New Covenant Renewal of the Body and Soul as Found in Jeremiah 31:31-34 (Part 1)
The American Church is on a dangerous trajectory leading to a bifurcation in our understanding of the body and soul. The rate at which we fragment our views, whether values and morals or theology and science, should alarm us. Our values and even facts have become subjective.
Here are some consequences:
Pew found that 36% of evangelicals believe that homosexuality should be accepted; 9% are neutral. Among the self-identifying evangelicals who view that homosexuality should be accepted, 39% attend weekly services, and 44% attended monthly to several times a year.
Pew also uncovered that 47% of black Protestants and 35% of white evangelical Protestants believe that it is acceptable for an unmarried couple to cohabitate even if they don’t plan to get married.
In Pew’s 2014 survey, 32% of evangelical Baptist and 50% of evangelical Presbyterians believe that abortion should be ‘legal in all or most cases,’ and 65% of evangelical Baptist and 45% of evangelical Presbyterians believe that it should be ‘illegal in all or most cases.’
According to Pew’s findings, Protestants 30% believe that whether a person is a man or a woman can be different from their sex/gender at birth (15% white evangelicals, 44% white mainline, and 36% black protestants).
According to Dr. Sam Perry’s research, Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants reveals that 40% of conservative Protestant men under the age of 40 viewed porn in the last year. Here Dr. Juli Slattery’s input on the purity movement is helpful, “Because of the church’s historical refusal to talk openly about sexuality, many people have a disconnect between their sexuality and their spirituality. They live with an invisible wall that appears to separate their sexual choices and beliefs from their relationship with God. I believe this divide between sexuality and spirituality is an illusion.”
This list continues when it comes to hookup culture (in which the individual is encouraged to disengage and disembody their emotions with the act), divorce, end-of-life issues,[1] personhood theory, and even the well-meaning Christian purity movement - all separate the body and soul in their presuppositions. This ‘two-fold division’ reveals a “… deeply dehumanizing worldview at the heart of abortion, assisted suicide, homosexuality, transgenderism, and the sexual chaos of the hookup culture.”[2] As Christians, we should see the body and soul as an integrated unity – “the human body is an embodied soul.”[3] We are made up of material (Genesis 2:7; 3:19; Ecclesiastes 3:20; 12:7) and non-material (Acts 17:24-25, Psalm 62; Job 32:8; 33:4-7) and are utterly dependent upon God. We depend upon him from our daily needs, bodily, to our salvation, spiritual. As compounded beings, “man is the link which unites the natural and the spiritual worlds.”[4]
Our bodies are a gift from God, and we are not our own – again, we have embodied bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). We worship him with our whole being (Hebrews 12:1-2), for "in him, we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). The body cannot live without the soul/spirit, and when the soul/spirit is departed, we will die and return to dust (Ecclesiastes 8:8, Ps 146:33-4). The same assigned body will be given back to us during the resurrection of the dead and will worship God as a whole and glorified being, both body and soul, in the New Heavens and the New Earth (NHNE).
The Church's dualistic tendencies are rooted in an epistemology that is not derived from a Biblical worldview. When Christians view porn, for example, they are selfishly receiving pleasure from and not honoring other image bears, including themselves. The same can be said about the views expressed above. The behavior does not match the renewed heart and is rationalized and justified as to why it should be tolerated. Under the new covenant, it is the renewed heart that impacts the behavior. God's Word needs to dictate our metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
Due to fall, humanity has an imputed sin nature from Adam, which causes death, "so death spread to all men because all sinned" (Romans 5:12). God made provision through the new covenant. The new covenant supersedes all other covenant previous covenant, yet it also realizes the other covenants' substances as revealed through history.[5] Jeremiah 31:31-34 tells us that the people of God will have the law written on our hearts, the forgiveness of sin is given through Christ’s final work, and wholeness to both body and soul is given in the NHNE. This blog series will discuss the new covenant found in Jeremiah 31:31-34, and how Christ is the fulfillment, and how the elect are renewed in body and soul.
In Part 2 we’ll take a closer look at this section of Scriptures and discuss how it can help us understand our whole renewal and how it completely changes how we interact in the marketplace of ideas.
[1] Pew’s 2013 survey shows that ‘Americans believe that it is their moral right to end their own lives,’ and in this same survey, 62% of all adults believe, “…that [if] a person [is] suffering a great deal of pain with no hope of improvement has a moral right to commit suicide, up from 55% in 1990.”
[2] Nancy Pearcey, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2018), 18.
[3] Pearcey, Love Thy Body, 21.
[4] James Orr, Christian View of God and the World: As Centering in the Incarnation Being the First Series of Kerr Lectures. Edited by Abby Zwart. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 115.
[5] O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1980), 272.