John Paul II - Defender of Truth

William Oddie has an excellent article on John Paul II on the occasion of the beatification of the former pope in The Catholic Herald. He begins:

"We have short memories; we take our recent history too easily for granted. Few people, it seems – at least among those who imply that the problems we still face as a Church were actually Pope John Paul’s fault – remember the state of the Catholic Church at the end of the reign of the unhappy Pope Paul VI, during which forces of disintegration were unleashed within the Church which brought it to the edge of losing all credibility as a defender of basic Christian orthodoxy.

This work of darkness was brought about, not by the Council itself, but by some of those, certainly, who had attended it. It was certainly not the work, as some still confidently claim, of a liberal pope: for if Pope Paul was such a convinced liberal, what about Humanae Vitae? What happened during his pontificate was clearly far from his intention. At a homily he preached in 1972, he is reported as saying, now famously, that he had “believed that after the Council would come a day of sunshine in the history of the Church. But instead there has come a day of clouds and storms, and of darkness … And how did this come about? We will confide to you the thought that … there has been a power, an adversary power. Let us call him by his name: the devil. It is as if from some mysterious crack… the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”

He was speaking particularly about the liturgy: but just as disastrous was the unchallenged rise during his pontificate of the so-called “alternative magisterium” of Küng, Schillebeeckx and the rest of their malign brood. It was a time of great destruction; and to destroy is always easier than to rebuild. Recovering from the aftermath of the Council will take 100 years. But Pope John Paul began the fightback: he set the barque of Peter, and the Church with it, firmly back on course."

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That is why I was elated at the news of his beatification: because of his re-establishment of the simple fact of the Church’s authority to declare the objective truth of Catholic doctrine (Veritatis Splendor, The Catechism of the Catholic Church and on and on), I had been enabled at last to come home, to escape finally from a Church in which there was absolutely no means of coming to a mind about anything, a Church which actually requires of its clergy no more than a formal acceptance of the creeds – not as declarations of beliefs held to be actually true, but as what the C of E sanctimoniously calls part of a “heritage of faith”. That is why I was at first so depressed by the hostility in some quarters, even within the Church, to the announcement of Sunday’s beatification. I had thought, in Pope John Paul’s final years, that we had moved beyond all that.

Read it all here. For me, it was not so much "the re-establishment of the Church's authority to declare the objective truth of Catholic doctrine" as it was the courageous and powerful reaffirmation of the existence of objective truth of doctrine! Pope John Paul II will be remembered for many things, but Evangelicals will always honor him for his stand for truth against relativism and liberal compromise.

The West-Schindler Debate Over Concupiscence in the Theology of the Body

David Delaney at the blog Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex has posted a summary of an article that will appear in the December Homiletic Pastoral and Review on the debate over the correct interpretation of concupiscence in John Paul II's Theology of the Body. I will give a few excerpts from the summary and then offer some comments from a Reformed, Evangelical perspective in red in between quotations.

_________

"The ongoing Theology of the Body debate between Christopher West and his critics (including Alice Von Hildebrand, David Schindler and Dawn Eden) is an important one. For those not familiar with it, I suggest reading David Schindler’s initial open letter, Christopher West’s public response and Dawn Eden’s thesis. West’s public response correctly identifies the primary issue; concupiscence. It, at least in part, underlies most of his critic’s concerns." [For those unfamiliar with this debate the above links are a good introduction. A bit of searching on Google, however, can lead to more relevant articles.]

"Schindler claims that West’s understanding of concupiscence is deficient because he neglects to understand “that concupiscence dwells ‘objectively’ in the body, and continues its ‘objective’ presence in the body throughout the course of our infralapsarian existence.” Eden explicitly quotes Schindler citing the same concern.

West admits he may have under emphasized the “fierce” and enduring nature of concupiscence in the past. Nevertheless, he doesn’t retreat from his emphasis that redemption brings about liberation from concupiscence, and for good reason. The words come from JPII. West points to 15 references in the TOB catecheses in support of this. Accordingly, one of West’s central themes is “mature purity.”

West believes mature purity excludes continence. Rather than turning away from temptations, it is an achievement in which one no longer need turn away." [West is here teaching something quite recognizable to anyone familiar with the Reformed tradition; we have encountered it before in the Wesleyan and Holiness traditions of sinless perfection.]

"West correctly interprets John Paul II’s demand that we can and must cooperate with grace in order to overcome concupiscent temptations. We have to demand self-mastery from ourselves in each and every temptation, explicitly demanding we orient our will toward the authentic good. For example, when tempted to reduce a woman to her sexual value because he notices the shape of her body, a man must demand of himself that he see and affirm her as created by God for her own sake. He must endeavor to recover the habitually threatened spousal meaning of the body (TOB 32:3). West rightly emphasizes this point." [John Paul II, in his section: "The 'Heart': Accused or Called?" (pp. 301-321) rightly emphasizes the fact that Jesus calls us to sanctification rather than simply using the law to lay bare our sin, guilt and need of grace. From a Reformed perspective, we would say he is embracing what Calvin called the "third use of the law," that is, as an aid to living a holy life.]

"In general, West is correct about that which John Paul explicitly teaches in this regard. However, I think that he seriously errs when he leaves JPII’s explicit words to concretely apply TOB. . . . Ultimately, West’s view about liberation from continence contradicts Catholic tradition; something John Paul II never does. Rather, John Paul synthesizes the tradition with new insights from phenomenological personalism, though mature purity is not a new insight. It is an articulation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s anthropology." [I think Delaney is exactly right in drawing this conclusion.]

[Here Delaney clarifies the difference between John Paul II and West. Note carefully:] "What John Paul II actually means by liberation is from the “constraint of the body” which arises with the advent of concupiscence (TOB 32:2). The constraint of concupiscence makes authentic total self-gift virtually impossible (TOB 32:6). He also uses constraint to describe the instinct of animals who cannot but follow their urges (TOB 14:6). Something like constraint to instincts is what happens to the man of concupiscence. This constraint is insuperable until the advent of Redemption. However, liberation from this constraint is not the same as near immunity from concupiscence for those who have become “pure” as West puts it.

John Paul holds to tradition saying that “immediate continence,” together with self-mastery and habitual temperance are all simultaneously needed to live the ethos of redemption (see TOB 49:4, 53:5). Continence is “a definite and permanent moral attitude, …a virtue” (TOB 124:4; emphasis mine). He doesn’t say continence can ever be set aside." [There is a huge difference between saying that, in this life, we can overcome the tug of concupiscence and make the sincere gift of the self to the spouse, on the one hand, and saying that we can, in this life, become free of the tug of concupiscence altogether. One is victorious Christian living by means of the filling of the Holy Spirit; the other is sinless perfection. Note: what I am calling "victorious Christian living" does not involve the disappearance of temptation; it involves deliverance from the power of sin but not the presence of sin. The freedom from concupiscence that West talks about is not part of the progressive sanctification, but part of glorification (or final, competed sanctification), which happens only at death or the return of Christ and involves having a resurrected, glorified body. It is not that what West wants is not part of salvation; it is just that it is unattainable in this life. If Delaney is right in his arguments, the upshot is that John Paul II is closer to the Reformed doctrine of sanctification than to the Wesleyan-Holiness doctrine, as well as being a good Thomist, as Delaney stresses.]

A final comment is that my Reformed position is informed by the Evangelical stress on the transformation of character and so is closer to that of Jonathan Edwards than to certain strands of the Reformed tradition which are highly suspicious of experience and reject revivalism. This makes me closer to John Paul II than some Reformed theologians, but not closer to the Wesleyan-Arminian-Holiness tradition, as I hope this discussion shows.

Pope Benedict on the Roots of the Sexual Abuse Scandal

Catholic liberals and secularist alike delight in bashing the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope and traditional theology using the child sexual abuse scandal as a club. They seek to imply that, somehow, conservative moral theology is the problem and that if only the Church adopted liberal theology then all would be well.

There is absolutely no evidence in favor of this tendentious claim and much against it. In his annual Christmas address to the Curia, Pope Benedict XVI explains why it is not conservative moral theology and its commitment to absolute principles of morality, but the abandonment of these things things which is at the root of the problem.

In the vision of Saint Hildegard, the face of the Church is stained with dust, and this is how we have seen it. Her garment is torn – by the sins of priests. The way she saw and expressed it is the way we have experienced it this year. We must accept this humiliation as an exhortation to truth and a call to renewal. Only the truth saves. We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred. We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen. We must discover a new resoluteness in faith and in doing good. We must be capable of doing penance. We must be determined to make every possible effort in priestly formation to prevent anything of the kind from happening again. This is also the moment to offer heartfelt thanks to all those who work to help victims and to restore their trust in the Church, their capacity to believe her message. In my meetings with victims of this sin, I have also always found people who, with great dedication, stand alongside those who suffer and have been damaged. This is also the occasion to thank the many good priests who act as channels of the Lord’s goodness in humility and fidelity and, amid the devastations, bear witness to the unforfeited beauty of the priesthood.

We are well aware of the particular gravity of this sin committed by priests and of our corresponding responsibility. But neither can we remain silent regarding the context of these times in which these events have come to light. There is a market in child pornography that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society. The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times. From Bishops of developing countries I hear again and again how sexual tourism threatens an entire generation and damages its freedom and its human dignity. The Book of Revelation includes among the great sins of Babylon – the symbol of the world’s great irreligious cities – the fact that it trades with bodies and souls and treats them as commodities (cf. Rev 18:13). In this context, the problem of drugs also rears its head, and with increasing force extends its octopus tentacles around the entire world – an eloquent expression of the tyranny of mammon which perverts mankind. No pleasure is ever enough, and the excess of deceiving intoxication becomes a violence that tears whole regions apart – and all this in the name of a fatal misunderstanding of freedom which actually undermines man’s freedom and ultimately destroys it.

In order to resist these forces, we must turn our attention to their ideological foundations. In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This, however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It was maintained – even within the realm of Catholic theology – that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a "better than" and a "worse than". Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today. Against them, Pope John Paul II, in his 1993 Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor, indicated with prophetic force in the great rational tradition of Christian ethos the essential and permanent foundations of moral action. Today, attention must be focussed anew on this text as a path in the formation of conscience. It is our responsibility to make these criteria audible and intelligible once more for people today as paths of true humanity, in the context of our paramount concern for mankind.

Here are a few observations:

First, is it not startling that in discussing this issue the Pope should be driven to quoting the Book of Revelation? Clearly, he sees the threat to the Church's witness as extremely serious and indicative of a great setback in spiritual warfare.

Second, Pope Benedict XVI goes back to the roots of the child sexual abuse scandal by referring to the rise of consequentialist thinking and the denial of the existence of objective right and wrong in the post-Vatican II rush to embrace secular and progressive thinking in the Roman Catholic Church.

Third, it is instructive to note that he highlights Pope John Paul II's great encyclical Veritatis Splendor and calls it "prophetic." In this encyclical, John Paul II forcefully and beautifully proclaims the permanent and objective character of moral truth in contradistinction to the subjective and shifting standards of morality found in contemporary left-wing theology.

Fourth, Benedict XVI notes that Veritatis Splendor must be utilized in the formation of conscience. Later in the address, Benedict XVI speaks of John Henry Newman and stresses that for Newman, as for the tradition in general, conscience does not denote the subjective feelings of an individual based on the current situation, but rather, the voice of the Spirit as it comes through Scripture, sound doctrine and a knowledge and love of the law of God.

Fifth, the clergy abuse scandal cannot be separated from other evils of the 70s and 80s including the rising acceptance of homosexuality, the breakdown of marriage, abortion and sexual licentiousness in general. In all cases the idea of a well-formed conscience was transformed into a fancy word for fleshly desires and the idea that some actions are always and in themselves evil was abandoned as "old-fashioned."

The Roman Catholic Church needs reform in doctrine, it is true, but one must admire her constancy in speaking the truth of moral theology in courageous opposition to the spirit of the age. In an age characterized by "the dictatorship of relativism" the Papacy is a liberation movement fighting for truth, goodness and joyful obedience to the law of Christ.

Any Protestant denomination or theological movement which purports to be "reformed" and "biblical" must demonstrate a similarly clear-headed approach to moral theology if it wishes to be taken seriously. Sadly, many Protestants and even many Evangelicals fall short of this standard, to our great shame and the world's great loss.

Appeasement Did Not Win the Cold War and It Won't Work with Islam

George Weigel learned a thing or two by researching and writing extensively about Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II. His treatment of John Paul II's role in ending the Cold War and liberating Eastern Europe from the Russian yoke in his great biography of the Pope is sterling and it highlights the huge gap between the curia's seemingly incurable, temperamental proclivity for appeasement of dictators and totalitarian systems.

But John Paul II was only able to do what he did to confront the Communist regimes because he went over the heads of the Vatican bureaucracy to speak directly to the people. He was able to broker his natural charisma, his media savvy and his personal courage to do what he never could have gained a consensus among his bureaucrats to do. (My favorite line from the CBC movie version of his life is one worried Vatican official saying to another: "He is the pope and he KNOWS it!")

Pope Benedict XVI is a good man with a firm commitment to orthodoxy, but when it comes to politics, the media and communicating his message without letting it be corrupted or co-opted between the time when it leaves his mouth and the time when it reaches the hearers of his audience - well, the most charitable thing to say is that he is no John Paul II.

John Paul II is one of the greatest historical figures of the 20th century and one of the reasons for this assessment is his role in liberating Eastern Europe from totalitarian rule. His contribution to the consigning of Communism to the dustbin of history was made because he rejected the quarter century long Vatican posture of appeasement of Communism and joined Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in being willing to confront totalitarianism with courage and determination.

Today, the Vatican tendency to appease totalitarianism has not changed and was on display in the recent synod on the Middle East held in Rome. The synod hardly criticized Muslims for anything but let Israel have it with both barrels. There were calls for the Palestinian "right of return" and for the handing over of all "occupied lands." The whole tone was that Israel is the problem and peace cannot be achieved without more unilateral concessions from Israel - concessions that place the viability of the country in serious jeopardy. Rabbi David Rosen of the American Jewish Committee, who addressed the synod, reports that at the news conference at which the final report was released, the following revealing statements were made by Monsignor Cyril Salim Bustros. Despite the fact that these statements were not in the final message from the synod, they do reflect the thinking of many at the synod.

But now in October 2010, Monsignor Cyril Salim Bustros, Greek Melkite archbishop of Our Lady of the Annunciation of Boston, Massachusetts has stated that "[t]he Holy Scriptures cannot be used to justify the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of the Palestinians, to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestinian lands." Furthermore, Bustros said that "[w]e Christians cannot speak of the 'promised land' as an exclusive right for a privileged Jewish people. This promise was nullified by Christ[.]" And finally, Bustros affirms that "[t]he Palestinian refugees will eventually come back and this problem will have to be solved."

In essence, these words contradict "the Second Vatican Council teaching and Pope Benedict himself -- who has welcomed the return of Jews to their ancient homeland."

Not all Catholics on the Left, it would seem, have yet accepted Vatican II! Forget the right, when will the Left catch up with the repudiation of supersessionism? Perhaps it is the case that the long-standing Vatican tendency to appeasement is leading the Roman Catholic Church into dangerous anti-Semitic waters.

Ironically, just as the synod was ending, the ineffectiveness of appeasement was made clear by a vicious attack on a Catholic Church in Baghdad. See the Washington Post story here. George Weigel comments at First Things:

The murder of more than 50 Catholics by jihadists during Sunday Mass in Baghdad on Oct. 31 is the latest in a series of outrages committed against Christians by Islamist fanatics throughout the world: Egypt, Gaza, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and on the list goes. The timing of the attack on Baghdad’s Syriac Catholic cathedral was striking, however, for it came shortly after the conclusion in Rome of a special Synod on the Middle East. During the Synod, very little was said about Islamist persecution of Christians; indeed, every effort was bent to show the Catholic Church sympathetic to Muslim grievances, especially with regard to the politics of the Middle East.

This strategy of appeasement has always struck me as unwise. The al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists’ answer to the Synod—the Baghdad murders—has now proven the strategy deadly. Appeasement must stop. . . .

The Vatican bureaucracy and local Catholic leaders in the Middle East must also reexamine the assumption—widely bruited at the recent Synod—that resolving the Israel-Palestine issue through a two-state solution will solve every other issue between militant Islam and Christianity. It won’t. Moreover, a viable two-state solution, which every reasonable person supports, is not on the short-term horizon (although important steps are being taken to build the infrastructure of civil society on the West Bank). Meanwhile, Islamist depredations against Christians in the Holy Land are a present reality. Christian leaders whose people are being murdered by jihadists and other Islamist fanatics ought to stop blaming their precarious situation on the State of Israel and put the blame where it belongs: with Muslim intolerance.

Weigel is absolutely right. The Synod on the Middle East was just another sad chapter in the history of Vatican appeasement of totalitarianism. Islam must be confronted as Communism was confronted. It cannot be won over by concessions or bowing and scraping, which it interprets as signs of weakness. Where is John Paul II when we need him?

Where Were You 32 Years Ago Today?

32 years ago today Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II in Rome. According to Timothy George, back in Cracow none other than Billy Graham was preaching in Woytyla's diocese at the very time the conclave was going on. Woytyla was open to Evangelicals in a way that liberal Catholics and liberal Protestants were not. Billy Graham and John Paul II were two of the greatest Christian leaders of the Twentieth Century.

A Review of "Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II's Theology of the Body"

Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II's Theology of the Body by Carl Anderson and Jose Granados (Doubleday, 2009) takes a unique approach to John Paul II's Theology of the Body by using John Paul's poetry and plays as a way of illustrating the major themes of the Theology of the Body. Anyone familiar with the outline of Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body will recognize that the book follows the outline of John Paul's work without directly quoting from it extensively. Instead there is constant reference to his poetry, especially Roman Triptych, and the major plays, especially The Jeweler's Shop and Radiation of Fatherhood.

This book is readable and even lyrical in its beauty at times. It does not presuppose knowledge of John Paul's other writings, but introduces the main themes in an accessible and enticing manner. Thus, it functions as a fine introduction to the Theology of the Body.

But there is something here also for the reader who is already familiar with the Theology of the Body. The authors are to be commended for demonstrating how deeply rooted are John Paul's ethical, philosophical and theological writings in his early literary thought. One result of reading this book is the gaining of an appreciation for the integration in John Paul's thought between his literary and his more abstract, scholarly thought.

Highly recommended.

Falling for the Materialist Lie in Post-Communist Poland

The other day, Rod Dreher wrote a post called: "John Paul II and the Mall Girls" in which he explored the sadness felt by John Paul II at the way Poland embraced the materialism and hedonism of the West instead of using its freedom after liberation from Communist tyranny to choose God and life. The post is well worth reading, especially where it quotes from a speech John Paul II gave in Poland, which is basically a lament.

But what I wanted to call attention to in the post is a quote from a New York Times article dealing with a film recently made in Poland about girls who engage in acts of prostitution in mall washrooms in exchange, not for money, but for expensive articles of clothing from the mall stores. The film, by Katrazyna Roslaniec, is called Galerianki (Mall Girls) and it is a commentary on Poland 20 years after the fall of Communism. The NYT article by Dan Bilefsky says:

"The revelation that Catholic girls, some from middle-class families, are prostituting themselves for a Chanel scarf or an expensive sushi dinner is causing many here to question whether materialism is polluting the nation’s soul.

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Ms. Roslaniec called mall girls the daughters of capitalism. “Parents have lost themselves in the race after a new washing machine or car and are rarely home,” she said. “A 14-year-old girl needs a system of values that can’t be shaped without the guidance of parents. The result is that these girls live in a world where there are no feelings, just cold calculation.”

Now the whole phenomenon of teen prostitution is unbearably sad, but it is prevalent in countries all over the world, not just ones recently emerged from Communism. The Asia child sex trade is well known. But what I found interesting was the almost reflexive link made both by the filmmaker and by the NYT writer between prostitution and materialism, on the one hand, and Capitalism, on the other. I wonder to myself: "Why is this link made so automatically?"

Bilefsky writes: "whether materialism is polluting the nation's soul" in the present tense, as if materialism entered Poland in the post-Communist period. Why not ask instead if the materialism of generations of Marxism has left the nation without the resources to handle freedom? Bilefsky quotes Roslaniec, who sounds like she is channeling James Dobson, when he writes that 14 year old girls need parents - even implying that a stay-at-home mom would help prevent her from developing such an unfeeling, cold calculating approach to morality.

Why does he quote her so approvingly when he is a liberal who rejects such ideas when they come from conservatives? Well, he want to make the point that the parents are chasing material goods in the new post-Marxist, Capitalist economic order and therefore ignoring their families. This is a bit rich coming from the NYT, is it not? After all, is not the NYT an advocate of abortion on demand so women can be in the work force and compete like men? It is good in New York, but bad in Poland, at least when you are bashing Capitalism.

Somehow, it is an automatic reflex on the Left to associate materialism and hedonism with capitalism. But here the filmmaker and the NYT overreach. It is actually conservative Christianity, not Communism, that promotes spirituality, morality, stay-at-home mothers and self-discipline. Communism is just as materialistic and hedonistic as Capitalism. If Capitalism makes a virtue out of greed, Communism makes a virtue out of envy.

The analysis here could just as well have been that after generations of Marxist atheism and materialism, Poland has yet to recover her historic faith. Her soul has been scarred by an ideology of cold calculation and statist bureaucracy imposed upon her by her Russian masters and people lack the spiritual resources needed to resist Capitalist materialism. But it is preferable to blame Capitalism than to see both Capitalism and Communism as deviations from orthodox Christianity.

John Paul II and I would both agree that post-Communist Poland has seen many people embrace the empty, Western, liberal notion of freedom as freedom for materialism, hedonism and soul-destroying cold calculation. But, unlike Bilefsky and Roslaniec, neither of us would point to an economic system as the cause of the evil. We would point to the sinfulness of the human heart. That is because we are Christians and not Marxists.

The TOB #5: Sanctification and Purity of Heart

In this post, I want to look at John Paul II's teaching on sanctification and life in the Spirit. This was one of the aspects of his theology that most surprised me as an Evangelical when I read it for the first time. He sounds just like an Evangelical calling for personal holiness and grounds his appeal in Galatians 5 and the work of the Spirit in the hearts of Christians.

In Chapter Two, Christ Appeals to the Human Heart, John Paul II bases his teaching on Christ's words in the Sermon on the Mount where he says that the lustful look is committing adultery in the heart (Matt. 5:27-28). But instead of understanding this verse negatively only, John Paul II also sees in it not merely condemnation of the sinful heart of man, but also a call to purity of heart.

This focus on the attitudes toward the woman and not merely on external actions opens up the possibility of having a change of mind and heart in which we no longer objectify a woman for her potential to gratify our desires, but rather relate to her as a person whom we love for her own sake. Instead of fearing or loathing erotic desires, John Paul II follows St. Augustine in seeking to discipline them and re-direct them into marriage. This is the opposite of Manicheanism because it links purity of heart with the love of the spouse, rather than with the suppression of desire. One of his section headings reveals this emphasis: "Purity - 'Keeping the Passions Away' or 'Keeping the Body with Holiness and Reverence'?" (p. 340)

In Part 6 "Purity as Life According to the Spirit" John Paul II deals with the meaning of "body" and "Spirit" in Paul's writings and concludes that what Paul means by "flesh" in Gal. 5 is not the bodily part of man with its passions, but rather the "man 'interiorly' subjected to the world" (331), that is, the man whose heart is subject to the "concupiscence that comes from the world." (330) He writes: "The man who lives 'according to the flesh (sarx)' is the man disposed only to that which comes 'from the world': he is the man of the 'senses,' the man of the three-fold concupiscence." (331) It is not merely a matter of the fact of the bodily passions existing, rather it is a matter of the inner man, in his "heart," desiring to live sinfully by giving in to bodily passions against the will of God or, in John Paul II's terms drawing on Paul, going against "what the Spirit wants." (332)

John Paul II sketches out how it is the power of Jesus Christ himself working through his Spirit that enables the Christian to live a life of integrity and victory over sin. The life in the Spirit is a matter of what John Paul II calls "the anthropological and ethical realism of the redemption brought about by Christ, whic Paul . . . also calls the 'redemption of the body.'" (335) It is significant that in talking about the works of the flesh which are overcome by the Spirit's power, Paul mentions many sexual sins including fornication, impurity, licentiousness, etc. These are actually, says John Paul II, sins of the human spirit, rather than sins of the flesh and the work of ths Spirit sets us free from slavery to them.

In his discussion of the fruit of the Spirit, John Paul II says "we should consider and above all realize evangelical purity, that is, purity of the heart according to the measure of that freedom for which Christ 'has set us free.'" (338) One aspect of this freedom that will become significant in the discussion of natural family planning is the fruit of the Spirit called "self-control." John Paul II equates "self-mastery" with "continence" and "self-control." Although Paul does not refer to the Greek virtue of temperance, nevertheless the meaning of purity in Paul's thought as a result of the work of the Spirit in the life of the believer is very close to the meaning of temperance in the tradition. (341)

One last quote: "Since 'purity' should be understood as the right way of treating the sexual sphere, depending on one's personal state of life (and not necessarily absolute abstinence from sexual life, such 'purity' is doubtlessly included in the Pauline concept of 'mastery or enkrateia." (341) Here John Paul II clarifies and deepens the traditional understanding of sex within marriage as being in no sense a concession or venal sin, but rather as inherently good in and of itself. Therefore the married person can be sanctified just as much as the consecrated celibate and the participation in sexual union with one's lawful spouse in no way compromises or reduces purity of heart - which is what Jesus calls for in the Sermon on the Mount and what Paul teaches is the work of the Spirit in Galatians 5.

My previous post on the Theology of the Body can be accessed here:

The TOB #1: Teaching John Paul II to Evangelicals
The TOB #2: The Rejection of Modern Dualism
The TOB #3: Comparing TOB to Evangelical Theology
The TOB #4: Scripture and Metaphysics

Theology of the Body #4: Scripture and Metaphysics

This is #4 in an occasional series on John Paul II's Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body.

One of the distinctive features of John Paul II's theology of the body is the way he combines philosophical sophistication in both contemporary phenomenology and also Thomism with expertise in biblical theology. John Paul II occasionally engages in detailed exegesis in TOB but he constantly engages with the text of Scripture; his method is more synthetic than analytical.

He is doing biblical theology by interpreting texts in the context of Scripture as a whole, rather than focusing on placing the text against the backdrop of the historical situation in which it was written (or edited). He is not against historical exegesis, the literal meaning or the historical-critical method, but his goal is to understand the canonical witness as a whole in terms of what it says about human sexuality and marriage. In this respect he stands very clearly in a tradition that extends back through Barth, Calvin, Luther, Thomas, Augustine and Athanasius.

Genesis 1-2 as Basis for a Philosophical Anthropology
In Part I, John Paul begins with Christ's words in Matt. 19 in reply to the Pharisees' question about divorce in which he directed them back to Gen. 1-2 to discern the truest and deepest intention of God concerning marriage. In this post, I want to examine how he grounds a Thomistic metaphysical doctrine of the human person in Gen. 1-2. Protestants may not be used to using biblical theology to under gird a metaphysics, and certainly not a Thomistic one, but that is the Pope's project here.

The second (older) creation narrative is the Yahwist account (named thus because it uses the covenant name for God revealed to Moses in Ex. 3:14)

“One can say that this depth is above all subjective in nature & thus in some way psychological. . . When we compare the two accounts, we reach the conviction that this subjectivity corresponds to the objective reality of man created ‘in the image of God’” (TOB, p. 137)

So JP II is saying that Gen 2 explains what Gen 1 means by our having been created in God’s image. What JP II is doing here is seeking to root his Christian anthropology in metaphysical reality, rather than in human reason or will. The truth about marriage is thus rooted in the ontological nature of man as created in God’s image. He is saying that Jesus, in appealing to ‘the beginning’ was rooting the truth of historical man (i.e. our experience of fallenness) in the boundary between primeval innocence and historical man’s consciousness of sin. Gen. 2 deals with the boundary (and connection) between original innocence & original sin, the state of integral nature and the state of fallen nature.

Modern Subjectivity
In his penetrating study of Wojtyla, Kenneth Schmitz argues that the most significant challenge to which Wojtyla’s personalism responds is a certain understanding of personal subjectivity and interiority that gained wide currency in the modern age. A particular emphasis on subjectivity, Schmitz shows, emerged from the sixteenth century onward together with the rise of a mechanistic account of nature.” (At the Center of the Human Drama, p. 131-7) Schmitz writes:

“The mechanistic account of human nature in the wake of Bacon & Descartes denied the interiority of material beings and consequently the kinship of the human person with the subrational natural cosmos. Alone in an inhospitable world that had been deprived of inner meaning, the freedom of the conscious subject becomes ‘absolute,’ detached from sources of meaning: ‘This, then, is the genesis of the modern sense of self as subjectivity. We might say that subjectivity is the self-defense by which consciousness fends off a world either hostile to its inhabitation or at least without companionate room for it, even while consciousness subverts the integrity of that world by its imperious demands. The modern shift gave to the human subject an absolute status precisely in its character qua consciousness; for human consciousness not only sets its own terms but the terms for reality itself.” (Kenneth Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama, pp. 135-6)

JP II versus Modern Subjectivity
He is saying 2 things in response to modern subjectivity:

1. That metaphysics cannot be rejected so easily as modernity thinks because man is a being whose historical existence is rooted in revealed, pre-historical theological truth

2. That the metaphysical truth of who man is is rooted in Genesis, (i.e. in the Word of God), not in mere philosophical speculation, which means that Christians cannot accept modern subjectivity with its starting point in the autonomous subject. This is so because Jesus drew a normative conclusion about our historical existence from our original state.

So we have a biblical-theological basis for a philosophical anthropology which is identical with the Thomist view of man. John Paul II rejects the modern dualism of mind and body and roots his understanding of subjectivity, not in the mind as opposed to the body as modern Cartesian philosophy does, but in the body itself, which speaks a language of its own and is not merely the tool of the person, but is the person.

This rooting of anthropology in biblical theology allows John Paul II to transcend the modern dualism and yet, at the same time, to give a personalist account of the human being that incorporates what is good about the modern emphasis on subjectivity and what we could call the integrated personhood of the human person.

The Theology of the Body #3: Comparing TOB to Evangelical Theology

Before we dive into the exegetical and theological meat of TOB, I thought I should make a few observations about the way in which the whole structure of the TOB is different from liberal Protestant and, increasingly, much of Evangelical Protestant theological writing about marriage. This difference is what makes so many Evangelicals so open to John Paul II's thought when they encounter it for themselves.

Let us take two books by Evangelicals that represent a conservative and a not-so-conservative approach. First, consider God, Marriage and Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation by Adreas J. Kostenberger with David Jones (Crossway, 2004). This book has the advantage of being very biblical in its approach and certainly takes the "correct" conservative position on many issues.

It attempts to be comprehensive and begins with chapters that deal with marriage in the OT, marriage in the NT, the nature of marriage, family in the OT, family in the NT and then two chapters on special topics relating to family: the issue of having or not having children (contraception, abortion, artificial reproductive technologies and adoption) and the issue of parenting methods. Then it turns to question of singleness as a divine gift, homosexuality as the abandonment of natural relations, divorce and family-related qualifications for church leadership for husbands.

This book reminds me of Millard Erickson's Systematic Theology in that it is hard to criticize the substance of his theology all that much but it is written in such a plodding style that it fails to engage any but the most determined reader. It also fails utterly to engage with the Catholic moral theology of marriage and treats the Catholic view as one of the rival views along with secularism and liberal Protestantism.

This book does have the following significant strengths, however. First, it deals somewhat seriously with the issue of contraception, rather than simply ignoring it as a non-issue, and it does condemn types of contraception that really cause early abortions. It does not, however, relate the contraceptive mentality to increasing social acceptance of homosexuality, although it does condemn contraception outside of marriage. Secondly, it makes a good case for viewing marriage as a covenant, rather than a contract, which is a beginning in critiquing modern deformations of marriage. It builds a positive view of what marriage is and then evaluates deviations from this norm, rather than beginning from contemporary human experience of sexual lifestyles as so many books do, including the next one we are about to consider.

Judith K. Balswick and Jack O. Balswick are professors in the School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary and they have written Authentic Human Sexuality: An Integrated Christian Approach (IVP, 2nd ed., 2008). The very structure of this book gives away its perspective. The book is divided into three sections: the origin and structure of sexuality, authentic sexuality and inauthentic sexuality. The choice of a theraeuptic term like "authentic," rather than an theological term like "responsible" or "natural" or a term like "biblical" is soon revealed to be no mistake or oversight. The method at work in the book is clearly to move from contemporary experience to theological conclusions and the goal is to bring Scripture into alignment with the best of "modern experience."

Significantly, homosexuality is not placed in the "Inauthentic Sexuality" section of the book, but in the first section on the origin and formation of sexuality. The Balswicks claim that there are only five passages in the Bible that are relevant to homosexuality and the only significant exegetical work done in the book is an attempt to explain these passages away. For example, the prohibitions in the Holiness Code in Leviticus are discounted because "Christ came to abolish the law" (p. 118) [They might want to re-read Matt. 5:17 again, which says the opposite!] They argue that I Corinthians 6:9-10 only condemns sexual relationships in which there is a significant power differential (such as between men and boys), thus implying that adulterous and homosexual relationships would be considered by Paul (and the Holy Spirit) to be fine as long as the people involved were close in age and status. There is no point in continuing to examine the dreary rehashing of the appallingly lame and inaccurate liberal arguments that they present (without refutation by Evangelical interpreters) in this highly unfortunate chapter.

By the time they get to the end of the chapter, the reader is prepared for them to say that they therefore advocate the acceptance of homosexual acts as normal and good, but they pull back at the last minute and do not do so. But they don't have to; they have already made the argument and any reader who is convinced by their writing will draw the conclusion for himself.

One interesting thing to note is that the Balswicks have managed to write a 300 page book on sexuality without hardly so much as mentioning children. One would never know from their book that sex often results in babies and that it is the means by which we all got here. They do have a whole chapter on "maximizing sexual fulfillment," however, which meshes with their therapeutic approach. And they spend a chapter puzzling over whether or not pre-marital sex and cohabitation is good, bad or indifferent. They finally conclude that the Church should "offer grace over law." (p. 178) While recognizing the negative effects of cohabitation, they find themselves agonizing to take a clear position that is counter-cultural.

The interesting thing to note in comparing the two books is that the only one that takes Scripture seriously also takes a complementarian, rather than an egalitarian, stand on the role of husband and wife in marriage. Only those Evangelicals who actually oppose secular feminism are, apparently, able to take a counter cultural stance on marriage and family issues. This gives a person who wants to take a pro-feminist and anti-same sex marriage postion some cause for discomfort. It is clear that the Balswicks and those influenced by them are moving rapidly in the direction of a secular view of marriage as basically a matter of sex and mutuality without any relevance to children. Such a view of heterosexual marriage makes it nearly impossible to assert logically that two men cannot "marry" in this sense just as well as a man and a woman can.

Unless marriage is understood as an inter-generational institution designed for the raising, nurture, education and Christian formation of children, it is going to be impossible to resist the cultural pressure to accept homosexual "marriage." And if the experience of modern feminists is enough to overthrow "patriarchial" approaches to marriage, the same experience-based methodology will inevitably lead to the acceptance, not only of same-sex "marriage" but to the expansion of the term "marriage" to cover all sorts of deviant sexual relationships.

In the TOB, the method John Paul II employs is to utilize phenomenology in such a way as to keep it firmly subordinated to the authority of Scripture by rejecting modern, gnostic, philosophical anthropologies and allowing the biblical vision of Genesis, as reiterated by Jesus, to shape the substance of his moral theology of marriage including his understanding of human sexuality. John Paul II begins by allowing Scripture to inform our theology of marriage and then he only deals with deviations from the norm after the substance of a theology is firmly in place.

Kostenberger also takes biblical exegesis seriously, but I agree with the reaction of my students in my Marriage in Theological Perspective class in viewing John Paul II's handling of Scripture as having far more depth and seriousness than Kostenberger's. In reflecting on why this is so, I think that it is because John Paul II's critique of modern philosophical assumption about anthropology is much more profound and penetrating with the result that he is able to challenge the shallow modern view of man as individual and replace it with a Trinitarian understanding of the image of God in man (which he derives from Karl Barth).

John Paul II structures the TOB around three statements by Jesus in the Gospels. First, there is the story in Matt. 19 in which he appeals to the beginning. In reply to the question of why Moses allowed divorce, Jesus directs his interlocutors back to God's original design for marriage as found in Gen. 1-2. He thus grounds permanent, procreative, loving marriage as closely related to the image of God and as rooted in creation.

Second, John Paul II deals with the words of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount in which Christ makes clear that the adulterous look is as bad as adultery, which clarifies both that our sexuality is fallen and that this falleness leads directly to objectification and lust. John Paul II interprets the teaching of our Lord here in the light of the Spirit-flesh struggle as described by Paul in Galatians and views Jesus as calling us to a life of holiness and self-control. Lust is something that can disfigure even a marital relationship and control of our sexual urges is necessary for the total gift of self in marriage that makes sexual union a personal act.

Third, John Paul II considers the words of Jesus in response to the question of the Sadducees as to whose wife the woman with seven husbands would be in the resurrection. Jesus here tells us that although we will still be male and female in our resurrected bodies, we will not participate in marriage as we know it here in this life. Thus, Jesus points us toward our eschatological destiny to be married to Jesus Christ as the bride of Christ and he alerts us to the provisional, anticipatory nature of marriage as we know it.

Then, fourthly, John Paul II turns to Paul's great analogy of marriage as a pointer to the relationship of Christ and his Church in Ephesians 5 and to the prefiguring of this in the Song of Songs. The importance of human marriage here and now is not limited to the satisfaction and well-being of the husband and wife; rather, it is so important because it signifies and is a figure of the relationship of God and Israel, Christ and the Church and the soul and God. Marriage is built into creation, marred by the Fall and a key aspect of the redemption that has already begun in the Spirit and will be carried forward to completion in the Resurrection.

It is only when the full theological significance of marriage is seen that its ultimate beauty and seriousness can be appreciated. The Balswick's book represents a lamentable falling away from the Christian understanding of marriage and sexuality with its shallow, modern, experience-based, therapeutic approach. The question Evangelical theologians need to ponder is whether there is enough depth and serious theological substance in books like that of Kostenberger to prevent Evangelicalism from sliding into liberalism. I fear that there is not, which is why I thank God for the witness of John Paul II and the tremendous deepening and development of the tradition that he provides us in his Theology of the Body.

The Theology of the Body #2: The Rejection of Modern Dualism

One of the main themes running through John Paul II's TOB (Theology of the Body) is the rejection of modern gnostic tendencies that are enshrined in modern philosophy, twisted in Romanticism, implemented in technology and finally worshiped in liberal theology. It is, after all, a theology of the body. But why does John Paul II put it this way? Why call it a theology of the body? I think there are many reasons one could point to in answer to this question, but let me just suggest two in the space of this blog post.

The Biblical Doctrine of Creation as the Foundation of Biblical Theology
First, John Paul II's project is a theological anthropology grounded in the doctrine of creation. God created man as a body-soul complex and the body is neither incidental to our true nature nor dispensable. We are our bodies. So John Paul II can speak of the "language of the body" as if the body was a person - because it is. I am my body and I speak through my body; this is what is behind the common phrase "body language." How if fidget, whether I make eye contact, what I do with my hands - all these things are part of the way "I" communicate. The person who is Craig Carter is a body and this fact is the reason why physical death is so unnatural and so fearsome; we rightly fear death because we fear the disintegration of the person as the body dies. We do not take lightly the loss of our bodies for the very good reason that we are our bodies and we are therefore talking about the loss of self.

For John Paul II, the Bible is a unified revelation that speaks to the way we are, what is wrong with us and how we can become what we were created to become. He finds a teleological understanding of human being not only in reason, but in Divine revelation. The Bible begins with the marriage of Adam and Eve and ends with the marriage supper of the Lamb. The heart of the Bible is the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

In the OT the relationship between Yahweh and Israel is compared to that between a bride and her husband and in the NT the relationship between Christ and the Church is compared to that of a bridegroom and bride. Near the physical center of Scripture is the Song of Songs, about which John Paul II thinks everybody is right. He thinks that the Fathers and the mystics who treated it as an allegory of the relationship of the soul to God were right on one level. But he also has sympathy for modern Evangelical literalists who interpret it as Middle Eastern love poetry and argue that God must not be embarrassed by sexual joy. John Paul II thinks it is about that too. And those who, like Barth, see it as linking the old and new covenants by foreshadowing the relationship between Christ and the Church in the context of the prophetic teaching on marriage as the relationship between the LORD and Israel are also right. Bodies do just fine, John Paul II thinks, as analogies for the Divine human relationship.

The point is that the Bible has an awful lot to say about bodies. Those who think it is a "spiritual" book are not wrong but bodies have spiritual significance and any sort of body-spirit dualism that says that one has little or nothing to do with the other does not understand biblical spirituality. For John Paul II, our bodies are at the center of God's creative activity, they are fallen as a result of sin, yet the image of God is not destroyed by sin and God is at work to redeem our bodies, a process which one day will culminate in the resurrection of the body into a glorious new divinized, spiritualized, glorified order of existence. The Bible, one might say with little exaggeration, for John Paul II, is all about bodies.

The Biblical Doctrine of Creation as the Basis for the Rejection of Modern Philosophical Anthropology
The second reason it is called a theology of the body is that John Paul II is here attempting to provide an alternative to the modern philosophical anthropology that has become dominant since Descartes.

For early modern philosophers like Bacon and Descartes the quest for power over nature was extremely important and a new concept of subjectivity was developed in which a dualism was created between the self, the consciousness, which was exalted to a divine status, and, on the other hand, the body, which was regarded as part of a mechanistic nature subject to the mechanical laws of nature described by Newton. So humans are, in this dualistic understanding, immaterial centers of consciousness, which are free, and bodies, which are subject to impersonal laws of physics. Here is an extended quote from philosopher Kenneth Schmitz, describing the situation that John Paul II faced:

"The mechanistic account of human nature in the wake of Bacon and Descartes denied the interiority of material beings & consequently the kinship of the human person with the subrational natural cosmos. Alone in an inhospitable world that had been deprived of inner meaning, the freedom of the conscious subject becomes ‘absolute,’ detached from sources of meaning: ‘This, then, is the genesis of the modern sense of self as subjectivity. We might say that subjectivity is the self-defense by which consciousness fends off a world either hostile to its inhabitation or at least without companionate room for it, even while consciousness subverts the integrity of that world by its imperious demands. The modern shift gave to the human subject an absolute status precisely in its character quaconsciousness; for human consciousness not only sets its own terms but the terms for reality itself.” (Kenneth Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama, pp. 135-6)

So, in modernity, the non-material center of consciousness is sovereign, rational and free but the body is not.

John Paul II's TOB is an attempt to put the human creature back together on the basis of the biblical doctrine of creation. Man is a body-soul complex, not a dualistic mind somehow connected to a physical body (the mind-body problem of modern philosophy). John Paul II is a Thomist so he does not accept modern philosophy, but in TOB he is not concerned to replace modern philosophical anthropology with a Thomist anthropology; rather, he is concerned to appeal to the doctrine of creation as discovered through biblical exegesis. John Paul II has this weird idea that Thomism is actually biblical and that God has created the world and revealed truth about the world that actually cohere! (See Veritatis Splendor, Par. 44-45 and the work of Matthew Levering, especially his recent Biblical Natural Law (Oxford, 2008).

So for John Paul II, unlike modern dualism, the body is as much an aspect of the person as the mind is. We are as much bodies as we are minds. Of course, the account of sin given in Scripture reveals that we experience a lack of cohesion as persons under the conditions of the fall, and modern dualism is a reflection of that sinful disintegration (which is one reason sin and death are so closely related in Pauline theology, for example). But we were created as unified, coherent beings and our redemptive destiny is reintegration. So Christian theology cannot follow modern philosophy into a dualism in which the body becomes basically as tool of the self, a means by which the self acts in the world but not really the true self. Christian theology, in order to be biblical and reform modern distortions, must therefore be a theology of the body.

For moderns, it is easy to see how the body becomes a despised tool of the self; modern use their bodies to achieve their goals but the body is just ultimately a part of nature. For John Paul II, on the other hand, the body has all the dignity of the person. We should respect our bodies and express ourselves through our bodies rather than using our bodies. The modern tendency for people to "use" each other's bodies for fleeting pleasure is thus preceded by the habit of using their own bodies in that manner. In the TOB bodies are too important to use as tools, manipulate with technology and treat impersonally as means rather than as ends.

How all this relates to personhood will be the subject of a following post.

Evangelicals and the Contraceptive Mentality

In teaching the Marriage course last semester at Tyndale I encountered no opposition of any kind to the fact that I assigned as my main text John Paul II's Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. The students liked it and no one from the administration or other faculty expressed any concern. Now, I'm well aware of the fact that my fortunate situation is not replicated on all Evangelical campuses. I was talking to a friend at another Evangelical liberal arts college who has witnessed significant anti-Catholicism, including prejudice against Natural Family Planning and the TOB (Theology of the Body).

The TOB in an Evangelical Context
There are two reasons why someone might be concerned about someone teaching TOB in an Evangelical context. One arises from anti-Catholic sentiment and the other from a liberal accommodation to the sexual revolution. I submit that the former is not so much of a concern in most Evangelical liberal arts colleges; there might well be opposition to hiring a Roman Catholic professor, but not to reading Catholic books. This is especially true in philosophy and moral theology, where the major theological differences between Evangelicals and Roman Catholics are not so prominent.

On the other hand, the real likelihood of opposition to the TOB comes from Evangelicals who have embraced aspects of the sexual revolution, second wave feminism and relatively liberal views of Scripture. The problem with John Paul II, in their view, is not that he is Roman Catholic, but rather that he is conservative. If a Protestant advocated the views on sexual morality taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he would be rejected just as quickly as the Pope.

Embracing the Contraceptive Mentality
Are Evangelicals embracing the contraceptive mentality? I consider the contraceptive mentality (which I will define in a moment) to be the heart of the anti-Christian sexual revolution that has spread over the Western world during the past century and especially since the 1960s. The contraceptive mentality is a view of human sexuality that is uniquely modern and which views the meaning of sexual activity as having nothing essential to do with procreation. The separation of sexual activity from procreation means the separation of sex from children and, ultimately, from marriage. When sexual activity is detached from reproduction, women are objectifyed as sex objects by which the lusts of men can be satisfied.

The Pill plays a big role in this objectifying because it makes women available every day of the month and the monthly cycle that differentiates women from men becomes irrelevant to woman's sexual identity. Natural Family Planning works around the monthly cycle and makes family planning a joint project in which a woman's body is respected rather than medicated and mutilated.

The sexual revolution makes pleasure (in the sense of the physical and psychological sense of well-being that is derived from sexual intercourse) central to the meaning of sex. In the traditional view of marriage, pleasure is a by product of sexual activity but not its meaning. Procreation is the meaning and sex is designed to conceive children and also to bind the husband and wife together is a mutual relationship of love, which creates the ideal environment for the nurture, care, education and raising of children.

When pleasure becomes the main meaning of sex, the marriage becomes a matter of what each person gets out of it. It is a contract for the mutual use of each other's bodies for pleasure and when the pleasure ceases the relationship loses its purpose. It is the genius of John Paul II's TOB to join together the two purposes of sexuality, procreation and mutuality, into one thing. The problem with Evangelicals today is not just that they have accepted contraception; the greater problem is that in doing so they have allowed the use of artificial contraception to alter their understanding of the meaning of human sexuality.

The contraceptive mentality makes the woman continuously available for sex and removes the need for periodic continence. It thus has a negative and a positive effect. Negatively, it removes the necessity for husbands and wives to develop the virtue of self-control, which is a fruit of the Spirit. Positively, it puts the focus on pleasure as the heart of the sexual relationship instead of procreation. Thus, contraception trains us to think of sex as a "need" and as something good "in itself" (i.e. detached from its procreative purpose). The result is that sex becomes a "power," that is, a good structure of creation that bursts its boundaries and becomes an idol by assuming too much importance in and of itself.

The TOB does not have a negative view of sexual activity; on the contrary, it views the sexual relationship between husband and wife as having dignity and purity when it serves its natural end - the conception of children and the binding together of husband and wife as the foundation of the home in which those children can be nurtured with the love that parents naturally lavish on their own offspring.

The TOB does not say that sex has no purpose other than conceiving children - as if a couple with four children should only have had intercourse a handful of times in 20 years. But the TOB wisely teaches that sex for pleasure's sake reduces sex to a trivial recreation and deprives it of its power, its beauty and its seriousness.

The contraceptive mentality is not simply a natural law debate about the morality of a single act of intercourse; it is a vision of human sexuality which is shallow and depersonalizing. The implications of the contraceptive mentality are seen in the fact that when it has a chance to develop and become dominant in a society that society loses its ability to understand why homosexual "marriage" is not "just as good" as heterosexual marriage.

Conclusion
If Evangelicals do not recover the traditional understanding of marriage as an inter-generational institution that revolves around the raising and educating of the children by parents (and grandparents), then we will lose our ability to resist the sexual revolution and all its poison fruit (divorce, cohabitation, homosexuality, promiscuity, etc.)

I do not see how we can balance forever between the traditional and the revolutionary views accepting part of both and yet ever so slowly drifting toward the modern view. Evangelicals must reject the contraceptive mentality if they wish to build strong families and resist of acids of modernity that threaten to dissolve all human relationships into contracts that create shallow relationships and temporary "family structures" instead of the natural family built on a covenant between husband and wife, a covenant that is enacted and re-enacted in every act of marriage.

So it begins . . .

The line is from The Return of the King (Gandalf on the walls of Minas Tirith, for anyone who does not readily recognize quotes from the greatest work of fiction in the 20th century).

In my predictions (the ink on which is scarcely dry - or whatever the digital equivalent of that old saying is), I predicted that in 2010 Evangelicals (among others) would begin the process of receiving the John Paul II's Theology of the Body. Four days into 2010, BIOLA graduate Matthew Lee Anderson announces on his blog Mere Christianity that he has just signed a contract to write a book for Bethany House called Body Matters: Overcoming the New Gnosticism of Young Evangelicals in which he states his intention to interact extensively with Roman Catholic moral theology and John Paul II's theology of the body in particular.

The influence of John Paul the Great on Dale Keuhne (Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationship beyond an Age of Individualism - Baker, 2009) is obvious, although it is not referred to explicitly so far as I can see. And it is clear that the theology of the body is becoming known in a small circle of Evangelicals who have come to love the Great Tradition, but it is still only a cloud in the sky. If anyone knows of other works by Evangelicals that interact with the TOB, I would greatly appreciate it if you could let me know in the comments section.

And stay tuned for the revolt against the revolution - an undertaking as audacious and ridiculous as Aragorn and his companions riding up to the Black Gate and demanding the surrender of the Dark Lord. But like Aragorn and his friends, we well know that victory, if it should come, will not come by our power and strength.

The Theology of the Body #1: Teaching John Paul II to Evangelicals

One of my predictions for the new year was that appreciation for John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" would grow among Evangelicals, as well as among all conservative Christians including Eastern Orthodox, Confessional Protestants, etc. A couple of comments call for some further discussion of this prediction. I intend to post regularly throughout the year on the TOB, but I want to start off by recounting my experience this past semester.

I taught a new course, RLGS 3943 Marriage in Theological Perspective, this past semester and I had 23 students in the course. Seven were married and several were engaged and all were very interested in the course; it was a pure elective for most.

My working assumption was that we are all bombarded with the sexual revolution and the liberal view of sex, marriage and family every day and so the course content was to examine the only two serious alternatives to the liberal view, which is now the establishment view in the West, namely conservative Evangelicalism and the TOB. We used a book by Andreas Kostenberger called God, Marriage and Family for the first few weeks and then studied Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body by John Paul II. Each student also did a review of a different book and made presented a 10-15 minute presentation on the book to the class.

Here is a sample of the books we read:

1. Pornified - Pamela Pauls (a non-Christian journalist examines pornography in the Internet age)

2. Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student - by Miriam Grossman (originally published anonymously out of fear of reprisals)

3. You're Teaching My Child What? A Physican Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How They Harm Your Child by Miriam Grossman (a look at the philosophy of SIECUS and Planned Parenthood and how they are influencing public education)

4. The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It by Philip Longman (a counter intuitive, but convincing study using UN data)

5. Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (a glimpse into the long term agenda of the pansexual movement by a cross-dressing, lesbian English professor who started out as an Evangelical)

6. Return to Modesty and The Good Girl Revolution by Wendy Shalit (two books by a young, Jewish graduate of Wellsley who thinks the pendulum is about start swinging back)

7. The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: The 25 Year Landmark Study by Judith Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis and Sandra Blakeslee (one of the few studies of the longterm effects of divorce)

8. Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family by Lee Silver (a fascinating exercise in futurology by a Princeton bioethicist and molecular biologist)

But what I really wanted to stress in this post is how positive the students were toward John Paul II's book. They were mostly surprised to be reading a biblical-theological study by a Roman Catholic that seemed to them to be informed by a high view of Scriptural authority and a deep engagement with the text. They found him to be Evangelical in his view and very convincing.

By the end of the class about half were convinced that artificial contraception is wrong and most of the rest were very open to the idea of Natural Family Planning. All found John Paul II's arguments to be impressive and not to be dismissed lightly. In fact, I have arranged for a speaker from the Couple to Couple League to come to campus on Feb. 4 to make a presentation on the practical questions surrounding NFP.

My experience is that the problem is simply ignorance. Evangelicals and Roman Catholics live in "two solitudes" and communication is bad. Christopher West, who has devoted his life to spreading the message of TOB, was in Toronto for a conference in Nov. and I attended with about 8 of my current and former students. It was quite an experience to be in such a heavily Catholic environment. (We even attended the 8 am Mass with Archbishop Thomas Collins as homilist and main celebrant and, no, we did not communicate.)

But John Paul II is bigger than Roman Catholicism, if I might be permitted to put it that way. He represents the Tradition and he also represents the apostolic message of Scripture as the fount of that Tradition. I have a student doing an honours thesis this year on how John Paul II's TOB differs from the teaching of St. Augustine, which is a very interesting topic. The TOB is for the whole church. I believe it is a gift given by God now for the post-sexual revolution Church in the West and I agree with George Weigel's famous prediction that it is a time bomb set to go off some time in the third millennium with great blessings for the entire world.

Some of the topics I want to post on in the coming weeks include:

1. The TOB and Feminism
2. Sexual Complementarity and the Dignity of Women
3. The Center of the Biblical Revelation on the Meaning of Sexuality
4. Marriage as a Sacrament: A Proposal for Catholic-Protestant Agreement
5. The Song of Songs in Relation to Genesis, Isaiah and Ephesians
6. Evangelicals and the Contraceptive Mentality
7. Four Views of Marriage (Traditional, Revolutionary, Evangelical and TOB)

I know that not all Protestants are open to John Paul II's insights just because he is Catholic, but I think that the answer is to present his views as "the conservative and traditional view" of sex as grounded in Scripture. It will be necessary for most Evangelicals to encounter this teaching first in a book written by an Evangelical and I hope to write such a book eventually. But once most conservative Evangelicals get past their prejudice and actually encounter the content of the TOB, their response is almost guaranteed to be positive to one extent or another.

Gnostic Reprogenetics

In his book, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family (Harper Collins, 1997), Princeton biologist Lee Silver describes how what he calls "reprogenetic technology" will allow same-sex couples to have children biologically related to both of them. He lauds this as a good thing and throughout the book approves of reproduction being separated from sex and of children being cloned and having more than two biological parents. It is all wonderful because it expands choice and allows people to "achieve their reproductive goals."

The confluence of reprogenetics and evolving patterns of family structure in the coming decades will eventually make the traditional marriage and family something people must consciously choose. The question I have is whether the Church can form and shape people to choose God's way for marriage and family or whether Western culture will simply overwhelm the Church and seduce Christians into abandoning God's intentions for marriage. I think this is a serious issue and I think that the future of the Church as a witness to the Gospel in an increasingly pagan culture is at stake.

What we are facing is a new Gnosticism that treats bodies as just so much raw material that we can manipulate to produce whatever we want. The "we" in this sentence is some sort of mind or brain or will that looks at its own body as something other and lesser than it. This devaluation of the material world is simultaneously a devaluation of man. Consider this quote from Silver. After describing a process by which human spermatogonial cells could be transplanted into animals, which would then be able to produce human sperm indefinitely:

"And since spermatogenial cells are easily frozen and can be transferred from animal to animal, it would be possible," he says, "to keep producting new sperm from the same original man for thousands of years after he has died."

"Once again, the bioethicists were called upon by the media to respond to another new reprogenetic possibility. This is what Arthur Caplan had to say . . . 'Part of the way we think of who we are and how we value ourselves has to do with our origins and reproductio. Something is challenging the specialness of humanity if you originate human beings in some animal's reproductive tract."

Then, we have Silver's revealing response:

"He is absolutely right. The 'specialness of humanity' has been challenged, and it's been found wanting. What this new technique, and so many others like it, tell us is that here is nothing special about human reproduction, nor any other aspect of human biology, save one. The specialness of humanity is found only between our ears; if you go looking for it anywhere else, you'll be disappointed." (p. 204)

The Gnostic worldview of modernity could not be expressed any more clearly. It is only our conscious willing self that is really us; our bodies are just tools and raw material to manipulate to our liking. This is the exact and precise opposite of what Pope John Paul II means by his "theology of the body." For John Paul II the human body is the human person and the human person is his body. We express our personhood through our bodies. It is time to take a second look at John Paul II's theology of the body, if the Church is going to think through the exact nature of the Gnostic challenge posed by reprogenetics.

John Paul II on Capitalism and Socialism

HT to Mark Mitchell at Front Porch Republic for this quote. [My comments are in square brackets and bold]

This is from Centesimus Annus. Here John Paul II reflects on two meanings of the word “capitalism.”

“Returning now to the initial question: can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress? [John Paul II is writing in 1991]

“The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy” or simply “free economy.” [Here John Paul II clearly endorses the market economy as a good thing. So Catholic Social Doctrine cannot simply be reduced to the critique of capitalism and the advocating of socialism. But note what comes next.] But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative. [The pope here endorses a certain kind of capitalism, democratic capitalism, in which there are two (actually many) major power centers: government and business. When and to the extent that business begins to take over or control government we have a problem. The fewer corporations there are and the less competition there is, the fewer hands the power of business resides in. And the larger government is, the easier it is for government bureaucracy and big business to become intertwined. So the smaller the government and the greater the degree of distribution of property and the more competetion between business corporations, the more likely it is that there will be a genuine democratic capitalism. Obviously, recent trends in both the US and Canada are of great concern here. We are definitely going in a dangerous direction.]

“The Marxist solution has failed, but the realities of marginalization and exploitation remain in the world, especially the Third World, as does the reality of human alienation, especially in the more advanced countries. Against these phenomena the Church strongly raises her voice. Vast multitudes are still living in conditions of great material and moral poverty. [Marerialism is built on a false anthropology and can manifest itself negatively both in capitalist and socialist countries.] The collapse of the Communist system in so many countries certainly removes an obstacle to facing these problems in an appropriate and realistic way, but it is not enough to bring about their solution. [Communism is a kind of state capitalism that concentrates power in the hands of the party elite.] Indeed, there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure, and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.” [State capitalism can arise either from socialism, in which the government takes over business, or from the type of liberal fascism in which big business merges with big government through the development of a managerial bureaucracy.]

Final Comment:
Both capitalism and socialism are modern ideologies coming out of the Enlightenment, which tend toward ignoring original sin and naively embracing "scientific solutions" to all social problems. Both are therefore dangerous. The real danger of totalitarianism arises from the concentration of economic and political power in the same set of hands. This can occur through capitalistic monopolies colluding with big government or it can occur through a socialist revolution that puts all power into the hands of the party.

Christians should beware of authoritarian utopianism in whatever form it takes. In Canada, the scientific management of the totality of social life by a managerial class of bureaucrats who share the ideology of the Enlightenment suspicion of tradition and the possibility of endless progress is well-advanced. In the US it appears to be taking a quantum leap forward under Obama.

Chastity and Resentment

In chapter 3 of Love and Responsibility Wojtyla says that chastity is a virtue in need of rehabilitation and explains why by referring to Max Scheler's concept of "resentment""

"Scheler saw a need for the rehabilitation of virtue because he discerned in modern man a characteristic spiritual attitude which is inimical to sincere respect for it. He has called this attitude 'resentment.'"

"Resentment arises from an erroneous and distorted sense of values. It is a lack of objectivity is judgment and evaluation, and it has its origin in weakness of will. The fact is that attaining or realizing a higher value demands a greater effort of will. So in order to spare ourselves the effort, to excuse our failure to obtain this value, we minimize its significance, deny it the respect which it deserves, even see it as in some way evil, although objectivity requires us to recognize that it is a good. Resentment possesses, as you can see, the distinctive characteriatics of the cardinal sin called sloth. St. Thomas defines sloth (aceida) as 'a sadness arising from the fact that the good is difficult. . . Resentment, however, does not stop at this: it not only distorts the features of the good but devalues that which rightly deserves respect, so that man need not struggle to raise himself to the level of the true good, but can 'light-heartedly' recognize as good only what suits him. . .

Chastity, more than any other, seems to be the virtue which resentment has tended to outlaw from the soul, the will and the heart of man. A systematic case has been built up against it, which seeks to show that it is not beneficial but harmful to human beings. . . But chastity and continence are seen above all as dangerous enemies of love . . . Christianity regards this tendency as one of the results of original sin." (143-4)

It was interesting to read in yesterday's The Toronto Star a perfect example of resentment, as described in 1960 by this "out of touch old cleric." An article "How 'Virginity' is a Dangerous Idea: The Author of a New Book Argues Against Purity Cults." The article begins: [My comments in black within square brackets]

"There is a moral panic in America over young women's sexuality – and it's entirely misplaced. [Panic? What panic? This is an imaginary crisis. Let's see what her purpose is in inventing such a panic.] Girls "going wild" aren't damaging a generation of women, the myth of sexual purity is. [So the porn industry is the friend of women; does anyone outside that multi-billion dollar industry believe that? And sexual purity is dangerous? No one ever died of virginity but plenty die every year of promiscuity.] The lie of virginity – the idea that such a thing even exists – [interesting, she is claiming that no such thing as verginity exists! What planet is she just in from? And why would she expect us to believe that existing things are unreal just because she says so?] is ensuring that young women's perception of themselves is inextricable from their bodies, and that their ability to be moral actors is absolutely dependent on their sexuality. [The 2nd century church father Irenaeus would say: "Ah, Gnosticism, are you still having trouble with that old heresy?] It's time to teach our daughters that their ability to be good people depends on their being good people, not on whether or not they're sexually active." [So being sexually active is the new euphemism for fornication and adultery! And sexual immorality isn't immoral because I say so. Got it.]

One's first reaction, upon reading this article, (purportedly written by a woman), is to wonder if it is a scam. Is it a commissioned piece for the pornography industry disguised as a news story? Is it what passes for "feminism" today in the Toronto Star? If so, it sounds more like advertising copy for Penthouse magazine model recruitment campaigns or for the "Girls Gone Wild" conglomerate that makes (a lot of) money by convincing intoxicated young women to expose themselves on camera. Very empowering, that. At the end of the article it is time for "True Confessions."

"My reasons for wanting to write this book weren't entirely altruistic, however. I was once that teenage girl struggling with the meaning behind my sexuality and how my own virginity, or lack thereof, reflected whether or not I was a good person. I was the cruelly labelled slut, the burgeoning feminist [So feminism = being sexually loose?] who knew that something was wrong with a world that could peg me as a bad person for sleeping with a high school boyfriend while ignoring my good heart, sense of humour and intelligence. [So she committed fornication and feels that society (or perhaps the Church?) is cruel to view her as morally guilty. I suppose that God and the moral law should just change to please her? Does it get any more pathetic than this?] Didn't the intricacies of my character count for anything? The answer, unfortunately, was no, they didn't. [The intricacies of my character - ah yes; isn't everyone allowed one pet sin? Who is God to condemn me!] It was a hard lesson to learn, and one that too many young women are dealing with nationwide."

What a perfect example of modern resentment against the virtue of chastity. It reminds me of Chesterton's comment that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and not tried. Interestingly, just as Wojtyla predicted, the sinner who finds virtue too strenuous tends to blame the Church, the Law, the moral standard, (anything!), except him or herself. Through a curious moral inversion, the Church and the Bible become the problem. There is nothing wrong with me. If God just wasn't so strict, it would be easy to be good. Resentment against traditional sexual morality has been building over the past forty years and is now reaching the point of active persecution of those who refuse to abandon biblical morality.

Update: For another take on the spiritual blindness of Jessica Valenti, the author of this article, see Dawn Eden's thoughtful post here.

Thanks be to God for His Servant John Paul II

Four years ago today the world lost one of the greatest saints of church history. John Paul II - poet, playwright, actor, priest, youth minister, philosopher, theologian, pastor, teacher, peacemaker, lover of God, lover of humanity, preacher of the Good News - we miss you!

Take time today to watch and listen to him at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN8SflZ0uR4&feature=related

When I listen to him speak and read his writings, I am overwhelmed by the clarity of the gospel, the firmness of his convictions and the vibrancy of his hope. Whereas in liberal Christianity there are only questions, confusion and a depressing moralism, in John Paul II there is a joy and delight in the will of God that beckons us into the faith. What a gift he was! How wonderfully God used him! What joy to think that we will see him again in the life to come along with the Lord he served!