Love Thy Body, Nancy R. Pearcey - Winter 2020/2021

Book: Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality

Author: Nancy R. Pearcey

Publisher: Baker Books; Grand Rapids, Michigan - 2018

Format: Hardcover, 335 pages.

This book took me wayyyy too long to read. I was working on it for 5 months when it should have taken 5-6 weeks. During that time I had health problems that disrupted (eliminated) my reading time/discipline for quite a while. Good news, I’m on the mend, and was able to finally close out this book which was put in my hands last fall by my friend, Dave Bouchard.

Thesis:

as found in the book:

“We can discover a reality-based morality that expresses a positive, life-affirming view of the human person - one that is more inspiring, more appealing, and more liberating than the secular worldview.” (p.15)

Argument:

Practically, this book serves as an issue-by-issue critique of modern social ethics. While the structure is heavily episodic, there is a unifying theme running through as Pearcey traces the point of origination to each of these modern perspectives to the (widely accepted, but rarely acknowledged) body/person divide which has resulted from western civilization’s philosophical willingness to divide theology and morality from science. This philosophical bifurcation of reality has manifested as an impassible division between values (private, subjective, relativistic) and facts (public objective, valid for everyone), and the victory of postmodernism has heavily (nearly exclusively) favored the former. Pearcey establishes that these philosophical divisions have been thoroughly worked into the modern consensus worldview in a way that severely shapes our culture’s moral reasoning. She also emphasizes the connection between praxis and worldview, repeating that each action and moral decision reveals the worldview that a person holds.

See Pearcy’s quotes and graphic below:

“Today, postmoderninsm takes Kant’s divide to its logical conclusion. It treats the material world - including the body - largely as a construction of the human mind. There is no created order that we are morally obligated to honor or respect. consciousness determines what is real for us… The outcome is that we do not live in a world structured by God. We live in a world structured by human consciousness.” (p. 165)

In each Issue discussed (topics include: euthanasia, abortion, chastity, homosexuality, transgenderism, & marriage) Pearcey constructs a positive argument for biblical ethics, emphasizing the value and meaningfulness of the body. Her ethical constructions are not lists of Bible passages related to the issue under examination, but rather appeals for an adoption of the biblical worldview more generally, especially as it relates to God’s creative will and design for the human body and its sexual function. you can get a taste for this in the quotes provided below:

“Biblical moraility is not arbitrary. Morality is the guidebook to fulfilling God’s original purpose for humanity, the instruction manual for becoming the kind of person God intends us to be, the road map for reaching the human telos.” (p.23)

“By contrast, biblical moraily expresses a high view of the dignity and significance of the body. The biblical view of sexuality is not based on a few scattered Bible verses. It is based on a teleological worldview that encourages us to live in accord with the physical design of our bodies.” (p.30)

“Biblical morality asks us to be consistent in what we say with our bodies and what we say with the rest of our lives. To tell the truth with our bodies.” (p.137)

“People often think of Christians as prudes and Puritans who hold a negative view of the body and its functions, especially sex. But the truth is that Christianity has a much more respectful view of our phyco-sexual identiy. It is not anti-sex, it is pro-body.” (p.142)

Her challenge to the reader is for them to understand and begin explaining how the consensus worldview has been poisoned by these faulty philosophical commitments which have led to the disregard of the body, while offering the biblical worldview as a more compelling and coherent alternative.

[we] need to explain why a secular worldview is ultimately dehumanizing and unfilfilling. And [we] must make a persuasive case that biblical morality is both rationally compelling and personally attractive - that it expresses a higher, mor positive view of the human person than any competing morality(153)…

The challenge is to show that in reality biblcial morality expresses a higer view of creation and the body than secular morality does. It grants greater dignity and worth to the huyman being is is ultametly more fulfilling. (157)

Review

This was a good book. I’m glad that I read it. Pearcey directly confronts the most challenging moral issues that believers are confronting in the modern world. Increasingly the challenge of the darkened world to the Christian faith is not brought as a matter of fact (i.e. ‘does archaeology align with the biblical account?’, ‘did Jesus really rise from the dead?’, ‘is the canon reliable?’), but on the social/moral level (i.e. ‘why are Christians bigots?’). I interact with Gen-Z a lot, and I have noticed an incredible tendency for them to believe the most ridiculous stuff on the factual level - things like statistical likelihood and academic authority can often mean so very little to them. The claim that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to the father where he reigns now as Lord, seems to me, a very low hurdle to clear as an evangelist to that generation. However, their social/moral compass has been so thoroughly tuned to protect the purportedly inviolable right of a person to chose their own reality/sexuality/ethics, that acceptance of a biblical model of marriage seems nearly impossible. What “The Case for Christ” was for Gen-X and Millennials, books like this will be for Gen-Z.

I think that Pearcey does a great job explaining the origin of our modern consensus worldview as it relates to the Issues that she explores in this book. The model and outline she provides will equip the reader to handle issues not directly addressed here as the believer learns to look for the devaluation of creation/body in moral reasoning. The reader will then be able to deal with challenges to the Biblical worldview on the level at which they need to be addressed - the philosophical commitments from which they arose - and show that the Christian faith offers a more coherent and compelling alternative.

Critiques

I do have a couple of critiques for this book. First, I found it to be too laden with anecdotes. Each chapter is filled with Pearcey’s personal accounts of interactions related to the ethical issue being discussed - or worse - second-hand accounts being relayed from someone Pearcey knows. In a book with a compelling philosophical argument, I found these to be more of a distraction than a benefit, and occasionally her accounts beggar belief (that’s my personal opinion). These anecdotes feel very sermonic, and I’m going to guess that her style of throwing them in so often arises from hearing a few of them. Preachers are FAMOUS for stretching/bending a real conversation or interaction they had to fit the purposes of their sermon outline and I get that feeling with a few of these anecdotal accounts.

Second, I would prefer the book to have a different structure. Pearcey seems to want to do two things, make a large argument about philosophy and worldview, and apply this argument to a set of modern social issues. However, the former endeavor gets diced up and mixed into the latter. While the larger argument is introduced in the first chapter it does not really approach its final form there. As you read on into the issue chapters (two through seven) you get a substantial amount of development and addition to her larger argument. I wouldn’t mind if I found her larger argument to be uncompelling, but it really is remarkable and important. This book should have been divided in half, with the larger philosophical argument given more pages to develop before it was deployed to tackle homosexuality and transgenderism.

next for me

I’ll be reading a very small book “Life in the Purple Wedge” (Van Harden) which was given to me by a friend, I’ll post it here when I’m done. I’ll plan to knock out another chapter of Wright and Bird’s enormous “The New Testament in its World,” then read either “Christianity at the Crossroads” by Krueger or “Live Not by Lies” by Dreher.