Perfectly beautiful, slim, and able?: Confounding expectations of eschatological embodiment

The Christian hope for the future body is of perfection on the other side of resurrection—but what does embodied perfection entail? Many people in Christian faith communities share the assumptions of modern Western culture, uncritically absorbing and reproducing its stigmatising assumptions and body-shaming practices. This shapes their expectations of what the perfected resurrection body might look: slim, beautiful, and non-disabled. I will use a multi-layered account of identity to propose that the continuity of identity-forming embodied features is required to safeguard the continuity of identity through the transformation of resurrection. While we must admit a modest agnosticism regarding the actual outcome, the possibility of persons with disabilities and bodies of all sizes, shapes, and colours flourishing in the new creationchallenges our underlying assumptions about what bodies are good bodies. I will argue that human flourishing lies not in aesthetic flawlessness but in the fulfillment of the body’s *telos*.