If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. . . . When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. . . .
So it will be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. —1 Cor. 15:13–44

“Lord, save our souls!” This end of many liturgical hymns sounds like familiar music to anyone who regularly attends divine services of the Byzantine liturgical tradition. “Glorify God in your body!” instructs Saint Paul, on the other hand (1 Cor. 6:20). Are the two ideas in contradiction?

Iconography is one of the most important ways in which the body is affirmed and understood within a Christian context. This is because of iconography’s inseparable relationship with the incarnation. Both affirm unambiguously that the salvation, regeneration, transfiguration, and deification of everyone and everything depend upon God’s taking on human nature. This, of course, includes God’s taking on a human body.
Simply put, without the incarnation, and therefore without the body, the work of creation is incomplete and the divine economy becomes ineffectual.

One of the most curious things about Christianity is that, for a religion with a literal human body at its centre, it is perhaps the most bodyphobic of faiths, and the one in which an unreceptiveness to diversity of identity sits in the starkest contrast to core precepts of the theology.

The infertile body is arguably the biblical body par excellence. It is the infertile female body that propels salvation history. From Abraham and Sarah to the coming of Christ through the Virgin Mary, the barren body is inhabited by deep metaphorical meaning. Though fertility and birth are pervasive in Orthodox liturgy and theology through the iconography and hymnography of the Theotokos, the more nuanced significance of the infertile woman and the emptiness she embodies is generally obfuscated.

A distinguishing feature of Orthodox Christianity is that it communicates its theology by visual and other sensorial modes. Whenever someone enters an Orthodox church, she finds herself surrounded by images of Christ, the Theotokos, and an impressive number of saintly figures. Even images of the local bishop or important donors may be present. Icons often serve as a starting point for explaining Orthodoxy to other Christians or nonbelievers. Their function is more than that of illustrating the life of Christ and the
saints. They are gates to heaven and depictions of our ultimate eschatological goal: union with God or deification. The gold surrounding the heads of the saints and their translucent, almost diaphanous, bodies are meant to represent the light of their eschatological communion with God.

Theological accounts of human sinfulness tend to have a deceptive simplicity across Christian traditions. Sin appears as a result of the first disobedience by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. After a brief discussion, they nibble on the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, in direct violation of God’s command, and it is all downhill from there

The history of the relationship between soul and body in science tracks the history of the battle between idealism and materialism—a conflict with only temporary, contingent winners. Meanwhile, through both advances in neuroscience and the decay of ideological obsessions, hope for a much-needed peace has come into view, in the form of moderate, synthetic views. This article will attempt to construct a brief description of how two movements, perhaps surprisingly, have become capable of creating conditions that facilitate convergence and fertile dialogue on the subject: psychoanalysis and Orthodox theology.

The incarnation is by far the most shocking aspect of Christianity. The resurrection of a god is not an unusual feature of mythic traditions around the world: Osiris, Baldr, Quetzalcoatl, and Dionysus all came back from the dead. But the idea that a god, let alone the God, would take on a mortal body and the fullness of our humanity would be an outlandish claim to most people outside the Christian world.

Contemporary Eastern Orthodox discussion of sexuality and embodiment generally assumes a static, binary gendered essentialism. Opponents of female ordination, same-sex relationships, and the legitimacy of transgender persons generally define appropriate roles and relationships according to binary essentialism.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Datalore” (1988), the android Data proves to have an evil twin, Lore, who tries to bring humanity under his power. Data, on the other hand, is represented as an intelligent, candid, idealized man, acting only altruistically, always striving to improve his humanity. At the end of the episode, someone asks the significant question: do Lore’s manipulation skills and lust for power make him more human than Data, or less so?

What place, if any, does the imagination have in the practice of prayer? The fourth-century theologian Evagrius of Pontus’s Chapters on Prayer addresses the importance of “imageless prayer” in two places. “When you pray” cautions Evagrius, “do not form images of the divine within yourself, nor allow your mind to be impressed with any form, but approach the Immaterial immaterially and you will come to understanding” (ch. 66).

Translators of Vladimir Solovyev and Sergii Bulgakov face a series of choices in glossing the Russian word богочеловечество (bogochelovechestvo) or the French divino-humanité. The early translators of these writers chose “Godmanhood,” and Professor Andrew Louth has argued in favor of this choice.

“Carrie, take off your shoes!” called my friend Betsy from the shore, as the small fishing boat I was on came to a stop. There was no dock, and the boat could not quite make it all the way to dry land, so a slippery wooden plank was placed on the stern.

Translated by Richard Pevear