There is a widespread but mistaken idea that Christianity makes an essential contrast between what is material and what is spiritual, as though the two were opponents rather than partners.  So the soul is treated in isolation from the body or even, as the pagan philosophers of ancient Greece believed, as the unfortunate prisoner of the body.  Such an idea forms no part of the Christian religion which recognises that it is soul and body together which constitutes the complete human being.

The essential contrast which the Christian religion in general and the New Testament in particular makes is not between the material and the spiritual, between the soul and the body.  Rather, it is the contrast between the natural and the supernatural, between the soul and body as living together at the animal level and the soul and body as indwelt by the Spirit of God and raised together to the Divine level.

It is that latter state which is described in Holy Scripture as glory, that is, the Splendour of the Character and the Presence of God.  As such it is the Christian’s hope and the Christian’s goal, but the initial stages which lead to it begin here and now with that moral and spiritual transformation of the whole person which Christ sets in motion through his Sacraments of Holy Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Communion.