REBUILDING A GODLY VIEW OF THE UNCLAD HUMAN BODY
-- Why and How to Stop "Thinking Dirty" about God's Image and Temple --


" . . . our calling is cosmic: none of life is off-limits from needing to be reformed and conformed to the will of God, and all zones of creaturely life require office-bearers outfitted with a passionate heart, gentle mind, and strong feet that bring good tidings of great joy to the world."
-- Calvin Seerveld (in "A Cloud of Witnesses and a New Generation," In the Fields of the Lord)
(Please, don't skip to the LINKS below
without understanding the following explanation.)

In the Bible, human nakedness is a rich metaphor, generally overlooked even by Christians. Depending on its context, nudity carries a variety of meanings that range between its wholesome place in creation (Genesis 2:25) to its unfortunate association with poverty (Job 24:7,10) and military defeat (Isaiah 20:2-4). It has both the theological significance of describing how God sees us (Hebrews 4:13), as well as the mundane insignificance of being the only way people in ancient times saw their friends and neighbors bathe (Exodus 2:5; 2 Samuel 11:2) or do dirty, sweaty labor that would soil or ruin their clothing (Exodus 22:26-27; John 13:4; John 21:7, see literal translations). But one thing the Bible does not do, which our culture does infamously well, is to focus exclusively on nudity's relationship to sexual activity. Through an intense pattern of cultural and religious training, we are blinded from seeing nudity as anything but a lewd sexual display. This blindness insulates us from the fact that, for most of human history, the sight of the naked body was a very common occurrence that did not draw undue attention or automatically create erotic excitement. But modern attention has been so captivated by society's sexualizaton of the body that this obsession has become an earmark of Western civilization. Sadly, most who grow up indoctrinated with such a mental image of the body cannot see how it misshapes human thinking. But experience has forced many to acknowledge how devastating this unnatural focus has been to their minds and lives.

Few areas of our humanity have been more conceptually distorted by Western culture than the natural phenomenon of nakedness. This becomes obvious merely by setting our society's body taboo next to the attitude in cultures where a wholesome body acceptance is the norm. This simple comparison embarrassingly exposes the West's dysfunctional emphasis. Starting in early childhood, we are socially programmed to associate the external human anatomy with indecency and obscenity, whether it's experienced by actual sight, or by images, or by imagination alone. Defenders of this overwhelmingly sexual response to the body are quick to point out that sexual intercourse usually happens in the nude. But these body-friendly cultures have managed to reproduce themselves quite successfully without our obsessive preoccupation with this one dimension of nudity. When people from those cultures first learn about or come into contact with this erotic fixation of ours, they variously interpret it as a form of childishness or insanity or perversion. Any or all of these interpretations are confirmed by the zeal and emotion with which we try to justify our sexualized view of the unclad body. We have behavioral inconsistencies, however, that nullify these efforts. Appreciating the nude artwork on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is only one example.

While Michelangelo's painting of "the Creation of Adam" affirms biblical faith, it also challenges our society's prudery and pornography. Originally, God created us "naked" and "unashamed" (Genesis 1:27; 2:25), which is how we continue to enter and exit this life (Job 1:21a). Porno-prudish responses to the sight of nudity come neither from divinely built-in reflexes nor from our inborn human nature. They are sown, cultivated and harvested as a fruit of cultural indoctrination. That culturally-propagated fruit is not only unhealthy, but toxic. It's still as poisonous to society today as it was "in the beginning."

Satan convinced our first parents to eat forbidden "fruit" that "opened" their minds to a "knowledge of good and evil" that was independent from God's direct leading (Genesis 2:17; 3:4-5). Inferred by God's second question to Adam ("Who told you that you were naked?"), evidently the devil's very next step was to feed their liberated moral thinking with the deceptive concept that "naked" bodies were "evil" and hiding the truth about them was "good" (Genesis 3:9-13). History shows that not all groups of humans accepted such unnatural thinking about the body. On the other hand, whenever and wherever this demonically-inspired thinking was adopted, it has almost always created a cultural taboo that interprets the sight of the unclad body in terms of sexual activity. Yet, all the rational, moral or theological arguments that people invent to substantiate this taboo, or validate its sexualized perception of nudity, are easily dispelled by the many actual human experiences that contradict them.

One noticeable contradiction is the acknowledged decency of bodies undressed for health care here in America. Another is observed in the beauty of nude statues and paintings adorning streets and churches in Europe or filling museums around the globe. We discover our inconsistency in the innocence of naked natives photographed in primitive lands that have not yet been infiltrated by Western ideals. These examples and many others highlight the obvious but irreconcilable conflict between what our culture teaches about nakedness and what normal people learn from a frank exposure to it in a nonsexual context. Dirty thinking about the body in its natural state arises exclusively from either a prudish or a pornographic view of our God-given anatomical design and its gender-specific distinctions. But the divine authority of our Creator stands behind the naked truth about our bodies. A true, creational view of the bare human body offers an almost immediate correction to Satan's original falsehood in the Garden of Eden. It can liberate people from the ongoing absurdity of the body taboo, no matter how long that taboo has possessed the mind and heart.

During my first 25 years of nursing work, I witnessed the illogical discrepancy between my routine experiences with nudity and the vain imaginations taught about it by society. All those years, I felt I had to live with this contradiction, seeing it merely as a quirky part of life, an inexplicable inconsistency, a rationally unsolvable paradox. Finally, I learned about the inherent connection between prudery and pornography. These two ideologies not only spring from the same false, ungodly view of the body, but their apparent opposition actually weds them inseparably in a symbiotic relationship. They feed off of one another, constantly fueling each other's fire. My job as a nurse laid a strong foundation for rejecting both those false conceptions about the body. But later, my research into the phenomenon of human nakedness led me to embrace what I now believe is a more sound and God-honoring viewpoint.

Typically, the mind-controlling power of the body taboo resists any open-minded investigation of its own validity. Even the hostility it engenders to the word "nudity" itself helps insulate its adherents from an honest, intelligent search for the truth. For years it blocked my own mind from discussing nudity calmly, thoughtfully, and realistically. Anyone with courage to stand still for a moment against the stream of social opinion will feel how fiercely its current flows. But that momentary stillness allows a person to see exactly where this stream of thought is taking us. The porno-prudery in the body taboo sweeps us away from a godly, creational mentality and theology. It keeps our minds "in the gutter," until it finally dumps them into a sewer system of "dirty" attitudes about the body. Allowing or promoting this defiling process is an offensive slap in the face to our Creator. These physical bodies of ours are not only "fearfully and wonderfully made" by Him (Psalm 139:14), but He calls them His "image" (Genesis 1:27) and "temple" (1 Corinthians 6:19). The fact that they maintain their divinely ordained status despite the absence of clothing is actually a firm "slap in the face" to the body taboo itself!

Have I gone overboard in trying to restore a wholesome body acceptance for our external anatomy? Some may accuse me of being "all wet" in this more natural understanding of nakedness. On the contrary, looking down at my feet, I see them planted high and dry on the deck of the only rational boat afloat in an immense ocean of Western cultural opinion. From the perspective of a godly, creational view of the human body, it's easy to see why so many, especially young people, are struggling against a storm of filthy waves. Some are morally drowning in the sordid depths of society's pornographic view of the body. I believe the only safe and sane refuge for the human mind is get aboard the ship I'm sailing on.

So what is my point here? Am I dreaming an impossible dream? Am I imagining that someday, before God finally strips away all clothing in death or rapture or judgment, our society can return to sound, healthy thinking about the body? Is it a hopeless hope that we can unlearn our wayward cultural viewpoint? Can we really readopt attitudes and behaviors that treat the physical human anatomy as a beautiful example of God's creative glory, as Christian theology teaches? I have very little confidence that my opinions or insights can win the world to my viewpoint. It will take more than logic and personal testimony to reverse this widespread porno-prudish mistreatment of our bodies as objects of obscenity and shame. But I have absolute confidence in Christ's promise that knowing the truth can set us free, especially when He personally is involved in the process (John 8:32, 36).

The truth about our bodies is simply not that complicated. Take a good, long look at your naked body in the mirror the next time you take a shower. Half the people in the world have exactly the same anatomical equipment you see. Even in the other half, the anatomical variations are missing at the outset of embryological development. Reality is so absolutely obvious, yet so absurdly obscured by man-made "fig leaves" (Genesis 3:7). But I believe that any individual who seeks to know the truth about the body can discover it and be set free by it in the same way I have been. We are not born believing that the sight of human nudity is a sexual event or a prelude to sexual activity. We learn to believe it, which means we can unlearn it. Purely logical thinking, as well as the experiences of masses of people throughout history, expose this "sexual" interpretation of the unclad body as a social aberrancy, if not as an outright sign of moral depravity. Given the human heart's propensity for selfishness and lust, such a falsehood has easily produced its own self-fulfillment. It creates the destructive social effects that its unnatural principles predict. I believe those principles are not just illogical, but God-dishonoring and immoral. I believe that anyone who has courage enough to resist the overwhelming current of worldly opinion, and to investigate the truth about this common aspect of our humanity, will have a transformational shift in their thinking. Rather than keeping their minds and bodies conformed to this dysfunctional, sexualized view fostered by our society, they will return to the will and viewpoint of the Creator (Romans 12:1-2).

The rest of this web page is my way of helping those interested in pursuing this honest investigation that I've just mentioned. Listed below are several categories of links. Some are to articles that helped lead me personally to rebuild in my mind a godly view of the human body. Included are also links to my own written thoughts on this subject in the form of poetry, articles and even fiction. I make this available not necessarily to convince everyone to adopt my own way of thinking. They offer people a window of opportunity to step outside the totalitarian jurisdiction of the body taboo, even if, after studying the same materials and reviewing my thoughts, they choose to reject my conclusions and re-affirm their allegiance to that taboo as their interpretation of reality.


Poems I've Written Inspired by My Research:

The Divine Story of Naked Glory (inspired by a review of Genesis after discarding porno-prudery)

Christians and Nakedness (elements of culture and history that confront our porno-prudery)

God's Naked Lamb (meditations on the fact that Jesus actually died naked on the Cross)

Origin of Body Shame (this poem has a one-page explanatory introduction of its purpose)

Nurse and Nudity (a logical perspective on nudity from my own healthcare experience)


Articles I've Written After Adopting a Godly View of the Body:

What About Hospital Nudity? (my "short answer" in My L&D Tips for those worried about hospital nudity)

My View on Nakedness (my "long answer" to above question for those not convinced by my "short" one.)

Will You Undress Before God? (a Gospel message using nakedness as a Christian metaphor)

The Pornographic View of the Body (an article written for My Chains Are Gone, an anti-porn addiction website)

Addiction to Pornography (another article written for the My Chains Are Gone anti-porn addiction website)

Christ's Ultimate Identification (an Easter sermon about the naked death and resurrection of Christ)

The Triune God and Social Nudity (The Trinity's creation of a socially nude humanity as a Self-portrait)


Websites and Material That Personally Influenced My Change in Perspective:

007 Breasts (This must be the most "woman-friendly" breastfeeding-friendly site on the entire Web! Its dynamic message was what first forced me to analyze my philosophical position concerning "the visible breast.")

"Nudity and Lust" (a chapter from Dr. James McKeever's book, It's in the Bible, which spurred me on in my research by affirming what I felt I was learning from Scripture.)

"Hippolytus on Nude Baptism" (a detailed prescription for the baptismal ritual in 215 AD [It took reading this to convince me that the modern church's reaction to the unclad body is foreign to early Christianity.])

"Nudity in Ancient and Modern Culture" (historically informative, but to be read with spiritual discernment)

"Good Nudity" (an online article by a Bible teacher who is also a massage therapist and spa-owner)

"The Virtues of Nakedness" (an MD frankly discusses nakedness and its wholesome benefits)


Websites and Material That Emphasize a More Wholesome View of the Body:

"A Christian Perspective on Nudity in Art" (a Christian art teacher discusses sound advice about nudity in art)

The Centerfold Syndrome (a secular perspective by psychologist Gary Brooks -- hits the nail on the head!)

The Theology of the Body (a Catholic website about Pope John Paul II's "body-friendly" Theology of the Body. The full series of seminar talks expounding these teachings ("Naked Without Shame" by Christopher West) can be listened to online, purchased on 11 CDs, or downloaded as MP3 files for free, at this link.)


Fiction Inspired by My Research and Further Thinking:

"Meeting at the River" (an autobiographical fiction about how biblical and historical research changed my mind)