The core of Christian belief has stood as a witness against such fancy. That Christ became incarnate and that God did not disdain the flesh He had made but chose to send forth His only-begotten into that flesh for us and for our salvation has at the same time but the foundation of our belief and the greatest cause of offense to the world beholden to science and the myth of progress. Not a prison but a wonderfully created gift of God, we are not embarrassed or ashamed of our bodies but celebrate them as signs of God's goodness and gifts of His own creative will and purpose. We are embodied creatures of God not as punishment and neither as our weakness but by design. That design, so profoundly crafted by God and unable for us to replicate except in the crudest fashion, is not our failing but our glory. This is the witness of Christianity. God lives in flesh for us and our flesh, even after the Fall and the curse of death, remains His gift even as it awaits its perfection in eternal life when new and glorious flesh shall replace what cannot be eternal.
C.S. Lewis coined the title, The Abolition of Man, but the work he authored is a prescient criticism of then modern attempts to debunk natural values, such as those that would deny objective value on rational grounds. This same work appears in his own fiction in That Hideous Strength. The Abolition of Man has turned out to be rather prophetic on the topic of "values", such that today they accepted as being projections of our feelings and subjective whims, and consequently, anyone who dares to speak of properly objective truth or objective moral value is engaging in an oppressive play of power." That small collection of essays which Lewis once complained had been ignored has become relevant again because of the conflict within the Western world over what it means to be human and the failure of science to offer us any help to solve such a crisis of anthropology.
In the midst of our walk to outgrow ourselves, Christians proclaim the Scriptures. “What we will be has not yet been made known” (1 John 3:2). We have become “partakers of divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), “for a little while [made] lower than angels” (Heb. 2:7–9), until the exaltation of Jesus, who “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and every name that is named” (Eph. 1:21–23) has prepared the place where we are to go to be with Him (Eph. 2:6). The resurrection does not disdain the flesh God created but transfigures it into the spiritual bodies like Jesus own glorious flesh. We plant these bodies in the earth as seed, just as Christ was planted in death to be raised in glory (1 Cor. 15:36–37). The mortal bodies are sown in dishonor and weakness not because they are bad but because of what sin did to them and so they give way to the imperishable bodies of glory and power (1 Cor. 15:42–44). What we shall be, we do not know but we dare not cast off or demean the flesh of God's own creation and redemption. Indeed, in the cemetery we pray that the God who created this body might keep these remains until the day of the resurrection of all flesh -- hardly a lament but rather the voice of hope. Our end is not the rise of the technological marvel of our own creation and a testament to our progress or evolution but rather to God's redemptive work, rescuing our bodies from the death that cursed them since Eden and promising that they too shall see them created anew when we, with our own eyes, behold God face to face.
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