First, I was asked to take part in Coinneach Maciomhair's radio programme recently, where the subject was organ donation. In a debate on the subject in the House of Lords, one of the Church of England representatives had stated that it was the duty of every Christian to donate a bodily organ for transplant after death.
The discussion was interesting, and raised a variety of topics, such as whether the State has the right to insist that we all pool our body parts in this way.
Currently we opt in to a system in which our organs can be used after our death; should that system be changed to an opt out one? What are the religious, theological and moral issues raised in organ donation? The issue is not as simple as it may first appear.
Second, I was asked to prepare a lecture on Irenaeus. Irenaeus is one of the second century church fathers, and one of the greatest theologians and apologists of the Christian era. He was a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John. Irenaeus is important for our understanding of Christianity in the Roman Empire just two centuries after Christ was born.
One of the things that contributes to his importance is the fact that we have a large body of literature from Irenaeus' hand. His work 'Against Heresies' extends to five volumes. These are not an easy read, but they are important for a variety of reasons, not least because of their deference to the canon of literature we know as the New Testament.
Irenaeus was concerned, as the title of his work might suggest, with other expressions of faith, with distinguishing orthodoxy from heterodoxy. There is one body of Christian belief, he argued, and it is this which the Church is mandated to preach and disseminate. Irenaeus' chief opponents were the Gnostics, people who made much of inner knowledge (their name comes from the Greek word for 'knowledge'), and who despised everything physical.
Gnostic ideas would have been bad enough, but what made the situation urgent for Irenaeus was simply the way in which these views infiltrated the church. It is not difficult to see why; after all, the message of the early apostles was that salvation depends on a particular kind of knowing. Eternal life is to know God.
Irenaeus is helpful in alerting us to the fact that there is no God behind Jesus Christ; knowledge of Jesus is knowledge of God. Furthermore, it is the incarnation of the eternal Son that is the basis of our knowledge of God. With their low view of the physical, it was precisely with the doctrine of the incarnation that the Gnostics took exception. If the physical is bad and only the spiritual is good, how can we understand the concept of God being revealed in flesh?
This relates to the third strand: my reading of a new book by Stephen Nichols. Nichols is Professor of a Bible College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he is a teacher of historical theology. He has already written very accessible books which introduce us to Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards and J. Gresham Machen.
Now he has written 'For us and our Salvation', a study of the Christology of the early church, and the intellectual context in which the church had to forge and speak its theology. It was Nichols who reminded me of the old Platonic concept of 'Soma Toma'.
'If they'd had bumper stickers,' Nichols suggests, 'this saying would have been on the chariots of the Platonist philosophers'. Literally translated, it just means 'Body, Tomb' – two nouns thrown together to encapsulate the idea that in Plato's philosophy the body is an inconvenience, a grave, in which we are incarcerated and imprisoned until death releases us.
Nichols goes on to demonstrate how this idea, rooted in Greek philosophy, posed a great problem for the early Christian theologians and preachers, who insisted that Jesus was God incarnate. How could that be a good thing, if the body is our tomb? While the Platonists insisted that nothing good comes from material things, the evangelists were proclaiming that our salvation is dependent on the material thing called Jesus.
What these three things have in common – the radio discussion, the lecture and the book – is the whole issue of the human body and its place in Christian thought. Perhaps the church has been so accustomed to preaching to the needs of the soul that we have forgotten the enormous biblical emphasis on physical issues.
After all, the body of man was created from the dust prior to man becoming (not receiving) a soul. Our personhood, reflecting the personhood of God himself, is what it is as a consequence of the union of body and soul, the psychosomatic unity.
It is this doctrine of our creation in the image of God that stands at the centre of our doctrine of man. Man is bipartite: he is physical and non-physical, body and soul together. The dissolution of that union is what we call death. Strictly speaking, it is the person who dies, not just the body.
But it is the body that has been so neglected in our Christian theology. It was a body that was prepared for Jesus. It is in the body that we serve him here. It is the members of the body that we are to yield as instruments of righteousness. It is the body we are to offer as a living sacrifice.
Further, although, to use the words of the Old Testament, it is likely that worms will destroy our body, it is in our flesh that we shall see God.
The Christian faith has the utmost regard for the physical aspect of our constitution, and insists that the bodies of believers are united to their Saviour even while separated from their soul, and that these bodies will be raised up at the last day. To preach the apostolic Gospel is to preach that 'there shall be a resurrection of the just and the unjust'.
According to the hope of the New Testament, the coming of Jesus will result in the transformation of all that is physical about us so that we will bear the image of Jesus in perfection and in glory. It is with bodies fit for Heaven that the souls of believers will ultimately be united, so that God's people will populate heaven in the completeness of their humanity.
Far from the body being an inconvenience, the New Testament describes it as a temple of the Holy Spirit, a place were God dwells.
That itself ought to deliver us from the slogan 'Soma Toma'; the body is not the tomb. It is possible for us to live our lives in the body but not under its dictates. Indeed, it is all too possible for the flesh – the material – to lust against the Spirit – the non-material.
But at last one thing is abundantly clear: God wants our bodies, not just our souls. He is interested in us in the totality of our constitution. Were it not so, Christ would not have done what he did, or become what he became. By his body we are sanctified, precisely so that in or bodies we might serve the Lord Christ.

iaind@backfreechurch.co.uk