TOBET—Overview of the Theology of the Body and Apologetics

I.       Introduction—Story about Mignon—my friend who was not Catholic but was writing songs to Mary and fussing at me because of her songs! Today I was given the task to introduce briefly the Theology of the Body and to use that as an undergirding for launching your Bible study on apologetics. So, after a brief intro to TOB, I want to show you how TOB can weave together into one piece various, seemingly disjointed doctrinal matters.

A.     The Body reveals the person

1.      We know we are here because our bodies reveal us. We are our bodies and more than our bodies. The person is revealed by his body. (St. Paul’s teachings)

2.      We would not know others without our bodies to receive the other—our ears hear, our eyes see. We need our bodies to see others and for others to see us.

3.      Our bodies show us where we begin and end. In other words, I—with my body—get to decide on my life; I have freedom. Pope John Paul calls that subjectivity (not subjectivism). Pope John Paul calls this Original Solitude.

4.      Our bodies “speak” a language, as Pope John Paul said.

a. Male—rough, tough, and buff—protect, provide, and put on proper pedestal for pursuit.

b. Female—hiding, inviting, and exciting—meant to conceal and reveal slowly (“apokalypse”—unveiling), welcome, nurture, give adventure/mission

B.     The Body reveals God.

1.      All humans have arms to hug others, lips to kiss loved ones, etc. (Not orcs)—why did God make us as such? To show we were meant to go toward the other—to form a communion of persons—how is that like God? God’s inner life is LOVE, a communion of persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

2.      All humans are either male or female, 2 incarnational ways of being human, says Pope John Paul II. The complementarity of the sexes reveals God….Men and women are to be attracted to each other, fall in love, become friends, get engaged, get married, and have children, forming a family. Again, they are being gifts to each other, thereby forming a communion of persons, the best way we image God, even more than we by ourselves in our intellect and will. Pope John Paul calls this Original Unity.

·       Genesis 2:18: “It is not good for man (Adam) to be alone.”

·       Genesis 2:25: “The man and woman were naked and unashamed.”

This shows that they knew that were to be gifts to one another because of the complementarity of the bodies that they can say, “This is my body, given,” and so know the meaning of life which is to love, that is, to give the gift of self. The body reveals God because the male and female bodies go together, and so a husband and wife form a “one-flesh union” (Eph. 5 and Gen 2), making a communion of persons. The deepest thing that can be said about God, “God is love” (1 Jn 4) has everything to do about God being a communion of persons in God’s very nature—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit loving each other from all eternity. Pope John Paul II called the Trinity the First Family.

C.     The Holiness of a Person consists in the body and soul totally going together, with us first purifying our hearts, as Jesus says in Matthew 5. The Pope says that when the pure heart and bodily actions have no fissure/break, then a person is integral or virginal. Thus, Our Lady was ever-virginal in the normal sense of the word, but also in the fact that she always had purity of Heart and her outer actions always reflected such purity. (The opposite of that is “un-being” oneself—Pope Benedict’s term. To sin is to create a fissure, a split in ourselves. It is to say no to the Fatherhood of the Father, so the split widens to our relationship with --God, which, of course, creates a split in our relationship with others—“It was the woman you made who gave it to me, so I took it”—blames God and the woman).

1.      Christianity in general, its goal—The Perichoresis of the Blessed Trinity

2.      The Incarnation—The Son, Who was only spirit, invisible became human, and so transformed all of humanity. We do not merely follow Him; we live in Him.

·       Col 3:3: “After all, you have died! Your life is hidden now with Christ in God.”

·       Gal 2:20: “For I am crucified with Christ, and yet I live. Not I but Christ who lives within me.”

·       Col 1:24: The Mystery of Christ in you, your hope of glory.”

·       Phil 3:9: “I may be in Him.”

·       Eph. 4:24: “You must put on that new man.”

·       Gal 6:17: “I bear the brandmarks of Jesus in my body.”

·       2 Cor. 13:3ff: “We live with Him by God’s power in us….Perhaps you yourselves do not realize that Christ Jesus is in you….Our prayer is that you may be built up to completion.”

 

Diagram of Condensed Version

 

The Catholic “AND’s” (Dr. Mark Lowery’s term)

 

 

I love being Catholic!! We do not only have to choose God or only have to choose man. We choose both, because we have both in Jesus Christ, the God-man. And the only way to God is via humanity which is elevated to a participation in the Divine Nature at baptism.

 

The Catholic Church knows that the central mystery of the Christian faith, the Trinity, is our goal and the only way to participate in God’s life and love is through Jesus, our Savior. The reason for this is that Jesus is divine and human. This is Pope John Paul’s central message in the Theology of the Body, the “most suitable education for us humans.” This is because the Incarnation, the 2nd most central teaching, is the hinge of Christianity, holding the human and divine together.

 

3.      Ecclesiology

The Wonder and Beauty of the Catholic Church’s Vision

The Catholic Church’s life—Her liturgy, her doctrine, her morality, her precepts—everything flows in and out of each other aspect, for She is ever united to her Incarnate Lord, Jesus the Christ. Thus, the Incarnation View of Reality undergirds everything the Church teaches—EVERYTHING. Mariology is tied to Scriptural Theology which is tied to Spirituality which is tied to Moral Theology which is tied to Liturgical Theology…and the list goes on.

So, this talk I am giving on apologetics and TOB is of one piece with this overarching design or myth, myth in the old sense of the word. It doesn’t mean “made up” or a silly childhood story but a deep, deep truth conveyed about reality whose vehicle is the imagination. Thomas Howard (a convert to Catholicism) puts it thusly, “Imagination, which is this faculty by which we suppose correspondences among all things and hence see them as images of one another (it is the imagination—the image-making faculty), is understood in opposite ways by the old myth and the new myth: by the new it is seen as a flight into fancy; by the old it was seen precisely as a flight toward actuality” (18). The old myth has been called the “music of the spheres”; not chance (new myth) in its randomness that we can take or leave, but the Dance (old myth), the belief that all of reality flows together. The Catholic Church sees this old myth and weds it to the Incarnation. All is related back to Christ.

4.      Apologetics per se

 i.     Mariology—Our Lady and The Church must be seen as parallels. This is why Protestant’s problems with Mary are essentially ecclesial and anthropological ones.

a.      Immaculate Conception

b.      Perpetual Virginity

c.      Assumption

d.      Without sin

e.      Co-redemptrix

f.       Theotokos—Mother of God

 

 

 

 

ii.     Authority—Once again, this is a problem rooted in ecclesiology and anthropology.

a.      Papal Primacy

b.      Infallibility (vs. impeccability)

c.      Magisterium (means “teacher”)

d.      Tradition and Scripture

e.      Salvation and Sanctification

iii.     Sacramental Theology

a.      Confession—Human and divine touch

b.      Indulgences and Purgatory

c.      Priesthood, along with other people who serve as mediators

iv.     The Mass

a.      Its sacrificial nature

b.      Its re-presentation of the self-same sacrifice of Jesus at Calvary

c.      Its cosmic dimensions—Pope Benedict’s The Spirit of the Liturgy.

d.      Its aspect of being a meal, the Supper of the Lamb

 

1.      His earthly Body

2.      His Eucharistic Body

3.      His Mystical Body

 

The Theology of the Body ties all of these in. Now, we are to say with Christ, this is my body, given. That is the meaning of life.