Our Bodies Tell God's Story , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Christopher West

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106 pages

English

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In response to a world awash in sexual chaos and gender confusion, this book offers a bold and thoroughly biblical look at the meaning of the body, sex, gender, and marriage.Bestselling author, cultural commentator, and popular theologian Christopher West is one of the world's most recognized teachers of John Paul II's Theology of the Body. He specializes in making this teaching accessible to all Christians, with particular attention to evangelicals. As West explains, from beginning to end the Bible tells a story of marriage. It begins with the marriage of man and woman in an earthly paradise and ends with the marriage of Christ and the church in an eternal paradise.In our post-sexual-revolution world, we need to remember that our bodies tell a divine story and proclaim the gospel itself. As male and female and in the call to become "one flesh," our bodies reveal a "great mystery" that mirrors Christ's love for the church (Eph. 5:31-32). This book provides a redemptive rather than repressive approach to sexual purity, explores the true meaning of sex and marriage, and offers a compelling vision of what it means to be created male and female. Foreword by Eric Metaxas.

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	21 janvier 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781493422487
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0518€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2020 by Christopher West
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2020
Ebook corrections 02.05.2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2248-7
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™
Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016
Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Quotations cited as TOB come from John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body , Translation by Michael Waldstein, Copyright © 2006, 1997 Daughters of St Paul, Published by Pauline Books & Media, 50 St. Paul’s Avenue, Boston, MA 02130. All rights reserved.
The Author is represented by the literary agency of Mark Oestreicher.
Contents
Cover i
Half Title Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Foreword by Eric Metaxas vii
Introduction xi
1. Our Bodies Tell God’s Story 1
2. Sex in the Garden of Eden 25
3. The Fall and Redemption of Sex 41
4. Will There Be Sex in Heaven? 71
5. This Is a Profound Mystery 93
6. Sex Refers to Christ and His Church 113
7. Keeping God in the Bedroom 135
Conclusion 159
Acknowledgments 165
Notes 167
Scripture Index 175
Subject Index 179
About the Author 187
Back Cover 189
Foreword
Eric Metaxas
In case anyone has missed it, the Western church is facing a serious reckoning with its inability to respond effectively to the secular world’s challenges regarding the meaning of sex, gender, marriage, and the family. And what could be more central to human life than the meaning of these most central of human concepts? The popular culture has been telling us a saccharine, rainbow-hued fairy tale about our bodies and about human love that innumerable people have nonetheless found more compelling and appealing than anything they’ve probably ever heard in church. But it strikes me—and the author of this wonderful book—that that is because we in the church haven’t been properly equipped to understand that our bodies tell a true story that is more glorious and transcendent and powerful and multidimensional and resonant and satisfying than we’ve ever imagined. As Christopher West illuminates for us in this much-needed and timely work, our bodies tell God’ s story.
The Enlightenment has taught us an infinity of things about the workings of the human body as a biological organism. But when it comes to the deepest meaning of our creation as male and female, the Enlightenment, ironically, has left us fumbling in the dark. It tells a story that is ultimately reductionist and that is therefore only part of the larger and grander story; and in being only part of the larger story but purporting to be the whole story, it is what we might accurately call a “lie” and a “fiction.” The body is not only biological. To say that we are only biological is like saying that Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa and Mozart were only clumps of cells. As West correctly asserts, “Since we’re made in the image of God as male and female, the body . . . is also theological . It tells an astounding divine story. . . . This means that when we get the body and sex wrong, we get the divine story wrong as well.”
Could this possibly explain why embracing the values of the sexual revolution has coincided with a widespread loss of biblical faith in general? “Sex is not just about sex,” posits West. “The way we understand and express our sexuality points to our deepest-held convictions about who we are, who God is, who Jesus is, what the church is (or should be), the meaning of love, the ordering of society, and the mystery of the universe.”
These are bold claims, but they are also indisputably and powerfully and dramatically true. And if you read this book you will see that West backs them up so that we can all see how true and inescapable they are. Of course these are not just his ideas. His task in this first-of-its-kind book is to make accessible for a broad Christian readership the insights of someone whom many consider the greatest Christian leader of the twentieth century. In my book Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness , I wrote that there is much to be said for the view that that title belongs to the man who led the world’s Catholics into the twenty-first century: John Paul II. Christian history will surely remember him for his fearless witness to Christ in the face of state-sponsored atheism (he was one of the key figures in the collapse of communism across Europe); for his tireless efforts in building bridges across denominational lines (he even reached out to Protestant and Orthodox Christians, asking them to help him reenvision the papacy); and for his courageous defense of the dignity of human life in the face of powerful ideological threats against it.
Today, however, as Christians in the culture and in their own congregations and families continue to grapple—and sometimes fail to grapple—with the near total eclipse of the biblical meaning of sex, gender, and marriage, it’s becoming increasingly evident that John Paul II’s greatest legacy may prove to be an extensive collection of biblical reflections he gave on the theology of the human body. This bold, compelling, hopeful, and healing vision of our creation as male and female has been hailed by Catholics and Protestants alike as an antidote to the sexual crisis now plaguing the church and the world. For that antidote to spread, however, the keen insights of these dense and scholarly lectures need to be put in a language that average believers can understand.
Which brings us back to Christopher West and the happy gift of this book.
West began teaching John Paul II’s Theology of the Body to a primarily Catholic audience in the mid-1990s—efforts that soon found him authoring bestselling books and lecturing around the globe. When a committee at Focus on the Family charged with drafting an official statement on sexuality solicited West’s assistance in the early 2000s, West took up the task of translating John Paul II’s biblical reflections for believers who would rarely (if ever) pick up something authored by a pope. Having been raised Catholic but evangelized largely by Protestant believers during his college years, West is fluent in both languages, so to speak, which makes him the perfect candidate to write this book. In his introduction, West mentions the debt of gratitude he feels toward his Protestant brothers and sisters for inspiring him with their commitment to Christ and their love for God’s Word. As you enter more and more into this study of God’s Word, you will surely agree with me that we also owe him our gratitude for making John Paul II’s Theology of the Body accessible and relatable to the whole body of Christ.
Introduction
There is really no way to overstate the profound impact [the Theology of the Body has] had on my mind and my soul. It helped me see how profound Christianity is in answering the deepest questions we all have about who we are and how we are called to relate to others and to God . . . by showing how the physical and spiritual are united in a profound way in our Lord Jesus Christ.
—Glenn Stanton
I gave my life to Jesus when I was twenty years old. I had been raised a Catholic and did the “Catholic thing” growing up. Unfortunately, like so many other Catholics, I hadn’t had an interior conversion to Christ. Jesus was a religious “idea” to me, a historical figure, and, I suppose, a holy teacher (whatever that meant). But I didn’t know him personally as my Savior until, largely through the influence of Protestant teachers and preachers, I started studying the Bible in my college years and experienced a dramatic conversion of heart.
Without a doubt, as strange as this may seem to some, the force that compelled me on my search for Christ was the swirling, maddening, tumultuous conundrum of sex. Let me explain.
Desire—eros, or erotic desire, to be more specific—kicked in pretty early in my life. I was often overwhelmed by a gnawing hunger and thirst I didn’t know how to handle. God bless my parents and my Catholic school teachers—they all tried—but people can’t give what they don’t have. No one had formed them in the true beauty and splendor of God’s plan for erotic desire, so they couldn’t form me. I was given the traditional biblical “rules” about sex, and my teachers did their best to instill a fear in me of breaking them, but I was never given the “why” behind the “what” of sexual morality.
Okay, those are the rules I shouldn’t break, but what the heck am I supposed to do with this crazy desire inside me? The basic message in the air was that sexual desire itself was “dirty” or “bad” and needed to be repressed or otherwise squelched. To put an image to the experience, it seemed the only thing my “Christian” upbringing had to offer me in my hunger