Last time in this series on the complex issues surrounding religious abuse and trauma we saw that trauma is about our body’s response to adverse experiences. In other words, trauma involves the deep connections between the mind and the body. This idea was popularized by Bessel van der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps the Score (2014). While some of the book’s more extreme claims have been questioned in subsequent literature, there does seem to be a consensus that negative psychological experiences are remembered by the body, and the initial response to those experiences can become a ‘standard operating procedure’ for future experiences of similar stimuli (113).* This phenomenon is known as post-traumatic stress, and its symptoms include both the mind (intrusive memories, avoidance behaviours, negative thoughts, etc.) and body (hyper-vigilance, difficulty sleeping, sweating, shaking, screaming, etc.).
Today I’d like to think through this from a theological lens: What does our Christian tradition have to say about the connection between the mind and body?
As it happens, it has quite a bit to say about it! Christianity is, in fact, a profoundly embodied tradition, to the point that humans are not conceived of so much as “embodied souls” in traditional Christianity as we are “ensouled bodies.” The body is not something secondary or unimportant, but rather an equal partner in our human experience. (Theologians call this “psychosomatic unity”: that is, the soul and body are united and indivisible. This is why, according to ancient Christian tradition, death is such a difficult process: it is unnatural for the soul and body to be torn from each other.) And it’s why the New Testament envisions the afterlife in terms of the resurrection of the body rather than immortality of the soul. This belief is most graphically represented in the doctrine of the Incarnation, which John’s gospel describes in the most embodied language possible, “the Word became flesh” (1.14). (In his 2024 novel in verse Dayspring, Anthony Oliveira powerfully added, “And the Word became flesh: coarse hair, crooked smile, the taste of salt on his clavicle.”) In a Greek cultural landscape which demeaned and denigrated the body as either unimportant or outright evil, the doctrine of the Incarnation was a powerful statement about the body’s not only practical necessity, but also theological importance, and its worthiness as a vessel for the divine.
The body’s importance however also means that we can’t say (as some like to do) that what we do with and in our body is unimportant. As I’ve previously written on this:
…Paul talks about sin — all of the ways we miss the mark in our relationships with God, ourselves, each other, and the world — as an embodied problem. This makes sense: So much of how we engage with the world is based on habit and muscle memory. And so much of how we engage with each other is based on how we feel in our bodies — relaxation, tension, anxiety, attraction, repulsion, and so on. If we add in the trauma responses discussed above, it’s no wonder that, as Paul famously says in [Romans 7], we often end up doing the things we don’t want to do and not doing the things we want to do. Our bodies respond how we’ve trained them to respond through years of practice instead of how we’d actually like to be in the world. And even worse, if our trauma responses are triggered, our bodies simply react without thinking.
As I’ve mentioned a few times over the years here, the New Testament talks about the psychology of sin using the ‘pop philosophy’ of the day, which was loosely grounded in Stoicism. Continuing from the previous quotation:
Paul connects sin’s embodied nature to what this translation calls the body’s “passions.” This needs a bit of unpacking, both since for twenty-first century English speakers, “passion” is a positive word, and since the word in Greek isn’t the normal word for passion.
The word Paul uses is epithymia, which is often translated as ‘desire’ but which can perhaps best be thought of as ‘appetite’. It’s a desire that isn’t based in cognition or active willing or wanting, but desire on an instinctive level: a craving for a particular food, the impulse to punch someone who is bothering us, or feeling horny (for lack of a more formal word). This is different from, but closely connected to, the ancient understanding of passion. Whereas for us the word ‘passion’ is about excitement for something we care about, for the ancients it was about passivity: To be ‘passionate’ meant to lose control of those bodily appetites: to let them hold sway, to be swept out to sea by these unpredictable currents.
So what Paul is saying here is that, left to their own devices, our appetites and instincts are going to control our bodily reactions, and that, more often than not, this leads us to harm our relationships, and therefore, to sin. What we need is a clean break from these old ways of being in the world. And for Paul, that means actively presenting ourselves — heart, mind, and body — to God.
In traditional Christianity, this has been generally thought of as using the mind to train the body. This is important, but I think in our increasingly digital and therefore abstracted and disembodied world, can lead to problems if left on its own. My attempts at this sort of spiritual training in my twenties left me disconnected from my body. I had unwittingly not led the body but left it behind, causing all sorts of problems. I think it was healthier for ancient Christians to talk of this kind of training unreservedly because their lives were far more embodied than our own — not just in terms of the labour required to do life, but also their religious expression too. When Western Christians (especially Protestants) first encounter Eastern Orthodox worship, the physicality of the worship — crossing oneself, processions, the incense, the sweaty-oily-crumbly-mess, the fasting, the feasting, the bowing and prostrations — is pretty shocking. In my case, it lurched my head back into communion with my body. (We might also note traditional religious practices such as meditation and breathing exercises, chant, rocking during prayer, and so on.)
What’s interesting is that trauma-informed counselors increasingly recommend therapeutic practices that look and sound a lot like these ancient sacred practices, things like conscious breathing, humming, and grounding the body in physical space (e..g, touching one’s belly, focusing on the body’s weight on one’s feet).
All this to say, as Christians we have no reason to be suspicious of a mind-body connection. It’s actually a profoundly Christian idea that we can ground in the most important teachings of our faith.
* All references, unless otherwise noted, are to Dr. Laura E. Anderson, When Religion Hurts You (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023).
