Gaps in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body

John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” began as a series of Wednesday audience talks in 1979, part of his preparation for the Synod of Bishops on the Family that took place in the fall of 1980; the series, however, was to continue through 1984. He begins to discuss the Christian understanding of marriage with Jesus’ response to a challenge from the Pharisees about divorce (Matthew 19:3ff), in which Jesus points them beyond Moses’ decree to God’s institution of marriage “in the beginning”; that leads John Paul to a consideration of the creation.

John Paul assumes the validity of the historical-critical analysis of the Pentateuch; he assumes a dissonance between Genesis 1 and 2. His focus on this dissonance, and possible meanings in it, leads him to ignore the implications of one of the critical passages in Genesis for a true understanding of a Biblical theology of the body–man’s creation from the dust of the earth, which, when God breathed into it, caused man to become “a living soul.” The dust, plus the breath, created a soul, and this soul was a living body (Genesis 2:7).

John Paul does not ignore the verse entirely. He says, for example,

The Yahwist text never speaks directly of the body. Even when it says that “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground,” it speaks of man and not of his body. (Part 6)

This is to miss the point. The text does not know of man other than as this breathing body.

Nevertheless, man’s bodiliness is critical for John Paul’s understanding of man’s creation. It is awareness of his bodiliness that causes man to be aware of his solitude, to be aware of himself as “a body among bodies.” This leads us to John Paul’s next mention of our text:

Consciousness of the body seems to be identified in this case with the discovery of the complexity of one’s own structure. On the basis of philosophical anthropology, this discovery consists, in short, in the relationship between soul and body. The Yahwist narrative with its own language (that is, with its own terminology), expresses it by saying: “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being” (Gn 2:7).

Here he interjects his prior philosophical assumption of a soul body dualism that is specifically denied by the text that he then quotes. It is this very dualism that keeps him from seeing the foundation of the very theology of the body he is seeking to explicate. And he knows this dualism is not in the text. In footnotes to his seventh and ninth talks, he admits as much:

(7) Biblical anthropology distinguishes in man not so much the body and the soul as body and life. The biblical author presents here the conferring of the gift of life through “breath” which does not cease to belong to God. When God takes it away, man returns to dust, from which he was made (cf. Job 34:14-15; Ps 104:29f.).

(9) The dualistic contraposition “soul-body” does not appear in the conception of the most ancient books of the Bible. As has already been stressed (cf. L’Osservatore Romano, English edition, November 5, 1979, page 15, note 1), we can speak rather of a complementary combination “body-life.”

He does not pursue the implications of this, however.

John Paul goes on to discuss man’s awareness of his bodiliness. It is this that causes him to see that he has a purpose, an activity that is rooted in that very bodiliness. And it is at the moment of the dawning of this awareness that man is given a choice between life and death. His future is conditional; immortality will include his body, or he will die. Here, too, John Paul could have probed further. This text is clear: man will die. Man is not by nature immortal. There is only life, and that a bodily life, only through maintenance of the relationship with God; disobedience will lead to death. Genesis knows of no immortal soul that will survive death of the body; it is the serpent who suggests to man that he will not die.

John Paul continues with a discussion of the creation of woman; the division between sexes, and their creation for each other, their sexual union with one another, is part of the original meaning of creation. Sexuality is part of man’s original blessedness, not part of the Fall. It is a part of the very definition of man.

In this discussion of the creation of Eve, however, John Paul brushes against another important concept. Adam is put to sleep so that God may remove his rib. “Perhaps,” he suggests,

… the analogy of sleep indicates here not so much a passing from consciousness to subconsciousness, as a specific return to non-being (sleep contains an element of annihilation of man’s conscious existence), that is, to the moment preceding the creation, in order that, through God’s creative initiative, solitary “man” may emerge from it again in his double unity as male and female.

“Sleep contains an element of annihilation of man’s conscious existence.” Where else do we hear of “sleep” in Scripture? Why, it’s the most common description of death in both Old and New Testaments. It is “a specific return to non-being.” This is what death will be to man–”a specific return to non-being,” “annihilation of man’s conscious existence.” God’s warning to Adam of the consequences of disobedience is not a warning without reference point: this is the analogy by which man can understand the warning. But again John Paul doesn’t grasp the full significance of the text because of his philosophical presupposition about the nature of the soul and its immortality.

In talk 10, he returns to the topics of marriage and sexuality as they are presented in Genesis. Marriage is a permanent union, a becoming “one flesh,” that is rooted in the choice of a man to “leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife.” It is only in this relationship of mutual self-giving that man fully realizes the nature of existence as a person in communion; this he terms the “nuptial meaning of the body,” which is accompanied by the blessing of fertility (13).

From here, John Paul goes on to unpack the meaning of marriage, love, lust, and so forth. He doesn’t stay with the creation story. He doesn’t reflect upon the meaning of death in Genesis. We must wait until talk 63 for some points related to death, when he first begins to talk about the resurrection of the body, which is the essential Christian eschatological truth. In this discussion, however, his position about our state between death and the resurrection of the body is informed more by Plato than by Scripture.

What if John Paul had taken Scripture seriously, that the “living soul” is man as he is created, a body animated by the breath of God, and that having sinned, this soul will die, and that death is an unconscious sleep until the resurrection of the body?

Well, he wouldn’t be able to have dead people appearing to the living (apparitions of various saints and spectres), who give instruction to them (whether to build shrines or offer masses). He wouldn’t be able to present hell as a place of eternal conscious torment or purgatory as a place of intermediary punishment/purification. It wouldn’t make sense then to offer sacrifices on behalf of the dead or to undertake indulgences on their behalf or to engage in conversations with the dead. A theology of the body truly rooted in both man’s creation as described in Genesis and in the future resurrection of the blessed would undermine much of Catholic teaching.

Practically speaking, such a theology of the body would lead us to look forward to the return of Christ in glory as the blessed hope when we will be reunited with both Jesus and our loved ones. Such a theology of the body would give renewed meaning to our present bodily life, and would inspire us both to care for the body we have as the temple of the Holy Spirit and to seek the health and wholeness of all who are suffering.

John Paul II was on the right track, and we can learn from him, but only by abandoning Plato and sticking with a Biblical wholistic anthropology.

The Fundamentals and Fundamentalism

Historic Fundamentalism, a reaction to the Modernist crisis in mainline Protestantism, particularly Presbyterianism, was so named because of a series of pamphlets published in the early 20th century, The Fundamentals. These were not the reactionary screeds of illiterate country bumpkins, as the despisers of Fundamentalism would assume, but were written by some of the best Protestant theologians of the day.

Now, I am not now and have never been a Fundamentalist. I have never believed in the dictation theory of inspiration, have never been a Dispensationalist, have never believed in the Calvinistic view of predestination–or a host of other positions that have been associated with Fundamentalists.

At the same time, I respect their defense of true Fundamentals such as the reliability of Scripture and the Christian confession of Jesus as fully God and fully man, born of a virgin, who died for us and will come again. I respect this perhaps more today than ever before, having seen tendencies in many varieties of liberalism to water down these teachings.

In both Catholic and mainline Protestant seminaries the Bible is dissected and undermined. Those books which speak of prophecy must, in the rationalistic mind, have been written after the fact (including Daniel and the Revelation). Scripture is seen as a human creation, with oral and written traditions manipulated by authors and redactors to address the needs of their communities. There is no historical value, it is suggested, to anything before the time of David, and even what the Bible says of his reign and that of Solomon must be taken cum grano salis.

Historical criticism, the method behind these various theories, has its origins in German rationalism and–shall we bell the cat?–antisemitism. Many German critics had a desire to undermine Jewish traditions and history, to show the superiority of the Hellenistic mind to the Hebraic, to emphasize Christ’s liberation from the yoke of the Law. Many German theologians would go on to support Hitler’s agenda, including folks still respected by Protestant and Catholic scholars around the world like Gerhard Kittel.

If you want to get into The Fundamentals, consider these essays as a starting point:

• The Tabernacle in the Wilderness: Did It Exist?
• The Book of Daniel

Of Blood

I was reminded today of a book I had read in the 1970s by M. R. DeHaan, The Chemistry of the Blood. DeHaan was a physician and minister, founder of the Radio Bible Class.

What struck me as odd when I first read the book was his strange Christology. The sermons making up this book are on-line. Here’s a sample:

Sin is in the blood, and transmitted in the blood of man and in the flesh. Since the LIFE is in the blood according to the Scriptures, and the wages of sin was death, sin affected the blood of Adam and caused him to die. Because sin is a disease of the blood, it can be cured by the application of sinless blood, for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul. As the first Adam’s sin corrupted the blood of the entire human family, so the pure sinless blood of the last Adam makes atonement for the sin of the world. “For without shedding of blood is no remission . . .” “It is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” It was not  Eve’s sin which affect us although Eve sinned before Adam did. It was the SIN of ADAM which brought death upon the whole race because it is ADAMS blood that transmits original sin and it is for this reason we are not called the SEED OF THE WOMAN but we are ADAM’S SEED. ONLY  Jesus is called the Seed of the woman, because He was born of a woman without one drop of human blood in His veins, and thereby could avoid the sin of Adam which is only transmitted through the blood which the male contributes to his offspring. Jesus could have a human body, but one drop of Adam’s blood would have made Him a sinner just as you and I.

Did you notice it? Jesus was born “without one drop of human blood in His veins.”

This is, of course, a denial of the incarnation. Scripture teaches plainly:

Hebrews 2:14ff: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham. Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people.”

News of the Weird

Scientologists are gloating over reporter John Sweeney’s on camera meltdown. Get info about Scientology at Xenu.net. Why “Xenu”? Find out here.

Falwell Dead

Jerry Falwell dead at 73.

Many images come to mind. I first heard him on the radio in the ’70s, before he founded “The Moral Majority.” Through the ’80s, he was the face of that movement, much pilloried in the press. In the wake of the PTL scandal, he assumed the role of “elder brother” who stepped in to try to salvage a ministry–a much publicized picture showed him going down the water slide of the Heritage USA park in his suit.

The term “fundamentalist” is overused and abused these days. The press speaks of “fundamentalist Hindus” and “fundamentalist Muslims” with no regard to historical use of the term. But Falwell was a Fundamentalist in the genuine sense, and he was proud of the title: he defended the fundamentals of the faith, including the inerrancy of the Bible, the Virgin birth of Jesus, his physical resurrection, atonement by his sacrificial death, and his Second Coming. But he changed Fundamentalism, too. It had been a separatist movement, a reaction to the Modernist controversies of the early 20th century, but he helped lead it back to engagement with the world, unashamed of the Gospel of Christ.

Perhaps that would be the phrase he’d have wanted as his epitaph.

Old and New

After lunch with my pastor yesterday, he handed me a book he’s found useful: Leading Congregational Change by Jim Herrington, et al.

I had to laugh. I know Jim from an organization he founded, Mission Houston. He’s a Baptist pastor, formerly head of the Union Baptist Association. He blogs at Faithwalking, and has just started a new ministry with that same name, Faithwalking, which is intended “To equip emerging missional leaders in the post-Christian culture to live transformational lives.”

The Theology of the Body

Samuele Bacchiocchi explores the Christian “Theology of the Body” in his latest newsletter, The Debate over Human Nature and Destiny (scroll down past the announcements), and in a recent book.

John Paul was heading in the right direction with his “Theology of the Body,” but he was a bit timid, and didn’t go far enough. He started with man’s creation in Eden and then jumped to sex. There’s more to it than that.

No Smoking in Church

New British law mandates “no smoking” signs be posted outside of churches.

Anglican bishops, normally a placid bunch, are fulminating at the costly inanity of it all. “Another example of the aggressive nanny state,” said the Rt Rev John Broadhurst, the Bishop of Fulham. “The whole thing is stark-staring mad.” Quite. Wouldn’t it be more sensible (as well as far cheaper) to accept that, under the new diktat, smoking is forbidden in all public places and that notices should be erected only where it is allowed?

“Getting Shot Hurts”

I had missed this: the Reagan diaries are soon to be published.

Given the silliness at the White House over the recent visit of the Queen of England, I appreciated this tidbit:

Reagan enjoyed meeting the “most likable” Prince Charles in 1981, but tea proved a disaster because the royal visitor refused to drink it: “Horror of horrors they served it our way with a tea bag in the cup. . . . I didn’t know what to do.”

Oh, and we learn, “Getting shot hurts.”

Believe it or not, I couldn’t stand the man when he was president.

The Stealing of Sermons

Thomas Long on homiletical plagiarism.

Trademarking the Gospel

Martin Marty comments on a pair of pentecostal preachers who have registered the word “Gospel” as a trademark in Brazil.

Taps

My grandfather, F. W. Smith, was a musician at Ft. Myer, Virginia, in the years following WWI, playing “Taps” at funerals of countless servicemen. It’s a key piece of the ceremony of a military funeral.

But today, as that mournful tune echoes over the grounds of cemeteries around the country, it is more often a recording.