Theology of the Body, Day 4

18. September 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: faith · Tags: , , ,

Ok, it’s been a little more than a few more ‘days’ since my last T.O.B post but I got a little derailed by school starting and life. Here are some excerpts for pondering from the next ‘day’, day 4, of Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body, given at the General Audience of September 26, 1979.

“1. When Christ responds to the question about the unity and indissolubility of marriage, he appeals to the words of Genesis about the subject of marriage. In our two foregoing reflections, we analyzed both the so-called Elohist text (Gen 1) and the Yahwist text (Gen 2). Today we want to draw some conclusions from these analyses.” [Can someone please explain in very simple terms what the difference between Elohist and Yahwist is??]

“When Christ appeals to the ‘beginning,’ he asks his interlocutors to go in some way beyond the boundary running in Genesis between the state of original innocence and the state of sinfulness that began with the original fall.

Symbolically, this boundary can be linked with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which delimits two diametrically opposed situations in the Yahwist text: the situation of original innocence and that of original sin. These situations have their own dimension in man, in his innermost [being], knowledge, consciousness, conscience, choice, and decision, and all of this in a relationship with God, the Creator…”

“Yet, Christ’s words, which appeal to the ‘beginning,’ allows us to find an essential continuity in man and a link between these two different states or dimensions of the human being…”

2. “It is not a question of mere dialectic. The laws of knowing correspond to those of being.” [The rest of this part was difficult to follow. I think the main point being made though is that when talking about our history as human beings, we must also understand the state of our original (pre-historic) and "fundamental innocence" as a "dimension of being created 'in the image of God'"]

“3. When Christ, according to Matthew 19, appeals to the ‘beginning,’ he does not point only to the state of original innocence as a lost horizon of human existence in history. To the words that he speaks with his own lips, we have the right to attribute at the same time the whole eloquence of the mystery of redemption.  In fact, already in…Genesis 2 and 3, we witness the moment in which man, male and female, after having broken the original covenant with his Creator, receives the first promise of redemption in the words of the so-called Protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15 and begins to live in the theological perspective of redemption. Thus…human beings today [and those of the past since the fall] participates…not only in the history of human sinfulness…but he also participates in the history of salvation…Precisely this perspective of the redemption of the body guarantees the continuity and the unity between man’s hereditary state of sin and his original innocence, although within history this innocence has been irremediably lost by him.”

“4. In the interpretation of the revelation about man, and above all about the body, we must, for understandable reasons, appeal to the experience, because bodily man is perceived by us above all in experience….our human experience is in some way a legitimate means for theological interpretation…”

“5. It seems that the words of Romans 8:23…express the direction of our research centered on the revelation of that ‘beginning’ to which Christ appealed in his dialogue about the indissolubility of marriage (Mt 19; Mk 10)….’We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for…the redemption of our bodies’”

So basically: We have an innocent history and a sinful history. Our human experience is a ‘labor’ that will hopefully bring us back to that original state of innocence through the redemption of our bodies. In the end, we hope to return to ‘the beginning’. Any other thoughts about this reflection?

 

 

 

 

 

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Theology of the Body Day 3: 2nd Creation Story

14. August 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: faith · Tags: ,

 

I apologize for the interruption in the ‘days’ of the Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body series. I had to read and re-read this 3rd day’s message a few times. It is all so important so it was hard to decide what to share here and what to cut out. I know it is heavy stuff so just read a little bit and then re-read it again a few times and it will start to sink in deeper.

This 3rd day focuses on 3 main things: 1. This 2nd story of creation gives us a first glimpse of ”man’s self-understanding” and ”human conscience”; 2. If you are a language nerd like me you’ll be fascinated with the etymology of the words “male” and “female” in section 2. (by the way I could not type the “is” and “issa” with the Hebrew symbols); 3. The 2nd story of creation shows us the difference between man (us) as he was made originally in the beginning and man (us again) as we are now after our fall. 

TOB (Theology Of the Body)

Day 3 Second Account of the Creation of Man

1.I n Reference to Christ’s Words on the subject of marriage, in which he appeals to the “beginning,” we turned our attention one week ago to the first account of the creation of man in Genesis 1. Today we will go on to the second account, often defined as “Yahwist” because in it God is often called “Yahweh.”

The second account of the creation of man…has by its nature a different character. ..we must observe that the whole text, in formulating the truth about man, strikes us with its typical depth, different from that of the first chapter of Genesis. One can say that this depth is above all subjective in nature and thus in some way psychological. Chapter 2 of Genesis constitutes in some way the oldest description and record of man’s self-understanding and, together with chapter 3, it is the first witness of human conscience…When we compare the two accounts [Gen 1 and Gen 2], we reach the conviction that this subjectivity corresponds to the objective reality of man created “in the image of God.” And also, this fact is – in another way – important for the theology of the body, as we shall see in the following analyses.

2. It is significant that in his response to the Pharisees, in which he appeals to the “beginning,” the Christ indicates in the first place the creation of man with reference to Genesis 1:27, “From the beginning, the Creator created them male and female”; it is only after this that he quotes the text of Genesis 2:24. The words that directly describe the unity and indissolubility of marriage are found in the immediate context of the second creation account, the characteristic feature of which is the separate creation of woman (Gen 2:18-23), while the account of the creation of the first man (male) is found in Genesis 2:5-7. The Bible calls this first human being “man,” (adam) while from the moment of the creation of the first woman, it begins to call him “male,”is [pronounced eesh]…in relation to issa [pronounced eesha] (“woman, because she has been taken from the male = is). And it is also significant that, when he appeals to Genesis 2:24, Christ not only links the “beginning” with the mystery of creation, but also leads us to the boundary, so to speak, between man’s primeval innocence and original sin.

3. Then, immediately after these verses, Genesis 3 begins the account of the first fall of the man and the woman, linked with the mysterious tree that before this had already been called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:17). A completely new situation thereby emerges…The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a boundary line between the two original situations about which Genesis speaks. The first situation is that of original innocence in which man (male and female) finds himself, as it were, outside of the knowledge of good and evil,…The second situation, by contrast, is that in which man…finds himself in some way within the knowledge of good and evil. This second situation determines the state of human sinfulness, contrasting with the state of primeval innocence.

…through this description [of the second story of Genesis]…the essential difference between the state of man’s sinfulness and that of his original innocence becomes clear. In these two antithetical situations, systematic theology was to see two different states of human nature, “status naturae integrae” (state of integral nature) and “status naturea lapsae” (state of fallen nature). All of this…has a fundamental significance for the theology of man and the theology of the body.


TOB “Day” 2

24. July 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: faith · Tags: , , ,

In continuing with JP II’s Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Bodyhere are excerpts from the 2nd General Audience (Day 2), from part 4.

In speaking about the different creation accounts, in this excerpt JPII talks about the first one that he says has more of a theological character than a chronological order.

An indication of this [that it is more theological] is above all the definition of man based on his relationship with God (“in the image of God he created him”), which includes at the same time an affirmation of the absolute impossibility of reducing man to the “world.” Already in the light of the Bible’s first sentences, man can neither be understood nor explained in his full depth with the categories taken from the “world,” that is, from the visible totality of bodies. Nevertheless, man too is a body. Genesis 1:27 establishes that this essential truth about man refers to the male as much as to the female: “God created man in his image…; male and female he created them.”One must recognize that the first account [the first creation story] is concise, free from any trace of subjectivism: it contains only the objective fact and defines the objective reality, both when it speaks about the creation of the human being, male and female, in the image of God, and when it adds a little later the words of the first blessing, “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and rule’” (Gen 1:28).

And if you can go on, here is some from part 5 of the same Day 2.

The first account of the creation of man, which, as we have observed, has a theological character, contains hidden within itself a powerful metaphysical content. One should not forget that precisely this text of Genesis has become the source of the deepest inspirations for the thinkers who have sought to understand “being” and “existing…

…To the mystery of his creation (“in the image of God he created him”) corresponds the perspective of procreation “be fruitful and multiply”)…In fact this aspect returns the rhythm of almost all the days of creation and reaches its high point after the creation of man, God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen 1:31)…Of course, all this has its own significance for theology as well, and above all for the theology of the body…The expression “theology of the body” used just now deserves a more exact explanation, but we leave it for another meeting…”

 

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