He showed the nail marks in his hands and feet. If you were to look for the body of Jesus you will never find it. However, this is not true, and it was so important to correct this false idea of dualism that the apostle Paul wrote unambiguous instructional letters, and it is why I, as a Christian pastor, am sharing this message today.Ĭhristians believe in something called bodily resurrection – that, as far as we are concerned, here on earth, one day in the future, all will be resurrected with new bodies – just like Jesus. Most people, including most Christians if you ask them, believe that the spirit part of us goes to heaven when we die – that we are ultimately destined for a heavenly spiritual home. The heresy of dualism was prevalent in the first century church and it is also present today. Alternatively, they felt like they needed to subjugate the body and control it through self-flagellation and extreme discipline. They were either thinking that as they were really spiritual beings inhabiting a temporary physical body – one that would ultimately be destroyed – that they could treat that body however they wanted and they engaged with every kind of hedonism. The second implication, and one that Timothy, as a church pastor, had to deal with was that people, accepting the concept of dualism were doing one of two things. Why does this matter? Well, if you believe in dualism then it has implications for who Jesus Christ is and it has implications for how we live our lives in the here and now.įor example, if the body is bad then how could God – who is perfectly good and holy – inhabit a body in the physical person of Jesus Christ? At the time that Paul wrote his letter to Timothy, dualists were claiming that the physical body of Jesus must have been a phantom or mirage, or worse, that God had temporarily possessed a human being! Therefore, the dualist teaches that when you die, the good bit – the spirit – goes to heaven and the bad bit – the body – remains in the ground. The biggest heresy of the time was a kind of dualism called body-spirit dualism.īody-spirit dualism is the idea that human beings can be divided into two separate parts: body and spirit, and that the body part is bad and the spirit part is good. You see, at the time the letter was written there were heresies (false teachings) doing the rounds and people were being misled. In Paul's second letter to Timothy he wrote it as an encouragement to help Timothy carry out his ministry no matter what difficulties or hardship he would face. The reason these letters were preserved was because they were both personal and official – designed to be read out to the congregations – and their content was highly valued and respected. We are very blessed, as a Christian church, to have letters passed down to us that were written in the first century letters, for example, between the Apostle Paul to one of the new young church pastors called Timothy. Body-spirit dualism is the idea that human beings can be divided into two separate parts: body and spirit, and that the body part is bad and the spirit part is good (Photograph supplied)

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