This war against the body lies at the heart of so much of our modern politics. It connects to the sexual politics that deny that human genitals are to be used in some ways and not in others. It connects to gender politics that see the significance traditionally ascribed to sexed bodies as an oppressive social construct. It connects to debates about abortion and the status of the bodies of both mother and the child in utero. And it connects to the politics of parenting that replace the significance of biology with notions of functional parenthood. In each area, the authority of the body is utterly denied. 

Given the chaotic and volatile nature of our culture, what should the church focus on in her teaching? This is one of the pressing questions of our day. The answer, of course, is “the whole counsel of God.” That is true but also somewhat glib. Do peculiar times not call for specific emphases in our teaching? As the fourth century wrestled with the doctrine of God, the fifth with Christology and the nature of God’s grace, and the Reformation era with sacraments and salvation, so our age wrestles with the question of anthropology. What does it mean to be human? More specifically, what does it mean to be an embodied human? For we now find ourselves not so much in a battle for the Bible but in a battle for the body.

The status of the body as it relates to us as human persons seems to be the issue that lies, often unseen, behind many of the other more prominent debates of our age. Take the most controversial question of recent years: What is a woman? This is remarkably simple to answer if bodies have importance, but it is now staggeringly difficult to answer because our culture denies the authority of the body in this matter. Contra Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one cannot punt the question of what is a woman to the biologists because biology doesn’t count.

Confusion over this is in large part the result of the immense power that technology has delivered into our hands. Take, for example, medicine. This was once understood to be restorative. Its purpose was to repair that which had broken and to replace that which should be there but for some reason was not. It assumed a normative notion of what it meant to be human, a normative notion closely connected to a normative concept of what a body should be and how it should function. Once society lost its normative understanding of this, however, the goal of restoration was replaced by that of transformation. And the loss of this normative understanding is inextricably bound up with technology. Technology opens up previously unimagined possibilities—changing from male to female, fusing our bodies with machines, downloading ourselves into a giant computer, developing means of living forever. In each case, technology tilts us toward thinking of bodies not as having integrity of their own but, to borrow Mary Harrington’s memorable phrase, as so much “Meat Lego.”

Read More