Is Physical Pleasure Evil?

Is physical pleasure evil?

After my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God. Job 19:26

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it. C. S. LEWIS

MUCH OF WHAT I’VE READ about joy attempts to raise it to such a peak of spirituality that it disappears from the realm of mortals. But is it really possible for joy to be unemotional or separated from happiness? How can joy without happiness truly be joy? If joy isn’t experienced as an emotion, how could it be experienced? Is the physical world so bad that we must spiritualize joy?

C. S. Lewis wrote,

I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy.^a

It’s no coincidence that the apostle Paul’s detailed defense of the physical resurrection was written to the church at Corinth. Corinthian believers were immersed in the Greek philosophies of Platonism and dualism, which perceived a dichotomy between the spiritual and physical realms.

Platonists see a disembodied soul as the ideal. The Bible, meanwhile, sees this division as unnatural and undesirable. We are unified beings. That’s what makes bodily resurrection so vital. That’s also why Paul said that if there is no Resurrection, “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19). The truth is, God intends for our bodies, once raised, to last as long as our souls.

Any views of the afterlife that settle for less than a full bodily resurrection—including Christoplatonism, reincarnation, and transmigration of the soul—are explicitly anti-Christian. The early church waged doctrinal wars against heresies that contradict the biblical account where God voices his pleasure with the entire physical realm, all of which he created and called “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Christ’s resurrection itself repudiates the heresy of Christoplatonism (the idea that physical pleasures are unspiritual).

Sadly, Christoplatonism tears down that bridge to unbelievers by negating the value and goodness of not only the natural world but also the creativity of God’s image bearers—their ability to build parks, playgrounds, zoos, dams, reservoirs, roads, monuments, greenhouses, and sculptures. People are sinners, to be sure, but is all human achievement nothing but sin? Does God hate creativity, art, architecture, business, music, and sports? Such thinking leaves believers with a shriveled view of both the present and the future. And it gives unbelievers a shriveled view of the gospel.

Some Christians’ anti-physical worldview causes them to envision spirits stripped of bodies whose heavenly lives consist only of worship and service in a “higher plane” of disembodied angelic spirituality.

The movie Babette’s Feast depicts a conservative Christian sect that scrupulously avoids “worldly” distractions.^b They live out the unhappy philosophy of Christoplatonism—quick to judge, slow to rejoice, and convinced that celebration, pleasure, and laughter must be sinful.

Then Babette, once a gourmet cook in France, is forced by war to become a maid for the two women who lead this small group of austere believers. Babette unexpectedly inherits a significant sum of money, and out of gratitude for their kindness to her, she spends it all to prepare a fabulous dinner party for the elderly sisters and their friends.

Babette’s Feast is a picture of God’s extravagant grace. Touched by Babette’s generosity and the great feast she prepared, the community’s false guilt dissipates, and they begin to laugh, take delight, and truly enjoy the richness of God’s provision. The movie illustrates the beauty of enjoying God’s lavish, creative gifts with heartfelt gratitude. Over the many courses of this meal, these legalists gradually come to understand that when God and his gifts are the objects of our happiness, feasting and laughter and beauty draw us not away from God but to him.

How sad when the world doesn’t see God as the source of the goodness of his creation. And how much sadder still when God’s people don’t see it either.

Oh, Father, you have promised us eternal life as healthy, embodied people who have said a final good-bye to sin and suffering and who will be more capable of worship, friendship, love, discovery, work, and play than we’ve ever been—and therefore we’ll be far happier than we’ve ever been! What joy to anticipate! Now open our eyes to the many good and wonderful physical gifts you give us on this side of eternity, and help us, with grateful hearts, to be happy with them and, in doing so, be happy with you.