Naked and Unashamed, Pt. 1: How a Robust Theology of Nakedness Changes the Game
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| Photo by Alem Sánchez from Pexels |
TW: Brief mention of pornography and sexual abuse without detail.
It is ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning and the members of Trinity Fitness gym are panting, hearts pounding with the effort of a high intensity work out. I am among them, standing with hands on hips as I attempt to slow my breathing. I look down at my body, a habit I am prone to these days as I hope for the ever-elusive “results” that are supposed to come with a gym membership. All I see today, though, is my belly, bloated due to the fact that I have filled my body with carbs and sugar and dairy this week, my gut sending the signal that I am deeply in need of vegetables. My period is also due any day now, my womb swollen with the unshed blood that will eventually sluff off the old, dead uterine lining to make room for the new and alive. These bodily processes are creational wonders, fearfully crafted by my Heavenly Father. But I can’t see past that small roll at my waistline. I suck in, hoping no one is looking.
I know, I know. I have nothing to worry about. My body is “perfect.” At least, that’s the idea that has been lobbied at me more than once throughout my life. Not only is this somewhat inaccurate and invalidating, but it also proves the points I’m about to make:
Our bodies have become places of shame.
No matter how closely someone fits the standard of beauty in a particular culture, we still see flaws. Our eyes are trained on them. Ann Voskamp writes about seeing “a world pocked with scarcity,” and it begins when I look at myself. I study my skin, my belly, my thighs, and instead of experiencing awe that I’ve been given something holy and wonderful, I feel embarrassed. I attempt to hide.
This story is not unfamiliar to the Christians, of which I am one. I’ve been reading it in picture book Bibles since before I could walk. Adam and Eve, the first humans, were placed in a lush garden. Here the word perfect was not an overstatement or a feeble encouragement; it was true. They had it all: the best health, the fastest metabolisms, the ideal climate and diet, direct access to the Sustainer of Life—and they discarded it because someone told them there was more. They tasted a lie. “[A]nd they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7 ESV).
The story hits differently when you have spent your whole life hearing the refrain, just eight verses earlier, “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25 ESV). It racks me with sorrow. I can’t remember a time reading this passage that my heart didn’t pull with the grief of all that was lost. Because I believe that they didn’t just lose it for themselves. They lost it for me.
In a rather impulsive move, I once answered a question asked to me on social media—“What is something about you I would be surprised to know?”—with the confession that I love to be naked. I do. At the beginning and end of most days, I go into the privacy of my bathroom and strip down to my birthday suit to enter the luxury of my unshared bathtub. (I grew up in a family of seven—bathtubs were always shared.) While my rolls are in full view—and I will admit, I often look upon them with disappointment—I adore the feeling of being clothed only in skin, with no need to cover the fact that God gave me flesh. Away from watchful eyes, I celebrate my embodiment.
Sometimes, I imagine what it will be like to share this naked body if I ever marry. That, too, sounds glorious to me. To be naked without shame and simultaneously in intimate relationship with someone covenanted to love my rolls? Heaven on earth.
And then reality comes back, ice poured into the warmth of my bath, because I’m not actually that sexy; and intimacy with anyone, naked or clothed, is definitely not sexy; and my culture’s experience of bodies is as broken as the rest of it.
Sometimes, when I was growing up, naked people would appear in a textbook or a documentary, usually from another culture or in an example of anatomy. My mom would say, “It’s like National Geographic,” thus giving us permission to look on the picture without cringing away in shame. I always wondered, though, what made National Geographic different than porn. They’re all nude, right? Apparently, even my evangelical subculture had accepted the idea that nakedness used for the sake of education is permissible. It didn’t quite make sense but I was afraid to ask.
There was a sense of amusement whenever anyone spoke about these people from other countries who walked around unclothed. I grew up understanding them as less civilized, almost animal-like. After all, they were presented on glossy pages like wildebeest and zebras, just another part of nature living in the wild, brought back to the civilized West to be gawked at. I wonder now if they ever signed a release giving permission for their photographs to be used in such a way. I’m sure some of them were interviewed, but I don’t recall paying attention to a single personal story. But it wasn’t porn, so I looked.*
Speaking of porn, that’s a whole other view of naked body, from gawking to using. Truthfully, I don’t have the hard hitting statistics memorized like many of my Bible school colleagues do, but I know what it is to sexualize someone or something because I’ve done it. It’s easy; in fact, it’s conditioned. Even Christians are taught that lust is a natural part of life. We are trained from toddlerhood, mostly implicitly, to view everyone we cannot touch as an object for our pleasure—and eventually it extends to those we can touch.
Either way, gawking or using, or even (perhaps especially) avoiding, as Christians are taught to do, there is shame. Whether it’s “I can’t believe they walk around like that,” or “I can stop whenever I want,” shame is present, so deeply rooted and expertly numbed that we usually don’t acknowledge it anymore. It has become our birthright.
Thus, like Adam and Eve, we hide. Our fig leaves are a bit more fashionable, a bit more creative, perhaps, but they serve the same primary purpose: to cover our nakedness. To cover our shame.
We have become adept at this: We now know that horizontal stripes bring emphasis to body parts, and vertical stripes have a slimming effect. We’ve developed whole scientific systems on color and shape to tell people exactly how to dress so they look the best they can. We invented Spandex. Fig leaves were a hasty solution before God showed up, but given thousands of years? We got good.
I will pause here to say that I actually love clothes. I even love the color/shape science. And in the garden, before Adam and Eve left, God gifted them with clothing. In fact, clothing in the Bible became symbolic, a metaphor used over and over again all the way to the descriptions of Jesus in Revelation, after everything is redeemed. That’s a whole other blog post. Suffice it to say, clothes are a good, God-given thing AND it is still true that they inherently represent a broken reality. It’s called tension; it’s a good thing, I promise.
I find it interesting, though, in light of this, that Christ came into this world naked and died naked. In an art and literature class in college, we were assigned a video to watch about carvings and statues of Jesus on the cross. At one point, the camera panned down the span of the whole figure to show the details. Discussing the video in class, one student said, “It was hard to watch. I had to use my thumb to cover his…his…”
“His part,” the professor replied, nodding to him to continue. (The word penis was, of course, off limits, as this was Bible school.)
We are ashamed even of Christ’s glorious nakedness! We do not know how to cope with a Christ who embraces his embodied form so completely as to surrender it to full display in ultimate humiliation. But that is our redemption: Just us as He gave Himself to death that we might live, He gave Himself to naked shame that we might no longer remain hidden. God’s pursuit of mankind did not stop when he handed them lambskin and banished us from Eden. It extended into His becoming us, literally: naked, shamed, and banished from the holiest place. And we can hardly bear to look at it.
The implications of a robust theology of nakedness are beginning to sound radical to my own ears. Much as I like being naked, I’m not planning on a nude bike ride any time soon. (This was a thing in Chicago.) I will say, I believe there are spiritual and emotional implications to the perfect vulnerability experienced by Adam and Eve in the Garden, as well as the way it broke after the fall. I plan to write a book about all of this. But I don’t think the implications stop at the spiritual.
In ordaining clothing, God invited man into an ethic of decency that now varies greatly culture to culture. There are many instances in the Bible in which nakedness is stewarded in exactly the wrong way, enough to be condemned as sin. So don’t sign up for the naked bike ride just yet. Hear me out, though: A robust theology of nakedness has implications for the way we treat our own bodies and those of others.
Bodies are NOT objects of shame, and are not to be treated as such. This concept alone has a ripple affect that extends for miles. Take, for instance, the Western evangelical concept of modesty (I’m generalizing here, but indulge me). The idea is that women should cover up as much skin, shadow, and curve as possible because men are lust-crazed and will inevitably use women as objects of shame if given the chance. It helps no one. Women are still objects, shrouded in frumpy clothing, and men are monsters. Shame all around. Our roles in the story are spelled out for us before we even leave the safety of our showers.
What if, instead, we practiced an entirely different approach: not gawking, using, or avoiding…but beholding.
Beholding still looks. It does not ignore the fact that we have skin. But it sees differently. The beholding gaze is a protective one that sees the full beauty and sacredness of the human form and esteems it beyond the level of ever being used. To the beholder, the thought of merely using a body is sacrilege, desecration. They perish the thought, not because they are “supposed” to, but because the goodness of the body is so important that it does not make sense to see it any other way. Abuse becomes unthinkable, not because bodies are covered but because the vision has changed.
The only people like this I have ever actually encountered are artists.
I was in high school the first time I met a Christian who painted nudes. She was a friend of my grandmother’s, and I had the privilege of taking a tour of her studio. Many of the paintings hung or propped around the room were in a category she called “Spirit paintings,” created during intentional communion with God. She believed images on those canvases were given by Him; the way she spoke, it was like He guided her very brushstrokes.
On an easel in a back room was a self-portrait of sorts, the artist lying down naked in a blooming thicket, asleep with a smile on her face. “I didn’t realize until I was finished, but look.” She pointed above and below the figure. “I painted His hands.”
It was true. The plants around her formed two cupped hands, holding her, protecting her. From that moment on, the image was planted in my heart as the way I wanted to relate to God. I wanted to be naked before Him and held in His hands. Beheld by Him in my total vulnerability.
The artist painting a nude portrait, if they are good at their craft, does not seek to use or gawk at the human body. They seek to capture its beauty. They are perhaps the only people left who understand that the body is not an object of shame but a storehouse of glory, stamped with the Image of the Divine. They may spend hours gazing upon a naked frame, taking in every minute detail to immortalize forever. For them, beholding is commonplace, a well-practiced skill.
Oh, that the same might be said for those who follow Christ!
May we not use or run from bodies but behold them, in every state of self-expression, as crowning wonders of Creation. May we not gawk at unfamiliar views of modesty but gently make space for our schemas to change. May we not look upon ourselves with shame, but with relish, deeply enjoying God’s gift of flesh.
May we be unashamed, naked or clothed, confident in the goodness of God on our behalf, for the Naked Christ was crucified that we might come out of our hiding.
This is the result of a robust theology of nakedness. It changes the way we see. It lends corrective action to our theologies of the body, sin, humanity, and even the Image of God. It influences how we treat vulnerability. It may even make our churches safer.
Maybe I've gone crazy, but maybe these words are a challenge worth taking. Notice I have not prescribed detailed action steps. This was intentional. Practical theology needs to be hashed out for oneself. I am coming into what I believe, now it's your turn.
Resources for a Theology of Nakedness:
* Theology of the Body for Beginners by Christopher West: This is on my reading list still, but people I trust have raved about it so I feel good about recommending it.
* The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis: Nakedness is peripheral in this one, but it’s a good take on how we might clothe (or not clothe) our bodies after redemption.
* This post about marriage by Ann Voskamp. It holds the mess and magic of embodiment in tandem well.
* Follow this badass lady Sheila Gregoire on Instagram—she’s very hard-hitting but she’ll learn ya a thing or two about righteous embodiment.
* sCrIpTuRe: This resource is listed last on purpose for a lot of reasons, which I don’t feel like explaining now because it is way past my bedtime. (DM me or email me, I’ll do it then.) Do a word study of “naked” and see watcha find. I bet some of it will surprise you….
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