Transcript: Lesson 9 - Theology of the Body
Friends, Welcome back. In this unit, we've been thinking about the story of creation, and understanding more how Genesis one and two sets the trajectory for everything else that we see in Scripture for understanding who we are as male and female and understanding God's call on our lives. In this video, we're going to reflect and do a little bit of digging into thinking about theology of the body. And in this section, I'm actually specifically building on the theology of the body of Pope John Paul II who, probably more than any contemporary theologian has really reflected on what it means to be embodied. And what it means to understand ourselves as male and female, how we should think about marriage, how we should think about singleness. And so in this section, I really try to build on it, what he does there, to better understand who we are as God's people. And so a couple of questions I want to try to answer. The first is what is the connection between the body and the person. And this gets a little bit to get a little bit philosophical but hang with me as we as we think about this. When I think about who I am, as a person, that includes more than you can see who I am, as a person involves my past. It involves my own experience, my own experiences growing up within a certain family within a certain context. It involves certain things that were great. And that really built me up as a person and involves certain things that that were difficult struggles I had to walk through or, or wounds that happened to me because of how people interact with me. So how do people know me? How do they come to encounter me? Well, it's actually through my body, my body is visible makes, makes who I am, as a person visible to you. This is even, even though we are connecting through video online, part of the reason you can know me and know something about me is because I am the bodily present, where I'm right now, speaking to articulating these things in this way. And so our bodies are really the place where we communicate, where we encounter each other, and our body makes our person visible. And so when I engage, when I encounter others, there's a sense that the body tells me something about who they are. It's it's the location or the site where I begin to interact with him and understand who they really are. Because, again, when I encounter somebody I can I can see their body, but it's as I engage with them as a person, that I start to understand their emotions, their their history, their past, all the things that make them who they are as unique person. And so we have to recognize that there's this dimension of who we are this visible, our bodies, in this dimension of who we are, that is invisible, all the things that make us who we are as a person, but that those are things that we encounter in through one another as we engage with each other physically. So we there's this close connection between the body and the person, the body makes the person visible. A second question here is, what is the spousal meaning of the body. This is this is actually a really strange phrase, if you're not, if you're not used to it. But this is a phrase and again, Pope John Paul II uses, and part of what he means by this is that what you see in Genesis and in Ephesians 5 and in other places, is that what we see in who we are as spouses is that we are called to give ourselves to our spouse. That part of what it means to be married to someone involves this total giving of ourselves, that includes the total giving of our bodies. That's in part why our sexuality or our, when we think about sexual union, that's something that Scripture says is reserved for our spouse, because it's to our spouse, that we give ourselves totally including totally who we are physically in sexual union. And so when we think about the spousal meaning of the body, what you see there is that in marriage, we totally give ourselves to our spouse. And in doing that, we start to uncover who we really are. And so what you see here is that this actually works against the story of individualism, the story of individualism says you define you you figure out who you want to be and do those things. The spousal meaning of the body essentially says, you find yourself truly, when you learn to give yourself away totally and freely in love. And this is linked to our understanding of the body of Jesus, that what you see in Jesus is that he gives himself totally and completely to the church to Ephesians 5 talks about the church, his bride. And so as he gives himself totally to his bride, we understand that something about our call as spouses that we totally give ourselves to one another. And so this is part of what we mean when we talk about the spousal meaning of the body is that we, we begin to discover who we are, we begin to understand who we're meant to be, when we learn to give ourselves away in that way, as spouses are called to do. And I've alluded to this a little bit already. But it's important to recognize what marriage symbolizes in Ephesians 5:21 - 33. Paul says, that marriage between a husband and wife is actually meant to symbolize is meant to point to Christ and the church. And so what we see in the way that God has ordained things to be is that in a loving marriage, and in marriage that really gets what marriage is about, where two spouses care for each other, where they're faithful, where they give their lives to each other, where they love each other in, in concrete, everyday practical ways. In a marriage like that, we actually start to get a glimpse of the reality of Christ's love for the church. And the way that Jesus Himself pours himself out for the church the way that he, he seeks the good of the church before his own. You know, he, he says in the Gospel of John, John 15, that he lays down his life for his friends for us. And that gives us a picture of what marriage is actually supposed to be. And so this is where we have to, I think, begin to cultivate the ability to see that marriage is not just about me, it's not just about finding a romantic connection. But what marriage is meant to do is actually put on display the Gospel story of who Jesus is, and help people see who God is, in this deeper way. Now, when we think about the theology of the body, and understanding some of these concepts, I want to just briefly highlight three different things that we see about human life in the beginning, that helps us again, dive deeper into this marriage relationship, and understanding of who we are as human beings. So one of the things that you see in the beginning is that Adam has this awareness of solitude, that that Adam has this awareness of being alone, as I read in a previous video, God is says he wants to provide a suitable helper, but that none of the animals fit that call. And so part of an emotion, this is of some of those dimensions, from time to time, in some animals, there is no animal like the human being, that part of what it means to be human is that we are created to love and created to be responsible for all God's creation. And so to understand who we are as human beings, who says, here's who you are, here's what you're called to do, and to be in my creation, and that we received that call and that we are responsible, that we are able to respond to that in a way that that goes beyond just just animal instinct, but that we actually recognize who God is. And we actually recognize who we are as, as image bearers in this distinct way, and that we're called to love and respond appropriately to that. So Adam's, Adam's solitude, the fact that there is no suitable helper in the animal kingdom helps us understand a little bit about what it means to be human, to have this ability to love and to be responsible. You also see in the beginning, this reality of of communion, communion of persons, that that this is one of the key features of the relationship between Adam and Eve, husband and wife. And to understand this again, I want to, I want to unpack a little bit what I mean by person, because Scripture says that body plus soul equals a living person. You see in Genesis 2:7 it says God formed a man from the dust of the ground breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being a living person. A lot of times, people can just focus on one one dimension, either body or soul. And this, in fact, is always going to warp our view of marriage, our view of bodies, our view of sexuality, there are some in our culture, who would essentially erase the dimension of who we are as soul as spiritual beings, and say, we are nothing more than bodies, we are nothing more than matter. That's the view we talked about in terms of naturalism. That's a problem, it's going to end up with a warped view of who we are. But in different ways, sometimes Christians can try to erase the bodily dimension of who we are, as I mentioned a little bit in a previous session, there were some or there have been some throughout the history of Christianity, that try to almost identify the body with evil, and so blocked it out of the picture. But what you see in Genesis is that who we are as persons is this body, soul unity, that we're not, we're not two things a body and a soul just smashed together. But that we have this integrity of being this body, whole body soul unity. And that defines how we understand human beings. This is, I would say, the big words on here, hang with me. What do I mean by holistic anthropology by holistic, I mean, this connection, it's not just parts body and soul, but it's a single whole. And it's a view of human beings that says, We are this body soul unity. I think that holistic anthropology leads to a holistic view of sexual union. In other words, what, what I mean is, if we tend to view ourselves, like naturalism does is just bodies as matter in motion, we are going to tend to treat other people as just bodies to be used, rather than people to be honored and loved and respected and given dignity too when we think about sexual union. And so when scripture talks about one flesh, sexual union, this includes physical sexual union, I think, obviously, but sexual union points to the reality that two people are united here, this is not just the uniting of two bodies, but it's the uniting of two people and two, peoples lives. That's why, you know, we often maybe don't fully get this when we read Scripture, but if you pay attention, what you start to see is that scripture views marriage or scripture views, sexual union, as a as a marital act. In other words, that to have sex with someone is to, in some ways, to commit yourself to be married to them. That's a strange thing. I mean, I grew up in a in a context where, you know, people will talk about having sex outside of marriage. And, again, I totally understand what people mean when they when they say something like that. But part of the way the Scripture talks about it, is that if you have sex with somebody, that's that's a miracle act, what's happening there is not just a physical union, but this uniting of two persons, which is, which is why in I Corinthians 6, Paul says, you cannot as men in the church, of course, you cannot go sleep with prostitutes, because the meaning of sex is is it has this marital meaning it unites two people. And so what we, what we see that in the biblical vision is that the body and person cannot be separated, I can't, I can't look at somebody and not think about them as a person. I mentioned I Corinthians 6, this is where Paul says, again, you can't go sleep with prostitutes, because sex has this meaning. You can't, we can think about this in other ways as well. You cannot just look at pornography where you're essentially just treating somebody as a body. Somebody that you're going to say, I'm going to get pleasure from looking at this, but I'm not going to consider who they are as a person. But that's that's what's wrong is that we try to divorce the body and person and Scripture says you can't do that you have to treat people as persons they have to be treated in this holistic way, with dignity, with love, with respect, and recognizing that there's this meaning to sexuality, meaning to sexual union, that what's happening here is not just something physical, but it's an actual communion of persons So we have this understanding of Scripture that solitude reveals who we are as persons. Sexual union involves this communion of persons. And there's also this reality of nakedness, a theology of nakedness. Maybe you haven't thought about this before. But Genesis 2:25 is very clear here, Adam and his wife were naked, and they felt no shame, naked, and they felt no shame. Part of what that shows us is that there's something about how we look at other people. That is crucial. Adam and his wife could be naked and unashamed because at that point, sin had not yet entered the picture. Why is it that we cover ourselves after sin enters the picture? Well, it's partly that not just because there's some sense of shame. But it's because we're trying to protect ourselves, from others who might look at us and exploit us, others who might look at us and not see us as persons not see us as image bearers. But see us as just an object. And so when we think about what Scripture teaches in Genesis 2 about nakedness, it's really important to see this link between nakedness and trust there between Adam and his wife, between between man and woman in the beginning. So part of what we have to ask ourselves is how do we see others that, again, we have to be really clear here. A bodies are not sinful, naked bodies are not sinful. What is sinful is a way of seeing other people that looks at them merely as objects for our own pleasure. So Wendell Berry, one of my one of my favorite thinkers, says this in his book, "Art of the Commonplace" in thinking about marriage and sex, he says, "What must we do to earn the freedom of being unguardedly and innocently naked to someone? Our own and other cultures suggested we must do a lot. We must make promises and keep them. We, we assume many fearful responsibilities and do much work. We must build the household of trust." See here, Barry's reflecting on this fact that, for Christianity, there's a sense of nakedness, sexual union goes, belongs in the context of marriage where we have made commitments to someone where we have made promises, where we say, not just I want to be with you sexually, but I promised to care for you in every aspect of life, that, that that's a big deal. And that the more that we actually just treat sex, the more that we treat bodies just flippantly as something to be used something to be exploited or just enjoy for my own pleasure, and then cast aside the will we undermine what God's intentions really are, and how he's trying to show a little glimpse of who he is, through our marriages, and through our sexuality. And so part of what we have to distinguish here is, I think, proper sexual desire versus lust. A lot of people will use these terms, as synonyms, they'll just use last to mean the same thing as sexual desire. And I want to be really careful here because I think we'll unpack lust a little bit more in a future video. Lust is not just sexual desire. Sexual desire that looks at another person as an object that says, this all revolves around me. Whereas proper sexual desire is looking at my spouse and saying, I desire them sexually. And it's proper, because I'm going to treat them as a person, I'm not going to treat them as an object to be used. So so this is really important, even when we think about struggling with things like pornography, which is such a, which is such a huge struggle for many in our cultural context. What's going on here, it's not just something physical or sexual, it's, it's I want that I want to use that person is a means to an end to gratify myself to bring pleasure to myself. So it's important to distinguish between these so we can say in the beginning, God's intention is that there is proper sexual desire. But that's not the same thing as lust, and then closely linked to this is in Genesis, this notion of blessing your spouse, we see over and over God blesses creation and says it's very good. And that spouses themselves are called to enter into that blessing as God pronounces this blessing over them of who they are, who they're called to be. That's very different from trying to grasp or possess somebody to control them to use them again, for my own ends, and so to to understand what we're called to do, But it's, it's, we have to be willing to see other people as people. And that is really, that's really at the heart of this sexual ethic, that male and female, that they're sexually different people in this one plus union are called to see each other as people before God. What this means, then is that how God has made us is that when we love each other as husband and wife in this way, including sexual union, that new life comes because of that. And so there's this close connection in Scripture, of recognizing that as man and woman, as husband and wife love each other new life comes from that. And so these are not little things. these are not minor things that we're talking about here. This is do you understand the nature of love. And do we understand the nature of life in Scripture, in Genesis 1 and 2, these things are tied together, that just as God's love, creates, and gives life to humanity, so our love for one another, is meant to bring forth new life. So as we enter into, and as we think about the story of creation, we're aware of the fact that our bodies point us to this deeper reality that we are not just bodies we're persons, we’re persons who are called to love, to be responsible. We are persons who are called in marriage, to commune with our spouses. And we are called to recognize it, that the nakedness that happens in marriage and in sexual union, is to point to this deep sense of belonging to each other, and truly caring blessing one another, not just trying to grasp or possess or lust after. And as we as we do that, as we enter into this way of life that is blessing this giving that is serving our marriages, more and more, become a picture of the Gospel story of Jesus and help us help us and help those around us see who God really is. So in this unit, we've thought about the story of creation, what that means. In the next unit, we're going to look at sin and think a little bit more deeply about how sin affects and corrupts how we think about ourselves, how we operate in terms of our bodies, our sexuality, marriage, and singleness. So until next time, blessings.