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Body and Gift
Body and Gift: Reflections on Creation Pope John Paul II, paraphrased by Sam Torode Philokalia, 2003 74 pp. $10.95, paper 
Purity of Heart
Purity of Heart: Reflections on Love and Lust Pope John Paul II, paraphrased by Sam Torode Philokalia, 2004 86 pp. $13.95, paper |
When George Weigel published Witness to Hope (1999), his bestselling biography of John Paul II, he made a plea for more accessible secondary literature that explored the pope's groundbreaking theological work on the human body and marital relations as "an icon of the interior life of God." Weigel anticipated correctly that this teaching would have explosive reverberations throughout the world: "These 130 catechetical addresses, taken together, constitute a kind of theological time bomb set to go off, with dramatic consequences, sometime in the third millennium of the church."
Sam Torode is an accomplice, if you will, in this benignly subversive enterprise. Already credentialed in the field through Open Embrace (Eerdmans, 2001), a Protestant consideration of natural family planning co-written with his wife Bethany, Torode takes language typically reserved for philosophers and theologians and makes the pope's insights available to the general reader.
I am grateful for his efforts, although some may want to go straight to the source, which is The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Daughters of Saint Paul, 1997). My introduction to this theology was through Catholic friends who talked about it as if they were on fire with good news, irrespective of their marital status. One gave me a copy of The Theology of the Body, and—expecting to be pulled in with similar verve—I was surprised to find myself working hard through dense reflections. Along with the valuable work of Christopher West, who has labored to explicate the theology of the body to a more popular audience, we now have Sam Torode to thank for offering such lucid re-workings, the first two installments in a four-volume set that will, when complete, present the entirety of The Theology of the Body in an "everyday English" version.
Evangelical Protestants who pick up these books in their local Christian bookstore may be skeptical or suspicious. The very term "theology of the body" is likely to set off alarms. What are these books really about? Contraception? Not exactly, no. This theology is not primarily about opposition to contraception, although the logic in favor of non-contraceptive marital union is easier to understand after encountering this teaching. In fact, the pope's theology of the body is not primarily about sex. It sets sex in a larger context, addressing the whole person, dividing joints from marrow in the way it tackles lust, "nuptial meaning," and masculinity and femininity. It is a fundamental account of the place of "human love in the divine plan."
If anyone could spark this conversation among evangelicals, it is John Paul II. As John Grabowski points out in his foreword to the published addresses in The Theology of the Body, the pope teaches what he does about marriage and sexuality from a foundation of biblical revelation, not natural law, thus arguing in terms familiar to evangelicals.
John Paul II began this conversation to weekly general audiences on September 5, 1979, concluding them in 1984. The first "cycle"—which Torode has published as Body and Gift—opens by reflecting on the passage from , where the Pharisees question Jesus about Moses' teaching on divorce. Refusing to be trapped by the artificial boundaries the Pharisees placed on the debate, Jesus points them back to the Book of Genesis: "Jesus replied, 'Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning' " (Matt. 19:8).
