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Our Guest: Professor John Kleinig
People don’t know how to regard their bodies and what to do with them, even though they imagine that their bodies belong to them and they can do what they like with them.
- They overvalue them and undervalue them.
- They idolize an ideal body and yet they are dissatisfied with their actual bodies.
- They abuse their bodies and work hard at improving them.
- They think that they are really nothing more than their bodies and also actually dissociate themselves from them.
Yet our bodies do not belong to us but to God who has made them and has decided what they are for. He not only gives us our bodies but creates them in his image to represent him visibly here on earth.
Rev. Dr. John Kleinig is a pastor of the Lutheran Church of Australia. After serving as a high school chaplain and parish pastor, he has been involved in the preparation of students for ordination as pastors for 25 years at Luther Seminary in Adelaide and is now retired from active service. He is the author of numerous books and articles. The most recently published of these is Wonderfully Made. He has been a frequent visitor to the USA where he has been closely associated with Doxology – The Lutheran Center for Spiritual Care and Counsel as a regular speaker at its conferences.
He is, by training, an Old Testament theologian but has also taught courses on other parts of the Bible and on pastoral theology. As a teacher of theology, he is interested in integrating all the classical theological disciplines pastorally and practically. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and honorary doctorates from Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne and Concordia University in Irvine.
Aged 79, he is married to Claire, a church musician and retired music teacher. He is the father of four children, and proud grandfather of ten grandchildren. His hobbies are fishing, gardening, reading novels, viewing films, and doing nothing.
Recorded March 1, 2022.