The Problem of Body-Hatred
Dear Church,
This Sunday, in the sermon on Leviticus 17–20, we’re going to talk about sex.
I’m writing this to you now for two reasons:
So that you know what to expect in the sermon, and
to give you some preliminary rationale.
Expectations
In terms of expectations, by doing a simple “Control + F” on my sermon manuscript, it looks like I’ll use the word “sexual” at least 24 times. So when I say that we’re talking about sex, I mean I’ll actually say the word.
I will not, however, use the other descriptions in Leviticus 18 and 20. If we were to read the text in detail, it mentions six forms of sexual immorality:
Incest (18:6–18)
Sex during menstruation (18:19)
Adultery (18:29)
Child sacrifice (likely sex slavery, 18:21)
Homosexuality (18:22)
Bestiality (18:23)
It’s repulsive. I won’t say these things in the sermon, but they’re what I’m referring to when I say “sexual immorality.”
I encourage parents to exercise discretion when it comes to your kids in the audience. My children will be there because they know the word “sex.” They don’t know some of the others words, and I don’t want them to, which is partly why I’m not saying them.
Now why even go there?
Rationale
I’m going there because this section of Leviticus, especially chapters 18–20, which gives us a vision for holy living, is very concerned with sexuality. That’s what Chapters 18 and 20 are mainly about, almost repeating one another (a sign of emphasis!). I simply don’t think I can faithfully preach this passage without talking about this. It’s too important in the text.
And it’s crucially relevant for us today. . . .
Explaining the Problem
The world around us hates the body.
That might not be immediately obvious to you when you look around at 21st century American culture, but it’s true. It’s there. And it makes a central part of Leviticus 18–20 hard for us to understand. Let me explain — and we’ll need to step back for a minute and put on our classroom hats.
This is a history of ideas thing that started way back in the 1800s. Basically, a dualism formed between the way people think about facts and values.
This is what author Nancy Pearcey calls our culture’s “two-story worldview.” She draws from Francis Schaeffer and explains that basically the way our culture understands the world is that you have facts (lower story) and values (higher story).
Facts are those things that are objective and observable. Values are those things that are subjective and psychological. And, according to the world, these two “stories” get pitted against one another, with the subjective and psychological being the higher, most important part.
This is why our culture says that whatever we think or feel is what matters most. That’s the two-story worldview.
And this two-story worldview has been applied to everything, including human beings, which led to what’s known as “personhood theory.” (Pearcey details this in her book Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality.)
Personhood Theory Bologna
Using those same fact-value divisions, personhood theory divides humans into two parts: bodies and persons. The body is the lower, physical part. The person is the higher, thinking part.
This higher, thinking person part, so they say, is actually what makes someone a person.
Personhood is subjective and self-determined, and it’s the part that “really matters.” Which means, it’s possible to have a body, to be alive, but not be a person. This is the category of a “human non-person.”
And as it turns out, human non-persons aren’t valuable. They don’t count. And so what do you do with them? Well, they’re disposable. You can kill them if you want to. … which is the argument for abortion.(See, science has proven a long time ago that the unborn baby is a human life, but that doesn’t matter to pro-choice leaders because “personhood” is where they assign worth.)
There’s been a separation between the living body and the thinking person, between objective reality and subjective assessment.
The subjective assessment (thinking person) is set over the objective reality (physical body) in a way that actually demeans the body.
The body gets belittled and is seen as lesser — and therefore it can be terminated, manipulated, or exploited if someone thinks or feels differently than the lesser objective reality. Right along with abortion, this is also the reasoning behind euthanasia and transgenderism. It’s body-hatred. Our 21st century American culture really does despise the body.
Now you may think: Wait a second, it seems to me that some people in our society worship the body. Yes, but get this: when there’s an infatuation with the body — think about hyper-health nuts, bodybuilding, or anti-age procedures — those things can seem like body-worship, but it’s actually still body-hatred, because at root is basically an insatiable discontentment with the body as it is. It’s constantly trying to control the body to make it different from what it is.
Many of our cultural evils come back to this two-story worldview, to separating the body and the person — which has led to body-hatred.
Now why does that matter for Leviticus 18–20?
Why Does It Matter?
It matters because “love your neighbor as yourself” is the central command in this section (see 19:18), and also the second greatest commandment in the Bible (see Matthew 22:37–40).
This important command expects that you love yourself, but the way our culture has taught us to understand the self is WRONG.
We think it’s all psychology. We think self-esteem. We’ve been shaped to think of the “self” as upper story.
But the Bible means “yourself” as in your body.
“Yourself” always means your physical existence — with your physical, tangible needs. And unless we understand that, unless we reject the insidious body-hatred of the world around us, we’ll fall short of obeying this fundamental command.
This is not even to mention that the most common form of body-hatred is sexual immorality.
But more on that in the sermon.
In hope,
Pastor Jonathan
For additional reading on this topic …
