Theology of the Body in Bite-Size Pieces, Part Four

In Part Two we addressed why the man’s “suitable partner” had to be made from his very substance, and not, like him, scooped from the ground then enlivened with divine breath. In this bite-size piece we’ll contemplate the man’s reaction to his partner, and the implication expressed by the author of Genesis.

“This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of ‘her man’ this one has been taken.”

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body. (Genesis 2:23-24)

Why does the man need a partner in the first place? Because he is the image of God; since God is love, the man needs someone to love in order to be this divine image.

The animals were unsuitable partners not only because they were created apart from the man’s substance, but because they did not possess the breath of divine life. The man cannot complete the divine image with an animal. Since the woman has proceeded from the man she is consubstantial, both body and spirit, and is thus his equal.

The man joyfully expresses, first of all, the woman’s equality with him.

“This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of ‘her man’ this one has been taken.”

But there’s more. The man’s fascination with the woman’s body is significant--it is very different from modern man’s fascination with a woman’s body!

At this point the man and woman do not know sin; their vision is perfectly clear, not clouded by sinful inclinations and selfish desires. They see in each other’s bodies nothing but the beauty and glory of God--and the incredible privilege they have been granted to love each other with their bodies as God loves.

That’s the fascination, that’s the excitement. They see in their genitals the gift to be joined as one body in a life-giving union--an image of the Holy Trinity--and this fascinates and excites them.

The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame. (Genesis 2:25)

The man in this original state of innocence could not be excited by the body of another man, for he could not be joined to another man as one fruitful body imaging the love of the Holy Trinity. The woman cannot do this with another woman.

For two persons made from the same substance to be joined as one, they have to be fashioned with complimentary bodies--which is why God created them so, with an innate yearning to be joined to each other.

For that union to image the Trinitarian God whose union of persons in love is free, total, faithful and fruitful, human sexual union has to be all of those. Anything short of that fails to image God who created human sexuality in the divine image.

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.

So what went wrong? We’ll examine this in Part Five.

Theology of the Body in Bite-Size Pieces, Part Three

“You are free…” (Genesis 2:16)

These are God’s first words to the man he just created and placed in the garden of Eden, words that would separate man from the animals God would soon create: “You are free.”

These are words we like to hear. Yet they are accompanied in the text of Genesis by two words we don’t like to hear: “order” and “except.” To some this may seem a contradiction--how can man be free if there is an exception to what he can do--especially if this exception is called an “order”?

Until we understand the true meaning of freedom, with the accompanying order we are bound to obey and the exception we must respect, we can’t understand the Theology of the Body, and thus we can’t understand the meaning of our life as human persons. In this bite-size piece, we’ll explore the true meaning of freedom.

First, the text in its entirety:

The Lord God gave man this order: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and bad. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.” (Genesis 2:16-19)

Let’s explore a false notion of freedom, one that suggests freedom is the ability to do anything we want to do. That’s an idea many children have (“It’s a free country!” is a time-honored expression children use to justify unacceptable behavior they choose to display) and one that too many carry into adulthood. Let’s use a childhood example to dissect this false notion of freedom.

I’m a child on the playground. Sally is using the swing I want to use. I am free to choose either to wait patiently for Sally to finish using the swing, or to bully her into getting off so I can use it now. I choose the latter. Someone says “That’s mean, you shouldn’t do that,” to which I reply: “It’s a free country!”

Here’s what’s wrong with that idea of freedom. First, by bullying Sally to get off the swing, I’ve deprived her of her “freedom” to do what she wants to do--she wants to use the swing also. Second, I’m not free at that moment to be the kind, considerate person God made me to be, because I’ve allowed myself to become a slave to the ungodly allure of selfishness, which imprisons me as a sinner rather than frees me an a child and image of the loving God.

So freedom as an idea that everyone can do whatever they want--that everyone can decide for themselves what is right and wrong to do at any given moment--simply doesn’t work, because sooner or later somebody’s “freedom” is going to be denied by another’s decision.

Free will is the God-given ability to decide what I am going to do. Freedom is the God-willed destiny I achieve, for myself and for others, when I consistently use my free will to choose the good, which I learn by listening to God, who alone knows what is truly good and bad. I can’t decide for myself what’s good and bad, for that’s the first wrecking ball swung at true freedom. It’s Sally and the swing all over again.

God gave us free will because, as people created in his image, we are called to love. We cannot love unless it is a free choice. Nobody wants to be in a relationship with someone who really doesn’t want to be in the relationship, if they’re only there because they think they have to be, and don’t have a choice. That doesn’t mean anything.

Love only means something when a person also has the choice to not love, or even to hate. In that case the choice to love is meaningful, it’s real.

God cannot call man to love unless he is also free to hate. That’s why God gave us free will, not so we can go hog wild doing anything we please, but so we can choose to love in a way that is real. And we learn what is good and bad by allowing God to tell us, not grasping at the tree of that knowledge which is his alone to know in his divine omniscience.

The warning of death for disobeying this order is fairly simple. God is reminding man of his total dependence on God for everything, and ultimately his life. If man chooses to be his own god by deciding for himself what’s right and wrong he’ll separate himself from the true God, the author and source of his life. If he chooses to separate himself from the source of his life, the natural consequence is death. God does not say “the moment you eat from it I will kill you.” God says “the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.”

Now that we have an understanding of free will and freedom--the difference between the two and how they are integrated in our lives--we can proceed with more of the Theology of the Body, which we’ll resume in Part Four.

Pope Francis Did Not Say "God is not a divine being"

The secular news media is buzzing with headlines that "Pope Francis Declares Evolution and Big Bang Are Real," and other such misunderstandings--again--about the Catholic Church.

But aside from these misinterpretations, once again the Pope has been the victim of a mistranslation. English news reports quote the Pope as saying "God is not a divine being or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life."

The Italian word the Pope used that was incorrectly translated as "divine being" is "demiurgo," which translates into English as "demiurge."

This is a Gnostic term, defined by the Random House Dictionary as "a supernatural being imagined as creating or fashioning the world in subordination to the Supreme Being, and sometimes regarded as the originator of evil." The Pope said this is NOT who God is.

Theology of the Body in Bite-Size Pieces, Part Two

The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)

So the Lord God cast a deep sleep on the man, and while he was asleep, he took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. The Lord God then built the rib that he had taken from the man into a woman. (Genesis 2:21-24)

In creating a “suitable partner” for the man, God did not repeat the process he used to create the man. He did not form another out the clay of the earth and breathe life into her nostrils as he did for the man. This would have also set the woman apart from the animals, bearing the breath of divine life which they lack--but the man and the woman could not truly be the image of God if she had been created separately. For that she had to be taken from the man.

Why?

Because of what we profess about the Holy Trinity--of which conjugal love is created to be an icon--in the Nicene Creed.

We profess that the Son is “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.” We profess that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.”

Had the woman been created in the same manner as the man she would be, like him, a body infused with a soul, but their bodies could not be an image of God unless they were of the same substance--woman from man, as it were, consubstantial, proceeding from him.

Only then could the union of their bodies, and the life that flows from that union, truly image the intimate communion of persons that is the Holy Trinity.

And such union--husband and wife, in a covenantal bond, giving themselves to each other freely, totally, faithfully and fruitfully--is the only one that images God. None other can.

Theology of the Body in Bite-Size Pieces, Part One

The human body shares in the dignity of "the image of God”. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #364)

Wow.

A simple sentence with profound and eternal implications. The human body shares in the dignity of being nothing less than the very image of God!

Wow!

Of course this shouldn’t surprise us. When we open the Bible we only have to read as far as the twenty-seventh verse of the entire book to encounter this amazing fact:

God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

The human body, and specifically its masculinity and femininity, images God, and does so by deliberate design.

Before we contemplate this any further, there’s something we need to first understand.

God could have created human beings any way he wanted to. (He’s God, he can do anything he wants.) He could have made us with three heads, six arms, eight legs. He could have created us in six genders--or no gender at all, designing another way to bring new people into the world. Or he could have created us purely spiritual like the angels, with no bodies at all.

But God deliberately fashioned humanity with bodies, crafted with a specific design, because he intended to create in humanity an image of his very self, a visible expression of his invisible reality. And this was the design he chose to express who he is.

So it all means something.

It means something that God created the human body, this image of himself, with sexuality.

It means something that in doing so God created two specific sexual identities, male and female.

It means something to be male; it means something to be female.

It means something that God created people in these two sexes to yearn for each other, and to join themselves in covenantal communion that brings forth new life.

It all means something, because God does everything for a reason.

Thus, the way we behave with our God-imaging bodies either shows the divine image they were created to be, or it does not. How we behave with our God-imaging bodies affects not only how we live on this earth, but how we will live eternally in the “resurrection of the body.”

There is a “theology of the body,” and we really don’t know God, we really don’t know ourselves, and we really don’t know the meaning of life, until we begin to understand what God has imprinted about all of this right in our bodies--the image of himself.

St. John Paul II devoted a series of 129 talks early in his pontificate to presenting this “Theology of the Body.” In this series of articles we will explore in “bite-size pieces” this profound theology.

As St. John Paul II said: “The body, in fact, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from time immemorial in God, and thus to be a sign of it.”

Mowgli and the Missionary

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