A few weeks before Kick-Off Sunday, the Rev. Doyt L. Conn, Jr., Epiphany’s rector, preached on the “logic of Jesus” versus the “logic of Nero,” using the burning of Rome as presented in Quo Vadis as an illustration of Christian ethics. Rather than running from the flames, the Christians of Rome ran towards them, incarnating their faith in service and sacrifice. Why did they do that? “Because each person is a soul first.”
Doyt’s explanation asks us to consider our own convictions, but it also captures an interpretive framework that brings to the fore a theology of the body and soul that’s ever-present, though sometimes obscured, in the Christian tradition: the resurrection of the body and the equality of all souls bearing the Image of God. At Epiphany, this framework has been expounded on over nearly two decades of preaching, with one story in particular giving its theology a name and a face. This is the story of Matthew Dyer, a boy who could do nothing physical, and yet, bore the full dignity shared by all souls.
Matthew was born with only a brain stem and was not expected to survive infancy. He lived for seventeen years, requiring constant care. His father, Bishop Mark Dyer, was assisted in these duties by many of the students where Doyt went to seminary, taking turns to look after Matthew. On one of his visits, Archbishop Desmond Tutu took his own place in this circle of care, saying: “To be in the presence of Matthew is a soul to soul encounter.”
This was an image that stayed with Doyt, crystalizing a complete theology in one word: to be born is to have a soul, and to have a soul is to be perfect in the eyes of God. Doyt shared this story with the parish as far back as 2012. Over the next several years, the story acquired a sophisticated theological vocabulary, with Bonhoeffer offering the first piece: the image of “a God-shaped place inside of each of us,” that essential self that points us to our souls. Aristotle supplied the second piece: the idea of the body and soul being “intrinsically intertwined,” because no soul exists without a body, and no body exists without a soul. As Doyt preached in 2014, the soul is what “correlates and integrates and enlivens” everything else about a person into a single life. Doyt would preach about the soul thirty-three times that year alone.
Then, in 2018, Matthew’s story returned with a phrase that would eventually become part of Epiphany’s common language: “walk up-right, soul first.” By 2022, the “soul-first lifestyle” had become one of the core concepts, alongside aphorisms like “belonging before believing” and “relationship is primary.” When Matthew’s story was told again a year later, its profound implications were stated plainly: “There is no hierarchy of souls.” That is the ontological foundation of all human rights, as popularized most recently in Pope Leo’s encyclical on “Magnificent Humanity.” Put simply: if we are born, then we are ensouled, and thus, equal in value and worth before God.
This is not a theology invented at Epiphany, but rather, it is a framework for interpreting the world as well as a foundation for a rule of life built out of ordinary lives. Matthew incarnated this theology. That’s why Epiphany’s theology of the body and soul is more than an aphorism or even a theory about what the soul is; it’s a practice of seeing “the thing behind the thing,” or the essential self behind all attributes we use to describe a person. Through “glasses of mercy,” it’s a way of seeing the disabled, the stranger, the enemy, and ourselves as equal citizens in the Kingdom of God.