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Embodiment, Boundedness, and Incarnation

July 15, 2006
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What would it be like to live without bounds?  To live unencumbered by the limitations of bodily existence?  To be relieved of the burden of meeting our bodily needs?  To be free of concern for our own mortality?  From our beginnings in the Garden, we have attempted to escape the limits of our embodied, dependent, creaturely existence.  Current ideologies that disparage our bodily existence offer messianic promises of transcendence here and now.  But do they indeed offer us escape, or only further boundedness?  This paper is founded on the premise that our embodiment, and its corresponding boundedness, is a fact of our God-designed telos.  It examines the ideologies of Gnostic dualism and post-modernism that have undergirded our perennial attempts to transcend our bounded, embodied existence.  The transhumanist worldview, with its goal to “jettison the body altogether and live as information patterns on vast super-fast computer networks” is critiqued from both a secular and Christian point of view.   Finally, the issue of our embodiment and its meaning for our lives is examined from a Christian and Biblical perspective, with emphasis on the Incarnation and its meaning for us as individually and corporately embodied human beings, existing in a particular place and time, “between the beasts and God.”

Keywords:
"the body, Christianity, the Incarnation, self-transcendence, embodiment, dualism, the soul"