Abstract
With embodied cognitive science and the philosophy of embodiment, theological anthropologyhas gained two valuable dialogue partners who can help theology understand its own anthropological traditions better. The Old and the New Testaments conceive of the human being as embodied and embedded. Because Christianity understands the Son of God becoming human as a becoming flesh, the core of its beliefs is fundamentally anti-dualistic. As corporeal beings, however, humans are in danger of basing their actions solely on nature and thus have the tendency to radical self-assertion at the expense of others, submitting to sin. Yet biblically speaking the body is not viewed simply as a creature subject to sin, but valued as being conducive to life as sôma psychikon. In using this expression, Paul is not only thinking of the deep interrelation of subjectivity and the body, but also that of the body and its environment. Even the overcoming of sin in the so-called new creation is consummated according to Paul in the concrete and bodily ways that community is lived out and performed. Paul’s highly successful „transvaluation of all values“ (Friedrich Nietzsche) begins with altered bodily practices.
