Yield Your Members

It is striking that when Paul begins to discuss the specifics of life under grace and in Christ, he emphasizes the bodily character of this life. We are “co-crucified” with Jesus, so that the “body of sin” might be done away (Rom 6:6). And the key exhortation that grows out of our baptismal death to sin is “do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as weapons of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as weapons of righteousness to God” (Rom 6:13). This is remarkably anti-Gnostic (Christian living is not an escape from body, but redirection of body). It also means that Paul sees the Christian life as being worked out PRIMARILY in the realm of embodied life. For Paul, as Brendan Byrne suggests, body means an instrument for communication with the world outside. To this we might add that body highlights the capacity for ordering and organizing the world. To speak of “body” is to speak of the whole person in his public and social life, and “members” perhaps even more emphasizes the specific capacities of human beings to operate and organize the creation. This is not to say that Paul is uninterested in a transformed mind; he emphatically is (Rom 12). But it is rather astonishing that he can go through a central passage on the doctrine of the Christian life without once mentioning the mind or the soul.

No doubt this emphasis is partly due to Paul’s concern to emphasize that the Christian lives between two bodily resurrections ?EJesus’ and his own.