And that’s why holiness is important, not because God is a killjoy, but because we are called to be fully human in a way most of us have scarcely begun to imagine. We ourselves are to be places where heaven and earth come together, which means that, as we pray for God’s rule to become a reality ‘on earth as in heaven’, we must daily seek to live out that reality in our own recalcitrant bodies. Platonic escapism and the asceticism that goes with it is a philosophical attempt to avoid that moral challenge by saying that the body is bad; the biblical vision is that the body is good and is to be
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