Marriage as a Sign of God’s Love | Christopher West Explains Theology of the Body and God’s Purpose for Human Sexuality

Oct 12

What if you found the cure for cancer? Wouldn’t you want to spread the news? Theologian and Theology of the Body Institute president Christopher West believes he has found the answer to the cancer plaguing our society and souls. The key is intimacy with God – not a sterile, head-knowledge belief, but a true relationship experienced in and through our physical bodies.

Christopher has made it his life’s mission to explain how our physical bodies — and specifically a marital union between husband and wife — express the reality of God’s covenant relationship to man. In short, Christopher proclaims God wants to marry His people. And that relationship will answer all man’s existential questions: Who am I? Why am I here? How can I be happy? Why do I experience all these deep longings in my body and soul, and what am I to do with them? What is my ultimate destiny, and how do I get there?

Christopher has spent the past three decades reflecting on and sharing this hopeful vision around the world. Raised in a devout Catholic home, he found his experience of the faith lacking — what he calls the “starvation diet gospel.” He learned, “Desires are bad, repress them, follow these rules, and you’ll be a good, upstanding Christian.” In college he found himself easy prey for the secular world’s promise of immediate gratification, but which ultimately left him bereft. Like most young men, his physical desires were twisted and did not align with God’s precepts, causing him to feel guilt and shame. In 1988, he cried out, “God in heaven, if you exist, show me why you gave us all these desires that are getting us all in trouble.”

Christopher sought answers in Bible study and spiritual discussions with friends, both Evangelical and Catholic, as he wrestled with the ache in his heart for something more. A chance comment referred him to the new-at-the time public audiences (teachings) by Pope John Paul II concerning human sexuality and its connection to spirituality. The audiences, given between 1979 and 1984, were collected into what became known as Theology of the Body. The lightbulb went off! Pope John Paul II’s messages resonated deeply with truths he’d found searching the scriptures about the meaning of human embodiment viewed through a biblical lens, particularly as it concerns human sexuality, marital love and erotic desire.

“I was holding in my hands the answer to the crisis of our times,” he said with wonder. “It’s bigger than a cure for cancer, because our problems are a spiritual cancer. The crisis in the modern world has gotten darker and deeper. The Holy Spirit has granted us this spiritual vision of the Theology of the Body (TOB). This is for all believers, men and women of good will.”

While he began speaking about TOB in the 1990s, Christopher was inspired to co-found Theology of the Body Institute in 2004 to help spread the message across denominations and cultures. After years of serving as a leading faculty member, board member, research fellow and curriculum advisor, he became the Institute’s president in 2018. He continues to teach in-person courses for the Institute each year in a retreat center near Lancaster, Pa.

Throughout this time, he has produced best-selling books, audio and video programs in English and Spanish, a popular YouTube channel (Theology of the Body Institute) and the world’s most popular Theology o the Body podcast, Ask Christopher West. Co-hosted with his wife, Wendy, the couple combine their wisdom to tackle the toughest questions dealing with vocation, sexuality, marriage, and the Catholic faith. He believes reading the Bible through the TOB lens will connect and unite Christians across all denominations throughout the world, as the liberating teaching empowers both Catholics and Evangelicals.

“In the midst of the profound sexual crisis that is wreaking havoc in both the secular world and in the Church, TOB offers the hope of healing and restoration we all so desperately need, enabling everyone to rediscover not only the meaning of our creation as male and female, but through that, ‘the meaning of the whole of existence, the meaning of life’ (TOB 46:6).”

Christopher has written numerous resources to help translate Pope John Paul II’s teachings into more digestible language and ease its life application. Theology of the Body for Beginners provides a basic introduction to Pope John Paul II’s response to the Sexual Revolution for a Catholic audience. Our Bodies Tell God’s Story: Discovering the Diving Plan for Love, Sex and Gender re-translates the information for Evangelicals. Good News about Sex & Marriage answers more than 150 practical questions about Catholic and Christian teaching as it relates to marriage, dating and relationships.

Christopher partners with professional Americana/blues musician Mike Mangione to take this healing, hopeful vision of what it means to be human around the world. They offer Made For More events that “creatively weave together dynamic presentations with live music, video clips, and sacred art for an evening of beauty and reflection on the meaning of life, love, and human destiny. You will come away with a faith-filled vision of hope that will instill in you the sheer wonder and joy of being alive,” according to the TOB Institute.

As Christopher began to study God’s word as a young man, even before he realized the ache of his heart aligned with Pope John Paul II’s vision, he noticed the Bible’s overarching theme of marriage. God begins Genesis with a wedding in an earthly paradise. Revelation ends with the wedding feast in a heavenly kingdom. Throughout the Bible, God is the bridegroom, the church is the bride.

“You can’t understand salvation without seeing how marriage foreshadows the marriage of Christ and the church. The union of man and woman is such a profound mystery. God wanted the marital plan to be so plain he chiseled it on our bodies,” Christopher said. “Very few Christians seem to understand that an image of the Gospel is stamped in their own bodies and in their yearning for union,” he wrote in Theology of the Body for Beginners.

“Christianity is not a starvation diet, it’s an invitation to a wedding feast!” he exclaimed. “This is the key that unlocks the story and ignites our faith. Christianity doesn’t require flight from the body, it’s the opposite. God took on a body as the Word became flesh at Christ’s incarnation. He not only saved our souls. He redeemed our bodies,” Christopher said.

As he dug deeper, Christopher understood the importance of seeing Christianity as an incarnational faith. Christopher commonly references Pope John Paul II’s reminder that “…The body is capable of making visible what is invisible…”

“We are incarnate people made in the image of God. The physical part came from dust, but he breathed life into us. We’re a profound marriage of the spiritual and physical, injected with the divine vision of life and love, created, blessed, and told to be fertile and multiply,” he said. “We used to call this ‘the facts of life’. Now we have 300 different gender identities. We have to return to the beginning where God made them male and female. Everything else is the twisting of the beautiful plan of God.”

“When we exchange the vision of love and life for a vision of lust and death, marriage breaks down, families break down, communities break down,” he added. Chaos reigns. “Everything God created is a sign of who He is. All that breathes and lives are called to be fruitful and multiply. Even plants are designed to reproduce.

“What does this tell us? The life giving-ness of creation is the message about the giver of life himself. Our sexuality, our call as male and female to be fruitful and multiply, is a sign of God’s mysterious lifegiving love. Our bodies tell God’s story. Is it any wonder the enemy would want to attack there?”

He believes Satan hates our ability to bear offspring, because creating new life physically and tangibly replicates God’s covenant love for people.

“Before the modern world started deconstructing the word ‘gender,’ we understood it to mean the manner of the way you generate the next generation of new life with your genitals, '' Christopher explained. “It is obvious what the body is for when genitals are used for generating. … We live in a world that has been hell-bent for almost 100 years to render the genitals unable to generate. We will never climb out of the gender confusion and the breakdown of marriage and family when the power of the genitals is no longer part of the equation. We’ve been viewing gender through condom-colored glasses.

“The life giving-ness of creation is the message about the giver of life himself. Our sexuality, our call as male and female to be fruitful and multiply, is a sign of God’s mysterious lifegiving love. Our bodies tell God’s story.”

— Christopher West

“When you divorce the meaning of gender from the genitals, the word is just floating around to be attached to whatever we want it to be attached to,” he continued. “Until we return to the truth of gender meaning (to generate new life), we will never be able to save marriage and family and civilization. We need to reclaim these fundamental biblical truths and inject them into the lifeblood of the church.”

Theology of the Body may seem foreign to those raised in modern culture. Currently, most protestant churches don’t align with the prohibition against contraception espoused by the Catholic Church, but has that always been the case? According to Christopher, the acceptance of contraception in Christendom is a relatively recent phenomenon — emerging in the 1930s.

“Were Christians wrong for 1,900 years, or have we been wrong for the past 90?” he asked. “A Trojan horse has entered the city of God. The embrace of contraception has sparked the chaos of today. We need to be bold enough to let the mercy of God take us into a deeper study of this question.

“We Christians are in need of conversion of heart here,” he continued. “Our situation is not that different from when the 12 apostles of Jesus Christ went out into the Roman empire. They said there’s another way to live and love.”

“Living according to the truth of our embodiment as male and female takes us to the heart of the Christian life,” he writes in Theology of the Body for Beginners. “We all desire authentic love. Christ empowers us to live from that deeper heritage of our hearts.”

What if the marital embrace was considered and celebrated as a representation of God’s gift of love. How would that change the way spouses connected physically, emotionally and spiritually? Would the necessity of being on the same page about timing physical intimacy to plan family size naturally foster more open communication and marital unity between spouses? Bring back virtues like self-control, dignity and morality? Would the deeper union between husband and wife and God unlock greater fulfillment, joy and spiritual connection? Would a return to God’s original plan for the use of genitals dissolve gender confusion, same-sex attraction, even abortion, and solve other problems of our modern age? Theology of the Body connects the dots to answer those questions. Find out more at tobinstitute.org.