I’m excited to share that the Spring 2021 issue of Eikon: A Journal for Biblical Anthropology is now available. You can download a free PDF or read individual essays at our website, and print subscribers should be receiving their copies soon. For those attending the Southern Baptist Convention next week in Nashville, copies will be distributed at a 9Marks late night event at no cost thanks to our generous donors.
As for the theme of this issue, we decided to focus loosely on the topic of human embodiment, paying significance and honor to the role of the body in our reflection on life and discipleship. I could narrate significant areas in my walk with Christ through how I’ve experienced the world in my body. As a sixteen-year-old experiencing near-death from a traumatic accident, I distinctly recall how the feeling of vulnerability and physical weakness provoked spiritual humility. Running marathons and the accompanying long hours of solitude with one’s thoughts, I recall, were unique times of wrestling with existential spiritual questions bombarding my existence. Silence and the mechanical-like rhythms of the body produced memorable spiritual concentration alongside physical exhilaration. Physicality and the role of the body in harnessing spiritual realities is profoundly real.
We are more than our bodies, but never less than our bodies. In the grave, the soul departs, and the body decays. But the promise of new creation awaiting all those found in Christ also signals the return of our souls to our bodies. Our bodies are not an afterthought. They are, rather, the mechanism through which we come to live life and experience redemption. Hence, when the Apostle Paul speaks of offering our bodies “as living sacrifices,” it means that the way we treat our bodies is inextricable to our sanctification. Desire, frailty, hunger, physical fitness — we are not simply carbon atoms with connective tissue. All of these aspects of the human experience reflect back on our inner spiritual states. It’s why, for example, fasting is not simply the absence of food, but the pruning of the flesh’s dependence on worldly excess. Denying the body somehow rewards the body in the divine economy. We are enfleshed souls whose corporeal experience is drawn up into our spiritual biography.
While these reflections are brief, I hope they prompt deep exploration as you enjoy the essays and reviews in the Spring 2021 issue of Eikon.
TABLE OF CONTENTS | Eikon 3.1
4 | “A Cultural History of Fatherhood & Its Retrieval” | Michael A.G. Haykin
23 | “Is Complementarianism a Man-Made Doctrine?” | Denny Burk
30 | “The Beautiful Meaning of Marital Sexual Intimacy” | Rob Lister
42 | “An Interview with Carter Snead on the Body and Bioethics” | Andrew T. Walker
46 | “An Interview with Rod Dreher on Soft Totalitarianism” | Andrew T. Walker
56 | “Mugged by Reality” | Sharon James
96 | “Is My Body Me? An Excerpt from What God Has to Say About Our Bodies” | Sam Allberry
98 | “On the Body and Its Meaning” | Colin Smothers
104 | “Dying and Embodiment: The Body in Late Stages of Life” | David W. Jones
108 | “Manhood, Womanhood, and the History of Doctrine” | Calvin Goligher
116 | “Puritan Women as Gospel Partners” | Nathan Tarr
122 | “Instruments of Unrighteousness: How Pornography Offends Male Embodiment” | Joe Rigney
BOOK REVIEWS
144 | Politics after Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World | Reviewed by Caleb Newsom
150 | Stumbling on Happiness | Reviewed by Jeremiah Greever
162 | The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies | Reviwed by Scott Corbin
You, too, can help support the ministry of CBMW. We are a non-profit organization that is fully-funded by individual gifts and ministry partnerships. Your contribution will go directly toward the production of more gospel-centered, church-equipping resources.
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