A professor from United Methodist Duke Divinity School is urging a “theology of the body” emphasizing not just sexual morality but also greater appreciation for the complimentary role of the two genders in God’s creation.
The teaching might apply not just to perennial United Methodist debates about homosexuality but also to even edgier issues such as transsexuality and sex change procedures.
Addressing a gathering of lay and clergy United Methodists and Roman Catholics in New Bern, North Carolina, Duke Divinity School’s Warren Professor of Catholic Theology, Dr. Paul Griffiths, instructed his audience about Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body (TOB). “The Catholic church, historically, and I think most Protestant churches too, has tended to address issues of sexuality through a combination of… approaches [that] tend very easily to focus on patterns of conduct that are acceptable and patterns of conduct that are not. [Such] divisions tend to focus only at that surface level.” In contrast, remarked Griffiths, “The driving force behind all of John Paul II’s thought was to develop for the church an understanding of what it means to be a human person.”
The Theology of the Body Seminar was sponsored by the New Bern District of the North Carolina Annual Conference, in partnership with United Methodist groups Lifewatch (a pro-life ministry also concerned with human sexuality) and Transforming Congregations (a ministry that that trains Christian leaders to deal with sexual brokenness in their communities). Leaders of both groups spoke to UMAction about why they felt it was important to bring the theology of the body to United Methodists.
More than Rules
“In our debates over human sexuality, United Methodists have clearly articulated our expectation that denominational members and leaders will not engage in sexual activity outside the bounds of heterosexual marriage, said the Rev. Karen Booth, chief of Transforming Congregations, a healing ministry for sexual brokenness. “But… it isn’t enough to point out that a certain behavior is sinful. We also have to show people the perfect plan God designed for us as men and women, and then convince them that this is the most fulfilling way to live. It was Booth who originally envisioned holding the TOB seminar. She noted that the mission statement of Transforming Congregations “is based on I Thessalonians 4:1-7, where Paul tells early believers that learning to control their own bodies ‘in a way that is holy and honorable’ is a critical part of their sanctification, their growth in faith and Christian maturity. Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is foundational for understanding that process, so it’s a natural fit for us.”
The Rev. Paul Stallsworth, director of Lifewatch and pastor of St. Peter’s United Methodist Church in Morehead City, NC, agreed: “More than moral rules are needed.” He explained that, though the Theology of the Body is a collection of sermons by Pope John Paul II, because it “draws heavily from the Bible and from the Church’s Great Tradition, his teaching is readily available to Protestants of all stripes. His theology of the body supplements the briefer, more rules-based teaching found in the social principles of various Protestant denominations.”
In his morning devotion, Stallsworth noted that the seminar was taking place on Ascension Day, when the departing Christ reminds his followers that he will not leave his church alone or abandoned. He argued that just as the Holy raised up St. Augustine to teach Christian truth as the Roman Empire chaotically crumbled, and theologians Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonheoffer to teach Christian truth in response to the rise of Nazi ideology, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were sent to teach Christian truth in the face of the “secularism and relativism” that have “become powerful and fashionable forces in the modern world.”
The Inseparable Body and Soul
Griffiths declared that TOB understands the body as essential as the soul in every human being as their soul. “These two are not identical but they are not separable… if the body is perceived as separable from what it is to be a human person, then contempt [for the body] is possible.”
Dualism, by emphasizing the goodness of the human spirit or intellect but calling the body neutral or evil, creates a perception of the body and soul as separable, Griffiths said. Pope John Paul II felt that dualism “remains extremely powerful in the West both among Christians and outside the Church.” Griffiths commented that for some Christians, “the idea of the heavenly life is a disembodied life.”
Griffiths also recalled that John Paul II “thinks we’re all basically biological reductionists; it’s not conscious, we just assume” that the human body is no more than the sum of the complex mechanical and chemical processes. In contrast, he said, “a biological account of the human body is not an exhaustive account.”
Dualism and biological reductionism cause “your body and the body of others [to] become, then, [viewed as] instruments. That view is not a possible view. The Christian view is that the body can never be an instrument,” Griffiths insisted.
The God- given design of the human body gives clues to an observer about how that body is to be used. “The very shape and order of the human body means that any particular human body already shows that it is not self-sufficient, that it requires other bodies with respect to other human beings and with respect to God,” Griffiths surmised. “The Genesis narratives show beyond any doubt that human persons can’t be human persons in solitude.”
The Spousal Nature of the Body
The word the Pope used for this “fundamental idea [of the body’s being] other-directed,” translates as “spousal,” Griffiths said. One element of the “spousal” nature is that human bodies are “sexed” as either male or female. “This doesn’t mean that every human being is supposed to have sex, but it does mean that every human being has its body sexed. This is not a negotiable fact,” Griffiths said. He added that the sexed nature of the body is not a result of the Fall; rather, alluding to Christ’s teaching in Matthew 19, “The Pope makes a big deal of this ‘from the beginning,’ [meaning that] before the Fall human bodiliness is sexed.”
TOB describes the human body’s state after the Fall and as the result of Christ’s redemption, as well as its original created state. Griffiths said that in response to the Fall, TOB teaches that the body retains its spousal nature, which “cannot be erased” but “loses de facto the response to its spousal nature as gift. It loses gratitude.” This is “the concupiscence of the human body,” a state where the body “wishes to establish dominion over what is desired… to seek the kind of control God has [over the desired person or object] where she or he becomes subsumed into you.” Griffiths described fallen human sexuality as “deranged” because it has been “removed from its proper range” and “can seek any object at all.” (He said “insanity,” the usual connotation of derangement, is “not quite what I mean.”)
“The excessive derangement of our fallen desires,” namely that “human desire is capable of desiring anything at all, and desiring it with radical intensity” correlates to our desire for God, Griffiths argued. “We have been given a radically excessive desire that can be satisfied finally only by God.”
The “Ethicization of the Erotic”
Ethicizing desire, “the Christian response to get your desire to find its proper home or end,” differs from the “Puritanical or pre-Christian response” which, Griffiths explained, was to “eradicate it or lessen its intensity.” In response to disordered sexuality (anything outside of “the [heterosexually] married state and the single, celibate state”), the Pope’s TOB stresses “the importance of catechesis: the instruction or formation of [sexual] desire,” which is also called the “ethicization of the erotic.”
Redeemed sexuality, Griffiths said, “moves the erotic away from the open field that we had [from the Fall]; ethicization moves desire back to reception of the spousal nature as a gift.” Pope John Paul said “explicit catechesis” or instruction about appropriate uses of human sexuality was necessary for this end, as well as the example of “vocations of desire that are present in the church:” marriage, celibate singleness. “The principle instrument for the catechization of desire… [that] presses it back to its original place and gets it to conform” to Christian boundaries, though, for the Pope, was the Eucharistic liturgy.
According to TOB, sexual intercourse (what it calls “the conjugal act”), should be “potentially procreative, and always unitive.” Further, reacting against past errors of Christian teaching, “the Pope is extremely concerned not to be presented as opposing sexual pleasure.” Griffiths articulated the exclusively Catholic position that “certain modes of trying to ensure that pregnancy does not result are disordered” because the effort to separate the procreative and unitive consequences of sex “would damage the unitive” aspect of the conjugal act. Despite this teaching, he acknowledged that contraceptives are as widely used among Catholics as in Protestant circles. (Protestants once condemned the usage of all artificial contraception also, until the Anglican Communion became the first to permit them in 1930.) Griffiths briefly mentioned another particularity of Catholicism, which is that marriage is considered a sacrament, and is thus an indissoluble act of God.
Protestants at the TOB event were more likely to recognize the Catholic Church’s condemnations of homosexual acts and pornographic representations of the human body. Pope John Paul II, said Griffiths, was “exercised by the increased ease that technology allows for representations of the human body” that are problematic. This is because, he said, pornography is “aimed at objectifying the body and separating it from the possibility of self-gift” that is essential to its spousal nature.
United Methodists at the TOB event pondered Griffith’s explanation of the body as a sign that humans should be directed outward towards one another, and subject to an ethic that retains human desire within God’s boundaries.
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