West Theology of the Body for Beginners

Rediscovering the Meaning of Life, Love, Sex and Gender
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-929266-45-6
Verlag: Wellspring
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Divorce. Broken families. Sexual abuse. Addiction. Pornography. Same-sex 'marriage.' Gender issues. Everywhere we look, we find more and more confusion about the most fundamental truths of human life. As we lose our basic understanding of the meanings of man, woman, marriage, and sex, the question becomes ever more urgent: What does it mean to be a human being?

Autoren/Hrsg.

West, Christopher

Leseproben

ONE

What Is the Theology of the Body?

God impressed his own form on the flesh … in such a way that even what was visible might bear the divine form.

—St. Irenaeus

It was a gorgeous, starlit night. A young couple, madly in love, drove off into the country to find a secluded place where they could express their amorous desires. Spotting a grassy knoll, they parked on the side of the road, grabbed a blanket and headed for the far side of the hill.

Little did they know they were on the property of a country parish. An elderly monsignor, hearing some commotion, looked out his rectory window, gathered what was happening, and decided he would go for a little “prayer walk.” The young lovers, engrossed as they were in one another, had no idea someone had approached and was now standing at the edge of their blanket. Jolted out of their passion by a startling but nonetheless polite “Excuse me,” they were all the more startled by the sight of his Roman collar. Expecting he would scold them roundly, instead, the mysterious man in black looked toward the heavens and probed inquisitively, “Tell me, what does what you’re doing here have to do with … the stars?” After a pregnant pause, he walked back to his rectory leaving the dumbfounded lovers to ponder his question.2

St. John Paul II, in his own way, invites us to ponder the same question in his extended reflections on the “great mystery” of our creation as male and female and the call of the two to become “one flesh.”

The Wednesday Talks

When Karol Wojtyla, the cardinal archbishop of Krakow, came to Rome in August 1978 to help elect a new pope, he brought along the lengthy handwritten manuscript of a book that he had been prayerfully crafting for nearly four years. It was almost complete, and he wished to work on it, when he could, during the conclave. Page one bore the unusual title (in Polish): “teologia ciala”— “theology of the body.” The hundreds of pages that followed held perhaps the most profound and compelling biblical reflection on the meaning of our creation and redemption as male and female ever articulated—in-depth mystical insights of a modern saint that had the power to change the world … if those insights had an opportunity to reach the world, that is.

After the election of Pope John Paul I, Wojtyla returned to Krakow and completed his manuscript. Soon after that, to the astonishment of the whole world, he emerged from the second conclave of 1978 as Pope John Paul II. And his “theology of the body”—delivered as a series of 1293 Wednesday talks between September 1979 and November 1984 rather than being published as a book—became the first major teaching project of his pontificate, establishing the core of John Paul II’s great vision of what it means to be human.

Still, it took some time for people to grasp the significance of what John Paul II had given us. It wasn’t until 1999, for example, that papal biographer George Weigel described the TOB to a wide readership as “one of the boldest reconfigurations of Catholic theology in centuries” and “a kind of theological time bomb set to go off, with dramatic consequences, … perhaps in the twenty-first century.” While the pope’s vision of the body and of sexual love had “barely begun to shape the Church’s theology, preaching, and religious education,” Weigel predicted that when it did it would “compel a dramatic development of thinking about virtually every major theme in the Creed.”4

God, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

What might the human body have to do with the tenets of the Christian Creed? To ask questions about the meaning of the body starts us on an exhilarating journey that, if we stay the course, leads us from the body to the mystery of sexual difference; from sexual difference to the mystery of communion in “one flesh”; from the communion in “one flesh” to the mystery of Christ’s communion with the Church; and from the communion of Christ and the Church to the greatest mystery of all: the eternal communion found in God among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is what the tenets of the Creed are all about.

The body is not only biological. The body, as John Paul II unfolds in great detail, is also theological. It tells an astounding divine story. And it does so precisely through the mystery of sexual difference and the call of the two to become “one flesh.” This means that sex is not just about sex. The way we understand and express our sexuality points to our deepest-held convictions about who we are, who God is, the meaning of love, the ordering of society, and, ultimately, the mystery of the universe. Hence, John Paul II’s TOB is much more than a reflection on sex and married love. Through that, it leads us to “the rediscovery of the meaning of the whole of existence … the meaning of life” (TOB 46:6).

Christ teaches that the meaning of life is found by loving as he loves (see John 15:12). One of John Paul II’s main insights is that God inscribed this vocation to love as he loves right in our bodies by creating us male and female and calling us to become “one flesh” (see Genesis 2:24). Far from being a footnote in the Christian life, the way we understand the body and the sexual relationship “concerns the whole Bible” (TOB 69:8). It plunges us into “the perspective of the whole gospel, of the whole teaching, even more, of the whole mission of Christ” (TOB 49:3).

Christ’s mission is to restore the order of love in a world seriously distorted by sin. And the union of the sexes, as always, lies at the basis of the human “order of love.” Therefore, what we learn in John Paul II’s TOB is obviously “important with regard to marriage.” However it “is equally essential and valid for the [understanding] of man in general: for the fundamental problem of understanding him and for the self-understanding of his being in the world” (TOB, 102:5).

Are you looking for the meaning of life? Are you looking to understand the fundamental questions of existence? Our bodies tell the story. But we must learn how to “read” that story properly, and this is not easy. A great many obstacles, prejudices, and fears can derail us as we seek to enter the “great mystery” of our own embodiment as male and female. For religious people, the most common temptation is to reject the body as “unspiritual.”

Christianity Does Not Reject the Body

Religious people are used to an emphasis on “spiritual” things. However, many are unfamiliar, and sometimes very uncomfortable, with an emphasis on the body. But this reveals a very dangerous split or dualism in our thinking. Spirit has a certain priority over matter, since God, in himself, is pure spirit. Yet God is the author of the physical world, and in his wisdom, he did not make us pure spirits. He made us as incarnate spirits: a physical and spiritual unity.

Living a “spiritual life” as a Christian never means splitting off from the physical world. Jesus “was far removed from philosophies which despised the body, matter, and the things of the world,” insists Pope Francis. Yet he also recognizes that such “unhealthy dualisms, nonetheless, left a mark on certain Christian thinkers in the course of history and disfigured the Gospel.”5 John Paul II’s TOB offers a definitive corrective to these disfigurements which have caused many Christians to grow up thinking of the physical world (especially their own bodies and sexuality) as something bad.

This is an ancient theological error called Manichaeism, and it couldn’t be further from an authentic Christian perspective. In fact, it’s a direct attack on Christianity at its deepest roots. Everything in the Christian faith hinges on the Incarnation, on the “Word made flesh.” Ours is an enfleshed religion, and we must be very careful never to un-flesh it. It’s always the enemy who wants to “deny Christ come in the flesh” (see 1 John 4:2-3).

If we’re to rediscover who we really are, as John Paul II observed, it’s necessary to contend with some “deep-seated habits” in our way of thinking that come from Manichaeism (see TOB 46:1). So let’s take a closer look.

Mani (or Manichaeus), after whom this heresy is named, condemned the body and all things sexual because he believed that the material world was evil. Scripture, however, is very clear that everything God created is “very good” (see Genesis 1:31). This is a critical point to let sink in. Unwittingly, we often give evil far more weight than it deserves, as if the devil had created his own “evil world” to battle God’s “good world.” But the devil is a creature, not a creator. And this means the devil does not have his own clay. All he can do is take God’s clay (which is always very good) and twist it, distort it. That’s what evil is: the twisting or distortion of good. Redemption, therefore, involves the “untwisting” of what...