Theology of the Body 2013/11/21

Readers who have been with me for a while will remember that I was giving a series of excerpts from the book Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body in Simple Language, published by Philokalia Press. I had begun with the second part, dealing with love and lust. Then I went through the first part, in which the Pope draws out the meaning of the Genesis creation accounts of humanity's creation as male and female. All of these previous posts are available under the label Theology of the Body, and I recommend reading them if you haven't already done so, or rereading them as a refresher.

John Paul II began by saying that one of the preeminent ways we are created in the image of God is our ability in conjugal sex to give a physical image of God's abiding, life-giving love. The body, in its maleness and femaleness has a nuptial meaning. In the second part, he went on to say that love means giving oneself unreservedly to the beloved. Lust, on the other hand reduces the other to an object for one's own gratification.

Now we come to the third part: "Heaven and Earth: Reflections on Resurrection" which the translator divides into two sections, "The Resurrection of the Body," and "Celibacy for the Kingdom." I expect the second section to have some relevance to the discussion of whether gay people need to be celibate. But we should realize that John Paul is not concerned to any great degree with homosexuality. So it's a matter of seeing what in his position illuminates our situation.

With that introduction, I now begin excerpting from Part III.


"What is the body's ultimate destiny?

"The Sadducees, a Jewish sect active at the time of Christ, taught that the soul died with the body.

"One day [they] challenged Jesus to accept their belief [by proposing the hypothesis of seven brothers who successively married the same woman and died. They asked whose wife she'd be at the resurrection. Cf. Matthew 22:24-28 and parallels in Mark and Luke.]

"… But Christ did not debate their logic on a human level. Instead, he answered out of God's wisdom:

"You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in  heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead — have you not read what God said to you, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not the God of the dead but of the living" (Mt. 22:29-32)

"This answer opens a whole new perspective on the body. Like his statements on 'the beginning' (Mt. 19:3-9) and 'adultery in the heart' (Mt. 5:27-28), this statement about the resurrection is foundational to the theology of the body.

"… The truth of the resurrection is a vital one; if we do not know our destiny, we cannot know how to live.