There is flesh and then there is flesh. The Bible uses the term "flesh" in a number of different ways. It uses it positively; for example when it describes the incarnation of our Lord, "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (Jn 1:14). The apostle Paul can use it negatively as referring to the flesh as the vehicle and locus of the fallen nature and its proclivity toward wickedness, as he does when he says, 'Those who are in the flesh cannot please God' (Rm 8:8). Flesh then becomes the marker or sign of the diseased fallen nature. Flesh taken by itself is a good creation of God, and that in and of itself is not the problem. After God had created Adam and Eve he looked upon them, together with all of creation, and pronounced them to be "very good" (Gn 1:31).

The tangibility of our flesh and our psychic familiarity with it, makes it impossible for us to distinguish for ourselves the flesh from our perversity. It is a distinction open only to theology, not to experience. Because of the Pauline usage, the "flesh" almost always smacks of wicked and often sexually perverse behavior. We are to hate the sins of the flesh and avoid them. But we must be careful that we do not reject the flesh as a good and precious gift of God along with that hatred. That hatred must not be turned on the flesh as God's creation.

Unfortunately, it seems a very short step from the hatred of the sins of the flesh to hatred of the flesh itself. I wonder if young people who have been sheltered from the mercy of Christ and the preaching of the gospel turn on themselves in self loathing, because they don't know that the Word has become the flesh to redeem the flesh in its fallenness. (Could we learn to hate our flesh, if we have always hated God? He is its Creator.) We feel the burden of the flesh, but we don't free ourselves from that burden by self-mutilation. When critic Meghan Cox Gurdon recently criticized the increasingly dark and violent content of books written for adolescents and teens in the "Young Adult" genre, she was roundly criticized, as though she had suggested that public libraries should be torched with all the books they hold. In a Wall Street Journal article defending her position she diagnosed the problem with many Young Adult books, "It is true that so-called problem novels may be helpful to children in anguished circumstances. The larger question is whether books about rape, incest, eating disorders and "cutting" (self-mutilation) help to normalize such behaviors for the vast majority of children who are merely living through the routine ordeals of adolescence" (WSJ 28 June 2011).

But what is the solution to this "dark" view of life magnified by much of this genre of literature? Fewer books of this kind? Perhaps. But that may not be getting down to causes. Why have popular authors taken up these subjects with such gusto? Why have young people taken to slicing themselves and reveling in the infliction of pain? Why have they been attracted to this literature? While psychological answers may be close at hand, it seems to me that the problem is in part that young people do not know that Christ has taken their flesh, and made it something new by redeeming it from the fallen way of life into which every human has been born. We are far better off seeing our flesh as Christ's, rather than loathing so that a slow suicide becomes our solution. Christ offered our flesh up to death in His own person on the tree of the cross to return it to us as a holy instrument for His good purposes. The nails cut through His skin and sinews that ours might not be.