ABSTRACT
Strangely, Christian theologians have struggled throughout the centuries to do full justice to an affirmation of the inherent goodness of these material and bodily aspects of the human condition. In critical dialogue with diverse movements such as neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, rationalism and German idealism, Christian anthropologies have affirmed the goodness of the material world formally. Nevertheless, the distorting legacy of these movements has all too often been obvious in Christian anthropology. Gnostic Christianity, for example, derived two contradictory ethics from their dualism of matter and spirit. If what is material and bodily is inferior and unimportant, one can either opt for asceticism (the body must be suppressed in the interest of the spirit) or for license (whatever we do with the body is of no ultimate relevance). Both these moralities derive from an underestimation of the goodness of creation.2 A vivid, if rather crude symbol of the aversion to that which is material, bodily, earthly is the notion that Adam's state of perfection before the fall must have meant that he was without sexuality, without intestines and without a stomach!3
