I have just uploaded to Scribd my powerpoint presentation on Arriving at the Peace of Chastity.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33273167/Arriving-at-the-Peace-of-Chastity-Part-One
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33273730/Arriving-at-the-Peace-of-Chastity-Part-Two
Here is a prayer also based on the book that is now being used in the US.
http://www.reapteam.org/sites/reapteam.org/files/Prayers%20for%20purity.pdf
The presentation is based on the breakthrough insights of John Paul II's Theology of the Body and T.G. Morrow's Achieving Chastity in a Pornographic World.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Love alone makes us happy
Benedict XVI: The strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: love alone makes us happy because we live in a relationship, and we live to love and to be loved. Borrowing an analogy from biology, we could say that imprinted upon his "genome", the human being bears a profound mark of the Trinity, of God as Love.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Theology of the Body: FAQ
by Dr Mary Shivanandan
I have heard it said that theologians have always accepted that the body is part of the person but could not explain it very well. What methods were used to explain that the body is part of the person before JPII and what were their limitations?
It must be kept in mind in discussing the Christian view of the body as part of the person, that it developed as an integration of two different anthropologies or views of the nature of Man. One was based on God’s revelation and the other on Greek philosophical concepts, faith and reason respectively. First and foremost, in the biblical view, the person is created as a living being. Biblical thought does not conceive of the soul and body as separate. The human being, moreover, is always in relation with himself, the world, other human beings, and God. Even in the shadowy world of Sheol after death the attenuated body has a place. By contrast the Greek philosopher, Plato, posited a radical otherness between the world of sense and the invisible world of ideas. Indeed, matter participated in various degrees in the abstract ideas of goodness, truth, and beauty, but the goal was to flee the decaying world of the body. Aristotle, on the other hand proposed that the soul is the form of matter, a much more affirming view of the material world.
It was the Aristotelian view that predominated in the development of Christian thought, especially in Thomas Aquinas. At the same time Aquinas adopted from Augustine Plato’s idea of participation, that all creation participates in the being, goodness, truth and beauty of God. Boethius following Aristotle defined man as “individual substance of a rational nature” (naturae rationalis individua substantia) . Now the problem with this definition is that “substance” or supposit refers to an existent being in reference to itself. The sense of relation to God, the world, and other human beings is obscured. The definition of Richard St. Victor in discussing the divine persons “an incommunicable existence in a divine nature” (naturae divinae incommunicabilis existentia) brought forward a more spiritual definition but Boethius’ formula remained the preferred definition for the human person even in Thomas.
Why did this definition eventually prove inadequate?
Substance came to be identified, not with the entirety of the human being as the body in union with the soul, but the body as set over against the soul, and isolated in itself, a distinctly non-biblical view. Francis Bacon, an originator of the scientific method, prescinded the body and matter from God as Creator and Revealer. Instead of seeing each created thing as participating in God’s creative act with intrinsic value ordered to its fulfillment in relation, matter became a “given, ” a “substratum” that could be measured and manipulated by mathematical formula. The criterion of truth became physical evidence, not faith in a personal God as Creator and reason participating in divine truth and conformed to the intelligibility in things. This brought about a tremendous mastery over the physical world but since physical evidence deceives, eventually a more secure mode of certainty as a criterion of truth was sought. At the same time in scientific materialism the interiority of the human person is reduced to insignificance. Enter Descartes with his philosophy of doubt about the external world and his turn to an interior source of certainty, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). It is now man who imposes truth on the external world through his own mind. Matter is res extensa, completely cut off from the invisible realm of the spirit. Such a development of Western thought on the body and matter, very briefly sketched, was hostile to the Christian view, central to which are the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
What advantages has the Theology of the Body to explain the body as part of the person?
John Paul II bases his reflections on marriage and sexuality on texts from Scripture, beginning with the creation of man and woman in Genesis. In other words he returns to a biblical view of the body and soul but without diminishing in any way the metaphysics of Aquinas. Not only does he return to a biblical view but he greatly expands our understanding of the body as expressing the person made in the image of God. The body in some way images the Creator. He goes further, the body in its masculinity and femininity is ordered to love and communion so that the love between a man and a woman in original innocence actually imaged the total self-giving love of the divine persons of the Trinity. It is the body alone that makes visible divine realities. Christ in the union of his divine and human natures is not the “ontological exception” but the fullness of what it is to be human, body and soul. As Gaudium et Spes, no. 22, says “Christ, the final Adam by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”
This is the real challenge of Christianity. It is the reason the Greek philosophers on the Areopagus rejected Paul when he spoke of the resurrection of the dead. It is the reason many Christians through the centuries have rejected the radical teaching of John 6 on the Eucharist. To start from this premise sheds a whole new light on the relations between Man and God, men and women, marriage and consecrated celibacy.
What are some key insights of John Paul II?
The idea of interpreting the human person as a gift ordered to self giving is an essential concept. John Paul II calls this the “hermeneutics of the gift.” God created the world out of nothing. He did not have to create it. The human person, the highest point of creation, is the fruit and image of God as a Person and a communion of Persons. It is the body that makes visible the spiritual and divine. Not only, says John Paul II, does the body make visible the spiritual attributes of the person as one who has the capacity to know and love freely, but even more in its masculinity and femininity, gender, the body makes visible its ordering to total self-giving love in the manner of the divine Trinitarian Persons.
Gender then is central to a Christian anthropology not just a social construction?
John Paul II takes Genesis 3:18, “It is not good that man (male) should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him” as a starting point for his whole discussion of the meaning of gender. The fact that Adam was created alone, he calls “original solitude,” referring to the original nature of Man in the Garden of Eden. He was created as a person, with intellect and will, with a body that expresses who he is as a spiritual being different from the animals and in a unique relationship with God. “Partner of the Absolute” is the phrase the pope uses since Man has been given the power to determine his own destiny. All these gifts, God saw were good but not enough. “It is not good that man should be alone.” So, God creates Eve out of Adam’s rib, which indicates she shares the same humanity, the same attributes of being a person in original solitude. Yet Eve is different. Eve is a different manifestation of the same humanity. And that difference is not just superficial but belongs to her very way of being a person. This is called asymmetrical difference.
Why asymmetrical difference?
In any giving and receiving of love, the integrity of the person must be preserved. This means that the man can never dominate the woman or use her for his own selfish ends. He must always receive her in her femininity as a gift from the hand of God, just as he received his own being from God. Only in this way can man and woman enjoy the fullness of communion and image divine Trinitarian union. The difference, which can never be overcome but only shared, must always be honored. It is this communion of complete self-giving that constitutes original happiness.
Man and woman were created for love. There must be one who first loves and one who receives love. In the one flesh union of man and woman the fruit is first of all the bond of love and then the child. It is this very way of being a masculine or feminine person, expressed in the body, that enables the love to be fruitful. The fruit is also spiritual in the education of the child.
The kind of communion you are talking about seems rare if not impossible in today’s world.
John Paul II would say that it is difficult but not impossible. Indeed when Adam and Eve sinned by eating the fruit of the tree of good and evil, its first and most devastating effects, after the rupture with God, penetrated their communion. They could no longer receive each other as a gift. The other became an object of use and manipulation. The Church has always taught that, even though human nature was damaged by original sin, its underlying goodness remained. This is a very important part of John Paul II’s catechesis, the recognition that there is a continuity as well as a discontinuity between the graced state of original innocence and the historical state of sin. In fact the experience of shame in some way links the two. When man and woman feel shame before one another’s nakedness, it reveals to them that something has been lost. They instinctively protect their vulnerability from the other out of fear of exploitation. Nakedness is significant not just in the physical arena. It comprises the whole area of psychological and spiritual relations between men and women. Chastity , either in the single or married state, is the virtue that protects the integrity of the person. It is intimately linked to self-mastery and is essential for the “freedom of the gift.”
If human nature was so grievously damaged by original sin, how can communion be restored?
Christ came in the flesh to restore Man’s dignity. Taking on a human body in the Incarnation, Christ raised the human body to a new level. In the catechesis, John Paul II shows how redemption through Christ has real power to restore the human person, body and soul, so that once again the body can express total self-giving love between man and woman. Now there is a new way of living the meaning of the body as gift in consecrated celibacy, when the total gift of self is given to God alone. Such a way of life points to the resurrected state where there will be no marrying or giving in marriage but all will be absorbed in God in a virginal way. The total transformation into a spiritual body will bring about a perfect “intersubjectivity” or communion between persons.
You have called your study guide A New Language, why is that?
John Paul II has always recognized the importance of language. It frames not only our way of thinking but our behavior. When we speak of fornication, we are reminded that sex before marriage is disordered. The sociologists knew this so deliberately changed the language to premarital sex which makes it sound benign. John Paul II has not only restored biblical language for speaking about sexuality but brings out the full meaning of the spousal language in Sacred Scripture, that reveals the nature of God’s incomparable love for his people. The Old Testament equates the idolatry of the Israelites to adultery. The body itself, says John Paul II speaks a language of which it is not the author. In its actions it speaks on behalf of the person, as it were truth or untruth. When, for example, a couple engages in sex outside marriage, the body speaks the language of total commitment but the man and woman falsify that language by not making the total commitment that can only be expressed in the indissolubility of marriage. It is the same with contraception. When the couple withhold the gift of fertility, their union is not total.
What place does passion have in the theology of the body?
John Paul II views eros, which strives to possess the good, the true and the beautiful, as a powerful force for the goodness of union. He interprets the Song of Songs not as a spiritual allegory but the love of man and woman as it would have been in the Garden of Eden. In the first English translations several of the more erotic verses were left out. These have been restored in the fine new translation by Michael Waldstein. Far from being suspicious of eros, John Paul II sees it as an essential ingredient of spousal love. When it is integrated with the love that desires only the good of the other it is purified and contributes greatly to total self-gift. Pope Benedict XVI has developed these insights in his encyclical, Deus caritas est, seeing eros even in God’s passionate love for us.
I have heard the phrase “the sacramentality of the body.” What does it mean?
John Paul II speaks of a general sacramentality of the material world, which makes visible the goodness of God in creation. The body participates in that. We are more familiar with the seven sacraments, of which marriage is one. In his comments on the Passage in Ephesians 5:21-33 on marriage as an image of Christ’s union with the Church, his bride, John Paul II offers a rich reflection on general sacramentality as well as the seven sacraments including marriage.
In a short interview it is not possible to bring out all the wealth of wisdom and insight John Paul II brings us in his Catechesis on the theology of the body. I have touched on only a few of the highlights. It is well worth spending the time to study it in depth.
I have heard it said that theologians have always accepted that the body is part of the person but could not explain it very well. What methods were used to explain that the body is part of the person before JPII and what were their limitations?
It must be kept in mind in discussing the Christian view of the body as part of the person, that it developed as an integration of two different anthropologies or views of the nature of Man. One was based on God’s revelation and the other on Greek philosophical concepts, faith and reason respectively. First and foremost, in the biblical view, the person is created as a living being. Biblical thought does not conceive of the soul and body as separate. The human being, moreover, is always in relation with himself, the world, other human beings, and God. Even in the shadowy world of Sheol after death the attenuated body has a place. By contrast the Greek philosopher, Plato, posited a radical otherness between the world of sense and the invisible world of ideas. Indeed, matter participated in various degrees in the abstract ideas of goodness, truth, and beauty, but the goal was to flee the decaying world of the body. Aristotle, on the other hand proposed that the soul is the form of matter, a much more affirming view of the material world.
It was the Aristotelian view that predominated in the development of Christian thought, especially in Thomas Aquinas. At the same time Aquinas adopted from Augustine Plato’s idea of participation, that all creation participates in the being, goodness, truth and beauty of God. Boethius following Aristotle defined man as “individual substance of a rational nature” (naturae rationalis individua substantia) . Now the problem with this definition is that “substance” or supposit refers to an existent being in reference to itself. The sense of relation to God, the world, and other human beings is obscured. The definition of Richard St. Victor in discussing the divine persons “an incommunicable existence in a divine nature” (naturae divinae incommunicabilis existentia) brought forward a more spiritual definition but Boethius’ formula remained the preferred definition for the human person even in Thomas.
Why did this definition eventually prove inadequate?
Substance came to be identified, not with the entirety of the human being as the body in union with the soul, but the body as set over against the soul, and isolated in itself, a distinctly non-biblical view. Francis Bacon, an originator of the scientific method, prescinded the body and matter from God as Creator and Revealer. Instead of seeing each created thing as participating in God’s creative act with intrinsic value ordered to its fulfillment in relation, matter became a “given, ” a “substratum” that could be measured and manipulated by mathematical formula. The criterion of truth became physical evidence, not faith in a personal God as Creator and reason participating in divine truth and conformed to the intelligibility in things. This brought about a tremendous mastery over the physical world but since physical evidence deceives, eventually a more secure mode of certainty as a criterion of truth was sought. At the same time in scientific materialism the interiority of the human person is reduced to insignificance. Enter Descartes with his philosophy of doubt about the external world and his turn to an interior source of certainty, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). It is now man who imposes truth on the external world through his own mind. Matter is res extensa, completely cut off from the invisible realm of the spirit. Such a development of Western thought on the body and matter, very briefly sketched, was hostile to the Christian view, central to which are the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
What advantages has the Theology of the Body to explain the body as part of the person?
John Paul II bases his reflections on marriage and sexuality on texts from Scripture, beginning with the creation of man and woman in Genesis. In other words he returns to a biblical view of the body and soul but without diminishing in any way the metaphysics of Aquinas. Not only does he return to a biblical view but he greatly expands our understanding of the body as expressing the person made in the image of God. The body in some way images the Creator. He goes further, the body in its masculinity and femininity is ordered to love and communion so that the love between a man and a woman in original innocence actually imaged the total self-giving love of the divine persons of the Trinity. It is the body alone that makes visible divine realities. Christ in the union of his divine and human natures is not the “ontological exception” but the fullness of what it is to be human, body and soul. As Gaudium et Spes, no. 22, says “Christ, the final Adam by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”
This is the real challenge of Christianity. It is the reason the Greek philosophers on the Areopagus rejected Paul when he spoke of the resurrection of the dead. It is the reason many Christians through the centuries have rejected the radical teaching of John 6 on the Eucharist. To start from this premise sheds a whole new light on the relations between Man and God, men and women, marriage and consecrated celibacy.
What are some key insights of John Paul II?
The idea of interpreting the human person as a gift ordered to self giving is an essential concept. John Paul II calls this the “hermeneutics of the gift.” God created the world out of nothing. He did not have to create it. The human person, the highest point of creation, is the fruit and image of God as a Person and a communion of Persons. It is the body that makes visible the spiritual and divine. Not only, says John Paul II, does the body make visible the spiritual attributes of the person as one who has the capacity to know and love freely, but even more in its masculinity and femininity, gender, the body makes visible its ordering to total self-giving love in the manner of the divine Trinitarian Persons.
Gender then is central to a Christian anthropology not just a social construction?
John Paul II takes Genesis 3:18, “It is not good that man (male) should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him” as a starting point for his whole discussion of the meaning of gender. The fact that Adam was created alone, he calls “original solitude,” referring to the original nature of Man in the Garden of Eden. He was created as a person, with intellect and will, with a body that expresses who he is as a spiritual being different from the animals and in a unique relationship with God. “Partner of the Absolute” is the phrase the pope uses since Man has been given the power to determine his own destiny. All these gifts, God saw were good but not enough. “It is not good that man should be alone.” So, God creates Eve out of Adam’s rib, which indicates she shares the same humanity, the same attributes of being a person in original solitude. Yet Eve is different. Eve is a different manifestation of the same humanity. And that difference is not just superficial but belongs to her very way of being a person. This is called asymmetrical difference.
Why asymmetrical difference?
In any giving and receiving of love, the integrity of the person must be preserved. This means that the man can never dominate the woman or use her for his own selfish ends. He must always receive her in her femininity as a gift from the hand of God, just as he received his own being from God. Only in this way can man and woman enjoy the fullness of communion and image divine Trinitarian union. The difference, which can never be overcome but only shared, must always be honored. It is this communion of complete self-giving that constitutes original happiness.
Man and woman were created for love. There must be one who first loves and one who receives love. In the one flesh union of man and woman the fruit is first of all the bond of love and then the child. It is this very way of being a masculine or feminine person, expressed in the body, that enables the love to be fruitful. The fruit is also spiritual in the education of the child.
The kind of communion you are talking about seems rare if not impossible in today’s world.
John Paul II would say that it is difficult but not impossible. Indeed when Adam and Eve sinned by eating the fruit of the tree of good and evil, its first and most devastating effects, after the rupture with God, penetrated their communion. They could no longer receive each other as a gift. The other became an object of use and manipulation. The Church has always taught that, even though human nature was damaged by original sin, its underlying goodness remained. This is a very important part of John Paul II’s catechesis, the recognition that there is a continuity as well as a discontinuity between the graced state of original innocence and the historical state of sin. In fact the experience of shame in some way links the two. When man and woman feel shame before one another’s nakedness, it reveals to them that something has been lost. They instinctively protect their vulnerability from the other out of fear of exploitation. Nakedness is significant not just in the physical arena. It comprises the whole area of psychological and spiritual relations between men and women. Chastity , either in the single or married state, is the virtue that protects the integrity of the person. It is intimately linked to self-mastery and is essential for the “freedom of the gift.”
If human nature was so grievously damaged by original sin, how can communion be restored?
Christ came in the flesh to restore Man’s dignity. Taking on a human body in the Incarnation, Christ raised the human body to a new level. In the catechesis, John Paul II shows how redemption through Christ has real power to restore the human person, body and soul, so that once again the body can express total self-giving love between man and woman. Now there is a new way of living the meaning of the body as gift in consecrated celibacy, when the total gift of self is given to God alone. Such a way of life points to the resurrected state where there will be no marrying or giving in marriage but all will be absorbed in God in a virginal way. The total transformation into a spiritual body will bring about a perfect “intersubjectivity” or communion between persons.
You have called your study guide A New Language, why is that?
John Paul II has always recognized the importance of language. It frames not only our way of thinking but our behavior. When we speak of fornication, we are reminded that sex before marriage is disordered. The sociologists knew this so deliberately changed the language to premarital sex which makes it sound benign. John Paul II has not only restored biblical language for speaking about sexuality but brings out the full meaning of the spousal language in Sacred Scripture, that reveals the nature of God’s incomparable love for his people. The Old Testament equates the idolatry of the Israelites to adultery. The body itself, says John Paul II speaks a language of which it is not the author. In its actions it speaks on behalf of the person, as it were truth or untruth. When, for example, a couple engages in sex outside marriage, the body speaks the language of total commitment but the man and woman falsify that language by not making the total commitment that can only be expressed in the indissolubility of marriage. It is the same with contraception. When the couple withhold the gift of fertility, their union is not total.
What place does passion have in the theology of the body?
John Paul II views eros, which strives to possess the good, the true and the beautiful, as a powerful force for the goodness of union. He interprets the Song of Songs not as a spiritual allegory but the love of man and woman as it would have been in the Garden of Eden. In the first English translations several of the more erotic verses were left out. These have been restored in the fine new translation by Michael Waldstein. Far from being suspicious of eros, John Paul II sees it as an essential ingredient of spousal love. When it is integrated with the love that desires only the good of the other it is purified and contributes greatly to total self-gift. Pope Benedict XVI has developed these insights in his encyclical, Deus caritas est, seeing eros even in God’s passionate love for us.
I have heard the phrase “the sacramentality of the body.” What does it mean?
John Paul II speaks of a general sacramentality of the material world, which makes visible the goodness of God in creation. The body participates in that. We are more familiar with the seven sacraments, of which marriage is one. In his comments on the Passage in Ephesians 5:21-33 on marriage as an image of Christ’s union with the Church, his bride, John Paul II offers a rich reflection on general sacramentality as well as the seven sacraments including marriage.
In a short interview it is not possible to bring out all the wealth of wisdom and insight John Paul II brings us in his Catechesis on the theology of the body. I have touched on only a few of the highlights. It is well worth spending the time to study it in depth.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
WHAT IS THE THEOLOGY OF THE BODY & WHY IS IT CHANGING SO MANY LIVES?
By Christopher West
“It is an illusion to think we can build a true culture of human life if we do not . . . accept and experience sexuality and love and the whole of life according to their true meaning and their close inter-connection.”
John Paul II, The Gospel of Life (n. 97).
The sexual embrace is the foundation stone of human life. The family + and, in turn, human society itself + spring from this embrace. In short, as sex goes, so go marriage and the family. As marriage and the family go, so goes civilization.
Such logic doesn’t bode well for our culture. It’s no exaggeration to say that the task of the twentieth century was to rid itself of the Christian sexual ethic. If we’re to build a “culture of life,” the task of the twenty-first century must be to reclaim it.
But the often repressive approach of previous generations of Christians (usually silence or, at most, “don’t do it”) is largely responsible for the cultural jettison of the Church’s teaching on sex. We need a “new language” to break the silence and reverse the negativity. We need a fresh theology that explains how the Christian sexual ethic + far from the prudish list of prohibitions it’s assumed to be + corresponds perfectly with the deepest yearnings of our hearts for love and union.
As many people are only now discovering, Pope John Paul II devoted the first major teaching project of his pontificate to developing just such a theology; he calls it a “theology of the body.” This collection of 129 short talks has already begun a “sexual counter-revolution” that’s changing lives around the world. The “fire” is spreading and in due time we can expect global repercussions.
Papal biographer George Weigel said it best when he described the theology of the body as “a kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences ...perhaps in the twenty-first century” (Witness to Hope, 343).
A Reply to Our Universal Questions
By focusing on the beauty of God’s plan for the union of the sexes, John Paul shifts the discussion from legalism (“How far can I go before I break the law?”) to liberty (“What’s the truth that sets me free to love?”). The truth that sets us free is salvation in Jesus Christ. It doesn’t matter what mistakes we’ve made or what sins we’ve committed. The Pope’s theology of the body wags a finger at no one. It’s a message of sexual salvation offered to one and all.
In short, through an in-depth reflection on the Scriptures, John Paul seeks to answer two of the most important, universal questions: (1) “What’s it mean to be human?” and (2) “How do I live my life in a way that brings true happiness and fulfillment?” The Pope’s teaching, therefore, isn’t just about sex and marriage. Since our creation as male and female is the “fundamental fact of human existence” (Feb 13, 1980), the theology of the body affords “the rediscovery of the meaning of the whole of existence, the meaning of life” (Oct 29, 80).
To answer the first question + “What’s it mean to be human?” + the Pope follows Christ's invitation to reflect on the three different “stages” of the human experience of sex and the body: in our origin before sin (see Mt 19:3-8); in our history darkened by sin yet redeemed in Christ (see Mt 5:27-28); and in our destiny when God will raise our bodies in glory (see Mt 22:23-33).
In response to the second question + “How do I live my life?” + John Paul applies his distinctive “Christian humanism” to the vocations of celibacy and marriage. He then concludes by demonstrating how his study provides a new, winning explanation of Church teaching on sexual morality.
We’ll look briefly at each of these different sections of the Pope’s teaching. Of course, in a short introduction such as this, we’re only scratching the surface of the Pope’s profound insights (see resource section to learn more). We’ll begin with his main idea.
Why is the Body a “Theology”?
According to John Paul II, God created the body as a “sign” of his own divine mystery. This is why he speaks of the body as a “theology,” a study of God.
We can’t see God. As pure Spirit, he’s invisible. Yet Christianity is the religion of God’s self-disclosure. In Christ, “God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange” (CCC, n. 221). Somehow the human body makes this eternal mystery of love visible.
How? Specifically through the beauty of sexual difference and our call to union. God designed the union of the sexes as a “created version” of his own “eternal exchange of love.” And right from the beginning, the union of man and woman foreshadows our eternal destiny of union with Christ. As St. Paul says, the “one flesh” union is “a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31-32).
The Bible uses spousal love more than any other image to help us understand God’s eternal plan for humanity. God’s wants to “marry” us (see Hos 2:19) + to live with us in an “eternal exchange of love.” And he wanted this great “marital plan” to be so plain to us, so obvious to us that he impressed an image of it in our very being by creating us male and female and calling us to communion in “one flesh.”
Thus, in a dramatic development of Catholic thought, John Paul concludes that we image God not only as individuals, “but also through the communion ...which man and woman form right from the beginning.” And, the Pope adds, “On all of this, right from ‘the beginning,’ there descended the blessing of fertility” (Nov 14, 1979). The original vocation to be “fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28), then, is nothing but a call live in the image in which we’re made + to love as God loves.
Of course, this doesn’t mean God is “sexual.” We use spousal love only as an analogy to help us understand something of the divine mystery (see CCC, n. 370). God’s “mystery remains transcendent in regard to this analogy as in regard to any other analogy” (Sep. 29, 1982). At the same time, however, the Pope says that there “is no other human reality which corresponds more, humanly speaking, to that divine mystery” (Dec. 30, 1988).
The Original Experience of the Body & Sex
We tend to think the “war” between the sexes is normal. In his discussion with the Pharisees, Jesus points out that “from the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:8). Before sin, man and woman experienced their union as a participation in God’s eternal love. This is the model for us all, and although we’ve fallen from this, Christ gives us real power to reclaim it.
The biblical creation stories use symbolic language to help us understand deep truths about ourselves. For example, the Pope observes that their original unity flows from the human being’s experience of solitude. At first the man was “alone” (see Gen 2:18). Among the animals there was no “helper fit for him” (Gen 2:20). It’s on the basis of this “solitude” + an experience common to male and female + that we experience our longing for union.
The point is that human sexual union differs radically from the mating of animals. If they were the same, Adam would have found plenty of “helpers” among the animals. But in naming the animals he realized he was different; he alone was a person called to love with his body in God’s image. Upon sight of the woman the man immediately declares: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). That’s to say, “Finally, a person I can love.”
How did he know that she too was a person called to love? Her naked body revealed the mystery! For the pure of heart, nakedness reveals what John Paul calls “the nuptial meaning of the body.” This is the body’s “capacity of expressing love: that love precisely in which the person becomes a gift and + by means of this gift + fulfills the very meaning of his being and existence” (Jan 16, 1980).
Yes, the Pope says if we live according to the truth of our sexuality, we fulfill the very meaning of life. What is it? Jesus reveals it when he says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12). How did Jesus love us? “This is my body which is given for you” (Lk 22:19). God created sexual desire as the power to love as he loves. And this is how the first couple experienced it. Hence, they “were both naked, and were not ashamed” (Gen 2:25).
There’s no shame in love; “perfect love casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18). Living in complete accord with the nuptial meaning of their bodies, they saw and knew each other “with all the peace of the interior gaze, which createsB the fullness of the intimacy of persons” (Jan 2, 1980).
The Historical Experience of the Body & Sex
Original sin caused the “death” of divine love in the human heart. The entrance of shame indicates the dawn of lust, of erotic desire void of God’s love. Men and women of history now tend to seek “the sensation of sexuality” apart from the true gift of themselves, apart from authentic love.
We cover our bodies not because they’re bad, but to protect their inherent goodness from the degradation of lust. Since we know we’re made for love, we feel instinctively “threatened” not only by overt lustful behavior, but even by a “lustful look.”
Christ’s words are severe in this regard. He insists that if we look lustfully at others, we’ve already committed adultery in our hearts (see Mt 5:28). John Paul poses the question: “Are we to fear the severity of these words, or rather have confidence in their salvific ...power?” (Oct 8, 1980). These words have power to save us because the man who utters them is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29).
Christ didn’t die and rise from the dead merely to give us coping mechanisms for sin. “Jesus came to restore creation to the purity of its origins” (CCC, n. 2336). As we open ourselves to the work of redemption, Christ’s death and resurrection effectively “liberate our liberty from the domination of lust” as John Paul expresses it (March 1, 1984).
On this side of heaven, we’ll always be able to recognize a battle in our hearts between love and lust. Even so, John Paul insists that “the redemption of the body” (see Ro 8:23) is already at work in men and women of history. This means as we allow our lusts to be “crucified with Christ” (see Gal 5:24) we can progressively rediscover in what is erotic that original “nuptial meaning of the body” and live it. This “liberation from lust” and the freedom it affords is, in fact, “the condition of all life together in truth” (Oct 8, 1980).
The Ultimate Experience of the Body & Sex
What about our experience of the body in the resurrection? Didn’t Christ say we’ll no longer be given in marriage when we rise from the dead (see Mt 22:30)? Yes, but this doesn’t mean our longing for union will be done away with. It means it will be fulfilled. As a sacrament, marriage is only on earthly sign of the heavenly reality. We no longer need signs to point us to heaven, when we’re in heaven. The “marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7) + the union of love we all desire + will be eternally consummated.
“For man, this consummation will be the final realization of the unity of the human race, which God willed from creation. ...Those who are united with Christ will form the community of the redeemed, ‘the holy city’ of God, ‘the Bride, the wife of the Lamb’” (CCC, n. 1045). This eternal reality is what the “one flesh” union foreshadows from the beginning (see Eph 5:31-32).
Hence, in the resurrection of the body we rediscover + in an eternal dimension + the same nuptial meaning of the body in the meeting with the mystery of the living God face to face (see Dec 9, 1981). “This will be a completely new experience,” the Pope says + beyond anything we can imagine. Yet “it will not be alienated in any way from what man took part in from ‘the beginning,’ nor from [what concerns] the procreative meaning of the body and of sex” (Jan 13, 1982).
The Christian Vocations
By looking at “who we are” in our origin, history, and destiny, we open the door to a proper understanding of the Christian vocations of celibacy and marriage. Both vocations are an authentic “living out” of the most profound truth of who we are as male and female.
When lived authentically, Christian celibacy isn’t a rejection of sexuality and our call to union. It actually points to their ultimate fulfillment. Those who sacrifice marriage “for the sake of the kingdom” (Mt 19:12) do so in order to devote all of their energies and desires to the marriage that alone can satisfy + the marriage of Christ and the Church. In a way, they’re “skipping” the sacrament (the earthly sign) in anticipation of the ultimate reality. By doing so, celibate men and women declare to the world that the kingdom of God is here (see Mt 12:28).
In a different way, marriage also anticipates heaven. “In the joys of their love [God gives spouses] here on earth a foretaste of the wedding feast of the Lamb” (CCC, n. 1642). Why, then, do so many couples experience marriage as a “living hell”? In order for marriage to bring the happiness it’s meant to, spouses must live it as God intended “from the beginning.” This means they must contend diligently with the effects of sin.
Marriage doesn’t justify lust. As a sacrament, marriage is meant to symbolize the union of Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32). The body has a “language” that’s meant to express God’s free, total, faithful, and fruitful love. This is exactly what spouses commit to at the altar. “Have you come here freely?” the priest asks, “to give yourselves to each other without reservation? Do you promise to be faithful until death? Do you promise to receive children lovingly form God?” Bride and groom say “yes.”
In turn, spouses are meant to express this same “yes” with their bodies whenever they become one flesh. “Indeed the very words ‘I take you to be my wife + my husband,’” the Pope says, “can be fulfilled only by means of conjugal intercourse” (Jan 5, 1983). Sexual union is meant to be the renewal of wedding vows!
A New Context for Understanding Sexual Morality
The Church’s sexual ethic begins to make sense when viewed through this lens. It’s not a prudish list of prohibitions. It’s a call to embrace our own “greatness,” our own God-like dignity. It’s a call to live the love we’re created for.
Since a prophet is one who proclaims God’s love, John Paul II describes the body and sexual union as “prophetic.” But, he adds, we must be careful to distinguish between true and false prophets. If we can speak the truth with our bodies, we can also speak lies. Ultimately all questions of sexual morality come down to one simple question: Does this truly image God’s free, total, faithful, fruitful love or does it not?
In practical terms, how healthy would a marriage be if spouses were regularly unfaithful to their wedding vows? On the other hand, how healthy would a marriage be if spouses regularly renewed their vows, expressing an ever-increasing commitment to them? This is what’s at stake in the Church’s teaching on sexual morality.
Masturbation, fornication, adultery, intentionally sterilized sex, homosexual acts, etc.+ none of these image God’s free, total, faithful, and fruitful love. None of these behaviors express and renew wedding vows. They aren’t marital. Does this mean people who behave in such ways are “inherently evil?” No. They’re just confused about how to satisfy their genuine desires for love.
If I offered you a million dollar bill and a counterfeit million dollar bill, which would you prefer? Dumb question, I know. But what if you were raised in a culture that incessantly bombarded you with propaganda convincing you that counterfeit was the real thing and the real thing was a counterfeit? Might you be a little confused?
Authentic Sexual Liberation
Why all the propaganda? If there’s an enemy that wants to keep us from heaven, and if the body and sex is meant to point us there, what do you think he’s going to attack? Sin’s tactic is to “twist” and “disorient” our desire for the eternal embrace. That’s all it can do. When we understand this, we realize that the sexual confusion so prevalent in our world and in our own hearts is nothing but the human desire for heaven gone berserk.
But the tide is changing. People can only put up with the counterfeits for so long. Not only do they fail to satisfy, they wound us terribly. Sadly, the truth of the Church’s teaching on sex is confirmed in the wounds of those who haven’t lived it. Our longings for love, intimacy, and freedom are good. But the sexual revolution sold us a bill of goods. We haven’t been “liberated.” We’ve been duped, betrayed, and left wanting.
This is why the world is a mission field ready to soak up John Paul II’s theology of the body. And this is why it’s already changing so many lives around the world. The Pope’s teaching helps us distinguish between the real million dollar bill and the counterfeit. It helps us “untwist” our disordered desires and orients us towards the love that truly satisfies.
As this happens, we experience the Church’s teaching not as a burden imposed from “without,” but as a message of salvation welling up from “within.” We experience the truth that sets us free. In other words, we experience what the sexual revolution promised but couldn’t deliver + authentic sexual liberation.
Prayer for Purity of Heart
Lord, help me to accept and receive my sexuality as a gift from you. Grant me the grace to resist the many lies that distort this divine gift and help me to live my sexuality according to the truth of self-giving love. Grant me purity of heart so that I might see the image of your glory in the beauty of others, and one day see you face to face. Amen.
Prayer for the Redemption of Sexual Desire
Lord, I praise you and thank you for the gift of my sexual desires. By the power of your death and resurrection, untwist in me what sin has twisted so that I might know and experience sexual desire as you created it to be + as the desire to love freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully. Amen.
Prayer in a Moment of Temptation to Lust
Lord, thank you for the beauty of this person whom you made to be loved + never to be treated as a thing for my gratification. I renounce any tendency within me to use this person for my own pleasure, and I ask you to set my desires aright. Amen.
“It is an illusion to think we can build a true culture of human life if we do not . . . accept and experience sexuality and love and the whole of life according to their true meaning and their close inter-connection.”
John Paul II, The Gospel of Life (n. 97).
The sexual embrace is the foundation stone of human life. The family + and, in turn, human society itself + spring from this embrace. In short, as sex goes, so go marriage and the family. As marriage and the family go, so goes civilization.
Such logic doesn’t bode well for our culture. It’s no exaggeration to say that the task of the twentieth century was to rid itself of the Christian sexual ethic. If we’re to build a “culture of life,” the task of the twenty-first century must be to reclaim it.
But the often repressive approach of previous generations of Christians (usually silence or, at most, “don’t do it”) is largely responsible for the cultural jettison of the Church’s teaching on sex. We need a “new language” to break the silence and reverse the negativity. We need a fresh theology that explains how the Christian sexual ethic + far from the prudish list of prohibitions it’s assumed to be + corresponds perfectly with the deepest yearnings of our hearts for love and union.
As many people are only now discovering, Pope John Paul II devoted the first major teaching project of his pontificate to developing just such a theology; he calls it a “theology of the body.” This collection of 129 short talks has already begun a “sexual counter-revolution” that’s changing lives around the world. The “fire” is spreading and in due time we can expect global repercussions.
Papal biographer George Weigel said it best when he described the theology of the body as “a kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences ...perhaps in the twenty-first century” (Witness to Hope, 343).
A Reply to Our Universal Questions
By focusing on the beauty of God’s plan for the union of the sexes, John Paul shifts the discussion from legalism (“How far can I go before I break the law?”) to liberty (“What’s the truth that sets me free to love?”). The truth that sets us free is salvation in Jesus Christ. It doesn’t matter what mistakes we’ve made or what sins we’ve committed. The Pope’s theology of the body wags a finger at no one. It’s a message of sexual salvation offered to one and all.
In short, through an in-depth reflection on the Scriptures, John Paul seeks to answer two of the most important, universal questions: (1) “What’s it mean to be human?” and (2) “How do I live my life in a way that brings true happiness and fulfillment?” The Pope’s teaching, therefore, isn’t just about sex and marriage. Since our creation as male and female is the “fundamental fact of human existence” (Feb 13, 1980), the theology of the body affords “the rediscovery of the meaning of the whole of existence, the meaning of life” (Oct 29, 80).
To answer the first question + “What’s it mean to be human?” + the Pope follows Christ's invitation to reflect on the three different “stages” of the human experience of sex and the body: in our origin before sin (see Mt 19:3-8); in our history darkened by sin yet redeemed in Christ (see Mt 5:27-28); and in our destiny when God will raise our bodies in glory (see Mt 22:23-33).
In response to the second question + “How do I live my life?” + John Paul applies his distinctive “Christian humanism” to the vocations of celibacy and marriage. He then concludes by demonstrating how his study provides a new, winning explanation of Church teaching on sexual morality.
We’ll look briefly at each of these different sections of the Pope’s teaching. Of course, in a short introduction such as this, we’re only scratching the surface of the Pope’s profound insights (see resource section to learn more). We’ll begin with his main idea.
Why is the Body a “Theology”?
According to John Paul II, God created the body as a “sign” of his own divine mystery. This is why he speaks of the body as a “theology,” a study of God.
We can’t see God. As pure Spirit, he’s invisible. Yet Christianity is the religion of God’s self-disclosure. In Christ, “God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange” (CCC, n. 221). Somehow the human body makes this eternal mystery of love visible.
How? Specifically through the beauty of sexual difference and our call to union. God designed the union of the sexes as a “created version” of his own “eternal exchange of love.” And right from the beginning, the union of man and woman foreshadows our eternal destiny of union with Christ. As St. Paul says, the “one flesh” union is “a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31-32).
The Bible uses spousal love more than any other image to help us understand God’s eternal plan for humanity. God’s wants to “marry” us (see Hos 2:19) + to live with us in an “eternal exchange of love.” And he wanted this great “marital plan” to be so plain to us, so obvious to us that he impressed an image of it in our very being by creating us male and female and calling us to communion in “one flesh.”
Thus, in a dramatic development of Catholic thought, John Paul concludes that we image God not only as individuals, “but also through the communion ...which man and woman form right from the beginning.” And, the Pope adds, “On all of this, right from ‘the beginning,’ there descended the blessing of fertility” (Nov 14, 1979). The original vocation to be “fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28), then, is nothing but a call live in the image in which we’re made + to love as God loves.
Of course, this doesn’t mean God is “sexual.” We use spousal love only as an analogy to help us understand something of the divine mystery (see CCC, n. 370). God’s “mystery remains transcendent in regard to this analogy as in regard to any other analogy” (Sep. 29, 1982). At the same time, however, the Pope says that there “is no other human reality which corresponds more, humanly speaking, to that divine mystery” (Dec. 30, 1988).
The Original Experience of the Body & Sex
We tend to think the “war” between the sexes is normal. In his discussion with the Pharisees, Jesus points out that “from the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:8). Before sin, man and woman experienced their union as a participation in God’s eternal love. This is the model for us all, and although we’ve fallen from this, Christ gives us real power to reclaim it.
The biblical creation stories use symbolic language to help us understand deep truths about ourselves. For example, the Pope observes that their original unity flows from the human being’s experience of solitude. At first the man was “alone” (see Gen 2:18). Among the animals there was no “helper fit for him” (Gen 2:20). It’s on the basis of this “solitude” + an experience common to male and female + that we experience our longing for union.
The point is that human sexual union differs radically from the mating of animals. If they were the same, Adam would have found plenty of “helpers” among the animals. But in naming the animals he realized he was different; he alone was a person called to love with his body in God’s image. Upon sight of the woman the man immediately declares: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). That’s to say, “Finally, a person I can love.”
How did he know that she too was a person called to love? Her naked body revealed the mystery! For the pure of heart, nakedness reveals what John Paul calls “the nuptial meaning of the body.” This is the body’s “capacity of expressing love: that love precisely in which the person becomes a gift and + by means of this gift + fulfills the very meaning of his being and existence” (Jan 16, 1980).
Yes, the Pope says if we live according to the truth of our sexuality, we fulfill the very meaning of life. What is it? Jesus reveals it when he says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12). How did Jesus love us? “This is my body which is given for you” (Lk 22:19). God created sexual desire as the power to love as he loves. And this is how the first couple experienced it. Hence, they “were both naked, and were not ashamed” (Gen 2:25).
There’s no shame in love; “perfect love casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18). Living in complete accord with the nuptial meaning of their bodies, they saw and knew each other “with all the peace of the interior gaze, which createsB the fullness of the intimacy of persons” (Jan 2, 1980).
The Historical Experience of the Body & Sex
Original sin caused the “death” of divine love in the human heart. The entrance of shame indicates the dawn of lust, of erotic desire void of God’s love. Men and women of history now tend to seek “the sensation of sexuality” apart from the true gift of themselves, apart from authentic love.
We cover our bodies not because they’re bad, but to protect their inherent goodness from the degradation of lust. Since we know we’re made for love, we feel instinctively “threatened” not only by overt lustful behavior, but even by a “lustful look.”
Christ’s words are severe in this regard. He insists that if we look lustfully at others, we’ve already committed adultery in our hearts (see Mt 5:28). John Paul poses the question: “Are we to fear the severity of these words, or rather have confidence in their salvific ...power?” (Oct 8, 1980). These words have power to save us because the man who utters them is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29).
Christ didn’t die and rise from the dead merely to give us coping mechanisms for sin. “Jesus came to restore creation to the purity of its origins” (CCC, n. 2336). As we open ourselves to the work of redemption, Christ’s death and resurrection effectively “liberate our liberty from the domination of lust” as John Paul expresses it (March 1, 1984).
On this side of heaven, we’ll always be able to recognize a battle in our hearts between love and lust. Even so, John Paul insists that “the redemption of the body” (see Ro 8:23) is already at work in men and women of history. This means as we allow our lusts to be “crucified with Christ” (see Gal 5:24) we can progressively rediscover in what is erotic that original “nuptial meaning of the body” and live it. This “liberation from lust” and the freedom it affords is, in fact, “the condition of all life together in truth” (Oct 8, 1980).
The Ultimate Experience of the Body & Sex
What about our experience of the body in the resurrection? Didn’t Christ say we’ll no longer be given in marriage when we rise from the dead (see Mt 22:30)? Yes, but this doesn’t mean our longing for union will be done away with. It means it will be fulfilled. As a sacrament, marriage is only on earthly sign of the heavenly reality. We no longer need signs to point us to heaven, when we’re in heaven. The “marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7) + the union of love we all desire + will be eternally consummated.
“For man, this consummation will be the final realization of the unity of the human race, which God willed from creation. ...Those who are united with Christ will form the community of the redeemed, ‘the holy city’ of God, ‘the Bride, the wife of the Lamb’” (CCC, n. 1045). This eternal reality is what the “one flesh” union foreshadows from the beginning (see Eph 5:31-32).
Hence, in the resurrection of the body we rediscover + in an eternal dimension + the same nuptial meaning of the body in the meeting with the mystery of the living God face to face (see Dec 9, 1981). “This will be a completely new experience,” the Pope says + beyond anything we can imagine. Yet “it will not be alienated in any way from what man took part in from ‘the beginning,’ nor from [what concerns] the procreative meaning of the body and of sex” (Jan 13, 1982).
The Christian Vocations
By looking at “who we are” in our origin, history, and destiny, we open the door to a proper understanding of the Christian vocations of celibacy and marriage. Both vocations are an authentic “living out” of the most profound truth of who we are as male and female.
When lived authentically, Christian celibacy isn’t a rejection of sexuality and our call to union. It actually points to their ultimate fulfillment. Those who sacrifice marriage “for the sake of the kingdom” (Mt 19:12) do so in order to devote all of their energies and desires to the marriage that alone can satisfy + the marriage of Christ and the Church. In a way, they’re “skipping” the sacrament (the earthly sign) in anticipation of the ultimate reality. By doing so, celibate men and women declare to the world that the kingdom of God is here (see Mt 12:28).
In a different way, marriage also anticipates heaven. “In the joys of their love [God gives spouses] here on earth a foretaste of the wedding feast of the Lamb” (CCC, n. 1642). Why, then, do so many couples experience marriage as a “living hell”? In order for marriage to bring the happiness it’s meant to, spouses must live it as God intended “from the beginning.” This means they must contend diligently with the effects of sin.
Marriage doesn’t justify lust. As a sacrament, marriage is meant to symbolize the union of Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32). The body has a “language” that’s meant to express God’s free, total, faithful, and fruitful love. This is exactly what spouses commit to at the altar. “Have you come here freely?” the priest asks, “to give yourselves to each other without reservation? Do you promise to be faithful until death? Do you promise to receive children lovingly form God?” Bride and groom say “yes.”
In turn, spouses are meant to express this same “yes” with their bodies whenever they become one flesh. “Indeed the very words ‘I take you to be my wife + my husband,’” the Pope says, “can be fulfilled only by means of conjugal intercourse” (Jan 5, 1983). Sexual union is meant to be the renewal of wedding vows!
A New Context for Understanding Sexual Morality
The Church’s sexual ethic begins to make sense when viewed through this lens. It’s not a prudish list of prohibitions. It’s a call to embrace our own “greatness,” our own God-like dignity. It’s a call to live the love we’re created for.
Since a prophet is one who proclaims God’s love, John Paul II describes the body and sexual union as “prophetic.” But, he adds, we must be careful to distinguish between true and false prophets. If we can speak the truth with our bodies, we can also speak lies. Ultimately all questions of sexual morality come down to one simple question: Does this truly image God’s free, total, faithful, fruitful love or does it not?
In practical terms, how healthy would a marriage be if spouses were regularly unfaithful to their wedding vows? On the other hand, how healthy would a marriage be if spouses regularly renewed their vows, expressing an ever-increasing commitment to them? This is what’s at stake in the Church’s teaching on sexual morality.
Masturbation, fornication, adultery, intentionally sterilized sex, homosexual acts, etc.+ none of these image God’s free, total, faithful, and fruitful love. None of these behaviors express and renew wedding vows. They aren’t marital. Does this mean people who behave in such ways are “inherently evil?” No. They’re just confused about how to satisfy their genuine desires for love.
If I offered you a million dollar bill and a counterfeit million dollar bill, which would you prefer? Dumb question, I know. But what if you were raised in a culture that incessantly bombarded you with propaganda convincing you that counterfeit was the real thing and the real thing was a counterfeit? Might you be a little confused?
Authentic Sexual Liberation
Why all the propaganda? If there’s an enemy that wants to keep us from heaven, and if the body and sex is meant to point us there, what do you think he’s going to attack? Sin’s tactic is to “twist” and “disorient” our desire for the eternal embrace. That’s all it can do. When we understand this, we realize that the sexual confusion so prevalent in our world and in our own hearts is nothing but the human desire for heaven gone berserk.
But the tide is changing. People can only put up with the counterfeits for so long. Not only do they fail to satisfy, they wound us terribly. Sadly, the truth of the Church’s teaching on sex is confirmed in the wounds of those who haven’t lived it. Our longings for love, intimacy, and freedom are good. But the sexual revolution sold us a bill of goods. We haven’t been “liberated.” We’ve been duped, betrayed, and left wanting.
This is why the world is a mission field ready to soak up John Paul II’s theology of the body. And this is why it’s already changing so many lives around the world. The Pope’s teaching helps us distinguish between the real million dollar bill and the counterfeit. It helps us “untwist” our disordered desires and orients us towards the love that truly satisfies.
As this happens, we experience the Church’s teaching not as a burden imposed from “without,” but as a message of salvation welling up from “within.” We experience the truth that sets us free. In other words, we experience what the sexual revolution promised but couldn’t deliver + authentic sexual liberation.
Prayer for Purity of Heart
Lord, help me to accept and receive my sexuality as a gift from you. Grant me the grace to resist the many lies that distort this divine gift and help me to live my sexuality according to the truth of self-giving love. Grant me purity of heart so that I might see the image of your glory in the beauty of others, and one day see you face to face. Amen.
Prayer for the Redemption of Sexual Desire
Lord, I praise you and thank you for the gift of my sexual desires. By the power of your death and resurrection, untwist in me what sin has twisted so that I might know and experience sexual desire as you created it to be + as the desire to love freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully. Amen.
Prayer in a Moment of Temptation to Lust
Lord, thank you for the beauty of this person whom you made to be loved + never to be treated as a thing for my gratification. I renounce any tendency within me to use this person for my own pleasure, and I ask you to set my desires aright. Amen.
Theology of the Body: A Compelling, Bold, Biblical Response to the Sexual Revolution
By Christopher West
“‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, and it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31-32).
If the typical Christian in our culture spilled the contents of his mind on a table, ideas about sex would probably look a lot more like Hugh Hefner’s vision than the Apostle Paul’s presented above. Hugh Hefner has been one of the most successful “evangelists” of our time. The world is starved for love, and when the Church fails to proclaim the glory of the banquet, we inevitably fall for the lies of the dumpster.
In Hefner’s “Christian” upbringing, sex was taboo – the body inherently tainted and “sinful.” Hefner, himself, said he started Playboy magazine as “a personal response to the hurt and hypocrisy of our puritan heritage.” Christians can – and should – agree with Hefner’s diagnosis of this disease. Rejecting the body as evil has no place in an authentic biblical vision. God proclaimed that everything he made was “very good” (Gen 1:31). Furthermore, Paul’s admonitions about the dangers of “the flesh” do not condemn the body itself. Paul, rather, is warning us precisely of the dangers Hefner fell into by divorcing the body from the spirit.
Thus, if Christians should agree with Hefner’s diagnosis of the disease, we must disagree with his treatment of it. Hefner’s pornographic remedy doesn’t, in fact, solve the problem at all. All he did was flip the puritanical pancake over from repression to indulgence. Both approaches flow from the same failure to integrate body and spirit. Only such an integration can truly cure the disease.
Paul called this cure the “redemption of the body” (Rom 8:23). Pope John Paul II called it the “theology of the body” (TOB).
A “Theological Time Bomb”
When John Paul II was elected Pope in 1978, he knew that Christians needed a new language to speak about sex that would break the silence in our churches and reverse the negativity. He knew we needed a fresh theology that explains the beauty and greatness of God’s plan for human sexuality. Above all, he knew that we desperately needed salvation from a widespread sexual chaos that, left unanswered, was sure to spell cultural suicide.
And so, in a collection of 129 scholarly addresses delivered between 1979 and 1984, that’s exactly what he provided. In its course, John Paul offered – not just to Catholics, but to all Christians – a bold, compelling, and thoroughly biblical response to Hefner’s pornographic revolution. Rather than condemn Hefner and his followers for eating out of the dumpster, the Pope simply laid out the banquet that truly satisfies the hunger.
Only now, after John Paul’s death, is knowledge of this “banquet” spreading. In due time – if Christians take it up and live it – we can expect global repercussions. Papal biographer George Weigel said it best when he described the TOB as “a kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences ...perhaps in the twenty-first century.”
Of course, a short article like this can only scratch the surface of the Pope’s profound vision. We’ll begin with his main idea.
What Makes the Body “Theological”?
To many Christians the phrase “theology of the body” sounds like an oxymoron. Yet such a reaction only demonstrates how far many of us have drifted from an authentic Christian world-view. As John Paul II observed, “Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh the body entered theology ...through the main door.” Because of the Incarnation, the Apostle John can proclaim it is that “which we have touched with our hands” that we proclaim to you concerning the Word of life. And that life was made visible (see 1 Jn 1-3).
We cannot see God; he is pure spirit. But the astounding claim of Christianity is that the invisible God has made himself visible through the human body. For in Christ “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). God’s mystery revealed in human flesh – theology of the body: this phrase is not only the title of John Paul II’s talks. It represents the very “logic” of Christianity.
Image of God
The Pope’s thesis statement proclaims that “only the body is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” This “mystery hidden in God” refers to the eternal union of the three Persons of the Trinity and our privileged invitation in Christ to share in the Trinity’s eternal exchange of love. This is the “theology” that the human body signifies.
How? Precisely through the beauty of sexual difference and union. In the normal course of events, the union of the “two” leads to a “third.” Here, in a way, we see a trinitarian image. Thus, John Paul concludes that we image God not only as individuals, but also through the union of man and woman. Of course, none of this means that God is “sexual.” We use spousal love only as an analogy to help us understand something of God’s mystery. God’s mystery, itself, remains infinitely beyond any human image.
The Bible, itself, uses spousal love more than any other image to help us understand God’s plan. It begins in Genesis with the marriage of Adam and Eve and ends in Revelation with the marriage of Christ and the Church. Here we find a key for understanding the whole of Scripture: God’s wants to “marry” us – to live with us in an eternal bond of love that the Bible compares to marriage. But there’s more! God wants to fill us – or, to go with the analogy – God wants to “impregnate” us, his bride, with his own divine life. This is a very “earthy” way of speaking, but it isn’t mere poetry. In Mary we witness a woman who literally conceived divine life in her womb.
What we learn in the TOB is that God wanted this great “marital plan” of union and eternal life to be so plain to the world that he impressed an image of it right in our bodies by creating us male and female and calling us to become “one flesh.” If we have difficulty seeing our bodies this way, it’s only because we have been blinded by sin and a deceiver who is literally hell-bent on keeping us from recognizing our true dignity.
“In the Beginning”
On this side of the Fall men and women are often blind to the truth about their bodies and plagued in their union with all kinds of tensions and conflicts. John Paul II reminds us of Christ’s words that “in the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:8). And the “good news” is that Christ came into the world to make God’s original plan a reality in our lives. With this approach – the Gospel approach – John Paul shifts the discussion about sexual morality from legalism (“How far can I go before I break the law?”) to liberty (“What is the truth about sex that sets me free to love?”). The truth that sets us free to love is salvation in Jesus.
In the beginning “nakedness without shame” (Gen 2:25) reveals a very different experience of sexual desire from our own. God created sexual desire as the power to love as he loves. And this is how the first couple experienced it. Nakedness without shame, in fact, is the key, according to the Pope, for understanding God’s original plan for human life. It unlocks the intimacy and ecstasy of love that God intended “from the beginning.”
The entrance of shame, then, indicates the dawn of lust, of erotic desire cut off from God’s love. We cover our bodies in a fallen world not because they’re bad, but to protect their inherent goodness from the degradation of lust. Since we know we’re made for love, we feel instinctively “threatened” not only by overt lustful behavior, but even by a “lustful look.”
Beyond “Sin Management”
Christ’s words are severe in this regard. He insists that if we look lustfully at others, we’ve already committed adultery in our hearts (see Mt 5:28). John Paul asks whether we should fear Christ’s words, or rather have confidence in their power to save us. Here, the Pope sets us on the path of an effective sexual redemption. This is perhaps the most important contribution of the entire TOB.
As we allow our lusts to be crucified with Christ (see Gal 5:24) we can progressively rediscover and live God’s original plan for sexual desire. We needn’t merely cope with our lusts or “manage” our sinful tendencies. Our sexual desires can be effectively transformed through the “redemption of the body” (Ro 8:23). C.S. Lewis offered a grand image of this at the end of The Great Divorce when “the lizard of lust” was transformed into a great white stallion.
Of course, on this side of heaven, we’ll always be able to recognize a battle in our hearts between love and lust. Only in eternity will the battle cease, as will marriage as we know it. However, when Christ said we will no longer marry in the resurrection (see Mt 22:30), this doesn’t mean our longing for union will be obliterated. It means it will be fulfilled in the “Marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7). That is the union we truly crave. The union of the sexes here on earth is only an icon that’s meant to point us to heaven. When we get there, the icon will give way to the ultimate reality!
In fact, all the sexual confusion in our world and in our own hearts is simply the human desire for heaven gone berserk. The gift of the TOB is that it helps us “unberserk” it. Lust has inverted our rocket engines causing us to crash and burn. The TOB redirects our rocket engines toward the stars.
True and False Prophets
Only in this context does the Christian sexual ethic make sense. Everything the New Testament teaches about sexual morality is an invitation to embrace the original plan of Genesis in order to launch us toward the marriage in the Book of Revelation.
But here’s what truly makes the Gospel good news: it doesn’t only give us a list of rules to follow. Christ empowers us with his grace to fulfill the law. As we allow grace to work in us, the law no longer feels like a burden imposed from without. It wells up from within. We embrace the biblical teaching on sex not because we “have” to, but because we long to. When we see the riches of the banquet, the dumpster no longer attracts us.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). For what reason? To proclaim and participate in the “great mystery” of Christ’s ecstatic union with the Church (see Eph 5:31-32). Could there be a more glorious vision of human sexuality than this?
As a proclamation of divine truth, sexual union has a “prophetic language.” But, as the Pope maintained, we must carefully distinguish true and false prophets. If it is possible to speak the truth with the body, it is also possible to speak a lie. Marriage vows are the solemn promise a man and a woman make to love each other “in the image of God.” In turn, spouses are meant to express this same love with their bodies whenever they become one flesh. In other words, sexual intercourse is meant to be a renewal of wedding vows – where the words of the vows are made flesh.
Ecumenical Significance
Since the “one flesh” union offers a prophetic reference to Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32), our understanding of sexuality has ramifications for all of theology – for the very way we conceive of Christ and his Church. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise us that disputes about the nature of marriage are often at the core of historical divisions within Christianity.
Followers of Christ everywhere recognize John Paul II’s tireless ecumenical efforts. He publicly repented on behalf of those Catholics whose sins led to division in the first place. He reached out repeatedly to Protestant and Orthodox leaders, even asking them to help Rome “re-envision” the papacy so that it could more effectively serve the needs of all Christians. Yet, when history witnesses the fulfillment of Christ’s prayer that “all may be one” (Jn 17:11), it may well recognize the TOB as John Paul II’s most important ecumenical contribution.
If disputes in Christ’s family have led to multiple divorces, the Pope’s daring, biblical apologetic for unity in the “domestic church” (the family) can contribute greatly to bringing about unity in the Church at large. It’s precisely here, in fact – in the cultural battle for marriage and the family – that committed Christians of varying professions find themselves overcoming their mutual prejudices and standing together.
Alan Medinger, who has served the sexually broken for a quarter century through Regeneration Ministries, observes that “evangelicals have much to offer the Catholic Church.... But this is a two way street.... Catholics have [much] to offer [us] in the area of teaching and theology regarding the related matters of life, reproduction, and sexuality.” He concludes, “At this point in my ministry, I can think of no greater service to render to my fellow evangelicals than to point them to Theology of the Body.”
Cultural Renewal
There will be no renewal of the Church and the world without a renewal of marriage and the family. And there will be no renewal of marriage and the family without a return to the full truth of the Christian sexual ethic. This will not happen, however, unless we can find a compelling way to demonstrate to the modern world that the biblical vision of sexuality is not the prudish list of prohibitions it is so often assumed to be, but rather it is the banquet of love we so desperately yearn for.
This is the gift and the promise of John Paul II’s TOB. But its riches have barely begun to penetrate the Catholic world, let alone the wider Christian community. Perhaps if Christians everywhere feasted on this biblical banquet, we could save our culture from its repressive heritage and from the pornographic backlash it inspired. In the process, we might even be able to evangelize Hugh Hefner rather than Hugh Hefner continuing to evangelize us.
____
“‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, and it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31-32).
If the typical Christian in our culture spilled the contents of his mind on a table, ideas about sex would probably look a lot more like Hugh Hefner’s vision than the Apostle Paul’s presented above. Hugh Hefner has been one of the most successful “evangelists” of our time. The world is starved for love, and when the Church fails to proclaim the glory of the banquet, we inevitably fall for the lies of the dumpster.
In Hefner’s “Christian” upbringing, sex was taboo – the body inherently tainted and “sinful.” Hefner, himself, said he started Playboy magazine as “a personal response to the hurt and hypocrisy of our puritan heritage.” Christians can – and should – agree with Hefner’s diagnosis of this disease. Rejecting the body as evil has no place in an authentic biblical vision. God proclaimed that everything he made was “very good” (Gen 1:31). Furthermore, Paul’s admonitions about the dangers of “the flesh” do not condemn the body itself. Paul, rather, is warning us precisely of the dangers Hefner fell into by divorcing the body from the spirit.
Thus, if Christians should agree with Hefner’s diagnosis of the disease, we must disagree with his treatment of it. Hefner’s pornographic remedy doesn’t, in fact, solve the problem at all. All he did was flip the puritanical pancake over from repression to indulgence. Both approaches flow from the same failure to integrate body and spirit. Only such an integration can truly cure the disease.
Paul called this cure the “redemption of the body” (Rom 8:23). Pope John Paul II called it the “theology of the body” (TOB).
A “Theological Time Bomb”
When John Paul II was elected Pope in 1978, he knew that Christians needed a new language to speak about sex that would break the silence in our churches and reverse the negativity. He knew we needed a fresh theology that explains the beauty and greatness of God’s plan for human sexuality. Above all, he knew that we desperately needed salvation from a widespread sexual chaos that, left unanswered, was sure to spell cultural suicide.
And so, in a collection of 129 scholarly addresses delivered between 1979 and 1984, that’s exactly what he provided. In its course, John Paul offered – not just to Catholics, but to all Christians – a bold, compelling, and thoroughly biblical response to Hefner’s pornographic revolution. Rather than condemn Hefner and his followers for eating out of the dumpster, the Pope simply laid out the banquet that truly satisfies the hunger.
Only now, after John Paul’s death, is knowledge of this “banquet” spreading. In due time – if Christians take it up and live it – we can expect global repercussions. Papal biographer George Weigel said it best when he described the TOB as “a kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences ...perhaps in the twenty-first century.”
Of course, a short article like this can only scratch the surface of the Pope’s profound vision. We’ll begin with his main idea.
What Makes the Body “Theological”?
To many Christians the phrase “theology of the body” sounds like an oxymoron. Yet such a reaction only demonstrates how far many of us have drifted from an authentic Christian world-view. As John Paul II observed, “Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh the body entered theology ...through the main door.” Because of the Incarnation, the Apostle John can proclaim it is that “which we have touched with our hands” that we proclaim to you concerning the Word of life. And that life was made visible (see 1 Jn 1-3).
We cannot see God; he is pure spirit. But the astounding claim of Christianity is that the invisible God has made himself visible through the human body. For in Christ “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). God’s mystery revealed in human flesh – theology of the body: this phrase is not only the title of John Paul II’s talks. It represents the very “logic” of Christianity.
Image of God
The Pope’s thesis statement proclaims that “only the body is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” This “mystery hidden in God” refers to the eternal union of the three Persons of the Trinity and our privileged invitation in Christ to share in the Trinity’s eternal exchange of love. This is the “theology” that the human body signifies.
How? Precisely through the beauty of sexual difference and union. In the normal course of events, the union of the “two” leads to a “third.” Here, in a way, we see a trinitarian image. Thus, John Paul concludes that we image God not only as individuals, but also through the union of man and woman. Of course, none of this means that God is “sexual.” We use spousal love only as an analogy to help us understand something of God’s mystery. God’s mystery, itself, remains infinitely beyond any human image.
The Bible, itself, uses spousal love more than any other image to help us understand God’s plan. It begins in Genesis with the marriage of Adam and Eve and ends in Revelation with the marriage of Christ and the Church. Here we find a key for understanding the whole of Scripture: God’s wants to “marry” us – to live with us in an eternal bond of love that the Bible compares to marriage. But there’s more! God wants to fill us – or, to go with the analogy – God wants to “impregnate” us, his bride, with his own divine life. This is a very “earthy” way of speaking, but it isn’t mere poetry. In Mary we witness a woman who literally conceived divine life in her womb.
What we learn in the TOB is that God wanted this great “marital plan” of union and eternal life to be so plain to the world that he impressed an image of it right in our bodies by creating us male and female and calling us to become “one flesh.” If we have difficulty seeing our bodies this way, it’s only because we have been blinded by sin and a deceiver who is literally hell-bent on keeping us from recognizing our true dignity.
“In the Beginning”
On this side of the Fall men and women are often blind to the truth about their bodies and plagued in their union with all kinds of tensions and conflicts. John Paul II reminds us of Christ’s words that “in the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:8). And the “good news” is that Christ came into the world to make God’s original plan a reality in our lives. With this approach – the Gospel approach – John Paul shifts the discussion about sexual morality from legalism (“How far can I go before I break the law?”) to liberty (“What is the truth about sex that sets me free to love?”). The truth that sets us free to love is salvation in Jesus.
In the beginning “nakedness without shame” (Gen 2:25) reveals a very different experience of sexual desire from our own. God created sexual desire as the power to love as he loves. And this is how the first couple experienced it. Nakedness without shame, in fact, is the key, according to the Pope, for understanding God’s original plan for human life. It unlocks the intimacy and ecstasy of love that God intended “from the beginning.”
The entrance of shame, then, indicates the dawn of lust, of erotic desire cut off from God’s love. We cover our bodies in a fallen world not because they’re bad, but to protect their inherent goodness from the degradation of lust. Since we know we’re made for love, we feel instinctively “threatened” not only by overt lustful behavior, but even by a “lustful look.”
Beyond “Sin Management”
Christ’s words are severe in this regard. He insists that if we look lustfully at others, we’ve already committed adultery in our hearts (see Mt 5:28). John Paul asks whether we should fear Christ’s words, or rather have confidence in their power to save us. Here, the Pope sets us on the path of an effective sexual redemption. This is perhaps the most important contribution of the entire TOB.
As we allow our lusts to be crucified with Christ (see Gal 5:24) we can progressively rediscover and live God’s original plan for sexual desire. We needn’t merely cope with our lusts or “manage” our sinful tendencies. Our sexual desires can be effectively transformed through the “redemption of the body” (Ro 8:23). C.S. Lewis offered a grand image of this at the end of The Great Divorce when “the lizard of lust” was transformed into a great white stallion.
Of course, on this side of heaven, we’ll always be able to recognize a battle in our hearts between love and lust. Only in eternity will the battle cease, as will marriage as we know it. However, when Christ said we will no longer marry in the resurrection (see Mt 22:30), this doesn’t mean our longing for union will be obliterated. It means it will be fulfilled in the “Marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7). That is the union we truly crave. The union of the sexes here on earth is only an icon that’s meant to point us to heaven. When we get there, the icon will give way to the ultimate reality!
In fact, all the sexual confusion in our world and in our own hearts is simply the human desire for heaven gone berserk. The gift of the TOB is that it helps us “unberserk” it. Lust has inverted our rocket engines causing us to crash and burn. The TOB redirects our rocket engines toward the stars.
True and False Prophets
Only in this context does the Christian sexual ethic make sense. Everything the New Testament teaches about sexual morality is an invitation to embrace the original plan of Genesis in order to launch us toward the marriage in the Book of Revelation.
But here’s what truly makes the Gospel good news: it doesn’t only give us a list of rules to follow. Christ empowers us with his grace to fulfill the law. As we allow grace to work in us, the law no longer feels like a burden imposed from without. It wells up from within. We embrace the biblical teaching on sex not because we “have” to, but because we long to. When we see the riches of the banquet, the dumpster no longer attracts us.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). For what reason? To proclaim and participate in the “great mystery” of Christ’s ecstatic union with the Church (see Eph 5:31-32). Could there be a more glorious vision of human sexuality than this?
As a proclamation of divine truth, sexual union has a “prophetic language.” But, as the Pope maintained, we must carefully distinguish true and false prophets. If it is possible to speak the truth with the body, it is also possible to speak a lie. Marriage vows are the solemn promise a man and a woman make to love each other “in the image of God.” In turn, spouses are meant to express this same love with their bodies whenever they become one flesh. In other words, sexual intercourse is meant to be a renewal of wedding vows – where the words of the vows are made flesh.
Ecumenical Significance
Since the “one flesh” union offers a prophetic reference to Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32), our understanding of sexuality has ramifications for all of theology – for the very way we conceive of Christ and his Church. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise us that disputes about the nature of marriage are often at the core of historical divisions within Christianity.
Followers of Christ everywhere recognize John Paul II’s tireless ecumenical efforts. He publicly repented on behalf of those Catholics whose sins led to division in the first place. He reached out repeatedly to Protestant and Orthodox leaders, even asking them to help Rome “re-envision” the papacy so that it could more effectively serve the needs of all Christians. Yet, when history witnesses the fulfillment of Christ’s prayer that “all may be one” (Jn 17:11), it may well recognize the TOB as John Paul II’s most important ecumenical contribution.
If disputes in Christ’s family have led to multiple divorces, the Pope’s daring, biblical apologetic for unity in the “domestic church” (the family) can contribute greatly to bringing about unity in the Church at large. It’s precisely here, in fact – in the cultural battle for marriage and the family – that committed Christians of varying professions find themselves overcoming their mutual prejudices and standing together.
Alan Medinger, who has served the sexually broken for a quarter century through Regeneration Ministries, observes that “evangelicals have much to offer the Catholic Church.... But this is a two way street.... Catholics have [much] to offer [us] in the area of teaching and theology regarding the related matters of life, reproduction, and sexuality.” He concludes, “At this point in my ministry, I can think of no greater service to render to my fellow evangelicals than to point them to Theology of the Body.”
Cultural Renewal
There will be no renewal of the Church and the world without a renewal of marriage and the family. And there will be no renewal of marriage and the family without a return to the full truth of the Christian sexual ethic. This will not happen, however, unless we can find a compelling way to demonstrate to the modern world that the biblical vision of sexuality is not the prudish list of prohibitions it is so often assumed to be, but rather it is the banquet of love we so desperately yearn for.
This is the gift and the promise of John Paul II’s TOB. But its riches have barely begun to penetrate the Catholic world, let alone the wider Christian community. Perhaps if Christians everywhere feasted on this biblical banquet, we could save our culture from its repressive heritage and from the pornographic backlash it inspired. In the process, we might even be able to evangelize Hugh Hefner rather than Hugh Hefner continuing to evangelize us.
____
Theology of the Body: A Compelling, Bold, Biblical Response to the Sexual Revolution
By Christopher West
“‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, and it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31-32).
If the typical Christian in our culture spilled the contents of his mind on a table, ideas about sex would probably look a lot more like Hugh Hefner’s vision than the Apostle Paul’s presented above. Hugh Hefner has been one of the most successful “evangelists” of our time. The world is starved for love, and when the Church fails to proclaim the glory of the banquet, we inevitably fall for the lies of the dumpster.
In Hefner’s “Christian” upbringing, sex was taboo – the body inherently tainted and “sinful.” Hefner, himself, said he started Playboy magazine as “a personal response to the hurt and hypocrisy of our puritan heritage.” Christians can – and should – agree with Hefner’s diagnosis of this disease. Rejecting the body as evil has no place in an authentic biblical vision. God proclaimed that everything he made was “very good” (Gen 1:31). Furthermore, Paul’s admonitions about the dangers of “the flesh” do not condemn the body itself. Paul, rather, is warning us precisely of the dangers Hefner fell into by divorcing the body from the spirit.
Thus, if Christians should agree with Hefner’s diagnosis of the disease, we must disagree with his treatment of it. Hefner’s pornographic remedy doesn’t, in fact, solve the problem at all. All he did was flip the puritanical pancake over from repression to indulgence. Both approaches flow from the same failure to integrate body and spirit. Only such an integration can truly cure the disease.
Paul called this cure the “redemption of the body” (Rom 8:23). Pope John Paul II called it the “theology of the body” (TOB).
A “Theological Time Bomb”
When John Paul II was elected Pope in 1978, he knew that Christians needed a new language to speak about sex that would break the silence in our churches and reverse the negativity. He knew we needed a fresh theology that explains the beauty and greatness of God’s plan for human sexuality. Above all, he knew that we desperately needed salvation from a widespread sexual chaos that, left unanswered, was sure to spell cultural suicide.
And so, in a collection of 129 scholarly addresses delivered between 1979 and 1984, that’s exactly what he provided. In its course, John Paul offered – not just to Catholics, but to all Christians – a bold, compelling, and thoroughly biblical response to Hefner’s pornographic revolution. Rather than condemn Hefner and his followers for eating out of the dumpster, the Pope simply laid out the banquet that truly satisfies the hunger.
Only now, after John Paul’s death, is knowledge of this “banquet” spreading. In due time – if Christians take it up and live it – we can expect global repercussions. Papal biographer George Weigel said it best when he described the TOB as “a kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences ...perhaps in the twenty-first century.”
Of course, a short article like this can only scratch the surface of the Pope’s profound vision. We’ll begin with his main idea.
What Makes the Body “Theological”?
To many Christians the phrase “theology of the body” sounds like an oxymoron. Yet such a reaction only demonstrates how far many of us have drifted from an authentic Christian world-view. As John Paul II observed, “Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh the body entered theology ...through the main door.” Because of the Incarnation, the Apostle John can proclaim it is that “which we have touched with our hands” that we proclaim to you concerning the Word of life. And that life was made visible (see 1 Jn 1-3).
We cannot see God; he is pure spirit. But the astounding claim of Christianity is that the invisible God has made himself visible through the human body. For in Christ “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). God’s mystery revealed in human flesh – theology of the body: this phrase is not only the title of John Paul II’s talks. It represents the very “logic” of Christianity.
Image of God
The Pope’s thesis statement proclaims that “only the body is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” This “mystery hidden in God” refers to the eternal union of the three Persons of the Trinity and our privileged invitation in Christ to share in the Trinity’s eternal exchange of love. This is the “theology” that the human body signifies.
How? Precisely through the beauty of sexual difference and union. In the normal course of events, the union of the “two” leads to a “third.” Here, in a way, we see a trinitarian image. Thus, John Paul concludes that we image God not only as individuals, but also through the union of man and woman. Of course, none of this means that God is “sexual.” We use spousal love only as an analogy to help us understand something of God’s mystery. God’s mystery, itself, remains infinitely beyond any human image.
The Bible, itself, uses spousal love more than any other image to help us understand God’s plan. It begins in Genesis with the marriage of Adam and Eve and ends in Revelation with the marriage of Christ and the Church. Here we find a key for understanding the whole of Scripture: God’s wants to “marry” us – to live with us in an eternal bond of love that the Bible compares to marriage. But there’s more! God wants to fill us – or, to go with the analogy – God wants to “impregnate” us, his bride, with his own divine life. This is a very “earthy” way of speaking, but it isn’t mere poetry. In Mary we witness a woman who literally conceived divine life in her womb.
What we learn in the TOB is that God wanted this great “marital plan” of union and eternal life to be so plain to the world that he impressed an image of it right in our bodies by creating us male and female and calling us to become “one flesh.” If we have difficulty seeing our bodies this way, it’s only because we have been blinded by sin and a deceiver who is literally hell-bent on keeping us from recognizing our true dignity.
“In the Beginning”
On this side of the Fall men and women are often blind to the truth about their bodies and plagued in their union with all kinds of tensions and conflicts. John Paul II reminds us of Christ’s words that “in the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:8). And the “good news” is that Christ came into the world to make God’s original plan a reality in our lives. With this approach – the Gospel approach – John Paul shifts the discussion about sexual morality from legalism (“How far can I go before I break the law?”) to liberty (“What is the truth about sex that sets me free to love?”). The truth that sets us free to love is salvation in Jesus.
In the beginning “nakedness without shame” (Gen 2:25) reveals a very different experience of sexual desire from our own. God created sexual desire as the power to love as he loves. And this is how the first couple experienced it. Nakedness without shame, in fact, is the key, according to the Pope, for understanding God’s original plan for human life. It unlocks the intimacy and ecstasy of love that God intended “from the beginning.”
The entrance of shame, then, indicates the dawn of lust, of erotic desire cut off from God’s love. We cover our bodies in a fallen world not because they’re bad, but to protect their inherent goodness from the degradation of lust. Since we know we’re made for love, we feel instinctively “threatened” not only by overt lustful behavior, but even by a “lustful look.”
Beyond “Sin Management”
Christ’s words are severe in this regard. He insists that if we look lustfully at others, we’ve already committed adultery in our hearts (see Mt 5:28). John Paul asks whether we should fear Christ’s words, or rather have confidence in their power to save us. Here, the Pope sets us on the path of an effective sexual redemption. This is perhaps the most important contribution of the entire TOB.
As we allow our lusts to be crucified with Christ (see Gal 5:24) we can progressively rediscover and live God’s original plan for sexual desire. We needn’t merely cope with our lusts or “manage” our sinful tendencies. Our sexual desires can be effectively transformed through the “redemption of the body” (Ro 8:23). C.S. Lewis offered a grand image of this at the end of The Great Divorce when “the lizard of lust” was transformed into a great white stallion.
Of course, on this side of heaven, we’ll always be able to recognize a battle in our hearts between love and lust. Only in eternity will the battle cease, as will marriage as we know it. However, when Christ said we will no longer marry in the resurrection (see Mt 22:30), this doesn’t mean our longing for union will be obliterated. It means it will be fulfilled in the “Marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7). That is the union we truly crave. The union of the sexes here on earth is only an icon that’s meant to point us to heaven. When we get there, the icon will give way to the ultimate reality!
In fact, all the sexual confusion in our world and in our own hearts is simply the human desire for heaven gone berserk. The gift of the TOB is that it helps us “unberserk” it. Lust has inverted our rocket engines causing us to crash and burn. The TOB redirects our rocket engines toward the stars.
True and False Prophets
Only in this context does the Christian sexual ethic make sense. Everything the New Testament teaches about sexual morality is an invitation to embrace the original plan of Genesis in order to launch us toward the marriage in the Book of Revelation.
But here’s what truly makes the Gospel good news: it doesn’t only give us a list of rules to follow. Christ empowers us with his grace to fulfill the law. As we allow grace to work in us, the law no longer feels like a burden imposed from without. It wells up from within. We embrace the biblical teaching on sex not because we “have” to, but because we long to. When we see the riches of the banquet, the dumpster no longer attracts us.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). For what reason? To proclaim and participate in the “great mystery” of Christ’s ecstatic union with the Church (see Eph 5:31-32). Could there be a more glorious vision of human sexuality than this?
As a proclamation of divine truth, sexual union has a “prophetic language.” But, as the Pope maintained, we must carefully distinguish true and false prophets. If it is possible to speak the truth with the body, it is also possible to speak a lie. Marriage vows are the solemn promise a man and a woman make to love each other “in the image of God.” In turn, spouses are meant to express this same love with their bodies whenever they become one flesh. In other words, sexual intercourse is meant to be a renewal of wedding vows – where the words of the vows are made flesh.
Ecumenical Significance
Since the “one flesh” union offers a prophetic reference to Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32), our understanding of sexuality has ramifications for all of theology – for the very way we conceive of Christ and his Church. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise us that disputes about the nature of marriage are often at the core of historical divisions within Christianity.
Followers of Christ everywhere recognize John Paul II’s tireless ecumenical efforts. He publicly repented on behalf of those Catholics whose sins led to division in the first place. He reached out repeatedly to Protestant and Orthodox leaders, even asking them to help Rome “re-envision” the papacy so that it could more effectively serve the needs of all Christians. Yet, when history witnesses the fulfillment of Christ’s prayer that “all may be one” (Jn 17:11), it may well recognize the TOB as John Paul II’s most important ecumenical contribution.
If disputes in Christ’s family have led to multiple divorces, the Pope’s daring, biblical apologetic for unity in the “domestic church” (the family) can contribute greatly to bringing about unity in the Church at large. It’s precisely here, in fact – in the cultural battle for marriage and the family – that committed Christians of varying professions find themselves overcoming their mutual prejudices and standing together.
Alan Medinger, who has served the sexually broken for a quarter century through Regeneration Ministries, observes that “evangelicals have much to offer the Catholic Church.... But this is a two way street.... Catholics have [much] to offer [us] in the area of teaching and theology regarding the related matters of life, reproduction, and sexuality.” He concludes, “At this point in my ministry, I can think of no greater service to render to my fellow evangelicals than to point them to Theology of the Body.”
Cultural Renewal
There will be no renewal of the Church and the world without a renewal of marriage and the family. And there will be no renewal of marriage and the family without a return to the full truth of the Christian sexual ethic. This will not happen, however, unless we can find a compelling way to demonstrate to the modern world that the biblical vision of sexuality is not the prudish list of prohibitions it is so often assumed to be, but rather it is the banquet of love we so desperately yearn for.
This is the gift and the promise of John Paul II’s TOB. But its riches have barely begun to penetrate the Catholic world, let alone the wider Christian community. Perhaps if Christians everywhere feasted on this biblical banquet, we could save our culture from its repressive heritage and from the pornographic backlash it inspired. In the process, we might even be able to evangelize Hugh Hefner rather than Hugh Hefner continuing to evangelize us.
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“‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, and it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31-32).
If the typical Christian in our culture spilled the contents of his mind on a table, ideas about sex would probably look a lot more like Hugh Hefner’s vision than the Apostle Paul’s presented above. Hugh Hefner has been one of the most successful “evangelists” of our time. The world is starved for love, and when the Church fails to proclaim the glory of the banquet, we inevitably fall for the lies of the dumpster.
In Hefner’s “Christian” upbringing, sex was taboo – the body inherently tainted and “sinful.” Hefner, himself, said he started Playboy magazine as “a personal response to the hurt and hypocrisy of our puritan heritage.” Christians can – and should – agree with Hefner’s diagnosis of this disease. Rejecting the body as evil has no place in an authentic biblical vision. God proclaimed that everything he made was “very good” (Gen 1:31). Furthermore, Paul’s admonitions about the dangers of “the flesh” do not condemn the body itself. Paul, rather, is warning us precisely of the dangers Hefner fell into by divorcing the body from the spirit.
Thus, if Christians should agree with Hefner’s diagnosis of the disease, we must disagree with his treatment of it. Hefner’s pornographic remedy doesn’t, in fact, solve the problem at all. All he did was flip the puritanical pancake over from repression to indulgence. Both approaches flow from the same failure to integrate body and spirit. Only such an integration can truly cure the disease.
Paul called this cure the “redemption of the body” (Rom 8:23). Pope John Paul II called it the “theology of the body” (TOB).
A “Theological Time Bomb”
When John Paul II was elected Pope in 1978, he knew that Christians needed a new language to speak about sex that would break the silence in our churches and reverse the negativity. He knew we needed a fresh theology that explains the beauty and greatness of God’s plan for human sexuality. Above all, he knew that we desperately needed salvation from a widespread sexual chaos that, left unanswered, was sure to spell cultural suicide.
And so, in a collection of 129 scholarly addresses delivered between 1979 and 1984, that’s exactly what he provided. In its course, John Paul offered – not just to Catholics, but to all Christians – a bold, compelling, and thoroughly biblical response to Hefner’s pornographic revolution. Rather than condemn Hefner and his followers for eating out of the dumpster, the Pope simply laid out the banquet that truly satisfies the hunger.
Only now, after John Paul’s death, is knowledge of this “banquet” spreading. In due time – if Christians take it up and live it – we can expect global repercussions. Papal biographer George Weigel said it best when he described the TOB as “a kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences ...perhaps in the twenty-first century.”
Of course, a short article like this can only scratch the surface of the Pope’s profound vision. We’ll begin with his main idea.
What Makes the Body “Theological”?
To many Christians the phrase “theology of the body” sounds like an oxymoron. Yet such a reaction only demonstrates how far many of us have drifted from an authentic Christian world-view. As John Paul II observed, “Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh the body entered theology ...through the main door.” Because of the Incarnation, the Apostle John can proclaim it is that “which we have touched with our hands” that we proclaim to you concerning the Word of life. And that life was made visible (see 1 Jn 1-3).
We cannot see God; he is pure spirit. But the astounding claim of Christianity is that the invisible God has made himself visible through the human body. For in Christ “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). God’s mystery revealed in human flesh – theology of the body: this phrase is not only the title of John Paul II’s talks. It represents the very “logic” of Christianity.
Image of God
The Pope’s thesis statement proclaims that “only the body is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” This “mystery hidden in God” refers to the eternal union of the three Persons of the Trinity and our privileged invitation in Christ to share in the Trinity’s eternal exchange of love. This is the “theology” that the human body signifies.
How? Precisely through the beauty of sexual difference and union. In the normal course of events, the union of the “two” leads to a “third.” Here, in a way, we see a trinitarian image. Thus, John Paul concludes that we image God not only as individuals, but also through the union of man and woman. Of course, none of this means that God is “sexual.” We use spousal love only as an analogy to help us understand something of God’s mystery. God’s mystery, itself, remains infinitely beyond any human image.
The Bible, itself, uses spousal love more than any other image to help us understand God’s plan. It begins in Genesis with the marriage of Adam and Eve and ends in Revelation with the marriage of Christ and the Church. Here we find a key for understanding the whole of Scripture: God’s wants to “marry” us – to live with us in an eternal bond of love that the Bible compares to marriage. But there’s more! God wants to fill us – or, to go with the analogy – God wants to “impregnate” us, his bride, with his own divine life. This is a very “earthy” way of speaking, but it isn’t mere poetry. In Mary we witness a woman who literally conceived divine life in her womb.
What we learn in the TOB is that God wanted this great “marital plan” of union and eternal life to be so plain to the world that he impressed an image of it right in our bodies by creating us male and female and calling us to become “one flesh.” If we have difficulty seeing our bodies this way, it’s only because we have been blinded by sin and a deceiver who is literally hell-bent on keeping us from recognizing our true dignity.
“In the Beginning”
On this side of the Fall men and women are often blind to the truth about their bodies and plagued in their union with all kinds of tensions and conflicts. John Paul II reminds us of Christ’s words that “in the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:8). And the “good news” is that Christ came into the world to make God’s original plan a reality in our lives. With this approach – the Gospel approach – John Paul shifts the discussion about sexual morality from legalism (“How far can I go before I break the law?”) to liberty (“What is the truth about sex that sets me free to love?”). The truth that sets us free to love is salvation in Jesus.
In the beginning “nakedness without shame” (Gen 2:25) reveals a very different experience of sexual desire from our own. God created sexual desire as the power to love as he loves. And this is how the first couple experienced it. Nakedness without shame, in fact, is the key, according to the Pope, for understanding God’s original plan for human life. It unlocks the intimacy and ecstasy of love that God intended “from the beginning.”
The entrance of shame, then, indicates the dawn of lust, of erotic desire cut off from God’s love. We cover our bodies in a fallen world not because they’re bad, but to protect their inherent goodness from the degradation of lust. Since we know we’re made for love, we feel instinctively “threatened” not only by overt lustful behavior, but even by a “lustful look.”
Beyond “Sin Management”
Christ’s words are severe in this regard. He insists that if we look lustfully at others, we’ve already committed adultery in our hearts (see Mt 5:28). John Paul asks whether we should fear Christ’s words, or rather have confidence in their power to save us. Here, the Pope sets us on the path of an effective sexual redemption. This is perhaps the most important contribution of the entire TOB.
As we allow our lusts to be crucified with Christ (see Gal 5:24) we can progressively rediscover and live God’s original plan for sexual desire. We needn’t merely cope with our lusts or “manage” our sinful tendencies. Our sexual desires can be effectively transformed through the “redemption of the body” (Ro 8:23). C.S. Lewis offered a grand image of this at the end of The Great Divorce when “the lizard of lust” was transformed into a great white stallion.
Of course, on this side of heaven, we’ll always be able to recognize a battle in our hearts between love and lust. Only in eternity will the battle cease, as will marriage as we know it. However, when Christ said we will no longer marry in the resurrection (see Mt 22:30), this doesn’t mean our longing for union will be obliterated. It means it will be fulfilled in the “Marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7). That is the union we truly crave. The union of the sexes here on earth is only an icon that’s meant to point us to heaven. When we get there, the icon will give way to the ultimate reality!
In fact, all the sexual confusion in our world and in our own hearts is simply the human desire for heaven gone berserk. The gift of the TOB is that it helps us “unberserk” it. Lust has inverted our rocket engines causing us to crash and burn. The TOB redirects our rocket engines toward the stars.
True and False Prophets
Only in this context does the Christian sexual ethic make sense. Everything the New Testament teaches about sexual morality is an invitation to embrace the original plan of Genesis in order to launch us toward the marriage in the Book of Revelation.
But here’s what truly makes the Gospel good news: it doesn’t only give us a list of rules to follow. Christ empowers us with his grace to fulfill the law. As we allow grace to work in us, the law no longer feels like a burden imposed from without. It wells up from within. We embrace the biblical teaching on sex not because we “have” to, but because we long to. When we see the riches of the banquet, the dumpster no longer attracts us.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). For what reason? To proclaim and participate in the “great mystery” of Christ’s ecstatic union with the Church (see Eph 5:31-32). Could there be a more glorious vision of human sexuality than this?
As a proclamation of divine truth, sexual union has a “prophetic language.” But, as the Pope maintained, we must carefully distinguish true and false prophets. If it is possible to speak the truth with the body, it is also possible to speak a lie. Marriage vows are the solemn promise a man and a woman make to love each other “in the image of God.” In turn, spouses are meant to express this same love with their bodies whenever they become one flesh. In other words, sexual intercourse is meant to be a renewal of wedding vows – where the words of the vows are made flesh.
Ecumenical Significance
Since the “one flesh” union offers a prophetic reference to Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32), our understanding of sexuality has ramifications for all of theology – for the very way we conceive of Christ and his Church. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise us that disputes about the nature of marriage are often at the core of historical divisions within Christianity.
Followers of Christ everywhere recognize John Paul II’s tireless ecumenical efforts. He publicly repented on behalf of those Catholics whose sins led to division in the first place. He reached out repeatedly to Protestant and Orthodox leaders, even asking them to help Rome “re-envision” the papacy so that it could more effectively serve the needs of all Christians. Yet, when history witnesses the fulfillment of Christ’s prayer that “all may be one” (Jn 17:11), it may well recognize the TOB as John Paul II’s most important ecumenical contribution.
If disputes in Christ’s family have led to multiple divorces, the Pope’s daring, biblical apologetic for unity in the “domestic church” (the family) can contribute greatly to bringing about unity in the Church at large. It’s precisely here, in fact – in the cultural battle for marriage and the family – that committed Christians of varying professions find themselves overcoming their mutual prejudices and standing together.
Alan Medinger, who has served the sexually broken for a quarter century through Regeneration Ministries, observes that “evangelicals have much to offer the Catholic Church.... But this is a two way street.... Catholics have [much] to offer [us] in the area of teaching and theology regarding the related matters of life, reproduction, and sexuality.” He concludes, “At this point in my ministry, I can think of no greater service to render to my fellow evangelicals than to point them to Theology of the Body.”
Cultural Renewal
There will be no renewal of the Church and the world without a renewal of marriage and the family. And there will be no renewal of marriage and the family without a return to the full truth of the Christian sexual ethic. This will not happen, however, unless we can find a compelling way to demonstrate to the modern world that the biblical vision of sexuality is not the prudish list of prohibitions it is so often assumed to be, but rather it is the banquet of love we so desperately yearn for.
This is the gift and the promise of John Paul II’s TOB. But its riches have barely begun to penetrate the Catholic world, let alone the wider Christian community. Perhaps if Christians everywhere feasted on this biblical banquet, we could save our culture from its repressive heritage and from the pornographic backlash it inspired. In the process, we might even be able to evangelize Hugh Hefner rather than Hugh Hefner continuing to evangelize us.
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