So the body in Christianity is sacred and significant. That means in any doctrine of man that we must be concerned with man's physical well-being. It may be true that man cannot live by bread alone, but the mere fact that Jesus added the "alone" means that man cannot live without bread. Religion must never overlook this, and any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the economic conditions that damn the soul, the social conditions that corrupt men, and the city governments that cripple them, is a dry, dead, do-nothing religion in need of new blood. For it overlooks the basic fact that man is a biological being with a physical body. This must stand as a principle in any doctrine of man.
-Martin Luther King Jr.
Posted by David at 8:00 PM
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3 comments:
i hope that you have seen the PBS "american experience" documentary about MLK...if not, it will blow you out of the water...just like that quote you posted just did to me.
I have it recorded and I plan on watching it soon.
"Bread" indeed. Food represents for those of us immersed in the American middle class the single luxury for which we avoid apology. Because "bread" is a necessity, it becomes the one acceptable indulgence of privileged classes who claim personal and spiritual morality. Unlike smoke, drink, pornography, sex, greed, jealousy, power-lust, etc., food is the one thing we cannot live without. Therefore, we bend it to become a vice which escapes personal culpability. My questions are two: 1. Is it truly a spiritual accomplishment to avoid those vices controlled by one's immediate social environment while indulging in vices uncontrolled by outside forces? To put this another way: Is the "man's physical well-being" that King speaks of put into jeopardy by what we've accepted as acceptable, that is by "the social conditions that corrupt men"? This physical well-being--as our social conditions become ever more luxuriant--is, instead of being a superficial concern, a cause for introspection on the most basic level. One might argue that King's words represent a larger, more abstract, physical whole (say, the body of the church, for example) but with King, as with other writers and leaders of his talents and wisdom, a person would be mistaken to narrow the meaning of his words to only one context. And I think we would be remiss to avoid looking at our own physical bodies and asking ourselves it that "temple", that "corpus" is a physical representation of the spiritual life we have led up until this point. Obviously, we cannot point to all ills and cancers, injuries and ailments, as manifestations of an inner life, but to a great degree, we can. Type 2 Diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, even some cancers, heart disease, not to mention energy levels (or lack thereof) are often the result of ways we've treated our body while walking through a life of luxury. America is filled with the over-weight, the sickly, the un-well, walking manifestations of the inner life led in an environment that allows such slips in moral detail to go unheeded. So my second question is this: 2. Is there such a thing as an obese Christian, really? or is the most basic part of a man, his physical body, the part which is most prey to a selective blindness in his religion?
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