Body of error

By Dan Popp

Archimedes said, "Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the world." Sometimes we remember the lever but forget the equally important "place to stand." Without an immovable reference point, all our levering will only leave us flailing in space. That's the difficulty I neglected to point out in my last article, The war on God goes to the bathroom. See if you can spot the error.

Make no mistake: the Bathroom War going on now in our culture is rooted in defiance of God. Jesus said, He who created them from the beginning made them male and female. (Matthew 19:4b, NAS95) Barbarians hate that. There's no other reason for pretending to be confused as to one of the most obvious facts about yourself.

Do you see it? It's implicit in the last line. The unspoken "you" can feign confusion about "yourself." Here I grant my own assumption that you are more than your body. I'm coming from the Christian view of man as a spirit, a soul and a body. Preachers sometimes say that a human being is a spirit with a body or "you in an earth suit," as I've heard it expressed; but this is not the best theology. I am spirit. I am soul. I am body. And I am one, not three, people. I've written about this subject in an article called, Are you a human being? Take this simple test, and also in an essay on Romans, Chapter 7 called, Je, misérable.

Have you made the connection? Hint: Archimedes. Class?

I'm not the only one to make this blunder. In the "transgender" revolt, the enemies of God use a theistic supposition, and get away with it because we're not thinking clearly. Let's take the question the other way 'round. Let's say that you're a materialist (a naturalist). You believe that what you see is all that exists. So there is no soul-me and no spirit-me; only the body-me. All our thoughts do not come from a mind; the mind is an illusion created by chemical interactions caused by other chemical interactions. These are the non-thoughts of the naturalist.

The question is, how – if my body is me – can I say that "I am trapped in a man's body," or "I identify as a different gender?" If I am my body, then from what vantage point can "I" say that "my body" is wrong? The anti-theists have been cheating. They've been using God's "place to stand" to pull their "no God" lever.

Now, a Christian could say, For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. (Romans 7:15, NAS95) There, an immaterial I finds itself at war with the I of the flesh. "I" can judge "me" because there is more than one thing that can be called "me." Or "I." But a person who says, "When you're dead, you're dead, that's it!" is claiming to believe that he is his body, and his body is him, that's it. Therefore, inescapably, your body cannot be "wrong" or somehow crosswise to "you," since "you" = "you."

But the theistic assumption also leads to a dead end for the barbarian. Once we allow a "place to stand" – the ground upon which "I" can criticize "my body" as a distinct thing – then the crying game is up. Now we have multidimensioned human beings under discussion, those funky spirit/soul/body hybrids. Now we have to answer the question of where those non-material "I's" came from. It wasn't from the material world. Now God is in the picture.

And once God is in the picture, He has the final say on what "I" am.

© Dan Popp