Perfectly beautiful, slim, and able?: Confounding expectations of eschatological embodiment

As the postgraduate theology class was discussing the nature of the resurrection body, one student interjected with a confident laugh, “it better be slim!”. The rest all joined in his laughter, comfortable in the shared assumption that a slimmer body was desirable and somehow eschatologically normative. While they may not say it out loud, or may never have articulated it to themselves, many Christians expect that their future resurrection bodies will be quite unlike their own. The gospel accounts of the risen Christ present a body that is both continuous and discontinuous with our usual expectations of human bodies, but the discontnuity tends to lie in unexpected places: the risen Christ is still disfigured by his wounds. For personal salvation to be meaningful, continuity of personal identity must be protected, and thus so must those embodied features that are identity-forming (Whitaker, 2023). Despite this, many contemporary Christians, when prompted, offer a vision of eschatological life that is decidedly impersonal, particularly when it comes to embodiment, and those features that are elided are primarily those that do not meet the prevailing cultural standards of aesthetic perfection. The nature or *telos*of the human person is not considered, merely appearance and form.

The historical Christian tradition supports this bias. Augustine asserted that “those who, on earth, are too thin or too fat” could take comfort, for “they would not choose to be that way now if they could avoid it [and] they will certainly not be that way in eternity.” Supposedly, human bodies will be perfected by being reshaped to a “harmonious contour” and repigmented to “a certain agreeableness of colour” (*De Civitate*, 22.19). The definitions of eschatological attractiveness are categorical, despite the fact that the aesthetics of the ideal human body are subjective; concepts of beauty are culturally formed and can vary widely over both time and place.

These emphases on body-size, beauty, and non-disability persist. These are often dealt with separately in the literature, but they are interconnected by capitalism, ableism and racism, and the fear, objectification, and commercialisation of the body. These currents commingle and mutually reinforce each other in the visions offered of bodily life after death: the Christian imagination of new creation is almost uniformly populated by beautiful, slim, non-disabled people. In the Christian artistic tradition, the resurrected saints are represented as uniformly beautiful. Their bodies (usually white bodies) wear the white robes of the Book of Revelation, which while a signifier of purification and holiness are also an aesthetic ideal. This aesthetic was always a negotiated performance, accessible only to those with higher socioeconomic status (Moss, 2019), and never to those whose bodies make obvious their impairment. Historically, the fear of the curvaceous black body has undergirded the white woman’s pursuit of thinness (Strings, 2019), and this aesthetic ideal has spread globally: the slow colonial violence of expanding western beauty standards. Similarly, disabled bodies are often perceived as “ugly,” provoking basic emotive responses, including fear, pity and disgust, and it is only recently that the claim that person with disabilities might retain elements of their diverse embodiument post-resurrection has gained some traction (Whitaker, 2023). Aesthetic flawlessness is linked with virtue and moral purity in both the historical and contemporary imagination, and these physiognomic assumptions undergird not only our hopes about our future bodies but also our expectations of our present bodies.

I am consistently disturbed by the unquestioning absorption of cultural ideologies and idolatries into a theological claim about the nature of eternal embodied life. Though our eschatological imaginings are of course speculative, however informed, they are powerful nonetheless. The way people of the Christian faith in particular express their hopes and expectations of human life in the new creation reveals what they think human life is supposed to be like: what God’s good intention for humanity was in the original creation, to what kind of *telos* we will ultimately be transformed, and thus what they believe human flourishing essentially entails. The students’ shared laughter indicated the shared assumption that to truly flourish one can do so only within a slim body, that this must be what God always wanted for all of us, and that it is what he will ultimately transform us into. One hopes that the students would not share a laugh about similar assumptions around disability or race, but these currents pervade the shared understanding of what defines a good human body.

In this paper I will use a multi-layered account of identity to propose that the continuity of certain identity-forming embodied features is required to safeguard the continuity of identity through the transformation of resurrection. In the case of disability, the physical transformation of the old creation and the redeemed sociality of resurrected persons will ameliorate the impairment and disability that diverse embodiment often entails in pre-resurrection life. The defence of post-resurrection continuity of diverse embodiment in the case of disability paves the way to more easily question eschatological assumptions about all forms of diverse embodiment. The resulting vision of the new creation that includes persons with disabilities and bodies of all sizes, shapes, and colours flourishing in fullness of life is a powerful proclamation that all bodies are good bodies, which may go some way to addressing the issues of body stigma that plague us here and now.

Moss, C. R., 2019, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity, Yale University Press.

Strings, S., 2019, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, New York University Press.

Whitaker, M. I., 2023, Perfect in Weakness: Disability and Human Flourishing in the New Creation, Baylor University Press.

NOTE: Alternatively, this paper proposal could be reshaped to form a lightning session on the word “perfect” as applied to the religious body, particularly the post-resurrection body in the Christian tradition.