Anthropology is the study of man. Easter as a commemoration of the resurrection presupposes a particular anthropology. It also reveals the great scandal of Christianity in both the ancient and modern world.

Classical-Greek anthropology

The world within which Christianity emerged was suffused by Greek, or classical, anthropology. Man was considered a composition of a material, temporal body and an immaterial, eternal soul. The soul is the immaterial, substantial part of man. The soul is the “real you.”

For many of the ancients, the body was a temporal shell, even a prison house in which eternal souls were temporarily encased. Death was a great liberation, because the eternal soul could then again exist without the confines of the body in the material world. Plato believed that souls were eternal: that they had neither beginning nor end. This was an important part of his entire philosophy: the visible, material world is an inferior pattern of the immaterial, ideal world. Every chair on earth, for example, is an imperfect reflection of the ideal of the eternal notion of a chair.

The body is a vehicle for relating to the material world. But since that world is not the real, higher world, according to the ancients, the body is temporary and disposable. The body is the automobile that carts around the really important component: the soul. The soul is the real you, and the body a necessary appendage in this life. This view shares characteristics with Gnosticism, the first Christian heresy which persists into our present day.

You can understand then why the classical Athenians listened politely to the sermon Paul delivered at the Areopagus until he invoked the resurrection (Acts 17:32). At that point, they scoffed. After all, their entire goal in life was to shed the body. To recover the body is to defeat the very purpose of life, which is liberation from the material, the temporal, and the earthly.

Biblical-Hebraic anthropology

This is in radical contrast to biblical anthropology, rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, we encounter this anthropology in the first chapters of the Bible (Genesis 2:7). When we read that God fashioned man from the dust of the ground, that he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and that man became a living soul, or being, we encounter the basics of the biblical anthropology: man is constituted as a creationally indissoluble union of divinely imposed breath within creatively fashioned soil. This is what a “soul” is: Spirit-shaped and enveloped soil.

Man is a combination of creatively constructed dirt and the breath of God. What makes the body of man special is not its inherent material composition, because it is simply dust, but how remarkably this dust is constructed! Think about sand sculptures. We walk along the beach and think nothing about the common, ordinary sand on which we tread. Then we see a remarkable sculpture of a porpoise or a mermaid. We are amazed by the intricate design. The sand is not impressive; the creative configuration is impressive. The same is true in a much higher and more exalted way, of course, with the human body.

The human body is a breathtakingly creative configuration by God that makes it so special, along with the breath, or spirit. The soul is not an insubstantial part of man in distinction from the body. The notion of a “soul” is a synonym for being, or life, or person. When you read “soul” in the English Bible, just mentally substitute “being” or “person.”

Bodily resurrection

In contrast to classical anthropology, most modern anthropology has been materialist: man is a combination of blood, bone, and electrical and chemical impulses. There are no metaphysics. There is no God, Satan, angels, demons, Heaven, or Hell. This dreary, hopeless anthropology undergirds the famous declaration of Carl Sagan: “The cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.” This is the pervasive anthropological myth of atheistic science.

In contrast to both dualist classical anthropology and reductionist modern anthropology stands true biblical anthropology, which we can term “spiritual materialism.” Man in all of his God-endowed glory is a fully material being, and the spiritual or immaterial parts of man are inextricably tied to his body. Death creates a tragic separation between these two that God never intended. The spirit, or breath, can exist without the body, but this condition is abnormal; it would never have existed had man never sinned, and man at death separated from the body will not again be fully human until the resurrection. To be denuded of a body is, in a very real sense, to be subhuman. See the aversion Paul has to this state (2 Corinthians 5:1-5).

In the Bible, anthropology centers on the resurrection of the body. In the classical world, the stress was on the immortality of the soul, or that the body remains dead as the soul endures.

Unfortunately, most of the church fathers and much of the church overall embraced and perpetuated this false Greek anthropology, rather than continuing the holistic view of man found in biblical anthropology. This classical view introduced heavy notions of dualism and even Gnosticism into the Christian church with which we are still afflicted.

Consequences

Because ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences, and bad theological ideals have the worst consequences of all, the consequences of a misguided classical anthropology have been severe. If the body is inferior and disposable, material things and this earthly life must be relatively unimportant to the Christian.

Christians long for dying and going to heaven, though the Bible says very little about that state. It tells us that when we die, we will be with the Lord, just as it tells us that in the eternal state the renewed heavens and earth will merge with one another, and God himself will dwell eternally in this material recreation (Revelation 21:1-4). Apparently God himself is not offended by materiality, since he will dwell within its reality eternally. Even now, Jesus still retains his resurrection body, reflecting the resurrection state to be enjoyed by his people.

If we see the goal of life as escape from the material world and catapulting into the next, we will completely misunderstand the kingdom of God: his reign in this world which gradually increases by the preaching of the gospel under the power of the Spirit. We will understand that when Jesus declared to Pilate his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36), he meant that its source is not bound by history. He did not mean that his kingdom is unconcerned with this world, since we are called to pray that his kingdom would come on earth as in heaven (Matthew 6:10). When Paul writes that we should seek things above and not things on this earth (Colossians 3:1-2), he did not mean that we should be unconcerned with material things, but that the object of our ultimate affections should not arise within this world but in our devotion to God himself.

If we perceive our Christian task as escape rather than victory, we will abandon the good world God made to Satan, and we will not press the claims of King Jesus anywhere: not merely neglecting this duty in families and churches, but also in business, entertainment, art, literature, science, technology, and everywhere else. We will fail to understand that when we say Jesus is Lord, we should mean that he is Lord everywhere, not merely within our homes and churches.

Conclusion

Easter memorializes a “holistic” event. Christ rose in every aspect of his being, including body, spirit, intellect, will, and emotions, because every aspect of man fell under the curse of divine judgment. This is because every aspect of man fell in the garden, and what sin corrupted, God is redeeming and restoring. Where sin abounded, grace is abounding much more.

Easter shows that all of creation is inherently good, and that the resurrection of Christ is the firstfruits of the comprehensive redemption to be experienced by man (1 Corinthians 15:20-23), and not only by man, but by all of creation (Romans 8:20-23). Easter, therefore, in memorializing the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, also celebrates the wholeness of man.

Because the first Adam led the whole person into sin, the second Adam, Jesus Christ, is saving the whole person from sin (Romans 5:12-21). That salvation will not be fully completed until the final resurrection. But that salvation has begun now in our current age.

Easter therefore pledges great victories in the present. To celebrate Easter is to celebrate not just the resurrection of Christ, but because of his resurrection, our resurrection.

This article was first published on P. Andrew Sandlin's CultureChange Substack.