A Return to Another Theology of the Body, Part 1--In the Beginning
The Liturgists released a podcast about a week ago entitled "The Ethics of F***ing." It was a excellent episode, and wisely featured Rev. Bromleigh McCleneghan and her book Good Christian Sex, which I did a deep-dive into a while back. But for me the most impactful interview, in a different sort of way, was the interview with Christopher West. West, for those who are not familiar, is a kind of celebrity proponent of the Theology of the Body, the complex philosophical and hermaneutical program to explain traditional Catholic sexual teachings in a modern form. Theology of the Body relies primarily on a reading of Genesis 1 through 3, and "Science Mike" of the Liturgist honed in on a core problem that resides at the heart of the Theology of the Body. Listening to West has inspired me to circle back to looking more closely at the problems inherent in the Theology of the Body (a project I worked on in a somewhat scattershot form a number of years ago), because Science Mike found a core problem.
Theology of the Body, as West rightly articulated, rests on a categorical vision of gender. Per their reading of Genesis 1 and 2, "male" and "female" are ontologically distinct categories, designed as such by God. It is from this fundamental distinction that the TOB crew works out a comprehensive schema for proper behavior and ordering of human relationships. Now, there are serious objections to be had with regard to the way they read Genesis 1 and 2, but let's put those aside for another post and hone in on the pressure point with this ontological account of gender, intersex people. Presented in its simplest form, if God made us to be either male or female (defined, as the TOB folks do, primarily and almost exclusively in terms of genitalia), how come there are people who have wholly biological traits that are ambiguous or straddle the line between the two? The existence of intersex people suggests that the ground state for human beings is not, in fact, nearly as binary on the gender front as TOB insists. And, if that's true, then the rigid categories and mandates associated with gender in the TOB scheme may not in fact reflect the divine will, but instead contingent cultural commitments.
West's response to this critique is to point to Genesis 3. The classic Christian (at least Western Christian) account of theological anthropology is that in the beginning God created humanity and declared that it was Good. But humanity experienced a Fall brought about by a primordial act of disobedience by the original pair of human beings created by God. This Fall changed on a fundamental level the nature of humanity, on a physical level as well as on a spiritual level. As a result, the physical operation of the human body is not, at least to some degree, "Good" in the way it was according to the original, pre-Fall (or, to use the technical term, "prelapsarian") design of God. This means that we can say that certain "natural" or biological processes are not in fact according to God's design for humanity. For example, in at least some theological accounts, Adam and Eve were not "designed" to suffer bodily death, and as such death is entirely a postlapsarian reality.
Applying this to intersex people, West's claim is that God did not intend people who are intersex to be intersex. Instead, the intersex condition is a product of the distorted nature of created existence in a postlapsarian reality. In fact, West seemed to me to claim that an intersex person has some sort of ontologically real (if perhaps difficult or impossible to discern) gender, one that will be expressed at the Resurrection and/or in Heaven. This move highlights a lynchpin for the TOB theory--if the system is to work, it cannot be God's will that people who are intersex be intersex. Because if God is OK making some people intersex, then clearly God doesn't care nearly that much about enforcing clear gender binaries, and TOB collapses. By chalking the existence of intersex people up to the Fall, God is not implicated in theologically problematic gender bending.
But that in turn creates a new problem, honed in on once again by Science Mike--how can we reconcile a Fall which effects a series of physical and biological changes with evolutionary biology? West talked about how the Catholic Church reads Genesis 1 through 3 in a mythical way (except when it talks about gender, when everything becomes hyper-literal, but more on that in a future post), and how the Church has learned not to tie itself to a particular scientific model or understanding. But West's answers either did not appreciate the thrust of Science Mike's question, or deliberately chose to avoid it. Because the question is broader than the simply about intersex people, though the intersex condition puts the issue into relief. The real question is whether it is possible to affirm at the same time (1) the basic scientific account of human nature and human evolution; and (2) the notion that there is distinction biologically between pre- and postlapsarian humanity.
Let's look at what the science picture is telling us. Human beings are part of the family of Hominids ("Hominidae") of the Order Primates. Hominids are divided into four existent genuses--Pongo (orangutans), Gorilla, Pan (chimpanzees and bonobos) and Homo (which also includes a line of ancestor and related species, including Homo neanderthalensis). While there are real differences between the different genuses and species (which is why they are categorized differently), the commonalities biologically between these different genii are extensive and pervasive. The oldest common ancestor of all four Hominid genii lived approximately 14 million years ago, likely in East Africa.
More specifically for our purposes, there is no clean biological disjunction between human beings and our other hominid cousins. And, even more to the point, all of the biological traits that are traditionally chalked up to the effects of the Fall in Christian theological discourse are present in all of our hominid cousins. Not to but too fine a point on it, but all of our hominid cousins (and all biological life on Earth) have natural life spans, get sick, and eventually die. That feature of human existence is not something that was introduced "from the outside" as a result of the Fall, but is something that is universal and endemic to having a bodily existence on the Earth. Moreover, insofar as "the Fall" is something understood to have occurred in time and to humans in an exclusive way, the fossil record makes clear that the kinds of biological processes that characterize human life have always existed in basically this form. So, its not just that our hominid cousins get sick and die, but they (and all other life on Earth) have always gotten sick and died. It has always been this way, from the beginning of life on this planet. Likewise, to return to the presenting example, intersex conditions exist in all of our hominid cousins--here is a story about an intersex chimp in Uganda. Intersex people are truly and fully "natural" by every definition of that word--they are a feature of humanity at a core, irreducible level.
The significance of this, in my view, is that it is not possible to affirm at the same time both the basic scientific account of human nature and human evolution and the notion that something changed biologically with the Fall. Whatever our biology was like "before the Fall" (however "the Fall" is understood), it must be the same as our biology is now, because our biology is essentially the same as all other forms of life on Earth, especially our closest cousins. If there was some radical discontinuity in the biological reality of human beings (or all life on Earth), there would be some indication of this in the fossil record, or some other sort of tangible evidence of this discontinuity. But there isn't, or at least nothing that would support the traditional account of the impact of the Fall.
So, where does this leave us? West, later in the podcast, says (correctly, I think) that TOB is in some sense predicated on the idea that our sexuality as it is manifest in the world now is not the way God designed it. Whereas science tells that, at least on the purely biological level, that it our sexuality is the way God designed it, in the sense that sexuality has always worked this way from the beginning of Creation, leaving us no reason to believe that there was some alternative plan or structure. This represents a fundamental divide and a fundamental choice between science and (at least one way of reading) the Bible.
In other words, Christopher West and the TOB crowd are functionally in the same boat (so to speak) as the Ark Encounter crowd. To affirm what they affirm, whether they want to admit it or not, they must reject human evolution in favor of what they see as the Biblical witness. They can accept the idea that human descend from other primates only insofar as the postulate a version of those descendants that is wholly different biologically from any primates that currently exist, or any of the primates for which we have scientific evidence. That's not affirming science, but instead affirming an alternate reality version of science created out of whole cloth to fit your theological commitments.
I have laid down my marker on this point on several occasions before--a Christianity that is not consistent with the world as it really exists is not a Christianity worth believing in or taking seriously. The "natural" in "natural law" must mean "nature as it really exists in our real world," in order to be meaningful. Looking at the natural world as it is allows us to draw some conclusions about sexual behavior that are radically different from those offered by TOB. For one thing, our closest cousins the bonobos engage in frequent, routine, "casual" sex with bonobos of either gender. They also engage in oral/genital contact. These are explicitly "natural" behaviors, and they suggest that same-sex sexual behavior, or at a minimum non-procreative sexual behavior, has been a reality in human life since the beginning. Along those lines, one of the significant differences between ourselves and our bonobo cousins is that human women display far fewer visible signs of fertility as compared to female bonobos. This seems to at least imply that human sexual biology is even less tied to procreation than bonobo sexual biology, as it is selecting against biological traits that would facilitate procreative-only sex.
To be clear, I do not believe that just because some behavior can be found in nature or in our hominid ancestors, that means that it is or should be normative for human beings. Chimpanzee sex is very violent, and would be considered rape if ported over to a human context, but (to the extent it needs to be said) rape is certainly not OK. I'm not one of these "evo psych" types--we are rational creatures that are able to, and should, move beyond our biological instincts and drives. But if you are going to posit some "natural" state that is normative for sexual behavior, as the TOB does, you have to go to a natural state that actually exists, as opposed to one that is basically a theological construct untethered from any concrete reality. If you want to talk about nature and natural theology, then you have to talk about real nature, nature as it is, not a fake nature that fits your preexisting commitments. And the prelapsarian vision expressed in terms of a particular interpretation of Genesis 1-3 is precisely that--a wholly theological product that has no relationship to our biological realities.
The problem here is broader and deeper than simply in the Theology of the Body context. As I alluded to above, the Roman Catholic Church likes to congratulate itself for being enlightened and sneer at evangelicals with regard to the six days of Creation issue, but then turns around and reads Genesis 3 (and Genesis 1 and 2 with regard to gender in the TOB context) in a manner every bit as literal as the Answers in Genesis folks who built a boat in the middle of Kentucky. If you believe that the discussion of the six days is basically allegorical, then there is no logical reason not to treat Genesis 3 as equally and similarly allegorical, especially where the scientific case against the literal reading is just as strong (if from a different discipline) for chapter 3 as it is for chapter 1 and 2. I talked about this in the context of the Original Sin discussion, but the whole Augustinian reading of Genesis 3 has to be pitched over the side completely and we have to start from scratch. It just doesn't work.
By grounding itself in at least a quasi-literal reading of Genesis 1-3, the Theology of the Body is a house built on sand. Genesis 1-3 does not, and cannot be read to be, a literal account of the creation of humanity by God, at least so long as you affirm the truth of modern science. That is not to say that it has no value and nothing can be gleaned from it, but we cannot take it as a concrete description of some fixed schema for human sexual and relational behavior. Or, at least so long as you are committed to affirming science.
Theology of the Body, as West rightly articulated, rests on a categorical vision of gender. Per their reading of Genesis 1 and 2, "male" and "female" are ontologically distinct categories, designed as such by God. It is from this fundamental distinction that the TOB crew works out a comprehensive schema for proper behavior and ordering of human relationships. Now, there are serious objections to be had with regard to the way they read Genesis 1 and 2, but let's put those aside for another post and hone in on the pressure point with this ontological account of gender, intersex people. Presented in its simplest form, if God made us to be either male or female (defined, as the TOB folks do, primarily and almost exclusively in terms of genitalia), how come there are people who have wholly biological traits that are ambiguous or straddle the line between the two? The existence of intersex people suggests that the ground state for human beings is not, in fact, nearly as binary on the gender front as TOB insists. And, if that's true, then the rigid categories and mandates associated with gender in the TOB scheme may not in fact reflect the divine will, but instead contingent cultural commitments.
West's response to this critique is to point to Genesis 3. The classic Christian (at least Western Christian) account of theological anthropology is that in the beginning God created humanity and declared that it was Good. But humanity experienced a Fall brought about by a primordial act of disobedience by the original pair of human beings created by God. This Fall changed on a fundamental level the nature of humanity, on a physical level as well as on a spiritual level. As a result, the physical operation of the human body is not, at least to some degree, "Good" in the way it was according to the original, pre-Fall (or, to use the technical term, "prelapsarian") design of God. This means that we can say that certain "natural" or biological processes are not in fact according to God's design for humanity. For example, in at least some theological accounts, Adam and Eve were not "designed" to suffer bodily death, and as such death is entirely a postlapsarian reality.
Applying this to intersex people, West's claim is that God did not intend people who are intersex to be intersex. Instead, the intersex condition is a product of the distorted nature of created existence in a postlapsarian reality. In fact, West seemed to me to claim that an intersex person has some sort of ontologically real (if perhaps difficult or impossible to discern) gender, one that will be expressed at the Resurrection and/or in Heaven. This move highlights a lynchpin for the TOB theory--if the system is to work, it cannot be God's will that people who are intersex be intersex. Because if God is OK making some people intersex, then clearly God doesn't care nearly that much about enforcing clear gender binaries, and TOB collapses. By chalking the existence of intersex people up to the Fall, God is not implicated in theologically problematic gender bending.
But that in turn creates a new problem, honed in on once again by Science Mike--how can we reconcile a Fall which effects a series of physical and biological changes with evolutionary biology? West talked about how the Catholic Church reads Genesis 1 through 3 in a mythical way (except when it talks about gender, when everything becomes hyper-literal, but more on that in a future post), and how the Church has learned not to tie itself to a particular scientific model or understanding. But West's answers either did not appreciate the thrust of Science Mike's question, or deliberately chose to avoid it. Because the question is broader than the simply about intersex people, though the intersex condition puts the issue into relief. The real question is whether it is possible to affirm at the same time (1) the basic scientific account of human nature and human evolution; and (2) the notion that there is distinction biologically between pre- and postlapsarian humanity.
Let's look at what the science picture is telling us. Human beings are part of the family of Hominids ("Hominidae") of the Order Primates. Hominids are divided into four existent genuses--Pongo (orangutans), Gorilla, Pan (chimpanzees and bonobos) and Homo (which also includes a line of ancestor and related species, including Homo neanderthalensis). While there are real differences between the different genuses and species (which is why they are categorized differently), the commonalities biologically between these different genii are extensive and pervasive. The oldest common ancestor of all four Hominid genii lived approximately 14 million years ago, likely in East Africa.
More specifically for our purposes, there is no clean biological disjunction between human beings and our other hominid cousins. And, even more to the point, all of the biological traits that are traditionally chalked up to the effects of the Fall in Christian theological discourse are present in all of our hominid cousins. Not to but too fine a point on it, but all of our hominid cousins (and all biological life on Earth) have natural life spans, get sick, and eventually die. That feature of human existence is not something that was introduced "from the outside" as a result of the Fall, but is something that is universal and endemic to having a bodily existence on the Earth. Moreover, insofar as "the Fall" is something understood to have occurred in time and to humans in an exclusive way, the fossil record makes clear that the kinds of biological processes that characterize human life have always existed in basically this form. So, its not just that our hominid cousins get sick and die, but they (and all other life on Earth) have always gotten sick and died. It has always been this way, from the beginning of life on this planet. Likewise, to return to the presenting example, intersex conditions exist in all of our hominid cousins--here is a story about an intersex chimp in Uganda. Intersex people are truly and fully "natural" by every definition of that word--they are a feature of humanity at a core, irreducible level.
The significance of this, in my view, is that it is not possible to affirm at the same time both the basic scientific account of human nature and human evolution and the notion that something changed biologically with the Fall. Whatever our biology was like "before the Fall" (however "the Fall" is understood), it must be the same as our biology is now, because our biology is essentially the same as all other forms of life on Earth, especially our closest cousins. If there was some radical discontinuity in the biological reality of human beings (or all life on Earth), there would be some indication of this in the fossil record, or some other sort of tangible evidence of this discontinuity. But there isn't, or at least nothing that would support the traditional account of the impact of the Fall.
So, where does this leave us? West, later in the podcast, says (correctly, I think) that TOB is in some sense predicated on the idea that our sexuality as it is manifest in the world now is not the way God designed it. Whereas science tells that, at least on the purely biological level, that it our sexuality is the way God designed it, in the sense that sexuality has always worked this way from the beginning of Creation, leaving us no reason to believe that there was some alternative plan or structure. This represents a fundamental divide and a fundamental choice between science and (at least one way of reading) the Bible.
In other words, Christopher West and the TOB crowd are functionally in the same boat (so to speak) as the Ark Encounter crowd. To affirm what they affirm, whether they want to admit it or not, they must reject human evolution in favor of what they see as the Biblical witness. They can accept the idea that human descend from other primates only insofar as the postulate a version of those descendants that is wholly different biologically from any primates that currently exist, or any of the primates for which we have scientific evidence. That's not affirming science, but instead affirming an alternate reality version of science created out of whole cloth to fit your theological commitments.
I have laid down my marker on this point on several occasions before--a Christianity that is not consistent with the world as it really exists is not a Christianity worth believing in or taking seriously. The "natural" in "natural law" must mean "nature as it really exists in our real world," in order to be meaningful. Looking at the natural world as it is allows us to draw some conclusions about sexual behavior that are radically different from those offered by TOB. For one thing, our closest cousins the bonobos engage in frequent, routine, "casual" sex with bonobos of either gender. They also engage in oral/genital contact. These are explicitly "natural" behaviors, and they suggest that same-sex sexual behavior, or at a minimum non-procreative sexual behavior, has been a reality in human life since the beginning. Along those lines, one of the significant differences between ourselves and our bonobo cousins is that human women display far fewer visible signs of fertility as compared to female bonobos. This seems to at least imply that human sexual biology is even less tied to procreation than bonobo sexual biology, as it is selecting against biological traits that would facilitate procreative-only sex.
To be clear, I do not believe that just because some behavior can be found in nature or in our hominid ancestors, that means that it is or should be normative for human beings. Chimpanzee sex is very violent, and would be considered rape if ported over to a human context, but (to the extent it needs to be said) rape is certainly not OK. I'm not one of these "evo psych" types--we are rational creatures that are able to, and should, move beyond our biological instincts and drives. But if you are going to posit some "natural" state that is normative for sexual behavior, as the TOB does, you have to go to a natural state that actually exists, as opposed to one that is basically a theological construct untethered from any concrete reality. If you want to talk about nature and natural theology, then you have to talk about real nature, nature as it is, not a fake nature that fits your preexisting commitments. And the prelapsarian vision expressed in terms of a particular interpretation of Genesis 1-3 is precisely that--a wholly theological product that has no relationship to our biological realities.
The problem here is broader and deeper than simply in the Theology of the Body context. As I alluded to above, the Roman Catholic Church likes to congratulate itself for being enlightened and sneer at evangelicals with regard to the six days of Creation issue, but then turns around and reads Genesis 3 (and Genesis 1 and 2 with regard to gender in the TOB context) in a manner every bit as literal as the Answers in Genesis folks who built a boat in the middle of Kentucky. If you believe that the discussion of the six days is basically allegorical, then there is no logical reason not to treat Genesis 3 as equally and similarly allegorical, especially where the scientific case against the literal reading is just as strong (if from a different discipline) for chapter 3 as it is for chapter 1 and 2. I talked about this in the context of the Original Sin discussion, but the whole Augustinian reading of Genesis 3 has to be pitched over the side completely and we have to start from scratch. It just doesn't work.
By grounding itself in at least a quasi-literal reading of Genesis 1-3, the Theology of the Body is a house built on sand. Genesis 1-3 does not, and cannot be read to be, a literal account of the creation of humanity by God, at least so long as you affirm the truth of modern science. That is not to say that it has no value and nothing can be gleaned from it, but we cannot take it as a concrete description of some fixed schema for human sexual and relational behavior. Or, at least so long as you are committed to affirming science.
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