{"id":4652,"date":"2005-07-31T00:58:28","date_gmt":"2005-07-31T00:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/the-theology-of-the-body.html"},"modified":"2005-07-31T00:58:28","modified_gmt":"2005-07-31T00:58:28","slug":"the-theology-of-the-body","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/the-theology-of-the-body.html","title":{"rendered":"The Theology of the Body"},"content":{"rendered":"

…considered by a Lutheran<\/a> and an Orthodox theologian, David Hart<\/a>, who wrote something controversial a while back in the WSJ – what was it? Ah yes, on theodicy and the tsunami.<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, here’s one of many good passages: <\/p>\n

\n
\n

John Paul\u2019s anthropology is what a certain sort of Orthodox theologian might call a \u201ctheandric\u201d humanism. \u201cLife in the Spirit,\u201d the most impressive of the texts collected in the Theology of the Body<\/em>, is to a large extent an attempt to descry the true form of man by looking to the end towards which he is called, so that the glory of his eschatological horizon, so to speak, might cast its radiance back upon the life he lives in via<\/em> here below. Thus, for John Paul, the earthly body in all its frailty and indigence and limitation is always already on the way to the glorious body of resurrection of which Paul speaks; the mortal body is already the seed of the divinized and immortal body of the Kingdom; the weakness of the flesh is already, potentially, the strength of \u201cthe body full of power\u201d; the earthly Adam is already joined to the glory of the last Adam, the risen and living Christ. For the late pope, divine humanity is not something that in a simple sense lies beyond the human; it does not reside in some future, post-human race to which the good of the present must be offered up; it is instead a glory hidden in the depths of every person, even the least of us\u2014even \u201cdefectives\u201d and \u201cmorons\u201d and \u201cgenetic inferiors,\u201d if you will\u2014waiting to be revealed, a beauty and dignity and power of such magnificence and splendor that, could we see it now, it would move us either to worship or to terror.<\/p>\n

Obviously none of this would interest or impress the doctrinaire materialist. The vision of the human that John Paul articulates and the vision of the \u201ctranshuman\u201d to which the still nascent technology of genetic manipulation has given rise are divided not by a difference in practical or ethical philosophy, but by an irreconcilable hostility between two religions, two metaphysics, two worlds\u2014at the last, two gods.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…considered by a Lutheran and an Orthodox theologian, David Hart, who wrote something controversial a while back in the WSJ – what was it? Ah yes, on theodicy and the tsunami. Well, here’s one of many good passages: John Paul\u2019s anthropology is what a certain sort of Orthodox theologian might call a \u201ctheandric\u201d humanism. \u201cLife…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Theology of the Body - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/the-theology-of-the-body.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Theology of the Body - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"…considered by a Lutheran and an Orthodox theologian, David Hart, who wrote something controversial a while back in the WSJ – what was it? 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}