's just it's. It's it's kind of just an assumed reality in people's lives. Among secular, all my secular friends, I read somebody who said you know, like our cultural addiction to, to sexuality, sexual intimacy, is a cultural longing to be known. And we are, we're fixated with stories, we're fixated with with, we're all crying out for touch, you know, and to be touched, and we're all accidentally misusing and abusing one another. When you talk about beauty, I I assume that you mean taking beauty and helping us see, see beauty when we conceptualize God, when conceptualize our faith. But surely it's not just a conceptual like, you're not just trying to give us a conceptual appreciation for beauty, what so? What does it look like to have a diet of beauty? What does it look like to have practices of delight and wonder? What are? What are you trying to give us, beyond just a conceptual appreciation, or conceptual, even just like awareness that beauty is important?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think you worked about four questions in there, shane, so I'll I'll try to try to untangle them.
Speaker 1:Answer all of them in three minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no. So what it shows, though? I think it's illustrative because it shows how interconnected beauty is. So, yes, absolutely there is. There is a gap, there is a lack, there is a cavity, there is a chasm, there is a restlessness, as Augustine talked about. Until we, until until the living God fills the empty spaces in our lives, those spaces are going to be empty, and beauty is one of the pointers to that. It's not the only one, but we're hungry for a lot of things. We are hungry for touch, intimacy, relationship. We're hungry for beauty and I think we are hungry to become beautiful, and so much of the brokenness in our world is because we know we're not beautiful in this way, that way or another way, and that's discouraging causes. You know it just leads to all kinds of impacts socially. But beauty is.
Speaker 2:Beauty is one of the areas where we see humanities need for God really, really clearly In terms of time. I'm agreeing with that, with that comment which was maybe one of your starting points, just in terms of a diet of beauty and what we do with beauty. I think it's. It touches our lives and enriches our lives in multiple ways, so one of them is simply to enjoy what is beautiful in front of us, to, whether that's in the arts, whether it's in something beautiful we see and how human beings are caring for one another. There's something there for our enjoyment. One of the proper ways to respond to that is to return the praise for that to God. So worship should be closely connected to our experience of beauty. Here's another thing that's true of beauty, and I don't think I really understood it as deeply until I started working on this project.
Speaker 2:Human beings have a very strong impulse to share beauty and share their experiences of beauty. So I experienced this recently just walking across Wheaton's campus and I saw a beautiful fall tree, just a blazing yellowy orange tree, just in the perfection of the height of autumn foliage, and I looked around and there was nobody around to just say this tree is awesome, praise God. Now I can worship God in that moment. What I actually did is also waited for somebody to walk by. So a faculty member walking by and I said this is perfect, I've been waiting for somebody to walk by. I just want to enjoy this tree with you and that you know.
Speaker 2:And beauty calls for replication. That's why we capture beautiful images on our phone, text them to a friend. There are other things we also like to share. We like to share humor because we like to share laughter as the human race, but beauty invites its own replication and transmission. It's something that's meant to be shared. Beauty pushes us towards community would be a way of expressing it.
Speaker 2:So those are a couple of things that we can do with our beauty and with our experience of beauty and, for the most part, rather than needing to be so, there is a place for it. Well, there's a place for a number of things and expanding our appreciation for beauty, but I wanted to highlight here was just noticing the beauty that is right there in front of us. Like, yes, we can do things to expand our appreciation of the arts or of music or of other areas of beauty. We can open up, open ourselves up to more experiences of human beauty expressed through love. Yes, but there's so much beauty all around us. We just need to open our eyes and have a sensitivity to it and appreciate the beauty that's in front of us. So it's not so much expanding our diet as it is savoring the food that is right there in front of us.
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Speaker 1:And now let's get back to our current conversation. So you talked about earlier how beauty can be used to tell the story and I'm wondering how a view of what's the kind of the view of sin in light of a story about beauty. I'm sure, like you know, we start with, like original sin, so we kind of tell the story wrong, like we got to back it up, start with original goodness, original beauty. But I'm wondering if you have kind of an Augustinian privation view of sin, like how what is sin and what is it doing to beauty and what has it done to us?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so just in terms of an Augustinian perspective, you know there's a long standing structure in theology creation, fall, redemption, glory, and as that, as those big categories were developed in medieval thought, it was really rooted in Augustin and what Augustin believed about creation, what Augustin believed about new creation. And from the beginning, as Augustin thought about those big categories, he thought in terms of okay, what's happening with human holiness and human sin? Going from a beautiful garden, human beings made in the image of God, made beautiful, but having the freedom to choose sin, falling into sin where we can't help, but sin were in such bondage to the relative liberation that comes through the power of the Holy Spirit, when we actually now are empowered to choose things that are righteous. We don't do it perfectly, but we have that power. And then what will it be like in eternity? This was, you know, kind of a blue blue Augustin's mind Wow, we won't even be able to sin, we will be made perfect in holiness, like that's, that's our destiny, that's the trajectory and those are, those are the kind of four states of humanity what really one of the things that really struck me in working on beauty is a part of my starting point was wanting to really see the beauty of things as they were intended to be the beauty of God, the beauty of creation, the beauty of all these areas of human endeavor and whatever you want to look at, that's beautiful.
Speaker 2:In a fallen world it's so broken and it's painful that it's broken. Human relationships are broken, sexuality so broken, the church broken, and so in almost in each of these topics, as I thought about them, even the beauty of creation and the natural, like what human beings, the damaged human beings, bring to create an environment like that's very distressing. So I think the higher appreciation you have for beauty, it actually makes your experience in a fallen world also more painful. It makes your experience more beautiful and you have an enhanced capacity for beauty and there's joy that comes with that. But then you also see how far short we fall and you see like that's really really ugly, the way that, what we've done with that in our fallen condition, and I I think you know we could probably talk more deeply about kind of the nature of sin and so forth.
Speaker 2:All I know is sin is an uglu fire and when we think about it in the context of beauty, it's the ugliness of sin that really stands out. And then what is it going to take to make things beautiful again? It's only what God can do, it's only what a beautiful son savior can do. It's only what a beautiful spirit can create in us. It's only God that has a beautiful plan for how things work out in the end. So part of what then gets enhanced.
Speaker 2:For us it's more painful, but it's also more hope filled and gives you a stronger expectation for eternity. If you really love beauty and want things to be beautiful and want to become beautiful, that is a very compelling motivation to pursue the beauty of God, because that that's the only place where that desire is going to be satisfied the way that you want it to be satisfied. So I'm just kind of playing around with some of the possibilities here, but I think thinking more about beauty helps us see the ugliness of sin much more clearly and in a way not merely in a theological sense, but also in an emotional sense to feel the weight of sin in a fallen world. Everything in terms of beauty heightens that for us, which I think is helpful.
Speaker 1:I want to spend our last few minutes just considering. Thank you for that. Considering embodiments, it's pretty easy. By this point I have the lens so much that it's intuitive for me to read Paul, the apostle Paul, as antibody. I've had to do work to see him as kind of body positive.
Speaker 1:Initially it's the association with sinful nature, with flesh. He talks about beating and pummeling his body, making it his slave. He talks about how godliness is of supreme value, how physical discipline is of some value, but it only pertains to this life. So it's almost too many overt things that ended up sabotaging me when I was younger just reading scripture. It's been such a delight to go back and actually read Paul and see the honor I bear in my body, the marks of Christ. I am storing up in my body what is lacking in Christ's afflictions. I don't even know what that means, but that's a big deal. Though our outer nature is wasting away, we're being renewed day by day and that is the practice of just waking up. I would love to hear the gospel really is God came into our story and then invites us into his story. He's not from the sky trying to power play and say, hey, get into my story. He becomes so contextualized. It's crazy. How do you understand the importance of taking care of our bodies, of being embodied?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's a great question. I think this topic of beauty is a topic that's getting more attention. More people are writing and thinking about it. I also think the topic of the body is getting way more attention than ever before. It's really helpful. It's helpful in areas of sexuality. It's helpful in thinking through aspects of abuse. It's important for thinking through self-care. There's a lot of aspects of embodiment that are really important. You're right, for whatever the church has minimized in terms of our physical existence, there's plenty of resource for us in the Bible and how the Bible looks at embodiment to really serve as that corrective. I think it's a healthy thing for us to think about our embodiment In addition to the other things you said.
Speaker 2:From the Apostle Paul, it's super clear he believed in the resurrection of the body. I've always been amazed. So many people think of a sort of disembodied eternity and that's not the Christian hope. The Christian hope so clearly, is the resurrection of the body. There's something of eternal significance here. Let me just illustrate a couple different ways the importance of the body. One is I remember talking to one of my children about human sexuality and particularly answering just some core questions about where new human beings come from and how that happens. Describing, probably in my own faltering way as a young dad, this is what happens when mother and father come together and this particular child just looked at me with a sense of wonder and with a smile on his face and he said, really and I could just see in how he was reacting this is the right reaction. There's a sense of wonder about this physical interaction.
Speaker 2:One of the quotes I really love that's in the book, and one of the things I try to do in this book, by the way, is give a little bit of a guide or a compendium. These are some of the best things that Christians have thought about beauty and I've had the privilege of doing reading. People need to hear that quotation. Let me put this in here and this can be kind of a source book I love. I really like Carolyn Weber's writings. I really like her book Sex and the City of God, which brings in an Augustinian perspective. Here's how she describes what happens in sharing sexual intimacy. When we enter another body, we enter another life. We enter another's joys and sorrows, needs and wants. That's profound and bears further reflection. I think it's very much in keeping with what the Bible says about becoming one flesh. It just highlights the significance of embodiment or the sexual dimension of our relationships. Here's just one other thing that's been profound to me in thinking about the body.
Speaker 2:So one of the just really tough realities of life in a fallen world is death and what happens to the physical body as a result of death. And this was something that a lot of theologians probably medieval discussions around this I'm sure there are that I'm less familiar with, but certainly post-reformation Like just thinking through okay, how does something that becomes dust actually become raised again? Like how does that happen? And theologians would talk about, like what happens to a body lost at sea? Just questions you wonder about. And I love the way the Westminster shorter catechism, I think it is, and I'm not going to be able to quote this is my tradition, presbyterian tradition. It's talking about what happens to bodies after death and there's this little throwaway line that is so significant. It talks about how the souls of believers at death immediately enter into the presence of God, beautiful, and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in the grave until the resurrection from the dead. That's not quite verbatim at the end, but that middle part, being still united to Christ, in other words the risen Lord Jesus Christ who, by the way, bears a physical body.
Speaker 2:One Scottish theologian, rabbi Duncan Rabbi was a sort of nickname of honor. He said the dust of earth sits on the throne of the universe. Just sit back and think about that for a minute, what that means. So there's something physical, but now glorified, that's on the throne of the universe and we are still connected with that even when we die. That's how committed the bodily risen Christ is to our future re-embodyment in a glorified state.
Speaker 2:Another way of saying that is that's how committed the beautiful risen Lord Jesus Christ is, how committed he is to our future beauty. There's no beauty for us unless there's a glorious resurrection of the body. That's the direction that things are going. So I don't understand all of those mysteries, but that's where this story is going. And the human body is not merely of temporal significance and this was maybe the problem with the thinking of the ancient Greeks that tended to minimize the body, and the New Testament is given in that context. It's a permanent significance and I think instinctively we want that to be true. We just can't imagine being disembodied really and we all sooner or later struggle with some of our physical limitations and we're hoping for a better resurrection at the end of all this. But those are just a few thoughts on embodiment, which is a really important topic.
Speaker 1:Now I love all of that, do you so, paul? So I'm thinking there, when he's talking about marriage and Ephesians, no one ever hated their body. Love your wife, love your wife, love her body. And then he's quoting the same thing. He's quoting Genesis again there, in 1 Corinthians 6, where he's rebuking what they're doing with their body because they're selling it short, because it's so valuable, like no, no, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, don't do that, don't do that. You know he's, he's, he's almost on edge.
Speaker 1:You know, for whatever reason, we've heard, like the millennials, the purity culture, this kind of like binary yes, no more knows than yeses, but more of a no so that you'll be pure, no so that you'll X, y and Z. And Paul doesn't do it that way. And I'm even interested with how he attaches it to priesthood identity. That a part of our priesthood is, as is temple care, body care. Do you see that? Do you? Do you think that that's a way of the kind of like an existential, a way to put on Christ and and like okay, like this is that's kind of dignifying, I can understand as an identity aspect and I can practice that. Can you speak to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I like that a lot, shane. So a couple things are prepped, but first of all I want to go back to this verse no one hates his own body, because in one sense, strictly speaking, that's not true. There are people who do hate their own bodies, and what that verse shows us is that something is deeply wrong. Deeply wrong, I would say this is an exaggeration. The fact that we live in a culture where self harm is so prominent is one of the clearest indicators that we are just very far from what God really wants for us. So it should be the case that nobody does hate their own body. But the reality is sometimes we do and sometimes we harm our bodies, and that's the point of it is not just to say that's wrong, you shouldn't do that, but like something is deeply wrong in our culture. It's not just you, it's the wider culture. When we have that sort of temptation On this point of temple you know you were talking about, seems like Paul says a lot of things that are kind of negative about the body, you know, about the flesh, and we've got to kind of think it through.
Speaker 2:Like what does he mean by flesh? What doesn't mean by that? But if all you had positively about the body from Paul was that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, you can drop the mic right there, because Paul said the most important thing about it are our bodies have a capacity for the divine. It's not merely spiritual, it's actually in our embodiment. And I really like what you said about purity. It's not as if it's not simply the case that we're impure and we're striving for purity. There's a gift of purity. There's a holiness that is intrinsic to human bodies and human persons, to people made in the image of God. There's absolutely a holiness intrinsic to anyone who is a child of God and a follower of Jesus Christ, and we need to live out of that and not just try to live up to it. And so that's a different way of thinking about holiness and purity.
Speaker 2:And then that that prompts so many other thoughts. I mean one one, something someone said to me recently that is unrelated, but I'm going to say it anyway. It's not. It's not super related, put it that way. You know what are the? What are the angels in the throne room of God saying about God? They have been worshiping him since eternity past and they haven't even gotten past Holy, yet they're still at that spot of just being overwhelmed with the holiness of God.
Speaker 2:So that's something for us to when, when we say the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that's the kind of holiness that is intrinsic to the follower of Jesus Christ and that's that's, you know, a calling for us, you know to live out of. So those are, you know. Those are a few thoughts. It's a really good thought about how, you know, purity relates to all of this and you know the context there. In 1 Corinthians 6, paul's very much talking about human sexuality and he is directly countering the Christians that are saying you know what, the body doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter too much what you do in your body. And as we're posing no, no, no, don't you understand how holy you are and that's core to your identity, and that is all kinds of implications for what you are called to say yes to and what you are called to say no to, and it's, it's healthy for us to have that perspective.
Speaker 1:Dr. Dr Reichen, you are a rock star. I've thrown you some legitimate curveballs today and I really appreciate you engaging with with my questions. I I've tried to be as honest as I can be with my questions and I really appreciate you taking them seriously. We all do so. We always end with two questions one, how can people track with what you're doing? Tell us about your book where we get it. And two, how can we be praying for you?
Speaker 2:I don't know much and I feel like we're just getting warmed up because there's so much to talk about in this topic. It's already, probably, you know, long for a podcast, I suppose. Yeah, beauty is your destiny. I think people can get it lots of places your favorite Christian bookseller. If you're really stuck, you could I'm sure get it on Amazon or you can get it directly from Crossway books. Crossway produces a lot of great books.
Speaker 2:I would encourage people to look at their website. I feel privileged to publish with them. You know, chapel messages from Wheaton College are on YouTube. We've got a YouTube channel, something like that. They're probably other ways. I'm not so tech savvy to know all the ways that you can connect with me. I would say, you know, I always just really encourage people to pray for God's blessing on our family. My highest priority is Mrs Reichen and our children and their spouses in some cases, and our grandchildren. So we've got, you know, some few generations to look after. That's my highest priority for prayer. And then maybe you know, for an audience like this, just that God would give me more opportunities to share, to learn things and to share things, which goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning. Yeah, so I love it when I have opportunities to do that and hope I can continue to do it as God gives me the strength for it.
Speaker 1:Dr Reichen you are. You've won me over. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been just such a delight to have you on.
Speaker 2:Thank you and I hope we get a chance to talk again. God bless you and God bless our listeners.
Speaker 1:Folks. Thank you so much for joining. All of the resources that Dr Reichen mentioned will be in the show notes. I would encourage you to go and see what he's doing. Check out the book. As always, if you appreciated this episode, would you share it with somebody you think would likewise appreciate it. Grateful for all of you, and we'll catch you next time on the Naked Gospel.