An interdenominational conference entitled ‘Our Bodies Proclaim the Gospel’, took place 14 –16 January at the Emmanuel Centre, Westminster.
The main speaker, Christopher West, is a Roman Catholic, but his core points were biblical. He began by noting that human desires are created by God to propel us upward towards ultimate union with Christ, of which the pleasurable, creative union of covenant faithful heterosexual marriage is the physical picture.
Theographic not pornographic
The problem is, as our sexuality has been corrupted by the Fall, the ‘rocket launchers’ (West’s phrase) of desire are turned inwards. Desires then instead of propelling towards marriage and children and worship of God in Spirit and truth, are used in idolatrous worship, lust after the human form (instead of honour for the whole person), and selfish pursuit of pleasure. In a memorable phrase, West said our bodies are created to be theo-graphic, not pornographic.
The gospel, then, is not that Christ came to affirm us in our wrong orientation of desire. Rather Christ enters in to our humanity, especially the messy hidden parts, and re-orients our desire so we can be fully human on earth as in heaven. Legalism (in the church) is trying to enforce the ethics of God’s law without changing the human heart. Other forms of ‘false teaching’ attempt to re-write the ethics of God’s law so they align with the ethos of our unregenerate hearts.
West was particularly scathing of views which see our true self as residing in our mind or soul and do not see the body as important. We have got used to seeing a human form as divorced from the full person which has led to many of the implications in our culture of the sexual revolution: objectifying the body for sexual pleasure, breaking the link between physical binary gender difference and procreation, rejecting the body’s gender in favour of a new one self-created by the mind, low self-esteem and mutilation of the body.
Picture of divine love
Marriage is a picture of human-divine love. According to West, ‘sex is the number one idol today because it is the number one icon’. Sex within marriage is the most powerful picture of the union of Christ and the church at the marriage feast of heaven. The strongest yearning of the human heart is to be there, so it’s not surprising that the evil one devotes so much energy to perverting and redirecting the picture so we don’t aim for the right target. This relates to the idea of sin being an attitude that ‘misses the mark’ rather than simply an action that breaks a rule.
Understanding marriage
Bishop Michael Nazir Ali spoke on the subject of marriage in creation, the church and contemporary society. There is a difference in the Bible, he said, between using human characteristics as analogies to compare an aspect of God’s nature (e.g. arm, eye, face) and words which in a more precise way describe God’s relationship to us, as Father, Bridegroom, Husband.
While the church has not invented marriage – it is set in the structure of creation and is the normative basis for family in almost all societies – the church has made a significant contribution to the understanding of marriage. Christian teaching has insisted on the equal dignity of men and women in marriage, on the importance of individual consent and on the mutual love of husband and wife being more important than social obligation.
Seeds of destruction
Christopher West noted that a state which does not discriminate between monogamous, heterosexual marriage and other relationships is sowing the seeds of its own destruction, firstly because it is not protecting the basic family unit and secondly because it is colluding in a false interpretation of reality. Mike Davidson, of Core Issues Trust spoke about the work of this organisation and some gave testimony of their journey away from a gay lifestyle.
