Greek philosophy had a slogan: sōma sēma — “the body is a tomb,” a prison the soul longs to flee. The New Testament took the same word, sōma, and turned the slogan inside out: the body is a temple, a sacrifice, and finally a thing to be raised. Few contrasts mark Christianity off from its surrounding culture so sharply.
The body is good
Paul calls the body “a temple of the Holy Spirit” and commands that God be glorified “in your body” (1 Cor 6:19-20). Worship itself is embodied — “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom 12:1). The Christian hope is not to shed the body but to have it redeemed; the human being, on the Bible's reckoning, is not a ghost in a machine but an ensouled body, and salvation reaches all the way down to the flesh.
Sown and raised
The clearest break with body-contempt is 1 Corinthians 15: the body is “sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body” (15:44) — not exchanged for a bodiless spirit, but transformed, made imperishable and glorious, animated now by the Spirit. Because the Son took a real human body and rose in it, the resurrection of the body is the Christian's destiny too. Matter has a future.
One body, many members
Paul then performs a daring move: he makes sōma his master-image for the church. “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor 12:27). The church is not a club of like-minded individuals but an organism — diverse members, mutually dependent, animated by one Spirit, headed by Christ. This is koinonia given a body. And at the Table, “this is my body” (1 Cor 11:24) binds the eucharistic body and the ecclesial body — feeding on Christ to become his body in the world; the traditions confess the mode of presence in their own distinct voices.
“The body is not made for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” — 1 Corinthians 6:13
Why it still matters
In an age that swings between worshiping the body and despising it, sōma holds a third way: the body is neither god nor garbage but a good gift, made holy, owed to God, and bound for glory. It dignifies the embodied life — work, rest, baptism, the Table, the care of the sick — and forbids both the asceticism that hates the flesh and the hedonism that idolizes it.
Where This Word Decides Debates
Soma anchors the resurrection of the body (against a merely immortal soul), the ecclesiology of the church as Christ's body, eucharistic theology (“this is my body”), and the Christian ethic of embodiment against both dualistic body-contempt and modern body-worship.
When This Word Study Proves Too Much
Do not read Greek dualism into sōma — the New Testament hope is resurrection, not escape from the body; the “spiritual body” is Spirit-animated, not non-physical. Do not collapse Paul's three uses (personal body, church body, eucharistic body) into one undifferentiated claim. And on “this is my body,” present the traditions' confessions in their own voices rather than declaring a winner.