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The crux of my theology
The Christian tradition has long struggled with keeping body and soul together and naming both good. The Church has long fought, not always successfully, against gnostic ideas that the body is false or bad, something to be spurned and separated from in the quest for the ultimate good in spirit. Many Christians even go down the path to keeping the flesh violently in check, an extreme form of discipline. But Genesis 1 repeatedly affirms two truths: that creation - physical and material, including human bodies - is good and that human beings are have the Divine breath of life within them. Whatever our faults, flaws or failures, these two truths remain constant. These two facts alone, if taken to heart, are radical, transformational and foundational underpinnings, profoundly effecting not just how we treat one another, but how we treat our environment and ourselves.
The Christian Church has long held that after death our bodies and souls will be reunited. While it is unclear (especially to me) exactly how this happens given the scientific reality that our bodies decompose and become part of the earth, therefore becoming part of the planet and future generations, this point of theology indicates a holistic view to the human person. We are not only our souls, neither are we only our bodies. Rather we are both, united in a complete complexity.
The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions also speak of a concept called deification, a process in which we grow ever closer to, and more and more like, God. This process is begun at baptism, but does not end when we die. This is part of what is possible thanks to the Divine spark, the breath of life within us. Because at our core, our nature and purpose is union with the Divine.
Jumping forward to Jesus as God incarnate, he is the ultimate example of complete union between creation and divinity. While we may never be able to reach this perfection, his example and especially the example of his mother, Mary (Theotokos, the God-bearer), who in her own flesh bore the union of creation and divinity, reveals to us the dignity and possibility of our humanity. As Sarah Boss says, it reveals to us "creation's capacity for glorification."
We do not miraculously attain perfection but we can confidently claim our dignity and divinity and move toward this union with God. We are all gods. This theology that divinity and creation, body and soul, spirit and matter, are not separated is a powerful corrective to damaging modern ideas that we completely control matter and/or that we are slaves to the tyranny and totality of our flesh, and to weak theologies that ask us to renounce this creation in favor of the "spiritual" and to hope only in the life to come.
The more I study theologies of the Virgin Mary, the more I realize what the crux of my theology rests on.
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There is a lot of unfortunate double-speak about bodies and heaven/hell in Christianity. I'm still not sure what orthodox Christianity has to say about hell. Many priest and pastors have talked to me about hell being where God is not (and is that even possible, which may mean that hell has more to do with us than with God). Short of fundamentalism I've rarely heard fire and brimstone preached.
I think it's also important to look at those ideas (heaven=pleasure, hell=physical pain) in their historic contexts. For most of human existence life has been hard, dirty work. For most in the world it still is. So the hope of rest and peace was something that got people through the day. A lot of the hell language in the scripture comes from a very apocalyptic time in general. The Jewish community of the last few centuries BCE and the early CE were times of great social, political and religious upheaval. Many wanted revolution, if not in the present than in the life to come, and they wanted justice, which for many means punishment.
Seeing these contexts helps me to see where the ideas came from, who and how they might or may have served, and what's the core that ought to be retained (if at all).