The Flesh That Matters

What if our bodies aren't simply vessels to transcend, but essential aspects of our humanity? In episode 1 of "Being Human" we delve into this provocative question with  Dr Isabelle Hamley and host Matt Cooper exploring the tensions of embodied existence in our increasingly digital world.

comms@ridley.cam.ac.uk

www,ridley.cam.ac.uk

Transcript

Introduction to Being Human

Speaker 1 0:00

Cool. Hello everyone, Thank you for coming and listening to the first of what hopefully will be many of Ridley Hall podcast productions. This is a limited series called being Human that me and Isabel are going to be trying to explore and bring some sense of biblical wisdom and insight into the challenge, the opportunity, the human situation. Isabel, just introduce yourself. Who are you? What's your job? Where have you come from? What gives you the authority to speak about being human?

Speaker 2 0:38

I'm not sure I have the authority to speak, but I'm Isabel Hamley. I'm the principal at Raleigh Hall, which is a college that trains people for ministry in the church, and I'm a biblical scholar. So I love Scripture, the Old Testament in particular, in particular the bits that everybody finds difficult, and I love asking why is that there and what do we do with it, and how does Scripture help us live our lives?

Speaker 1 1:01

And just so everyone's sure, isabel is the kind of person that is translating ancient languages of the Bible into English so that she can then make commentary on it. She's not content just using someone else's translation. That's the kind of amazing person that's going to be part of this. My name's Matt person that's going to be part of this. Um, my name is matt. Um, I'm head of marketing at ridley hall, but also an aspiring writer myself on on various topics and have, yeah, vested interest in topics of being human, because I am one, and I guess so are you. You are French, but you are human.

Speaker 2 1:43

Last time I looked, yes.

Humanity in a Digital World

Speaker 1 1:44

Okay, that's good, cool. Well, let's crack on with it. This is episode one of being Human, produced by Ridley Hall. It's three o'clock in the afternoon and the school bell is minutes away. You can feel it coming like when the wind picks up before a storm. Even the teachers begin to ease off, winding down their final sentences half-heartedly, pretending we're all still listening. The volume of the classroom begins to rise. The soft bud of closed books, the shuffle of bags, whispers turn to chatter. Hey, hey, what. What time are we meeting tonight? Four o'clock when. Call of duty, yeah, cool. The bell rings, that glorious, slightly distorted ring. The siren of freedom. Chairs forcibly screech backward. It's home time.

Speaker 1 2:52

We burst out of the classroom. It's a fight through the door, down the corridor, dodging teachers Laughing too loudly, shouting vague goodbyes, school bag thudding against my back, legs flying. I run home. I've got places to be. We're meeting soon. Front door swings open. The bit at the bottom of the door falls off. My dad won't be happy about that, but I've not got time to sort it out. Shoes kicked off. He won't like that either. Tie yanked loose, jumper flung on the nearest chair. Mum calls something from the kitchen. I can't quite hear. She won't like that. I've got places to be Straight to the cupboard. Cereal, the best kind. Milk Spoon Munch. Playstation on Headset plugged in Login screen glowing. I made it Headset plugged in Login screen going. I made it One minute to spare.

Speaker 2 3:54

Humanity isn't an easy thing to live with. We often struggle with our limitations and the realities of a physical world that we can't ever fully control, a human world of interactions that bring as much pain as it does joy. And yet this is the existence that God chose and embraced, the existence that brought salvation, not by removing us from our humanity, but by God entering it and inviting us into a journey of transformation within it.

Speaker 1 4:28

In this six-part limited series produced by Ridley Hall Cambridge, isabel Hamley and I are going to be discussing some of the unique situations, opportunities and challenges us humans are facing and try to gain unique insights and wisdom that the Bible and the Christian life can offer us. This episode Embodied unique insights and wisdom that the Bible and the Christian life can offer us. This episode Embodied Are we trying to escape our bodies? Do you think?

Speaker 2 5:10

Well, I think the story you told is a perfect example of that, isn't it? You're like you're in class, you're with a friend you plan to meet later, but you're not actually meeting. You're going online in separate rooms playing a video game, and at one level, there's nothing wrong with that, but at another, I think we do that in so many parts of our lives, don't we? In the contemporary world, we meet online, we work online, we have less and less embodied interaction. We have arguments online where you can't see a person's face, their facial expression, the impact of your words on that other person, and I think that's something really interesting about that.

Speaker 2 5:47

Why is it that we long for the digital world so much where we can hide some of who we are, manipulate our photos so that our real, embodied kind of person are not fully seen? They're hidden, they're masked, they're changed, and I think in the wider world we do that as well. You know, look at how many TikTok videos are about losing weight or getting a better body, or, you know, putting makeup on, and we spend so much time kind of almost battling the fact that we're embodied and trying to make ourselves different.

Speaker 1 6:23

Do you think it's a unique situation that we're in because of technology? Has technology given us a way of escaping our bodies that people from the Old Testament just never had, so they could never even consider it as an option?

Speaker 2 6:35

I think that's true, though I don't think it's new. I mean, there's plenty of Greek philosophy that considers you know, are you a whole person or are you a body and a soul? And does the body matter or is it just the soul that matters? So I think that's as long as humanity has been, there has been this tendency to want to think is there something that's just me, that's completely separate from my body, or am I a whole thing? And if I'm a whole thing, how do I deal with what other people see, with what is there in the world? How do I deal with the fact that I'm a whole person and I can't just easily kind of divide myself between body, mind and soul?

Speaker 1 7:18

I definitely grew up in a Christian tradition in a sense where the body was secondary to the spirit, maybe even secondary to emotion. Well, the spirit was definitely on the kind of pedestal right that was the most important part of humankind. And then gradually we introduced this idea of the mental being and the social being, kind of, and they caught up. But there there still feels to me like there's a tendency to say the body is this temporary vessel. I was workshopping this in my head a little bit before having this conversation and this is pure observation because I've never been an atheist so I can't 100 comment on what it's like. But I wonder whether there's something in the body is the pinnacle of the experience for the non-christian, and for the christian it's like the worst bit of the experience sex, drugs, alcohol, party life, you know these feel quite grounded in your physicality, whereas when you're a christian it's kind of like, well, that's kind of the worst bit that life has to offer. Do you see that?

Christians and the Body Problem

Speaker 2 8:28

I kind of see that I think Christian tradition has a lot to answer for, actually, in how we talk about the body in really, really unhelpful ways. I think it's extraordinary, isn't it, that the center of our faith is God made flesh. The word made flesh, it's the incarnation. And what do we do? We spend centuries trying to disincarnate the gospel, trying to take the body bit out and just say no, no, what matters is the spirit. Well, god could have come as spirit. Only God could have just touched our spirits. But God didn't do that. God came as a full human person.

Speaker 2 9:02

If you think about it, we're promised a resurrection. It's a bodily resurrection. We're not saying, oh, there's a bit of soul, that's the bit that matters, and you lose your body and then you really reattach a body into it. Actually, you're a whole person. In Hebrew, in the Old Testament, you don't have a body, you are a body.

Speaker 2 9:23

And in the logic of Scripture, actually, bodies matter because there are consequences. If we say bodies don't matter, then does it matter if bodies are abused or maimed or hurt? If bodies don't matter, does it matter whether people go hungry and thirsty? You know, actually we have to be able to say that bodies matter if we want to look for justice, for instance.

Speaker 2 9:42

I think Christians are afraid because actually a lot of God goes wrong in life, goes wrong in our bodies, but I think that's partly because it goes wrong in our minds as well. I think the stuff you mentioned if you look at the things that go wrong in our intimate relationship or with drugs or with whatever, it's never just about the body, is it? It's about what's going on in the whole of you. But the body is where we make it visible and where we hurt one another. But I'm not sure that the answer to that is to divide the body from the soul. I think the answer to that is to look at whole persons and kind of say what does it look like to live well as this person who has a body?

Speaker 1 10:24

Is that a new idea for you as someone that's deeply grounded in kind, of the stories of ancient human life? Is that something that people have done better than we have, or is that something that actually we've not really got a clear idea of what it looks like to do that well?

Speaker 2 10:43

Well, I think it's both hands. So, to a degree, human beings have always struggled to live well, haven't they? That's the whole story of scripture, but I would say certainly, being an Old Testament scholar, I would say the Hebrew scriptures are better at that. You know, if you read Leviticus. You know, have you read Leviticus recently?

Speaker 1 11:00

Everybody's favourite book, isn't it? I can't say that I nobody read it this morning particularly loves leviticus.

Speaker 2 11:07

But if you read leviticus what you see is that sense of everything matters. The whole of life matters. You know, how you, how you treat your animals, matters. How you deal with the, the body that is sick, matters. How you deal with the reality of our bodily kind of interactions with other people matters. And so there's this sense of the whole of life being together and there's no division between different types of sin or different types of holiness. It's like the whole person is called to be holy. You know, be holy as I am holy, says the Lord, leviticus 19. That's not an attitude of the mind, that's not about the soul, that's about the whole person. And what I find interesting in Leviticus it's quite granular. That's the bit where it gets boring. But it's also interesting because it says there is nothing that is too small or too insignificant for God. There is nothing that's too small or too insignificant for us not to pay attention to how that small thing kind of might affect our relationships with God on one another.

Speaker 1 12:13

So that unravels, in the sense of being like my little finger, is of equal value as my greatest feat of imagination or my greatest greatest in a sense, yes which is really odd because I guess we've we've been doing this with sin and we've been doing this with everything. Is that our success metrics apart from olympians, where we see the body as this massive like win? Our success metrics of being human? Yeah, feels like it's quite limited to not to do with the body. It's not how well you look after your little finger.

Speaker 2 12:50

But even then I would say I was watching the final of the Euros with the lionesses and the commentators said multiple times oh, it's not just about body, it's about the mind, it's about your control. So they were very, very keen to kind of help people see that actually sport isn't just about body, it's about the mind, it's about your control. So so they were very, very keen to kind of help people see that actually sport isn't just about the body even, and I think that's good in many ways, because that's true. But it's also interesting that we feel the need to kind of reassure people almost that that's the case there was this friend that I had.

Speaker 1 13:22

uh well, was he a friend? I'm not sure he was a friend. He was an acquaintance that I made because I got involved with a different youth working organization at the time. At the time I was a youth worker myself in London and we were collaborating with a different organization and this person that I was working with, we had a real bust up over this idea of the hope of being a Christian. Is heaven very much him, and I was like, oh, that's way too far away. Yeah, like my hope needs to be for today, like because I don't really have any otherwise, like if we just put in the hope back and I guess there's something about us as Christians, as ministers, particularly trying to draw that hope into the now which really speaks to the bodies, what's your interpretation of, you know, is it a greater hope that one day we're going to resurrect in heaven, or is it on par? I mean, again, I don't know if you can speak about it like that, but are they kind of equal hopes that God can be made manifest now as much as?

Heaven, Hope and Resurrection

Speaker 2 14:28

To me they're not dissociated from each other, they're not two separate things, because if you say you know, as the lines of the Lord's Prayer, your kingdom, may your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, and that tells us that Jesus encourages us to think as we pray about the way in which our picture of heaven needs to transform our picture of life on earth. So there's not two different things. The kingdom that we think about being the kingdom of heaven also needs to be the thing that guides how we think about God is acting kind of today. So I think there's something about thinking about that greater hope. But that greater hope needs to be our kind of template for how we live today, and I think how we live today also kind of helps us understand what comes next. So I find it really interesting that we talk about the kingdom of God. Now, I know some people don't like the word kingdom because it kind of conjures up images of imperialism, colonialism and all of that.

Speaker 2 15:32

But I think I want to retain the term, partly because the idea is that it is a different kind of king anyway, but also because the image of the kingdom is that image of people in relation. The kingdom isn't just about me here relating to God, you over there relating to God. You know, like you know, in my father's house there are many rooms. Please can I have a single en suite. It's not that it's a kingdom, it's everybody relating together and you still have that sense of almost an economy and a society. And so we're not thinking of life, the life of the kingdom in heaven, as radically different from life on earth, and God is not going to be radically different in heaven than God is.

Speaker 1 16:17

That's a really weird concept. I think this because you do you push out, or at least I do you push out. This idea of heaven is so distant from what this is that actually there's nothing relatable. There's nothing that I'll recognize, but maybe there is, or in some way at least.

Speaker 2 16:37

None of us know. But if you think of the resurrection appearances of Jesus, right, jesus was different. He was different enough that the disciples, on the road to Emmaus, walk with him and don't recognize him. But he's still human, he still has a body.

Speaker 2 16:53

He still has the scars in his hand, he's still eating, he still breaks the bread, at which point people recognize him. So I think there is that sense of both continuity and discontinuity and of course we don't know exactly what heaven looks like and, to be honest, I'm not particularly interested in trying to work it out because we have no way of knowing, and I kind of trust that God's got that one first.

Speaker 1 17:16

You know if.

Speaker 2 17:17

I can try and live better and enable others to live well around me now. I think that's what God is calling me to do now. I don't think God is calling me to just live in tomorrow. And there's a real risk with that, isn't it? I mean, if you read some of the rhetoric of preaching in the deep South under slavery, there was a real sense of trying to kind of portray Christianity. Oh well, you know, if you have a bad time now, that's fine, because you'll have a great time in heaven. And I think if you're constantly looking for that hope over there, it takes away the motivation and the responsibility to work for the kingdom of God today, to joining with what God is doing to transform the world as it is.

Speaker 1 18:00

Do you think the physical body has fallen as much as the rest of us has?

Speaker 2 18:06

I just don't think about the body and the rest of me. I think I'm a whole person, I'm a whole thing and I think the whole, the whole of what it means to be human is both made in the image of god and falls short because of what happens, and I don't think you can dissociate the body from the rest. So it's really interesting when I think some of the reasons why Christians have often kind of dissociated body and other parts of ourselves is the talk of the flesh. Like you know, the flesh is weak.

Speaker 2 18:37

But actually a lot of talk of flesh in the Bible is really positive. You know, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, that's we're part, we're together, we're kin, we're part of the same family. There's God treats flesh tenderly. So flesh is the place where we're fragile and where God kind of comes to meet us. But also, you know, the word was made flesh and then you know we're told that this is where God brings His glory and we see the glory of God in that body that God has made. And if you can see the glory of God in the body and in the flesh you know John's Gospel then you can't just see the body as somehow more fallen or more problematic than any other part of us. And equally, salvation also comes in the flesh, which I find really interesting. So we're very good as Christians at talking about how sin is. You know the sin of the flesh, but actually salvation takes hold in the whole of ourselves, including our bodies, and salvation comes through the body of Christ.

Speaker 1 19:45

Yeah, so what does? Does that? My dad would love to ask this question, probably. I mean, it's silly me asking because I'm gonna ask what's. You know, is running a form of worship, in a sense, leading on from all of this? So my dad is a big runner. I don't run at all. I I can tell. All right, when was the last time you did exercise?

Speaker 2 20:10

I don't think exercise is good for me.

Speaker 1 20:12

Okay, cool, you're one of them, one and only people. It's like to be fair. Maybe that's true. I need to do some exercise. Worship, in my understanding at least, this process of bringing yourself in line and the surrendering of yourself to God and pouring out your prayers and all of the various articulations of that, bringing our body into it is perhaps something that you know. Maybe we're not as familiar with, and I know, for instance, someone like my father who, especially in the latter years of his life as a Christian, has felt increasingly complex about worship and what it means to live a worshiping life and at least feels a sense that when he's exercising which he does a lot that there is some kind of interaction between God there.

Speaker 1 21:06

How do you see that? Do you see there being some kind of line that we can draw between that, the activities of our body and looking after our body or healthy eating might be another one is is that a posture of worship?

Touch, COVID and Human Connection

Speaker 2 21:19

well, if you go back to leviticus, certainly what you eat right and what you do with your body is part of worshipping God by attending to what it is to be holy to be the people of God, and I don't think that has to be in a slavish way or in a really controlling or kind of rule-bound way, but being able to ask what is it that I am doing? How do I care for myself in the right way. I think that those are spiritual questions, not just kind of material questions that have nothing to do with God. I find that walking in nature helps me worship, because there is something about the beauty of creation that, for me, just has got a very spiritual kind of meaning.

Speaker 1 22:05

That's an interesting one because I feel like I hear people talk about that a lot, but do you think that's the observation of the world or is there something innate in you being physical in that moment?

Speaker 2 22:18

I think it's a little bit of both, but for me there is something about just being in awe at the world that God has made. But there is something as well about recognizing my own participation into the world. So you know, if you read the creation story in Genesis 2, I find it really interesting that the first human created is taken out of the ground.

Speaker 2 22:41

So if we do a little bit of Hebrew, the grind is adamah in Hebrew, and the human person that is made is the Adam ha-Adam, so it's based on the Hebrew word for grind.

Speaker 2 22:56

So what basically is happening is God makes a grind creature, or grindling, as various theologians have said, and so even the name that is given for what it is to be human is connected to the earth to the grind, and there is something about being in nature and recognizing that as a human person, I am dependent on the ecosystem that God has given me and I am made of the grind and of the breath of God. You know, in that story you're kind of both dust and glory, as it were, and there is something for me about being in nature that reminds me of that and that reminds me that how I treat nature, how I treat the natural world, is part of my worship.

Speaker 1 23:39

That's the beauty of things like touch, which is obviously a physical sense and part of being embodied, is that it, through touching a tree or whatever, there is a connection back to our the roots of humanity. Yeah, it's you know, touching leaves is not just some kind of hippie activity oh, thank you. I'm a tree hugger, so that's good I mean I'm, I'm perfectly at home hugging trees, but touch is interesting, isn't it?

Speaker 2 24:08

Because that's one of the places where I think in modern life we're becoming afraid of bodies, in two areas that I've been thinking about that are relevant to the church really. I mean, one is the post-COVID thing, so in.

Speaker 2 24:21

COVID, we were afraid of each other's bodies, because it was made really clear to us that our bodies were dangerous. So I had this thing where I you know, I became really ill with COVID quite early on and you couldn't just go to the doctor because you couldn't. So they sent because I needed to see a doctor. They sent a taxi to collect me and the taxi driver wouldn't come out or anything. So I had to open the taxi door.

Speaker 2 24:44

The taxi was all lined in plastic, with every little gap between the front and the back of the taxi Separate. There was like things for me to wear, gloves and everything kind of all the protective gear. And then the taxi dropped me off. I could barely walk, I was struggling to breathe but nobody would help me because we were too afraid of one another, and then dropped me off at this medical centre lined in plastic everywhere. So you arrive as somebody who's really ill ill enough to need a doctor, but they didn't have chairs because they thought having chairs was too dangerous because you might contaminate one another. And then when I got to see the doctor, the doctor wore all protective gear a mask, a shield and everything. I couldn't see anything of the doctor's humanity. It honestly felt like the most dehumanizing experience of my entire life. But we were afraid of that physicality and I think post-COVID we've retained some of that. We've retained some of that fear, some of that sense that the other person might be dangerous.

Speaker 2 25:46

And then the other area where we do that is things like safeguarding when touch and bodies have gone so wrong, we've abused each other one another so much that we're now kind of almost saying you know we mustn't touch, but actually human beings need touch as well, you know, and I guess it spirals out of control.

Speaker 1 26:08

If someone's lonely and doesn't have children or a spouse, yeah, or where do you get a hug? Where do you get a hug? I know because one of our very elderly people come to work with her and actually sometimes she found that a lot of them needed that, even though she was doing physical work, the physical touch was something which was actually as restorative as as the work itself yeah, and it's, but I think, as human beings, we're confused about that.

Speaker 2 26:52

We don't know what to do. We don't know how to touch one another in a way that's responsible and holy and but, but the solution isn't to run away from touch either, yeah, so how we find that right balance, I think is something that, as a society, we're really struggling with.

Speaker 1 27:10

It's scary, isn't it? The social lines of this are so intimidating, like I'm not going to go anywhere near touching anything Like a shoulder, or if you can see someone's crying. We have a problem with the embodiment of being just people, community.

Speaker 1 27:31

Until we can find some sense of, it's going to take courage to be re-embody ourself yeah and maybe that's what we're missing is like and and, I guess, some grace for recognizing that we all need to try and do that yeah, whilst maintaining, yeah, whilst not losing the lessons that clearly we need to learn we need to learn from the abusive touch.

Digital Devices and Embodied Living

Speaker 1 27:58

Yeah, um, I just want to touch on this digital thing again. We started off with um, a story from from my youth years. I was born in 95 and probably I mean I've read a book called the anxious generation which details out this radical switch between children going to the park to play after school to children going home to their own like games, consoles. Yeah, it was particularly detailing um, guys in this chapter, boys in this chapter. But do you think this is now a problem which is just starting? So it's starting out in our youth and by the time we reach adulthood and we're meant to be custodians of how we engage with each other through touch and and how we are responsible of looking after our bodies, if we're not learning how to do that in the park where it's where you can get it wrong as a 14 year old.

Speaker 1 28:55

And you know cause they even. You know when I was there was a real switch, probably when I was in school. I, like the first couple of years, were very much still football down the park. The last years were, you know there's a we would make lots of, probably you know, 12 year old, 13 year old decisions when it came to, you know, having fight proper fights which is an abusive people's bodies, the way that we probably, like girls and boys, learn about each other and their bodies. If you're revisiting that when you're 20 and the stakes are a lot higher at that point and the grace obviously for a 20-year-old learning how to be in their body is a lot less than a 13-year-old. One of the suggestions that the anxious generation made was that we just need to put a complete, blanket ban on digital devices. How does that sit?

Speaker 2 29:58

with you for embodied people. I think blanket bans on things that have been discovered have not been shown to work well in history you know, but you know what I?

Speaker 2 30:08

mean yeah so for me? I'm a mom, I have a, you know, I have an 18 year old um. I've always asked myself how do I? I can see some of the harm that technology has done, but I can see also some of the benefits, and I've always thought my job as a mom is not to try and get her to grow up in a different world than the one she's in. My job as a parent is to try and say how can I help you reflect on your world? How can I help you reflect on your world? How can I help you be responsible in how you engage in this world? How can I help you have a little bit of distance, you know, from the digital world? So you you learn how to have a filter about what you see, how to analyze it, how to tell what's real and what's not real, and how do I help you engage with it responsibly. So, for good or worse, you know, we did allow a smartphone.

Speaker 1 31:02

Because I guess your daughter grew up exclusively in this world, exclusively in this world.

Speaker 2 31:07

She's never known anything else, and often she says I wish I hadn't.

Speaker 1 31:11

Right, and I think there's probably a lot of us that wish.

Speaker 2 31:14

But you can't turn back the clock, you can't uninvent the smartphone, you can't uninvent computers. So the real question for us is well, how do we do this? Well, are there limits we need to put? So, for instance, I think banning phones in school is a good idea.

Speaker 1 31:30

I don't mind a child having a phone in a bag. So you kind of gatekeep specific areas, specific spaces and times.

Speaker 2 31:37

And you know, I know I'd probably be a bit unpopular for that, but I am doubtful about online work. I think at least having some hybrid work is really important. It's really really hard to know when a colleague is really struggling If you haven't got to know them, if you don't see them, if you don't pick up all the little cues for body language.

Speaker 2 31:58

It's much harder to build a team if all you do is online space, because your online space is a business space. You know it's task focused, it's. You're meeting online to do the stuff that you need to do. You might have a tiny bit of chit chat to do the stuff that you need to do.

Speaker 2 32:16

You might have a tiny bit of chit-chat, but actually you're losing that liminal space around where you meet over coffee, where you go out for a drink after work, where you get to know one another as people, you know as entire people, and I think I worry that we're impoverishing relationships because we are reducing relationships to business and tasks by doing them online. And if you look at, you know probably the thing that worries me the most about online spaces is the level of polarization and aggression that you see online and you know I'm not naive People do that in person as well. But I think a lot of people I know they're people, I know and I think you would never behave like this towards a real person sitting in front of you, because you would see you're making them cry.

Speaker 2 33:02

You would see how devastated they are their body would be given all the cues of this is wrong, kind of really horrendously abusive or just really harsh judgment on people, in a way that in person you would see the otherness of that person, you would see the space between you, you would see the impact of your own words and I think you would temper your reaction accordingly.

Speaker 1 33:33

So the biblical wisdom on this body does sit, yeah, in equal value, yeah, and maybe, maybe the shift that if anyone still and and it's a shift even I'm having to make, because this idea of tool, it's strange, isn't it, because we call it an episode embodied with and then, inherently, I made the jump to talking about the body yeah but it seems like one of the helpful shifts that we can be making is trying to go no, no, no, not the body and the soul and the it's it's you it's you, the person, the person, yeah and that, and let that way of articulating something spiral out into the way that we engage with the world and engage with ourselves.

Speaker 1 34:18

Yeah, is that fair?

Speaker 2 34:20

I think that's fair.

Speaker 1 34:22

Beautiful.

Closing Thoughts

Speaker 2 34:26

He was in the world and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Speaker 1 35:07

Well, this has been episode one of being Human Embodied, and on the next episode we're're gonna be discussing being related and dependent, so be sure to tune in for that one.