ADOPTING GOD’S VIEW OF BARE ANATOMY

(The title preface and accompanying image below were given to my article when originally posted on the Seedbed blog for pastors. For an unknown reason, it was removed recently. It had been listed in the "Top 14 Articles for 2014," but it disappeared. This is unfortunate for those with a sex-focus on the body that chains them to porn and body shame problems. I reproduce it here because its message remains prophetic and crucially needed by Christians caught up in the demonic lie of porno-prudery.)

Embracing Nakedness: Adopting God’s View of Bare Anatomy

by David L. Hatton (published on Seedbed.com, Jan. 9, 2014)

I’m a Wesleyan pastor who is grateful for the landmark Theology of the Body of Karol Wojtyla (late Pope John Paul II). No theologian ever dealt so comprehensively with God’s purpose for gendered human embodiment. This quote summarizes his theme:

“The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.”

As an art lover and amateur artist, I was surprised to read Wojtyla’s ideas somewhat echoed by Henri Robert in his book The Art Spirit:

“There is nothing in all the world more beautiful or significant of the laws of the universe than the nude human body. In fact it is not only among artists but among all people that a greater appreciation and respect for the human body should develop. When we respect the nude we will no longer have any shame about it.”

But before ordination or art classes, I was an L&D nurse, and still am. I work routinely and intimately with bare female anatomy. If this raises any brows, I’ve hammered out my own quote that brings Wojtyla’s and Robert’s together:

“A Creator-honoring, incarnational view of the naked human body dispels the fantasy-laden, porno-prudish conception religiously taught and pornographically exploited in Western culture.”

For almost 25 years, I put up with the uncomfortable contradiction between my experiential view of hospital nudity and the one taught by my Christian upbringing. Finally, when God opened my eyes to the dysfunctional immaturity of our culture’s reaction to public breastfeeding, I did my homework. Through intense research about the phenomenon of human nakedness biblically, historically, culturally, and psycho-socially, I experienced a radical paradigm shift in my thinking. My studies showed me the American church’s urgent need of repentance, reformation and restitution for having adopted and promoted Victorianism’s flight from the body.

The bottom line is this: a prudish view of the body is a pornographic one. Religiously placing an obscene or indecent sexual connotation on the sight of gender-distinguishing body parts creates a sexually objectified body. Such legalism, if socially embraced, becomes the conceptual foundation for a pornographic culture, as ours is now. Also, this objectification trivializes the body language of human genitalia, allowing them to be ignored as features of personal gender identity and distinction. Take some time to do the math on this, and it should cause tears.

Theologically, beyond shining a spotlight on the church’s notorious support of Victorian prudery, these personal insights showed me how Gnosticism’s influence on the early church still lingers in popular Christian thinking.[1]

Practically, my discoveries led me to join some other pastors in creating a website to fight porn addiction. Our message at MCAG (mychainsaregone.org) is body acceptance, calling men to see women as the Creator does, in opposition to the traditional body-shame approach, which tells them, “Bounce your eyes!”

Ministerially, I feel like “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” Christian porno-prudery is so well established as a virtue that most are blind to its real nature as a vice. Yet it has kept Christians from being the world-renowned experts in sex education that our understanding of creation and the Incarnation ought to have made us. It has stopped multiple thousands of Christian art students from ever becoming skilled with the nude. If we hadn’t abandoned the human body by surrendering God’s image and temple into secular hands, these young artists might have become modern Michelangelos painting contemporary “Sistine-Chapel” ceilings. Such a holy display of human nudity in our churches might have been a realistic preventative to our current religious and social focus on naked anatomy as an avenue of lust and on gender-specific body parts as sex objects.

I explained the gist of this article to one senior pastor who agreed with my viewpoint but believed the situation hopeless, saying that society and the church are too far into this to ever be changed. I must disagree. The naked truth of reality changed me. Porno-prudery is a learned attitude that can be unlearned through repentance. Gnostic ideas that devalue matter and flesh can be dispelled from our pulpits. Preaching theologically-correct body acceptance can bring a reformation in Christian thinking that restores the strong incarnational message our modern world needs to hear.[2] Although it means swallowing our pride, even the last step is possible: restitution. If our porno-prudery has played a role in the development of a society riddled with porn addiction, body-image dysfunctions, gender confusion issues, human-trafficking, and more, we must confess our error, ask forgiveness, and start behaving as if the “fearfully and wonderfully made” naked human body never stopped being “very good” (Gen 1:31).

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[1] For further study on this, see my article, “Incarnational Truth about Humanity’s Sexual Nature (Doing Body-friendly Theology Free from Gnostic Prudery)”.

[2] Anyone truly serious about this area might like to read some of the same material I have on this subject in my webpage “Rebuilding a Godly View of the Unclad Human Body - Why and How to Stop ‘Thinking Dirty’ about God’s Image and Temple”.

ARTIFICIAL BEAUTIFICATION

“They have gone beyond the limits of impropriety. They have invented mirrors to reflect all this artificial beautification of theirs, as if it were nobility of character or self-improvement. They should, rather, conceal such deception with a veil. It did the handsome Narcissus no good to gaze on his own image, as the Greek myth tells us. If Moses forbade his people to fashion any image to take the place of God, is it right for these women to study their reflected images for no other reason that to distort the natural features of their faces? . . . If the Lord places more importance on beauty of soul than on that of the body, what must he think of artificial beautification when he abhors so thoroughly every sort of lie? 'We walk by faith, not by sight.'” — Clement of Alexandria (150–215 AD) in Christ the Educator, 3.2.11-12

When I came across the above quote recently, it reminded me of my opinion about makeup in my early teen years. I had read and was so impressed by the following verse that I used sunlight to burn its words into a wooden plaque with a magnifying glass:

Despite the fact that this plaque still hangs in our house—directly above our bathroom mirror—its presence doesn’t keep my sweetheart from spending time in front of it trying to beautify her face. Even my repetitive avowal that she’s the loveliest woman in the world isn’t effective. Evidently her artificial beautification isn’t for me, or for God. For whom then? For the world? For herself? It may be an unconscious part of a woman’s self-identity....

I’ll never forget a mime routine Red Skelton once did on his TV show. He role-played a couple coming home from a party. First, the wife entered the bedroom and removed her painful high heels, her earrings, her wig, her imitation eyelashes, and the two falsies from her bra. Applying cold cream to her face, she wiped off her lipstick and makeup. Then, wiggling out of her girdle and setting it on the vanity with the rest of her things, she went to bed. When Red entered as the husband, he quickly and easily undressed. But before climbing into bed, he went over to the vanity, looked down at everything his wife had removed, and said, “Goodnight, honey.” How funny it was, and how informative!

My wife knew my feelings about makeup before we married. While she uses it minimally, she shares with most women in America the common habit of a facial routine before the mirror. It’s part of her culture, yes, even of her Christian culture. I remember a teacher telling me of his visit to a Christian family in Germany. At the dinner table, the wife, who had just taken a big swig from her beer mug, asked him, “Is it true that Christian women in America actually wear lipstick?” Arbitrary culture is a bigger gatekeeper on morality than Bible teachers want to admit.

But Bible teachers are mostly men, and when lax in marital devotion, they can be blatantly chauvinistic. At the university where I met my spouse, I cringed during one chapel service when the university president defended his wife’s use of makeup by saying, “If the barn needs painting, paint it!” As my sympathy for his wife rose, my respect for him fell. Maybe he didn’t intend to liken her to a barn, but his statement implied an even worse malediction: an aging woman’s face is unacceptable without artificial beautification.

Our culture idolizes the transient state of youth. Cosmetic painting has a hidden but inherent message: youthful beauty alone is beautiful. Beyond red lips, smooth skin and the absence of gray hair, this ideal encompasses other body parts. Historically, the corset was invented to narrow older abdomens to a younger size, while its two upper half-cups gave the bosom a breast-lift. When women finally salvaged themselves from the unhealthy tyranny of the corset, they weren’t wise enough to resist its twin offspring, the girdle and the braziere. These also had health risks. But with girdles making tummies appear youthfully slender and bras keeping breasts looking perky—firm and sticking out, as they were in late adolescence or early adulthood—the risks were ignored.

Joined to cosmetics, in the growing business of beautification, are diet programs, plastic-surgery procedures, and various skin-care technologies, all trying to remove or slow the signs of aging. But these age-erasers are not age-eliminators. They only procrastinate the attitudinal adjustment that all women must eventually make. Thinning, sagging, wrinkling skin is a future reality that every face will, sooner or later, have to face. By embracing that reality now, at any stage of life, a woman can bless herself with the special gift of self-acceptance. Accepting her face, figure and features, her skin, shape and size, along with every other part of her unadorned body, can be a time-saver at the mirror. But personally practicing body acceptance can also be an emotional life-saver, a healer of low self-esteem.

Because our bodies are temples for God’s presence and incarnations of His image, Christians should have led the way in spreading a sound message of body acceptance. Instead, secular voices have become its loudest proponents. Numerous women have given impressive TED Talks in this area.[1] But the best full-length documentary I’ve seen so far is EMBRACE (2016), by the Australian body image activist Taryn Brumfitt.[2] Without claiming a theological basis for their ideas on body acceptance, these ladies have proclaimed an essentially prophetic word calling for a healthy personal and social repentance (metanoia), a “change of mind” about their perceived body image.

Whose thinking should guide our thoughts on the appearance and appeal of our face, our skin, our shape? Shouldn’t it be the mind of the Creator who gave them to us? God is not against beauty. His salvation plan through Christ includes the restoration of physical bodies that will surely outshine the beauty of our youth. But, until Resurrection Day, we live, move, and have our being in these aging bodies, which serve as sanctuaries of the Holy Spirit. At whatever age they’ve reached or state they are in, our bodies are uniquely personal, and each one is “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

The next time you shower or bathe, stand in front of the mirror and look with care at your naked body. It has been your closest companion in the ups and downs of life, and it might be physically showing the wear and tear of your adventures. But we should not let a preoccupied focus on chasing lost youth cause us to miss enjoying the present state and achievements of our bodies. Instead, we should rejoice in them, and heed Paul’s injunction to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship,” (Romans 12:1, ESV).

Inspiration for this concluding poem came to me in an art class on “facial expressions” after the professor decried the beauty-care industry’s use of Botox for killing nerves that controlled the facial muscles behind wrinkle formation.

WRINKLES

Please, never treat your wrinkles
    as if they were a blight.
Like stars that shine and twinkle,
    they set the soul in sight.
They’re formed in special places
    as journey-marks, not scars.
God paints them on our faces
    as part of who we are.

— David L. Hatton, 3/2/2009
(from Poems Between Birth and Resurrection ©2013)

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ENDNOTES:

[1] The following TED Talks are presently viewable on YouTube:
The lady stripped bare by Tracey Spicer
An epidemic of beauty sickness by Renee Engeln
My story is painted on my body by Chantelle Brown
Plus-size? More Like My Size by Ashley Graham
Ending the pursuit of perfection by Iskra Lawrence
The Business of Beauty is Very Ugly by Carrie Hammer
A new standard of beauty by Amber Starks
Beauty and how we're obsessed with the wrong idea by Christina Gressianu
A bold message about beauty by Michelle Serna
Stop hating your body; start living your life by Taryn Brumfitt

[2] Taryn Brumfitt’s film EMBRACE is now available on Netflix streaming.

DESTROYING THE LIE OF BODY SHAME

I want to blow up a dam of false thinking about our bodies that impedes the desperately needed flow of theological truth. Only a trickle escapes, and our thirsty world ends up drinking from filthy drainage in the gutter. Destroy that dam, and a flood of creational, incarnational, restorational truth about the human body can wash away this lewd, gutter‑minded thinking from both society and the church.

All naked creatures God created remained so, except for us. Few animals artificially camouflage their natural appearance for protection or stealth, but none for hiding nudity. Except where humans learn body acceptance culturally, body shame takes over.

Most Christians won’t adopt body acceptance if they believe that body shame is humanity’s natural response ordained by God. Scripturally, that’s a groundless assumption. Historically, what’s recorded contradicts it. Culturally, its promotion reveals the “dark side” of indoctrination. Personally, just from these three categories, I’ve found enough truth to demolish the dam built by this false but widespread belief.[1]

I began working at this by confronting the church’s ineffective approach to porn addiction.[2] Strategies based on body shame get no help from God. He sets people free with truth. But a sacrilegious allegiance to body shame often stifles the truth of body acceptance.

Pornography is the tip of the iceberg. From body shame, and the sexual objectification accompanying it, come other social problems. The original sin undermined God’s will for us to accept ourselves as a divine fusion of dust and spirit. Body shame, which at first manifested as fearing nakedness, brought mental alienation into humanity’s body‑spirit self‑concept. Once disassociated from personhood, the body became open to self and social misuse and abuse. Among the results beyond porn addiction were body‑image dysfunctions, sexual promiscuity, gender confusion, and human sex trafficking.

The only sure way to “blow up” this stubborn dam of body shame is to reveal its diabolical origin. When I discovered that its source was the exact opposite of my assumptions, I was shocked. Until confronted by a critical mass of evidence against it, I too believed body shame was God’s will.

Like most Christians, I grew up hearing from pastors that bodies without clothing were indecent or obscene and that seeing the opposite sex undressed would cause sinful thoughts. My 34 years as a male RN proved otherwise, especially working 24 of them in L&D, helping mothers birth and breastfeed babies. Working routinely with unclad female patients never stimulated the sexual lust predicted by sermons. These religious warnings were mere suspicions, not reality. To serious Bible students, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Who dares teach that sexual lust comes from seeing naked Bathshebas, when Jesus clearly said it comes from the heart? (Mark 7:20-23)

Later in life, I took a college figure drawing class, where we drew from nude models.[3] Neither I nor my classmates got sexually excited by seeing naked guys and girls. Although staring intently at their bare anatomy to sketch various poses, their nudity didn’t trigger the lust that church leaders led us to anticipate.

I learned something else. When missionaries first went among naked tribal people, they preached body shame right alongside the Gospel, insisting that converts cover up. But this backfired, opening up those lands to pornography. Modern missionaries quit this practice, letting these naked people keep their natural, wholesome view of the body. This policy reversal exposed the past mistake, but churches at home failed to admit and apologize for the error. Christianity’s enemies try to condemn the church of hypocrisy by broadcasting these historical facts. If we still preach body shame in the name of Christ, their criticism is justified.

Also, those visiting “clothing optional” beaches in Europe may discover a surprising absence of the body shame or sexual stimulation warned about by their religious upbringing. Experiencing no shame when joining their European friends in skinny dipping or nude sunbathing may heighten their doubts about the church’s credibility. Having found church ministers wrong about something as simple as the body’s natural state, can we blame such people for questioning our accuracy on something as important as the soul’s destiny?

Lessons and illustrations like these compelled me to search the Bible for the real source of the body shame taught so zealously from pulpits. The world desperately needs the Gospel, but it’s not “good news” when body shame is mixed into the liberating message of Christ. I wrote this poem to help blast away this falsehood from believer’s minds and from Christian preaching:

ORIGIN OF BODY SHAME[4]

Dressed up as a serpent in crafty disguise,

A demon attempted, by using his lies,

To blot out the beautiful image that God

Had made of Himself out of hand‑woven sod.

As naked as truth from the day of their birth,

And destined by God to be rulers of earth,

Both Adam and Eve were alive by God’s breath,

But Satan used knowledge to put them to death.

The serpentine liar pretended to heal

Their blind faith in God for what’s moral and real.

His trick by that Gnostic fruit opened their eyes,

Remaking their minds independently wise.

“You see for yourself, God left both of you nude!

Your unhidden bodies are shamefully lewd!”

Our first parents listened to what Satan said,

For now their life‑bond to the Maker was dead.

The diet of conscience controls how it guides,

Which sins it allows, or what goodness it hides.

So, God found and asked them, with leaves round their waist,

“Who said you were naked? What fruit did you taste?”

Some call it God’s will to keep chewing that fruit,

Embracing its scruples in zealous pursuit,

Maligning His gift of our wonderful skin

By calling the sight of its nudity sin.

But others discover a godlier view,

Rejecting this prudery’s body taboo,

Resisting the porn that is wedded to shame

Passed on from the devil’s original claim.

These temples are sacred, not sordid, unclean.

If you would be holy, don’t call them obscene.

Our hearts can be dirty, or lustful and bad,

But bodies are closest to truth when unclad.

(c) David L. Hatton, 1/23/2009

Our ancestors in the faith didn’t have our modern body shame. In the first few centuries after Christ, believers were baptized in their birthday suits. These early church nude baptismal rituals required that each naked believer be anointed with the oil of exorcism, as he or she renounced Satan and his ways.[5]

Most believers, preachers, Bible scholars and popes (except for John Paul II)[6] ignore God’s question to the first victims of body shame: “Who told you that you were naked?” Of course, since God was rhetorically asking who taught them about nakedness, He already knew the answer. But do we? Obviously, Satan was the culprit. But by disregarding the implication in God’s inquiry, most attribute to God the satanic work of sowing body shame into the minds of fallen humanity. This ought to cause “fear and trembling” among Bible teachers guilty of this!

Today’s church needs to embrace the body acceptance exemplified in ancient times, exorcising body shame from believers by renouncing its deceptive originator, and perhaps validating that exorcism’s effectiveness by reinstating the requirement of a fully naked immersion. That, indeed, would be a stick of dynamite to blast away from Christianity the dysfunctional dam of body shame.

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[1] On my website, I made a page specifically dedicated to “REBUILDING A GODLY VIEW OF THE UNCLAD HUMAN BODY ‑ Why and How to Stop ‘Thinking Dirty’ about God’s Image and Temple”.

[2] Some years ago, I joined some other pastors in creating the website “My Chains Are Gone” to help liberate porn addicts through the truth of body acceptance. Our site, though geared toward men, has been a blessing to both men and women.

[3] Read the “Art Policy On Nude Models” from the art department at Gordon College, an old and well known Christian school.

[4] From Poems Between Birth and Resurrection 82013 by  David L. Hatton.

[5] See Chapter 21 in The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of Rome (215 AD), which gives in detail the early church’s prescribed congregational pattern of fully nude baptism preceded by exorcism.

[6] The most extensive and comprehensive theology of body acceptance in all of church history is Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body - Male and Female He Created Them (1986).

"OBJECTIFICATION SUSTAINED!"

A couple with a baby and young son sit in a restaurant awaiting their order. When the infant becomes fussy, the mother opens her blouse and begins nursing. After loud whispering from a few tables down, an elderly lady approaches them on a mission.

“Honey,” she scolds, “not in public like this . . . and surely not in front of your little boy. Have some decency and take it to the ladies’ room. For Heaven’s sake, this is a restaurant!”

Sound familiar? It should. Her words echo much of the modern church. Her reaction to open breastfeeding is common among evangelicals. But the attitude expressed is neither godly nor God-honoring. It’s a subtle perversion that slithered its way into popular Christian culture as a “Gospel” standard. God referred to its deceptive source when He found Adam afraid of his nudity and asked, “Who told you that you were naked?” Satan is behind most human-unfriendly ideas.

“But the sight of her breast might lead to lustful thoughts!”

Ask a simple, logical question: “Why?” Who or what imposed a sexually lustful focus on women’s breasts? Some tribal cultures don’t treat the bare female bosom that way, until Western ideals supplant their once wholesome perspective. If you don’t believe this, ask missionaries who’ve witnessed the process. If you don’t believe them, then ask maternity nurses like myself, who fight uphill against a culturally sexualized breast in trying to help moms maintain the normalcy of public breastfeeding when they leave the hospital.

But the breast is not the problem. Jesus addressed the real issue when He said, “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” (Mark 7:15). Bare nipples cause immoral enticement only when people are programmed to see them as objects of sexual arousal or lustful fantasy. It requires scrupulous social training to undermine a healthy view of their God-intended purpose as organs of maternal nurture.

“Who’s behind this sexual objectification? Hollywood?”

Movies exploit body parts only by misusing what’s already been sexually targeted. Sadly, the Western church has a long social history of targeting the female body as a sex object—a behavior that “misses the mark” of God’s design. This is a religious sin with social consequences. By sustaining an objectified view of female anatomy, we have significantly assisted those who profit from that objectification in ways that grow progressively more depraved.

Face the tragic reality: wherever prudery is imported , it guarantees the growth of pornography. Take Japan, for instance—once famous for the body acceptance displayed by its nonsexual custom of mixed public bathing. Today, Japanese society exemplifies how Western influence turned a modern, body-friendly culture into one flourishing with pornographic exploitation. Who’s to blame, a pagan Japan or a “Christian” West?

When cross-culturally savvy missionaries witnessed this same degrading trend among primitive tribes, it forced them to do their math. They saw that nudity was our own cultural problem, not theirs. So, they had to quit preaching clothing as part of Christ’s Gospel to naked people groups—a doctrinal sacrilege of which their predecessors were unwittingly guilty. The church at home gained no wisdom from this cross-cultural error abroad. Yet how we cringe in embarrassment when college professors of cultural anthropology tattle on us for this part of our missionary past!

Laura Bates

“So, are you blaming this on the church?”

A spiritually healthy church is quick to acknowledge its errors and correct them. Sadly, we often postpone our reform until compelled by a critical mass of secular outrage from those who logically connect the dots that we chose to ignore. Outside the church, many secular voices are addressing the causative factors of female exploitation and are calling for its end. (See these TED Talks: “Everyday Sexism” by Laura Bates and “The Sexy Lie” by Caroline Heldman, for starters).

Caroline Heldman

We can’t hide the implicating trail of evidence left by our persistent complicity in female objectification:

• our Victorian redefinition of biblical “modesty” from practicing humility to hiding skin
• the unforgettable evangelical episode of measuring girls’ skirt lengths on Christian campuses
• the tactic of  “eye-bouncing” in “every man’s battle” against the sexual allure of female bodies
• the existence of church cry-rooms for babies who wouldn’t be fussy if breast-fed in the pews

These and other behaviors—religiously baptized as “Christian morality”—have broadcast a united cultural message that females and their bodies are sex objects.

Our pulpits have tried to insure that women in general, and young girls in particular, accept an unavoidable self-identity as “sexual targets.” Instead, we should have trained them to stand up alongside men and assert their right to be treated as unique individuals, never as enticing stacks of body parts. Sermons should have preached feminine beauty as a divine stimulus for praise to the Creator. Instead, we have earmarked the gender-distinctive anatomy of our sisters as a dangerous pitfall from which spiritual men should flee in fear. That fearful flight, however, allowed exploiters, porn-mongers, and human-traffickers to seize control of a crucial realm of creation that belongs to God. We prudishly abandoned our stewardship of that realm.

“Can we repair the damage?”

The human body is God’s holy turf. The hands that surrendered it must retrieve it. We have a duty to retake this lost territory, first by cleansing our own minds from any sentimental allegiance to an objectification of our sexual physiology. Porno-prudery is both theologically heretical and socially destructive. Religiously, it sabotages the credibility of our presentation of the biblical message of sexual morality. We must rebuild into corporate Christian thinking a wholesome attitude about the nitty-gritty physical reality of the human body’s sexual dynamics.

There’s nothing to be ashamed of in this area except for our own near-Gnostic reputation of hesitation or silence when it comes to the body’s gender-specific anatomy. Ours is a shameful neglect that has effectively marginalized the church’s impact on society’s sexual ideas and practices. The Bible’s healthy, incarnational understanding of how our fleshly “male and female” nature images the Creator ought to be well-known in the social arena. But, as in times past, whenever we weren’t doing our theology properly and proclaiming it powerfully, we now have immense “catching up” to do.

If we are going to liberate women from religious attitudes and social actions that showcase them as sex objects, we must start by confessing our personal and ecclesiastical failures. If the repentance is authentic, reform and restitution will follow. This will require new strategies and bold changes, such as:

• Encouraging Christian moms to nurse their babies in public and especially in the congregation, so that the next generation can learn why God made breasts in the first place
• Preaching on the “milk of the Word” (1 Peter 2:2) by expounding how the analogy comes from the familiar, healthy sight of breastfeeding in Bible times
• Preaching from Isaiah 66:9-13, where God uses His functional design of the female body to illustrate His own birthing and nurturing care
• Encouraging young Christian artists to excel in depicting God’s fleshly temple by ignoring the legalism that made the nude models in anatomical drawing classes a religious taboo
• Cross-examining “lust” myths about the body by having Christian healthcare workers—expert witnesses—describe the mundane reality of routinely working with non-sexual nudity
• Hosting conferences for youth and parents where Christian biology teachers bring frank, sex-education talks that explicitly address gender-distinctive human anatomy and sexuality with visual aids that confront porno-prudery directly

Will such radical moves toward a healthier viewpoint eradicate sexual lust? Although coed latrines and public bathing in Bible times may have helped limit it, they didn’t eliminate it. But recapturing the common body acceptance implicit in those ancient customs can point us in a more sane direction. It can lead toward re-subjectifying the body—associating physical anatomy with the person who lives there. It can help us theologically disengage the sight of external skin from its present misuse as an explanation for internal lust. Only by dispensing with misplaced suspicions and vain imaginations about body parts can we refocus on God’s target: human hearts.

If you need more ideas and ammunition for your reform efforts, I’ve written two other articles on this issue of the sexual objectification of women: “Teaching God’s Design for BREASTS - A Message about ‘the Visible Breast’ for Christian Leaders” and “A Dangerous Male MYTH: ‘Men are visual.’”

GOD HAS SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU

When God asks us questions—as He frequently does in Scripture—they are of the utmost importance. Of course, being omniscient, He already knows the answers. He’s not gathering information. He asks them rhetorically to tell us what we need to learn or need to remember. Look for God’s questions, as you read the Bible, but be sure you meditate on the very first three (Genesis 3:9-11), because they form a foundation for most others in Scripture. This brief article points to a few of things I’ve gleaned from studying them.

“Where are you?”

God already knew Adam had gone astray, but Adam needed to know it. God asked him (and us) “Where are you?” because He wants lost humans to know He’s searching for them. As a shepherd looks for sheep that go astray, God wants to find and bring us home. The old saying is accurate: “If we feel far from God, guess who moved?” We did—we fled. But God is on our trail. His first question tells us that if we run, He runs after us. We may try avoiding Him, but ultimately He shows up. The poet Francis Thompson describes this God as “The Hound of Heaven”:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, . . . .
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’

God’s first question also helps us to see where unfounded fears take us: into hiding—hiding from each other behind fig leaves, hiding from God behind bushes, hiding from our human calling and its responsibilities behind excuses. A proper response to His question is to agree that we’re lost and let Him lead us to safety. But Adam didn’t respond properly.

A new condition guided the thinking of the first fallen humans. They had eaten from a tree that gave them a “knowledge of good and evil” independent from a direct relationship with God. It brought them, and all their descendants, into a condition of spiritual death. Adam’s reply to God revealed that he had adopted a new form of morality that was essentially legalistic in nature: “I was afraid at your approach because of my nudity, so, of course, I hid.” To God, such behavior was a novelty, not a matter of course, and it led to His next rhetorical question.

“Who told you that you were naked?”

Most Bible teachers avoid the clear implications in this second question by skipping over it without comment. For them, lingering here is embarrassingly dangerous. It might unmask the real root of their teachings about the shamefulness of the naked human body. In fact, I enjoy exposing this cowardly theological neglect with a bit of my own humor:

Serious consideration of God’s 1st question to fallen humanity, “Where are you?” might lead a person to repent and become a Christian. Serious consideration of His 2nd question, “Who said you were naked?” might lead a person to repent and become a nudist.

In a totally naked world—like the original creation—nakedness had no moral meaning. Shame about it had to come from outside, introduced by someone who detested the openness nakedness fosters. Who, from outside the naked material cosmos, would want to camouflage reality, hide truth beneath lies? God leaves no room for denying the obvious. His question, “Who told you that you were naked?” clearly identifies the foreign source of humanity’s body shame.

The point of God’s second question is this: “Where did you get these new ideas about your body? Who have you been listening to? Have you been listening to a deceiver, that lying fallen angel who hates the naked glory of My embodied image? Is he now your teacher? Have you traded My instructions for the word of a liar?”

It’s crucial for us to acknowledge the sin of entertaining falsehoods. Unless we realize our error, we will continue listening to the deceiver of souls, who wants to destroy us. To be set free from false thinking, we must look to our Maker alone for moral guidance. The opened eyes Satan promised our first parents laid them wide open to deceitful suggestions. We must vomit up and spit out the forbidden fruit of moral independence and learn to live by feeding upon every word that comes from the mouth of our Creator (Matthew 4:4).

“Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

Of course, the purpose of Satan’s deception was to get us not only to believe lies, but to disobey our Maker. Again, God is completely aware of our sins. Our answer to this question is for our benefit, not His. We cannot experience God’s healing forgiveness unless we fully acknowledge our disobedience.

This question also reminds us how much God cares about our welfare. His commandments, His directives, His rules-to-live-by, weren’t intended to stifle our happiness, but to secure it. God wants keep us from doing what harms us. We pave our own road to destruction by failing to realize the grave consequences of doing our own thing. Safety for the human soul lies only in living according to God’s will and ways.

This last question calls us to confess our sins, which is a direct path to divine mercy (Proverbs 28:13). What would have happened, if Adam and Eve had responded in confession and repentance? Perhaps human history would have been quite different. God was kind to them in the midst of their newly fallen world, but He never got to show them the “mercy” bestowed on those who confess and renounce their sins, because they didn’t do it. Instead, as they had tried to hide their bodies with fig leaves, they tried to cover their sin with excuses.

How Will We Answer God’s Questions?

God still asks fallen humans, “Where are you? Who have you been listening to? Did you fail to do what I told you?” Try to answer them while reviewing the circumstances and situations you experience, the mass of information you receive, the various failures and shortcomings you bring into your earthly journey. These three questions reveal the heart of the God Who asks them. He is our loving Creator Who seeks to find us, guide us and heal us.