Fleeing the Body of Jesus: Death and the Incarnation

This week it was my pleasure to make another presentation to the ACU faculty regarding my recent research. The title of the presentation was Feeling Queasy About the Incarnation: Fleeing the Body of Jesus.

I’ve blogged about much of this theoretical material. The new material I presented was some preliminary empirical data supporting my theoretical contention that ambivalence regarding the Incarnation is partly driven by death anxiety and existential fears.

This will be a longer post with some of the slides from the presentation. The upside is that you will be given a pre-publication peek at data points that have never before been seen in the psychology of religion literature.



The Gnostic Impulse
The presentation began with a discussion of what I call the Gnostic impulse within Christianity. Regarding the body, the Gnostic impulse, which has many historical sources, is defined as those impulses within Christianity that deemphasize, disregard, or degrade the body. The Gnostics, in their rejection of the physical world, also rejected the physical body. This can be seen in the recently published Gospel of Judas. Judas is the hero in this Gnostic gospel because Judas is the one who frees Jesus (via what looks like a “betrayal”) from his body. As Jesus says to Judas, “But you will exceed all of them [the disciples]. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.”

Historically, we have seen this view of the body manifest itself in everything from priestly chastity to bodily mortification. The impulse has been pervasive. As Philip Lee has contended in his book Against the Protestant Gnostics, “…the aversion to this world with a desire to escape it has been one of the most prominent strands in the fabric of Christianity.” This aversion has led to body ambivalence, as Lee states, “…the Church’s suspicion of cosmos led to some unfortunate attitudes toward the flesh, human nature, and sexuality.”

As we see in the Gospel of Judas this ambivalence about the body has affected views of the Incarnation. A fully human Jesus, one who participates in our sweat, sexuality, and excrement, has regularly scandalized Christian believers. This has led many to overtly or tacitly adopt hyper-spiritualized views of Jesus. As Lee notes, “Gnostics of all eras have, on the other hand, maintained a most profound mistrust of the body, regarding it as the enemy without that constantly tries to undo the best efforts of the soul within…Their distain for the physical led them to a docetic, disembodied view of Christ.”

In short, the Gnostic impulse causes us to not only flee our own bodies but to also flee the body of Jesus. Many feel queasy about the Incarnation.

The Source of Body Ambivalence
What are the psychological sources of this body ambivalence? Recent research in the area of Terror Management Theory has suggested that we flee the body because it is a mortality reminder. Becoming conscious of the body heightens death anxiety.



In my presentation I walked through three “exhibits,” areas of inquiry that support the notion that the body does indeed function as a mortality reminder.



Exhibit A: Disgust
Disgust researchers typically define "core disgust" as the disgust involved with food aversions. But, interestingly, many non-food related objects also elicit disgust, some strongly so. In North Americans, the reliable disgust-eliciting domains are:

Body products (e.g., feces, vomit)
Animals (e.g., insects, rats)
Sexual behaviors (e.g., incest, homosexuality)
Contact with the dead or corpses
Violations of the exterior envelope of the body (e.g., gore, deformity)
Poor hygiene
Interpersonal contamination (e.g., contact with unsavory persons)
Moral offenses

Paul Rozin, the leading disgust researcher in the world, and colleagues have noted that two of these domains, the last on the list, involve interpersonal or moral disgust. Collectively, these domains are called "sociomoral disgust." I have written at length about sociomoral disgust in my "Spiritual Pollution" series.

However, once we remove the sociomoral disgust domains what about what is left on the disgust list? Here is what we have:

Body products (e.g., feces, vomit)
Animals (e.g., insects, rats)
Sexual behaviors (e.g., incest, homosexuality)
Contact with the dead or corpses
Violations of the exterior envelope of the body (e.g., gore, deformity)
Poor hygiene

Looking over this list Rozin and colleagues have suggested that these domains remind us of our animal nature and, hence, our mortality. Thus, beyond core disgust and sociomoral disgust we have "Animal-reminder disgust." In short, we defend against death anxiety by pushing away, via disgust and its related behaviors, the facets of life that remind us of our mortality.



This analysis gains support when we examine the case of bodily fluids. Specifically, all bodily fluids (e.g., saliva, urine, vomit, puss) are reliable disgust elicitors. All, that is, except one. Can you guess which bodily fluid does not elicit disgust?

Tears.

Now why would that be? According to Rozin's theory tears are quintessentially human. Tears are associated with our loves, joys, and sorrows. Humans are the only animal known to cry in these cases. Thus, given that tears are human-specific, tears are not animal reminders. Consequently, tears do not elicit disgust.



Exhibit B: Sex
This analysis of tears is supported by research regarding sex and death awareness. Terror management theorists suggest that sex is problematic for humans because, stripped to its essence, sex is just an animal act. As a consequence sex can function as a body/animal/mortality reminder. To repress these associations we attempt to elevate sex to the spiritual plane where sex can become a physically transcending activity. This “spiritualizing” of sex represses the animal function and makes sex quintessentially human.

Evidence for this contention comes from a study conducted by Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, McCoy, Greenberg, and Solomon entitled Death, Sex, Love, and Neuroticism: Why Is Sex Such a Problem? Goldenberg et al. took two groups and moved them through a visualization exercise. One group was asked to think about the romantic/spiritual aspects of sex. The other group was asked to think about the physical aspects of sex (the smells, fluids, etc.). After the visualization each group then went through a word-completion task, completing words such as this:

Coff _ _
Sk _ ll

As you can see, each word could be filled out in a non-death related manner:

Coffee
Skill

Or a death related manner:

Coffin
Skull

The findings? As predicted by Terror Management Theory those who reflected on the physical aspects of sex completed more death related words. That is, reflecting on the physical aspects of sex activated death concepts in the mind. This finding converges on the disgust research in that it appears that the physical aspects of sex are animal-reminders which heighten death anxiety. Further, as we observed with tears, spiritualized aspects of human existence do not remind us of death. “Romantic” sex doesn't heighten death awareness. However, when stripped of its spiritual overlay sex becomes a reliable animal reminder which subsequently heightens death awareness.



Exhibit C: Profanity
Steven Pinker in his recent book The Stuff of Thought has surveyed much of the recent research on the psychology of profanity. One puzzle of profanity is that profanity across cultures pulls from the same domains. As Pinker notes, “In most other languages, the taboo words are drawn from the same short list of topics from which English and French get their curses: sex, excretion, religion, death and infirmity…” Pinker asks, “What can these concepts possibly have in common?”

Our analysis of the disgust and sex research seem to provide one answer: Profanity is a mortality reminder. The insult associated with profanity is that it strips away the spiritual and Gnostic pretentions of humans. “Making love,” a spiritualized euphemism, is reduced to “f***ing.” Profanity is an assault on our tacit Gnosticism.



A Terror Management Perspective on the Incarnation
To summarize, the church has always struggled with the body. This body ambivalence has led some to reject robust notions of the physical Incarnation of Jesus. Our psychological review suggests that one source of body ambivalence is death anxiety. The body functions as a mortality reminder.

These analyses lead to the following question: Is death anxiety and existential repression associated with rejections of the Incarnation? This question motivated a study I’ve just concluded here at ACU. This post is the first public sharing of the results (a fuller more detailed account is now being written up for publication).



The procedure of the study was straightforward. I had a sample of college students complete measures of death anxiety, theological belief, and Incarnational ambivalence. First, a quick commentary regarding the theological measures:

The Defensive Theology Scale is a scale I developed in other published work to assess an existentially defensive theological configuration. Briefly, high scores on the DTS indicate that the person has adopted a belief system that is existentially comforting. More about the DTS can be read here. The Quest measure, developed by Daniel Batson, has been regularly used in the literature as a measure of existential openness. Generally, those who score high on Quest value doubts and questions over religions certainty. In past research the DTS and Quest have been negatively correlated (i.e., as persons open themselves up to doubt and questions their theology becomes impacted by existential worries). The final belief measure assessed creedal orthodoxy.

The assessment innovation of the study was the development of the Incarnation Ambivalence Scale. The IAS asked participants to imagine a variety of “body scenarios” regarding Jesus. The items assessed four different domains as can be seen in the following slide:



For example, participants were asked to imagine Jesus having body odor or experiencing vomiting during illness. For each scenario participants were asked to rate four likert-style items asking how uncomfortable they were with the scenario, how demeaning they felt the image was to Jesus, how realistic they felt the image was, and how biblical they felt the image was. Items were summed across the ratings for each scenario to create a total score (Note for social scientists: a factor analysis justified the summation). Thus, high IAS scores indicate that a person found these body images demeaning to Jesus, unrealistic, and unbiblical. As a consequence, the scenarios made the participant very uncomfortable. By contrast, low IAS scores indicate that the person found the images appropriate for Jesus, realistic, and supported by the biblical witness. These participants were very comfortable imagining these scenarios.

The associations between the measures are presented in the next slide:



As can be seen, the correlations, although not overly strong, were significant and in the predicted directions. Specifically, death anxiety was associated with Incarnational ambivalence: Those with the most death anxiety were the ones who tended to report the most discomfort over the Incarnational images. The theology measures supported this trend. Specifically, participants who were less existentially open (high DTS and low Quest scores) were the most rejecting of the Incarnational images. By contrast, orthodoxy was unrelated to Incarnational ambivalence. That is, Christian belief, generically speaking, was unassociated with feeling queasy about the Incarnation. Rather, only a certain kind of theological configuration was associated with Incarnational ambivalence. Specifically, theological configurations that are existentially repressive tend to be the ones most associated with fleeing the body of Jesus.

In conclusion, the preliminary results of this study suggest that death anxiety and existential repression are associated with feeling queasy about the Incarnation.

Death anxiety is implicated in certain Christological formulations.