Liposuction and the Incarnation

Here's a Christmas gift for the girl who has already carved her thighs, ballooned her breasts and shrunk her tummy --- a lobe job to plump up her ears.

Socialites may perk their saggy ears at the thought; but the death of Donda West, mother of rapper Kanye West, has heightened public awareness of the physical dangers of cosmetic surgery. Lilian Calles Barger, author of Eve's Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body, told WoW she is concerned about the spiritual dangers, too.

Barger argues that the church still divides body from soul, embracing the age-old Gnostic heresy that the body is something to transcend, not something to redeem. She said most Christians assume that God has nothing to say about the body, but "God is in the business of bringing our bodies into wholeness." She calls cosmetic surgery "violence to the body" and says that women are sacrificing their bodies to the "false idols of beauty and consumer culture."

Other Christians, like Kay Harms in Christian Women Today, argue that Christians cannot "arbitrarily decide what is extreme and what is acceptable" when it comes to cosmetic enhancement. Harms said, "While I still am not planning to go under the knife myself, I no longer feel decisively superior to those who do."

Barger counters that the church should reconsider its definition of beauty. True beauty's intangible virtue can point us to God, Barger said, but "we have reduced beauty to a specific, very narrow definition of material reality where there is no room for the imagination." Instead of seeing ourselves in Solomon's song to his Beloved, "Now we're told that the Beloved looks like a model that's five-eight and weighs 110 pounds. … We have lost our romantic imagination."

It comes down to the Incarnation itself, Barger said: "Do we believe that God, the holy powerful God, came down and took on human flesh through the womb of a woman? … That has great significance for us as human beings for how we're going to live in our bodies."