My Recent Readings and Reflections 

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about the Bible’s teaching on the body. Our biblical understanding of the body has great significance for how biblical counselors minister to people holistically. As I’ve said recently,

God calls us to be soul physicians of embodied-souls. 

Does Your Body, Your Suffering, Your Pain Matter to God? 

Yes!

“Our physical pain genuinely matters to Jesus—it matters to God! We are far too prone to spiritualize what Jesus makes physical, even theologizing his physical suffering into a response to a spiritual problem (sin), as if our true being were only spiritual and not physical. For Jesus, the physical and spiritual are indissolubly connected, and his life and death address them both” (Kelly Kapic, Embodied Hope: Theological Mediations on Pain and Suffering, 94).

On Facebook and X (the site previously known as Twitter), I shared this about Kapic’s book:

Are you facing pain that won’t go away? Unrelenting suffering? I’d encourage you to consider reading Kelly Kapic’s Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering. The entire book is rich. Chapter 5, “Questions That Come With Pain,” provides a robust, realistic look at the book of Job to convey how God invites us to wrestle with Him through honest, raw lament.

Kapic also shares:

“Dividing the spiritual from the physical can only distort our understanding of the gospel, of Jesus, and of ourselves. The biblical story is necessarily a physical one, as well as spiritual, from start to finish” (Kapic, 89).

“The Gospel writers present Jesus’ ministry as holistic, bringing spiritual cleansing and physical healing as he embodies the Father’s tender care in the power of the Spirit. Through him the Spirit of creation was moving about and starting the work of making all things new” (Kapic, 93).

Biblical Counseling and Physical Suffering: Candid Compassion Versus Impatient Pretense 

When we diminish the Bible’s emphasis on embodiment, if we are not careful we can become like Job’s miserable counselors. As Kapic explains,

Like Job’s miserable counselors, “as time moves on we expect the wounded person to get better; we expect their frustrations and questions to turn into stoic acceptance. We expect denial or victory—ongoing struggle is the option we are most uncomfortable with, yet that is exactly where most who live with ongoing pain and suffering actually are” (Kapic, 65). 

As pastors, counselors, or caregivers, when we have exhausted our solutions for the unsolvable chronic pain and suffering of others, our ability to continue recognizing the sufferer’s pain is often exhausted, too. Faced with a problem we can’t fix, we race to a problem we think we can alleviate. Then we demand that the sufferer join us in our pretense by “suffering well”—which often means pretending that all is well. Unfortunately, sufferers don’t have this luxury since their pain is still there—unrelenting.

The book and life of Job, God’s Word, and church history communicate that we do not testify properly about God if we lie about the state of the world, the state of our soul, and the state of our body. Lament is candidly, honestly, and courageously agreeing with God that life is bad in this fallen world, even as we cry out in our pain to the God who is good—all the time.

Stanley Hauerwas says it well in Naming the Silences:

“One of the profoundest forms of faithlessness is the unwillingness to acknowledge our inexplicable suffering and pain.”

While others pretend; Jesus acknowledges our pain for us. Kapic (73) quotes Ann Weems on Jesus lamenting with us.

“Jesus wept, and in His weeping, He joined Himself forever to those who mourn. He stands now throughout all time, this Jesus weeping, with His arms about the weeping ones: ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ He stands with the mourners, for His name is God-with-us. Jesus wept.” (Ann Weems, Psalms of Lament.) 

Biblical Counseling and the Body, Act #1

Gregg Allison, in Embodied: Living as Whole People in a Fractured World, writes:

“The church has been infected with the disease of Gnosticism and neo-Gnosticism. The church elevates spiritual and immaterial matters and minimizes or even denigrates physical and material matters. The church is held captive to anti-body sentiments. As a result, a holistic sanctification—a full-orbed process of maturing as wholly developed Christians that includes making progress as embodied believers—is rarely envisioned and pursued” (Allison, 127).

How might we “gently” word this for our biblical counseling world?  

• Is it possible that in our biblical counseling world we at times have been infected with the disease of Gnosticism and neo-Gnosticism?

• At times in our biblical counseling, do we elevate spiritual and immaterial matters and minimize or even denigrate physical and material matters?

• In any way is the modern biblical counseling movement held captive to anti-body sentiments?

• Might it be accurate to say that a holistic sanctification—a full-orbed process of maturing as wholly developed Christians that includes making progress as embodied believers—is rarely envisioned and pursued in our actual ministry, interventions, and methods as biblical counselors?

• Are we acting primarily as soul physicians of souls, rather than as soul physicians of embodied-souls?

Biblical Counseling and the Body, Act #2 

Because the biblical counseling movement rightly worries that the world doesn’t account for spiritual realities, we then can be tempted to move to an unbiblical counter extreme. We overcompensate by undervaluing the physical and overemphasizing the immaterial.

If we are not careful, we can become just as “monistic” as the world, but in the opposite direction.

The world tends to focus only on the body and material matters, dismissing, denying or minimizing the soul, the spiritual (this is physical “monism”).

Christians and biblical counselors, if we are not careful, can tend to focus only or almost exclusively on the soul and immaterial matters, tending to dismiss or minimize the importance and sacredness of the body, of the physical (this is spiritual or spiritualized “monism”). (This way of thinking about human beings has more in common with Platonic philosophy, Gnostic theology, and Enlightenment secular thinking than with biblical theology.)

If we are not careful; if we are not biblical, we can become soul physicians of souls, instead of being biblical soul physicians of embodied-souls.

The Bible declares everything to be sacred, everything to be spiritual. The Bible treats the body with utmost sacredness—it is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Our embodied-soul is vital in our present progressive sanctification and in our future glorification.

“May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you completely. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it” (1 Thessalonians 5:23-24).

Jesus’s incarnation highlights the value of the body. As Athanasius says in, On the Incarnation,

“He sanctified the body by being in it.”

The Bible and the Spirituality and Sacredness of the Body

Ponder just a few sample passages on how the Bible highlights the sacredness, the importance, the value, the “spirituality” of the body, of the physical, of the material (for 112 passages on embodied-souls, go here):

• Genesis 1:31
• Genesis 2:7
• 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24
• 1 Corinthians 6:19-20
• 1 Corinthians 10:31
• 2 Corinthians 4:6-12
• Romans 12:1-2
• Romans 6:11-14
• 1 Corinthians 9:27
• Luke 2:40, 2:52
• James 3:1-12
• 1 Timothy 4:8

Resources 

Here’s a collation of some resources that can help us become soul physicians of embodied souls:

• Resources for Counseling the Whole Person: God Designed Us as Embodied-Souls 

• 6 Biblical Counseling Convictions 

Final Thoughts 

Paul, in 2 Corinthians 1:3-5, connects God’s compassionate concern for our suffering with our compassionate concern for one another’s suffering. 

Your body, your suffering, and your pain matter to the embodied, incarnate Son of God. 

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles…”

Your body, your suffering, and your pain ought to matter to your biblical counselor.

“…so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.”

Note 

The featured image for this post is from part of the cover of Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering.