In the early centuries of the church, the questions that vexed Christians and church leaders were Christological. How do we understand the divinity and humanity of Jesus of Nazareth? What does it mean to confess the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God? The crises of the church during that era centered on getting God right—what it means to receive God’s self-revelation as Father, Son, and Spirit.
In the late medieval era, Western church controversies shifted toward salvation, how a sinner is made right with God. What must one do to be saved? What is the relationship of faith and works? Other debates surfaced during this time over the nature and number of the sacraments; the relationship of scriptural authority to church tradition and papal authority; and the definitions of assurance, justification, and sanctification.
Today we’re facing a third major crisis. This time the focus is on anthropology, the nature and destiny of humankind. What’s a human being? What does it mean to be made in God’s image? To be created male and female? Do we receive our identity and purpose or do we create identity and meaning for ourselves?
Humanity in a ‘Create Yourself’ World
In the late modern world, it’s common to see humanity as something to be crafted, a project awaiting creation. Our creatureliness gets sidelined, replaced by a “you can be anything you want” approach to life, set against the narrative backdrop of resisting outward conformity to some other standard of life. You must define yourself, goes the idea, even when it’s in opposition to whatever the past, your family, your society, or (increasingly) your biology says you are.
Meanwhile, the acids of postmodernity have eaten away at the idea that humanity has an essence, that there might be a givenness to things. Also lost is the idea that humanity has a general telos—an inherent purpose or supreme goal to which we strive.
The spread of a technocratic understanding of the world whereby we make the world we want, rather than work with and cultivate the world as it is, puts us in situations previous generations would find incomprehensible: the logic of rectifying the “injustice” of biological men not being able to give birth, or removing healthy body parts in the name of health to accommodate someone’s self-perception as disabled or belonging to a different gender.
We Believe in the Body
What does it mean to be embodied? What do our bodies signify? What does our design say about our identity and purpose?
The church that will be relevant in the days ahead will not make peace with reductionist visions of humanity that downplay the significance of the human body and eliminate a transcendent telos. As we recount the grand narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, we’ll give more attention to the implications of biblical teaching on creation and the fall. As we proclaim Christ crucified and raised for the forgiveness of sins, we’ll give more attention to the incarnation and the implications of our confessing “the resurrection of the body.”
Today’s crisis is every bit as volatile and destructive as the Gnosticism faced by the ancient church. The Gnostics claimed that what matters most about us is a divine spark, a spirit inside that one day will be released from the human body. They insisted the “real you” was imprisoned in this world of matter and the “spirit” mattered more than the body. Writers like Valentinus described the encounter with God in the heart, the reception of “secret knowledge of the divine,” as the source of truth and wisdom.
Against them stood church fathers such as Irenaeus who defended the goodness of the body. He refused to narrow the truth, to choose “spirit” over “matter,” or “soul” over “body.” Christianity holds together what Gnosticism would separate.
‘What’ and ‘Why’
As we preach and teach and catechize and disciple others in the days ahead, we’ll need to devote an extra measure of attention to the what and why of Christian teaching:
- We believe God created us male and female, in his own image, to know and love him and share his everlasting joy. The good life is found not in inventing our purpose but in bowing to God’s design and reflecting his glory.
- We believe sexuality is a God-given aspect of our embodied existence as people made in his image, male and female, ordered toward the physical and life-giving union of a man and woman in marriage. Sexuality is embodied, not imagined; physically grounded, not psychologically determined.
- We believe we are persons beloved by God, created to love God, love others, and care for the good world he has made. We become like what we love. Our identity is found not by looking within ourselves but by looking up to God.
In rising to the challenge of this present moment, it’s crucial to acknowledge how today’s anthropological challenges have already permeated the church. They’re shaping the moral perspectives of our congregations.
It won’t be enough for a church to merely affirm the right beliefs related to sexual behavior if our sexual ethic is built upon a quasi-Gnostic understanding of expressive individualism. We’ll need to explain not only to the world what we believe but to the church why we believe what we believe. This is the task before us—a momentous opportunity to dig deeper into our faith as we uphold a vision for humanity that reaches far higher than anything the world offers.
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