The Sensuality Of The Human Body

The legalistic shunning of the human body in the evangelical world has resulted in nothing but harm to individual Christians, endorsed in the name of preserving conservative social norms that equate sensuality with sexuality.  Sensuality is not only nonsexual in itself, but it is also something that Christians have significant Biblical reasons to embrace.  While the personal, subjective enjoyment of the human body is reason enough to not flee from its sensuality (because sensuality is not sinful on its own), the first two chapters of Genesis not only portray the human body in a very positive light, but even imply that God prefers the naked body to a clothed one.

Yes, Genesis 1-2 certainly does suggest that God might actually prefer the unclothed human form to its alternatives.  His choice to create men and women in a state of open and full nudity was intentional, after all; there is nothing logically impossible about the creation of clothed beings, and yet God did not create humans in this way.  The mere fact that God created humans in the state of nudity means that God not only approves of the exposure of the human body in social contexts, but that he also very likely prefers it in one sense.

God's exact motivations for creating humans naked are not outlined in Genesis--or elsewhere in the Bible--and yet we do not need to know them in order to realize that the sensuality of the human body is not something that God opposes.  On the contrary, a Biblical theology embraces the sensuality of the body, emphasizing that the subjective pleasure many people derive from it directly complements the fact that Genesis treats the human body as God's ultimate physical creation.

Within the Christian worldview, there is nothing shameful about embracing one's physicality or admiring the physical bodies of others.  It is, at the very least, Biblically erroneous to scorn sensuality as if it is beneath a committed, sincere Christian.  The human body is designed to experience sensual pleasure, but the human body--both one's own body and the bodies of other people, whether naked or clothed to various extents--is itself also a rich source of pleasure.  Only an invalid understanding of the Genesis creation account pits righteousness against sensuality, as if the two are inherently exclusive on any level.

It is one thing to subjectively dislike the public sight of the naked or "scantily clad" body, and there is nothing Biblically immoral about merely experiencing a sense of aversion to such displays of the unadorned human body.  Subjective preferences are amoral on their own.  However, to oppose public nudity--or bikinis or male or female shirtlessess--on ideological grounds is inherently contrary to Biblical metaphysics and ethics.  The Christian who cannot shed an emotional aversion to the human body (if he or she has one to begin with) needs to learn how to live with it in light of the spiritual significance of sensuality.