My friend, Matt Anderson, has a piece in Christianity Today on a theology of the body. You might not agree with everything, but I commend Matt for giving attention and hard thinking to a much overlooked doctrine. And, the article is extremely well written. In my opinion, Matt is one of the best writers in evangelicalism right now.
Here are two core quotes:
Evangelicals desperately need, then, an ordered account of how Scripture informs our understanding of the human body and its uses. But with few exceptions—like James K. A. Smith and Amos Yong—evangelical theology is still playing catch-up. As Westmont College theologian Telford Work recently pointed out in these pages, the theology of the body is one of evangelicalism’s least developed doctrines.
And:
When Paul exhorts the church at Rome to “offer [their] bodies as living sacrifices,” he is commending to them a spiritual act of worship. Our bodies, and what we do with them, matter to God. They’ve been given as a gift—a gift meant to be returned to his service. As evangelicals, the pattern for our sacrifice must be the pattern of the Cross, and the power for our giving must be the power of the Resurrection. Otherwise, our ethics will be moralism and our spirituality will be disconnected from the unique revelation of God to man in the incarnate person of Jesus Christ.
Matt blogs at Mere Orthodoxy and is also the author of Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith