James Nelson, Body Theology

Doing Body Theology

James Nelson

Until recently, most of the Christian and Jewish writings about the body and sexuality were one-directional. They began with religion and moved to the body, not the other way around. They began with such questions as these: What do the scriptures say about our bodily life and how we ought to live it? What does the Vatican say about this or that sexual expression? What does the church teach? The assumption was that religion had its truth, received or arrived at quite independently of our bodily-sexual experience, a truth that then needed only to be applied. Religion provided the instruction book that came with the body appliance, an instruction that often seemed to say "CAUTION: READ CAREFULLY BEFORE OPERATING!"

Remember Soren Kierkegaard's biting comment about his nineteenth-century contemporary, the German philosopher Hegel. In his monumental, abstract philosophy of religion, Hegel had rationally systematized the human experience of God. Kierkegaard's response was simple and to the point: the philosopher had forgotten only one thing--concrete, particular, existing individuals.

In an analogous manner, our religious tradition has too often forgotten the embodied self. Through the centuries, most theologizing, unfortunately, has not taken seriously the fact that when we reflect theologically we inevitably do so as embodied selves. Male theologians, in particular, have long assumed that the arena of theology is that of spirit and mind, far removed from the inferior, suspect body. Consequently, we have begun more deductively than inductively. We have begun with propositions and attempted to move from the abstract to the concrete. The feminist and the lesbian/gay liberation movements have now reminded us to take body experience as important theological data.

For centuries, however, it was not generally recognized that human bodies are active sources of meaning. Rather, it was believed that bodies were like cameras in a photographic process, simply recording external things mechanistically, things that were passed through the nervous system to form images in the brain according to physical laws. Now, however, there is reason to understand differently.¹ The body has its own ways of knowing. The body often speaks its mind.

Thus, our concern here is not primarily with the "body-object," as studied by the anatomist or physiologist, but rather the "bodysubject," the embodiment of our consciousness, our bodily sense of how we are in the world. Our concern is the interaction of the "givenness" of our fleshly realities and the ways in which we interpret them. It is our bodily sense of connections to the world, our bodily sense of the space, and time we are in, our bodily knowing of the meanings of our relationships.²

Starting with Experience

Body theology begins with the concrete. It does not begin with certain doctrinal formulations, nor with certain portions of a creed, nor with a "problem" in the tradition (though all of these sources may well contribute insight later). Rather, body theology starts with the fleshly experience of life--with our hungers and our passions, our bodily aliveness and deadness, with the smell of coffee, with the homeless and the hungry we see on our streets, with the warm touch of a friend, with bodies violated and torn apart in war, with the scent of a honeysuckle or the soft sting of autumn on the cheek, with bodies tortured and raped, with the bodyself making love with the beloved and lovemaking with the earth.

The task of body theology is critical reflection on our bodily experience as a fundamental realm of the experience of God. It is not, in the first instance, a theological description of bodily life from a supra-bodily vantage point (as if that were possible, which in actuality it is not). Nor is it primarily concerned with articulating norms for the proper "use" of the body. Body theology necessarily begins with the concreteness of our bodily experience, even while it recognizes that this very concreteness is filtered through the interpretive web of meanings that we have come to attach to our bodily life.

After all, we know the world and respond to it through our embodiedness. That is how as little children we learned to differentiate ourselves from other persons: we touched them, heard their voices, saw their movements as other than our own. As children we learned to make sense of language through body motions and images. If as adults we have been taught to abstract much of our knowledge from the body, that only makes both our knowledge and our bodies less real. Moral knowledge, for example, is bodily: if we cannot somehow feel in the gut the meanings of justice and injustice, of hope and hopelessness, those terms remain abstract and unreal.

The way we feel about our embodiedness significantly conditions the way we feel about the world.. Studies in "body psychology," for example, disclose strong correlations between self-body connectedness and the capacity for ambiguity tolerance. The more connected and comfortable I am with my bodily reality, the more I am able to accept the confusing mix of things in the world I experience. Contrarily, there are also strong correlations between body alienation and the propensity toward dichotomous reality perceptions: the more I feel distant from my body, the greater my tendency to populate my perceived world with sharply etched "either-ors" (either me or not-me, we or they, good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, sick or well, true or false, heterosexual or homosexual).³ 0ur body realities do shape our moral perceptions in ways we have seldom realized.

"We do not just have bodies, we are bodies." This sentence is both a hopeful statement of faith and a lived experience. It is a part of our faith heritage. Hebraic anthropology was remarkably unitary about the bodyself, and when the Christian tradition is purged of its dualistic accretions it too incarnationally proclaims the unitary human being. But let us be clear about the difference between a dualism and a duality. A dualism (like a dichotomy) is the experience of two utterly different elements at war with each other. At times they may exist in uneasy truce, but always there is hostility. A duality (or polarity) is the perception of two elements which, while distinguishable from each other, truly belong together. Sometimes the two elements may be experienced in creative tension, but always they belong together. Thus, the alienation of body from spirit is dualism, or polarization. The sense that there are different dimensions of myself but that I am essentially one is the perception of duality, or polarity, within my essential unity.

While our self-experience is too frequently dualistic and divisive, we also know the reality of our bodyself unity. That, too, is our lived experience. We feel "most ourselves" when we experience such bodyself integration. When, in illness, the body feels alien to us we say, "I'm not myself today." And we feel most fully ourselves when bodily connected with each other and the earth. The unitary bodyself, then, is not simply an abstract hope, a revelation "from outside" imposed on a very different reality. We are able to articulate this faith claim and we are moved to do so precisely because this too is part of our body experience.

On the other hand, we do live between the times, knowing well the ravages of our body dualisms very personally, but also socially and planetarily. We have been taught that not only is the body different from the real core of selfhood, it is also lower and must be controlled by that which is higher. Our language itself is often strongly dualistic., to say, "I have a body" seems much more "natural'' than "I am a body." Certain experiences--notably illness, aging, and death---seem to confirm the otherness of my body. In those situations, my body seems radically different from me. Though the body is "me," the body is also "it," a thing, a burden to be borne, to be put up with, to be tolerated, sometimes an enemy lived with in warfare or uneasy truce. Then, though the body is "mine," I am also "its."

Thus, for good and for ill, the. body has theological and ethical relevance in a host of ways. And our bodily experience is always sexual. Such experience, obviously, is not always genital actually, only infrequently so. Sexuality is far more than what we do with our genitals. It is our way of being in the world as bodyselves who are gendered biologically and socially, who have varying sexual orientations, who have the capacity for sensuousness, who have the need for intimacy, who have varied and often conflicting feelings about what it means to be bodied. It is all of this body experience that is foundational to our moral agency: our capacities for action and power, our abilities to tolerate ambiguity, our capacities for moral feeling. Our bodily experience significantly colors our interpretations of social relations, communities, and institutions which are the stuff of ethics.

Similarly, our body experience lends considerable shape to our basic theological perspectives. These days we have been frequently and rightly reminded that the images and metaphors we find most meaningful to our experience of God are inevitably connected to our lifelong body experience. In contrast to the anti-body images of experiencing God, listen to the positive body revelation in Brian Wren's hymn "Good Is the Flesh" (based on Gen. 1: 31, John 1: 14, and John 14:23):

Good is the flesh that the Word has become,
Good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,
good is the feeding, caressing and rest,
good is the body for knowing the world,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body for knowing the world,
sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,
feeling, perceiving, within and around,
good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
growing and ageing, arousing, impaired;
happy in clothing, or lovingly bared,
good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
longing in all, as in Jesus, to dwell,
glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell,
good is the body, for good and for God,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.⁴

Interpretive Theory

Even if we are willing to accept our bodyself experience in all its dimensions as relevant and important for our theological/ethical reflections, we are still faced with an important question. By what basic interpretive theory shall we approach this body life? Presently, the two major perspectives are social constructionism and essentialism. A social constructionist approach emphasizes our active roles as agents, influenced by culture, in structuring our bodily realities. It recognizes that the concepts and categories we use to describe and define our experience vary considerably in their meanings over time and among different cultures and subcultures. Further, it holds that the persistence of a particular interpretation of something depends not only on its correspondence to the reality being described, but at least as much on the usefulness of the concept, often its usefulness in social influence, power, and control.⁵

Symbolic interactionism, as an expression of social constructionism, emphasizes both the highly symbolic world in which we as human beings live and the relatively malleable nature of the realities we experience. Through language, symbols, and gestures we attach meanings to everyday acts and things. We do not respond to the things themselves so much as to the symbolic meanings they have for us. And these meanings are always social, arising and being modified and changed through social interaction.⁶ For example, the Navahos consider direct eye contact rude and invasive, whereas European Americans believe that avoiding eye contact is evasive, cold, even shifty. The meanings of these bodily gestures are not intrinsically coded into people. They are socially assigned.

Social constructionism can be contrasted with those approaches commonly labeled essentialist or empiricist, which stress the objectively definable reality of topics of investigation. In such a view, the body has its own intrinsic meanings. It has a given nature and character, quite apart from what anyone believes about it. Sexuality, for example, may be acted out differently in different times and places, but there is something universal and constant about its core reality. Thus, the official Roman Catholic understanding of natural law assigns to sexual expression an intrinsically procreative meaning. All sexual expressions--such as contraceptive sex, oral sex, anal sex, and masturbation--that deliberately frustrate the procreative possibility are considered unnatural. They are contrary to the created, essential, and intrinsic meaning of genital expression.

Both scientific and popular discussions of sexuality still usually rest on essentialist assumptions. Even though most people reject the notion that contraception is against the natural law and contrary to the essence of sexuality, most still seem to assume that the sexual body is universally the same, always possessing certain sexual drives and needs. Those drives and needs can be socially encouraged or thwarted in various ways and times, but they are fixed in their underlying essential nature.

As with sexuality, so also with issues of bodily health and illness our cultural understandings have leaned strongly toward essentialism. In modern times our bodies have been heavily "medicalized." Using a biomedical model, we give medical meanings to certain bodily conditions or behaviors, defining and classifying them in terms of health and disease. Then authorized medical practice becomes the primary vehicle for eliminating or controlling those conditions or practices defined as diseased or deviant. Such medicalization gives a privileged position to biological discourse and knowledge, assuming that disease and health are objective realities capable of universal definition and standardized practice. When persons with cancer go to Mexico seeking alternative therapies, or when Christian Scientists use prayer for the healing of diseases, most of us assume that these folk (however understandable their intentions) are violating the essential and objective truth about the body.

In contrast, a growing minority approach contends that the body is always socially constructed in its particular historical contexts. The body's sexuality, for example, is not so much a "constant"--an essential human quality or inner drive--but rather a human potential for consciousness, behavior, and experience that can be developed and modified by social forces of definition, organization, and control. Thus, it makes sense to say that there are not simply variations of an underlying universal sexuality, there are indeed different sexualities.⁷ Regarding health and illness, to be sure, there are given biological realities to most diseases, realities that social interpretations do not, of themselves, create. But what those diseases mean, how they are experienced, how they are treated--such things are never automatically given.

My own approach, while emphasizing social constructionism particularly as shaped by the symbolic interactionists, attempts also to recognize certain claims of the essentialists. Our sexual bodyselves are subject to an enormous range of socially constructed meanings that are extraordinarily plastic and malleable. We need to understand those meanings historically, contextually, and relationally. At the same time, there is still "something there" that is not simply the creation of social discourse.

Consider our sexual orientations, for example. Contrary to some recent more extreme constructionist interpretations, I believe that homosexuality is not merely an artifact or construct of particular social structures at particular times and places. There is still something "given" about our sexual orientations, however significant the social meanings that shape their expression. It is also true of our genders. That I have never menstruated but that I do have penile erections does mean something for my interpretation of the world. Yet, just what these orientations and differently sexed bodies mean is never fixed once and for all. That is hopeful, for if sexual meanings are socially constructed, they can also be reconstructed when they are not life-giving. Indeed, a holistic perception of the bodyself has compelling reasons to hold both constructionist and essentialist perspectives together. Simply put, constructionism alone suggests spirit or mind without bodily reality, and essentialism alone suggests body without spirit.

A relational value theory provides an important framework with which to understand the constructionist-essentialist tension. As H. Richard Niebuhr observed years ago, while most of the value theories in ethics are either objectivist or subjectivist, neither approach is fully satisfactory. The objectivist insists that value actually resides in a particular thing. If I say, "This is a very good table," I am pointing to qualities of worth I believe are actually present in the table, such as its fine construction, design, or beauty. The subjectivist, on the other hand, knows that value simply resides in the feelings and beliefs of the valuer. When I say, "This is a very good table " I know that I am not saying anything objectively real or provable about the table, but rather I am making statements about how I feel about it.

Niebuhr, however, suggests that while there is an element of truth in both objectivism and subjectivism, a different interpretation truer to our experience is relationalism. While value cannot be simply reduced to our feelings about what we like, neither is value itself an objective kind of reality. Value always arises in relationships, but positive value arises in particular kinds of relationships in which persons, other creatures, or objects connect in ways that complement and fulfill them.

As with values in general, so it is also true with body values in particular. They cannot simply be read off as intrinsic and objective meanings present in bodily life, meanings that are only awaiting our discovery and application. Nor are body values and meanings whatever we feel about them. They neither exist objectively "in" the body, nor are they simply social creations built on a completely plastic, malleable bodily reality. Rather, such meanings and values arise out of the interaction of our bodily reality and our interpretive capacities as social, relational beings. Those meanings that contribute to our wholeness as bodyselves in relation are what we deem authentically "valuable."

If body and sexual meanings are always in some measure socially constructed, they can be reconstructed. Descartes, whose philosophy so profoundly influenced the body understandings of modern medicine, taught us that the body is essentially a machine. It is a complex machine, to be sure. But the real person, he believed, "resides" in the mind. "I think, therefore I am." One of the invidious results of this social construction of body meanings is our disconnection from nature. If my body is essentially a complex machine, I am also strongly inclined to view the earth's body mechanistically. I see neither its organic wholeness nor my deep connectedness to it. I feel essentially "other than" the earth. I am not part of it, nor it part of me. The earth and I in our embodiments are machines in proximity to each other--no more.

A reconstruction of the body's meaning, however, is possible. Listen to some far different meanings of the earth and our human bodies. Tradition suggests that Seattle, the Duwamish Indian chief, said this to Isaac Stevens, governor of the Washington Territory:

Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. The very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.⁹

Similarly, listen to a poet of the earth, Wendell Berry:

Sowing the seed, my hand is one with the earth.
Wanting the seed to grow, my mind is one with the light.
Hoeing the crop, my hands are one with the rain.
Having cared for the plants, my mind is one with the air.
Hungry and trusting, my mind is one with the earth.
Eating the fruit, my body is one with the earth.¹⁰

Now the body experience is revealing something very different from Rene Descartes's body-machine. Now it is connection rather than disconnection. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once commented that we have been taught to understand our bodies as fragments: of the universe, as pieces completely detached from the rest, handed over to us to inhabit. We must learn, he said, that the body is the very universality of things. My body is not part of the universe that I possess totally--it is the totality of the universe that I possess partially.¹¹

Defining an Incarnational Body Theology

What, then, is body theology? It is nothing more, nothing less than our attempts to reflect on body experience as revelatory of God. How can we understand both the givenness of our body realities and the meanings that we ascribe to them, and how can we interpret these in ways that nurture the greater wholeness of our lives in relation to God, each other, and the earth? Obviously, there us no single path. But one approach of crucial importance to Christianity is in exploring the meanings of "incarnation."

Webster's primary definition for incarnation is simply embodiment--being made flesh. Theologically, it means God's embodiment. Christianly, it means Christ. In particular, it means Jesus as the Christ, the expected and anointed one, Through the lens of this paradigmatic embodiment of God, however, Christians can see other incarnations: the christic reality expressed in other human beings in their God-bearing relatedness. Indeed, the central purpose of Christology, I take it, is not affirmations about Jesus as the Christ. Rather, affirmations about Jesus are in the service of revealing God's christic presence and activity in the world now.

While this understanding of the main purpose of Christology may seem at odds with much in the tradition, I believe it faithful to tradition's intent. Christologies, our reflections about the meanings of Christ, serve best when they clarify the present activity and embodiment of God, not when they keep our vision fixed on a past epiphany. Indeed, traditional Christologies frequently have raised difficult problems. The formula of a hypostatic union of two natures was largely based on a dualistic metaphysic and has perpetuated it. Beginning with the assumption that divine nature and human nature were essentially foreign to each other, the question then became, how can these two utterly different natures be united in one being?

Confining the divine incarnation exclusively to Jesus has tended to make him a docetic exception to our humanity and has disconnected the christic reality from our experience. Docetism--the early heresy that believed God took on only the appearance of human flesh in Jesus, but did not really enter a fully human being--is, unfortunately, still alive and well. Further, focusing on who Jesus was (the divine and human natures) has relegated his actions and relationships to secondary importance. By suggesting to many Christians that belief in a certain Christological formula is necessary for their salvation, such theologies have encouraged Christian triumphalism and have been oppressive to many persons.¹²

I have spoken of essentialism in views of the body and of objectivism in value theory. While I find some truth in each of these, they become distorted, indeed, when taken as the whole truth. Now it is time to name the parallel danger in our views of Jesus Christ. The danger becomes manifest whenever Christology succumbs to one-sided essentialism and objectivism. This happens when claims are made that through God's unilateral decision and action the "objective" divine essence became embodied in Jesus, quite independently of his own faith, decisions, actions, relationships, and interpretations. When such interpretation holds sway, not only is Jesus' humanity effectively undercut, but also all other human beings are effectively excluded from participation in the christic reality.

What is at stake for body theology is not the paradigmatic importance of God's revelation in Jesus. In our faith community's history, it is this figure and not another who has been and who is central for us. It is through him that we measure the ways we are grasped by the christic presence. But the marvelous paradox is that Jesus empties himself of claims to be the exclusive embodiment of God, and in that self-emptying opens the continuing possibility for all other persons.

The union of God and humanity in Jesus was a moral and personal union--a continuing possibility for all persons. Incarnation is always a miracle of grace, but the essence of miracle is not "interference" in the "natural" world by the "supernatural." It is the gracious (hence miraculous) discovery of who we really are, the communion of divine and human life in flesh. One essential criterion of Christological adequacy must be the moral test. Does this interpretation of Christ result in our bodying forth more of God's reality now? Does it create more justice. and peace and joyous fulfillment of creaturely bodily life? Do we experience more of "the resurrection of the body" now--the gracious gift of a fundamental trust in the present bodily reality of God, the Word made flesh?

All this suggests that the human body is language and a fundamental means of communication. We do not just use words. We are words. This conviction underlies Christian incarnationalism. In Jesus Christ, God was present in a human being not for the first and only time, but in a radical way that has created a new definition of who we are. In Christ we are redefined as body words of love, and such body life in us is the radical sign of God's love for the world and of the divine immediacy in the World.¹³

This incarnational perspective, only briefly sketched here, is one critical way of beginning to move into the deeper meanings of our body and sexual experience. There are other ways. Yet this path is an important part of the Christian tradition, even if it has often been muted.

It was present, for example, in the later period of the Byzantine Empire, a time in which Christ's transfiguration was seen to be at the very center of our understanding God, ourselves, and the world. It was a time that affirmed that while the final mystery of God will always remain beyond the reach of our faculties, nevertheless, in the energies of the divine action and presence, God is revealed to our bodily senses. This vision of a transfigured world, a vision at the heart of Eastern Orthodoxy, was also present in the Anglican vision of the seventeenth century. In Thomas Traherne's work, for example, it finds remarkable expression: "By the very right of your senses, you enjoy the world. . . . You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because others are in it who are everyone sole heirs as well as you."¹⁴

True, the developments in science and philosophy in the latter days of the seventeenth century muted that theme in the West, and ever since then it has been more difficult to see the bodily consequences of an incarnational faith. The time is upon us for recapturing the feeling for the bodily apprehension of God. When we do so, we will find ourselves not simply making religious pronouncements about the bodily life; we will enter theologically more deeply into this experience, letting it speak of God to us, and of us to God.

The significance of all this has not escaped Toni Morrison in her Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Beloved. A central character is Baby Suggs, grandmother and holy woman of the African American extended family who had escaped from slavery in the South only to find continued oppression by the Northern whites. Speaking to her people, Baby Suggs "told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. 'Here,' she said, 'in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it . . . . YOU got to love it. YOU.'"¹⁵ Note carefully Baby Suggs's counsel. The only grace we can have is the grace we can imagine. If we cannot see it, we will not have it.