The Church receives her teachings on the theology of the human body from several important sources — first of all, from her rich pedagogical patrimony on the dignity of the human person made in the image and likeness of God (see Gen. 1:26-27) and as the only creature God has willed for its own sake. The teachings of Pope St. John Paul II also contribute greatly to this area of study, especially his 129 audiences devoted to the subject and given at the Vatican from September 1979 through November 1984.
But there’s more: natural law, revealed moral law, science, and ontology all contribute in their own important ways to the study of the theology of the body.
But what does “theology of the body” mean? Theology is the study of God (from the Greek theos, “god,” and logia, “study of”), and “body” here refers to the human body. Thus, “theology of the body” could be defined as “the study of God in, through, and about the meaning, reality, and being of the human body.”
The magnus corpus of John Paul II on this topic provides a most succinct manner for approaching and studying it. As an online article summarizes his teaching:
The human body has a specific meaning, making visible an invisible reality, and is capable of revealing answers regarding fundamental questions about us and our lives:
• Is there a real purpose to life, and if so, what is it?
• What does it mean that we were created in the image of God?
• Why were we created male and female? Does it matter if we are one sex or the other?
• What does the marital union of a man and a woman say to us about God and His plan for our lives?
• What is the purpose of the married and celibate vocations?
John Paul’s reflections are based on Scripture and present a vision of the human person truly worthy of man. They emphasize the ideal of love as self-gift and oppose the societal trends that view the human body as mere objects of pleasure or as something to be manipulated. Rather, he calls us to love in the image of God, encourages a deep reverence for the gift of sexuality, and challenges us to live our sexuality in a manner worthy of our great dignity as human persons. This theology of the body applies to everyone, regardless of age or state of life.
Saint Paul exhorts the Christians at Corinth to glorify God in both body and spirit:
“Shun immorality. Every other sin which a man commits is outside the body; but the immoral man sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:18-20).
Moral evils such as abortion, euthanasia, contraception, embryonic stem-cell research, and human cloning all challenge the innate dignity of the human person, as do unnatural marriage (in its multiple and varied forms), pornography, drug abuse, human trafficking, and the homeless crisis. Gender theory and transgender ideology promote metaphysical dualism and distort reality and the very order of creation itself.
But given the awesome truth of the body-soul composite of the human person and the dignity that lies therein, we do well to study the Church’s — and John Paul II’s — theology of the body, which resonates with love, truth, goodness, and beauty.