Theology of the Body, Part 3

Now, yet more on Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution. My two earlier installments in this occasional series may be read here and here.

Actually, this amounts to something of a new beginning on the subject for me since open-heart surgery, followed by the outset of several weeks of recuperation, have intervened since the last time I cracked open the book. And I find that I am still massively conflicted with respect to the author's point of view on sexual morality — which is that of the late Pope John Paul II, explained in layman's terms.

According to West (p. 2): "Far from being a footnote in the Christian life, the way we understand the body and the sexual relationship 'concerns the entire Bible' [as the Pope put it in 1982]. It plunges us into 'the perspective of the whole Gospel, of the whole teaching, in fact, of the whole mission of Christ' [the Pope had previously said in 1980]."

These snippets and many others are quoted by West from "a series of 130 fifteen-minute conferences at papal audiences beginning on September 5, 1979 and concluding on November 28, 1984," in the words of this web page. "The conferences were grouped into four clusters: 'The Original Unity of Man and Woman,' 'Blessed Are the Pure of Heart,' 'The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy,' and 'Reflections on Humanae vitae.' These talks were [eventually] brought together [and published as a book] under the title Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan."

This view, taken to its logical extreme, implies that you can't really understand Christ without unerstanding sex in the way God and the Pope want us to. The bliss associated with physical sex, as long as it's in the context of the pure, conjugally chaste union of a married man and woman who are not in any way misusing or defiling it, is a positive foretaste of the noncarnal bliss to be found when we are in God's heaven. Any other kind of sex is, accordingly, a travesty.

Premarital sex. Extramarital sex and adultery. Marital sex when it's not open to conception because artificial birth control is used. Abortion. Gay sex. Masturbation. Pornography. Child abuse. Broken families and divorce. Illegitimacy. The failure of today's social mores any longer to rein in our carnal lusts. All these represent ways in which we have fallen away from the original divine plan for sex and procreation.

Actually, I buy that. Or some of me does, if only with bigtime reservations.


Yes, there's a huge part of me that stands up and cheers when West (after John Paul II) reminds us that the Old and New Testaments, taken as a whole, form what is in effect an extended "spousal analogy" (see pp. 10-11), which I think of also as a "bridal" or "nuptial" motif. At the end of the Bible, in the Book of Revelation, we are told that the climax of all history will be the marriage of Christ as Bridegroom with his Church as Bride. The Church is, of course, made up of its innumerable members. All of us who have accepted the invitation to the wedding feast will find that we ourselves are, lo and belold, the Bride at this glorious wedding. "Through this lens," writes West, "we learn that God's eternal plan is to 'marry' us ... to live with us in an eternal exchange of love and communion."

Revelation's nuptials must be understood in the light of the call in Genesis 2:24, at the very outset of the Bible, for man and woman, represented in the persons of Adam and Eve, to become "one flesh." In turn, this aspect of the original creation is why Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians 5:31-32 links the selfsame "one flesh" metaphor in Genesis to the "great mystery ... in reference to Christ and the church" (see pp. 8-9).

From such scriptural references — including that item of the Ten Commandments which forbids adultery — may be spun out the entire basis for Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body." Of course, the great body of Catholic teaching, down through the millennia, including the documents of Vatican II which so shaped this particular pope, amplify this theological world view, which is also duly reflected in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that was issued in the 1990s under JPII's aegis. Even so, writes West, even though this is established teaching from way back, "Catholic theologian George Weigel describes John Paul II's theology of the body as 'one of the boldest reconfigurations of Catholic theology in centuries' — 'a kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences'" (p. 1).

I buy that too. Even though JPII made all this theology-of-the-body stuff crystal clear from day one during his 26+ year pontificate, for some reason I personally am just starting to tune it to it. And even though, outwardly speaking, it's not going to make a big difference in my mostly chaste existence — I'm a single man whose worst sexual sin has been looking at Internet porn and occasionally "spanking the monkey," both of which I have given up — I think it may make a huge difference inwardly.

For, as I say, there's a major part of my soul that absolutely relishes the idea of marital purity and sexual chastity. You can't convince that part of me that sex in this world which does not honor our "supreme calling" to "eternal ecstasy; unrivaled rapture; bounteous, beauteous bliss" in the next is anything but a travesty and a tragedy (see p. 64).


But I'm also very conflicted about all this. I've spent 58+ years — nearly 20 of them as a practicing Christian and the last ten of them as a "good" Catholic — in a culture which says "if it feels good, do it."

Our mainstream culture has it that sex between consenting adults, of whatever gender, is simply nobody else's business.

That abortion is a private decision which must be left up to the woman in question and never made illegal by courts and legislatures.

That marriage is optional for lovers, and divorce is an acceptable solution when marriage goes sour.

That entertainment which is not raunchy or violent, or both, is boring.

That theology-based ideas are radioactive and need to be kept strictly clear of the public ethos.

I'm increasingly finding that aspect of the mainstream culture to be "sick," and yet I realize that there are millions of us who with sincere heart and clear conscience would defend the secular status quo to their dying day.

There are many who feel, as I used to, that we are better off not reinstating "old-fashioned" ideas on sexual morality — especially to the extent that they may represent a stalking horse for society's return to the anti-feminist, anti-gay intolerance of yore.


In fact, the theology of the body is downright radical — and that's what gives me the willies. If the call to human sexual purity is inscribed by God in the very fabric of creation, if it is, as West says, a sign of the love the three divine persons of the Holy Trinity bear for one another, there can be no compromise.

Most or all of the other outlooks I've espoused in my various blogs are compromises of moderation, carefully wrought intermediate positions between radically opposing viewpoints. For example, in my Beyond Darwin blog, I have championed a view of evolution which accepts most of what Darwin proposed abou tnatural selection but claims evolutionary history is nonetheless directional — toward better and better "non-zero-sum games" and more and more complexity. That sort of compromise means we can have our intellectual cake and eat it too. Our species (and all others) evolved, rather than being directly created by God. But the planet's biosphere nevertheless gravitates toward producing conscious life "in God's image."

But by accepting the theology of the body of Pope John Paul II, I'd be rejecting (among other things) the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and '70s outright, lock, stock, and barrel, along with all its fruits. There can be no compromise on this point, for this particular baby cannot be split.

And that is, at the end of the day, what gives me the jim-jams. I'm not fond of radical positions that do not admit of compromise.