Book Review: Christian Flesh by Paul J. Griffiths

Abstract

I began this fascinating book two summers ago, but various exigencies forced me to put it aside before I was into the thick of it. This was fortuitous. Beginning the work afresh as the pandemic waned in this country allowed it to speak all the more potently. If there is any common discovery from the months of lockdown, quarantine, churches closing, and ZOOM virtuality, it might be that we humans are inescapably enfleshed creatures, whose flourishing is tied to the exchange of fleshly caresses. I thus suspect that readers will find themselves particularly vulnerable to Griffith’s speculative theological reflections on the realities of Christian flesh. In an important way, this book takes up a topic raised in Griffiths’ previous publication, Decreation, on the last things. In that intriguing book, he proposes that the beatific vision—the last thing for human creatures—must include (and wait upon) the resurrected flesh, for humans are fundamentally animated flesh. This depiction of resurrected flesh sensorially encountering the flesh of the ascended Jesus remains a central paradigm in this present work. Yet here Griffiths unblinkingly confronts the existential realities of living in “the devastation” (the post-lapsarian world) as baptized flesh. No whisper of a Christian Neoplatonism is permitted in these frank and challenging pages. Griffiths’ cogent examination of the caresses of Christian flesh, given and received, will make some Christian moral theologians uneasy. The first three chapters of Christian Flesh are a theological tour de force. Chapter 1 (“Flesh Devastated”) is a poignant portrayal of human life as haptic. Human flesh requires the capacity to touch and be touched; but this need also defines the vulnerability of human flesh to injury—both from