#469: The Crisis of the Body
Reading John Paul II’s *Theology of the Body*
Do I need to persuade you that the English speaking world has a crisis of the body? Do I need to name Caitlyn Jenner, or speak of transgender surgeries, or point to the euthanasia crisis in Canada, to convince you that our civilization cannot make sense of the flesh? Must I remind you of CRISPR or of babies born with seventeen genetic ‘parents’ in order for you to believe that our great technological powers imperil the nature of our humanity itself?
There was a time when persuasion was necessary. In 2009, I was invited to write a book for an evangelical press. They wanted me to write on “the youths”—I wanted to write on the body. I’ll never forget hearing from my editor that the publisher was nervous about the project, as he was unconvinced that there was an interest in it. He proved to be right: the book did not sell. They took it off their shelves in 2012. Three years later, Bruce became Caitlyn.
No one needs persuading that we have a crisis of the body. Only a decade on from when Earthen Vessels ceased to be available, I continue to be persuaded that we are all implicated in the semi-gnostic attitudes and practices that organize so much of our world today. It is comforting and right to denounce the spectacular reputation of the flesh at work in the world around us—but the satisfaction we gain in standing courageously for the truth cannot blind us to the quotidian, commonplace ways our own lives ‘embody’ the very ideologies we denounce. The crisis lives within us, in our own bodies and communities, as much as it is without.
There are a myriad of books on the body in Christian circles now, from any number of angles. That much has changed in evangelicalism, and changed for the better. (The tide had begun to turn even when I wrote Earthen Vessels—James K.A. Smith had published Desiring the Kingdom not long before I got mine out, a work that bore much good fruit for reflection about the value of bodily life.)
Yet many of the Protestant explorations of the body still look backward to Pope John Paul II’s magisterial Theology of the Body, for good reason. TOB remains a landmark work in theological anthropology because of its peculiar combination of Biblical, exegetical sensitivity and philosophical acumen. It is not a comprehensive theology of the body; it is specifically and uniquely concerned with the body in its sexed dimension—an obviously critical aspect of the body, but by no means the only aspect worth thinking about. Yet its substance and scope offers a way of looking at the world through the body, and looking at bodies, that can be worked out in any number of arenas that John Paul’s work did not explicitly consider.
When faced with a crisis, what should we read?
That is perhaps too simplistic a question—but it is one that I have not been able to shake. If we really are in a crisis of the body, why should we settle for easy explanations that take the work out of learning for us? We do not only need to understand what is happening around us: we need the kinds of categories that help us think creatively about it. We need, now more than ever, to knock our heads up against books that can help us build an intellectual scaffolding so that we can not only understand what time it is but have the wisdom to act well within it. We need to rub our minds up against thinkers with a depth and wisdom that has long gone from our world. If it is a crisis, the least we can do is gird up our loins and get to work. Some leaders think that the laity does not have time to read the great texts, but the reality is the inverse: we no longer have time to waste in the shallows, because if we do not enter the depths we will go on unwittingly perpetuating the evils we claim to be against.
I plan over the next few months to return to John Paul’s Theology of the Body for this reason—and I invite you to join me. It is easier to approach daunting, large texts when we read them together—a lesson I learned as an undergraduate, but which 100 Days of Dante reinforced. Reading a big text together gives us an incentive to simply keep going when we might otherwise quit.
Most of my commentary will be for subscribers (remember that subscribing for free is an option!). I am not an expert on John Paul II’s work, and I do not plan to offer anything like a definitive guide. Instead, essays will take the form that they always take in this newsletter—reflective, deliberative, and (hopefully!) aimed at the practical contexts where real decisions must be taken. While I know many of you will likely not read through Theology of the Body, my hope is that essays will be sufficiently interesting in their own right to keep you engaged. I have no ‘reading schedule,’ nor do I have a sense for how quickly I plan to proceed. I plan to use the Waldstein version, and encourage you to do the same.
There has never been a better time to think about how the Word of God informs our bodily lives, and to do so in and through a bona fide big book that not only offers a compelling diagnosis of the pathologies of our day, but provides meaningful antidoted to them. The aim of working through a text like Theology of the Body is to think along with John Paul II, and so to see the flesh with a precision that we might lack otherwise. There are no shortcuts to wisdom anymore—there is only the hard, plodding work of grappling with minds who have penetrated to center of things with a clarity we do not have. I think John Paul II is one of those thinker, and Theology of the Body one of those texts. Read it with me and find out for yourself.
Around the Web
Speaking of 100 Days of Dante, it’s coming back for another round this fall-starting August 23rd. Sign up to read through The Divine Comedy at 100DaysofDante.com.
This was an excellent conversation about reading on Mere Fidelity.
Part of my motivation for reading through John Paul II: I’m going to be speaking in September in DC about a “Protestant Theology of the Body.”
“Pride Month” has more or less turned the “LGBT+” identities into an opportunity for corporations to make money—which means it is an excellent time to read John D’Emilio discuss ‘capitalism and gay identity.’ I have some quibbles with the history that he tells, but they are relatively minor. It is an excellent distillation of just how complex the history and how intertwined the two sides of our great culture war are.
Speaking of sex, I think this defense of churches making their views of marriage transparent is sensible.
The Penultimate Word
“His confession fills earth and heaven. What does that mean—His confession fills earth and heaven? The confession God makes? No, that by which all things confess him, and all things cry out his praise. The very beauty of all these things is like a voice that they raise to confess God. The sky cries to God, “You made me, I did not make myself” The earth cries out, “You founded me, I did not establish myself.”
How do these things cry out in worship? Whenever men and women observe them and discover the truth of them, all creatures cry out through your appreciation of them; they shout with your voice. His confession fills earth and heaven. Gaze up at the sky: how beautiful it is! Look to the earth: it is lovely. Each in its own way is beautiful, and together they are very beautiful. He made them and he rules them, by his pleasure they are directed. He orders their seasons, he restores their movements and restores them through his own will, through himself. Therefore all these things praise him: whether they are at rest or in motion, whether on earth below or in heaven above, whether they grow old or are made new again.
When you see all these things and rejoice over them you are drawn up toward their maker; through the things that have been made you understand and contemplate something of his invisible nature. His confession fills earth and heaven, for you confess to him through contemplating things of earth, and you confess to him through contemplating the things of heaven. And because he made all things, and nothing whatever is better than he is, whatever he has made is within him. Whatever among all these gives you pleasure is less than God himself.
Do not allow your pleasure in what he has made, therefore, to lure you away from him who made it; rather, if you love what he has made, love the maker far more. If the things he has made are so beautiful, how much more beautiful must he be who made them? His confession fills earth and heaven.” — Augustine