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”.

EarthEarthEarthEarthEarth!

The title isn’t a typo. Read it again, with new capitals and strategically placed dashes…

eart—He art—Heart—Hear the art—h!

When merged together consecutively, the word “earth” spells repetitions of the phrase:

“He art, He art, He art,”

or the word:

“Heart, Heart, Heart,”

or the imperative sentence:

“Hear the art, Hear the art, Hear the art.”

As far as I know, this spelling trick with our planet’s name works only in English, and it’s not something I came up. The interesting story of how I learned of it often comes to mind when I look at the painting I did using this word-play.

In January of 1996, I acted upon a growing desire to learn art by enrolling in an elementary drawing class at a local community college. I ended up taking one each semester, a total of 11 art courses over a five year period.

In the last weeks of a “color theory” class, we were given a very regulated painting assignment for our final. Except for tints and tones, it was to contain just 3 colors. Only 3 sheets of letter-size paper could be used, taped together in any arrangement we chose. And the painting had to contain some form of lettering. I had trouble coming up with an idea for it. But one night shift I got some help from a patient I took care of in labor and delivery.

The previous nurse on the PM shift gave me a fairly straightforward report. It was this patient’s first pregnancy, and she wanted to try delivering without an epidural. For that reason, she’d requested to move to an “ABC” (alternative birth center) room, where she could shower and move more freely about the room to cope with her contractions. An ABC room was soon to be available....

But my dear coworker neglected a “biggie” in her report, which I discovered upon entering the room. As part of her way of dealing with labor, my patient was laboring in the nude. After making sure she didn’t mind having a male nurse, I began to work with her as I would with any other patient.

Most moms don’t labor totally naked, but the sight of bare body parts was as normal in my OB job as it was in the figure drawing class I’d taken at the college. Both healthcare and that specific art class can help a person see nakedness with new eyes. They heighten awareness and appreciation of our anatomy’s “fearfully and wonderfully made” beauty, rather than treating nudity in terms of sex appeal, which is the ongoing obsession of our depraved culture. Nursing and art didn’t dull my vision; they healed it.When I saw this patient’s lovely pregnant form fully exposed, I began imagining the challenge of capturing it on paper in charcoal or pastel.

My way of keeping my nursing care human-friendly was to try having normal social conversations with patients and their families. That’s how I discovered that my patient was an artist. When I shared my own love for art, she gave me a wonderful gift: “EarthEarthEarth.” She explained how running the word “earth” together spells those three things: “heart,” “he art,” and “hear the art.” Immediately, I envisioned the possibilities of using this in my art assignment.

Much to my teacher’s consternation, I was the first of his students in this assignment ever to cut up my three sheets of paper and paste them into a polygon. It was the only shape I could make to fit the circular nature of my project while staying within his limit of 3 sheets of paper. He also chided me for choosing the primaries for my 3 colors, but I told him my composition needed them.

I wanted my art-piece to preach, and I think it did by displaying Earth’s dependence on the Triune Godhead. God is Creator: “HE ART!” God is Lover: “HEART!” God is Teacher: “HEAR THE ART!”

The magnificent beauty of creation came from the mind and hand of an Almighty Father. The gracious redemption of Earth’s wayward human population came from the bleeding heart of God’s loving Son. The call and counsel for us to see and enjoy the divine artistry of Earth’s Designer come from the Holy Spirit. All Three Members of the Trinity are personally connected with the story of Earth, and Earth itself, as a uniquely designed and carefully placed planet, points to our need for personally connecting with its Triune Creator. (addendum) Some months after posting this blog article, I wrote a poem about it.... EARTH, EARTH, EARTH

He Art, He Art He Art He Art,
before . . . behind our earthly start,
when—by His strong creative hand
that formed the sea and motherland—
He sculpted dust for lasting worth:
He Art, HE art made EArtH EartH Earth.

His Heart, His Heart, His Heart Heart Heart,
seeking a world that fell apart,
pursuing souls who breathed His breath
to rescue them from realms of death—
re-image them by second birth:
His Heart, Heart Heart for eartH earth Earth.

Now Hear the Art . . . yes, Hear the Art,
Who sings, a course divine to chart!
Inspiring Guide for human tales
blows living breeze to hoist our sails!
His wind instills artistic mirth:
O, Hear the Art call eArtH EartH Earth!

Lost children of this groaning Earth,
return and find your pristine worth
as portraits of the Triune Love
in Father, Savior, Spirit Dove:
re-taste what Life and Light impart
from He Art, Heart, and Hear the Art!

— David L. Hatton, 6/28/2016

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.’”

POEMS BETWEEN BIRTH AND RESURRECTION - Introduction

(My books are available on Amazon at this link.)

(Before becoming a preacher, a nurse, an amateur artist, or a massage therapist, I was a poet. I still am. Getting my poetry published in more than homemade binders had been a dream for years. Health challenges and the rise of modern book-publishing technology merged to motivate me to make the effort. This and my other books are published through Kindle Direct Publishing in both paperback and Kindle editions.

I wanted to put the introductory essays for each poetry collection on my blog. If you want to know what makes me tick, my poems tell it better than a biography.

This "Introduction" and the concluding poem are from my 4th book of poems. To read the posts from my others, click on these links:

Poems Between Heaven and Hell

Poems Between Darkness and Light;

Poems Between Death and Life;

Poems Between Here and Beyond;

Poems Between Fear and Faith;

Poems Between the Beginning and the End.)

“Introduction” to

Poems Between Birth and Resurrection

My life journey has brought me delightful discoveries, all of them best described in their relationship to love and truth. Loving brings joy, whether through sending a check to a worthy cause, putting extra care into someone’s body-work massage, or holding my wife in an affectionate embrace. Joy rises especially strong when a sudden burst of love for God overflows in silent, verbal, or poetic praise. But love’s nature is fully experienced only when fully reciprocated. I find the same joy in loving as in being loved and appreciated, whether by my wife, family, Christian friends, hospital co-workers, or grateful new parents I’ve helped with newborns. Love returns to us in sincere “thank you” notes, in spontaneous hugs, in a silent presence at times of grief. The God of love has prescribed equally mixed proportions of loving and being loved as the divine epoxy glue that binds human hearts together. He ordains this mutually reciprocating love to characterize our journey from the womb to the tomb. It’s our calling during this present life and for the eternal glory beyond it.

In a similar way, love itself must be tempered with truth, and vice versa. As loving draws us closer to the God of love, so discovering and embracing truth draws us closer to the God of truth. Truth liberates love from the dysfunctional rut of sentimental lies. Love emancipates truth from the chains of stifling legalisms. The wedding of love and truth gives birth both to an abundant life and to an authentic lifestyle.

Two special theological truths make the Christian Gospel the most alive and human-friendly faith in existence. One is the Incarnation. God, our Creator, “became flesh to dwell among us.” He was born into this world as a real human being to teach us, as our Master; to die for us, as our Redeemer; and to restore us and the rest of creation, as our Deliverer. The other human-friendly truth is the Resurrection. This same incarnate God-Man was physically raised from death to be the body-spirit Mediator and priestly Ruler of all worlds, cosmic and celestial. His bodily resurrection is the guarantee of our own, for which the whole “creation waits in eager expectation” (Romans 8:19-23). In His own physically resurrected human body, God—as King of the universe—will forever lead the rest of redeemed and resurrected humanity in ruling over the whole material and spiritual creation. Nothing is more human-friendly than these two truths: in His Incarnation, Jesus is Savior; in His Resurrection, Jesus is Lord.

In my journey of digging out rich gems from these two deep mines of doctrinal truth, I’ve had to grapple with some human-unfriendly attitudes toward the material world, and toward our physical bodies in particular, which seem firmly embedded in the popular “Christian” view of earthly life. This first happened in my job as an RN, when my frank view of unclad female bodies didn’t arouse in me the immoral, lustful thoughts that all my life had been faithfully preached to me as inevitable. Many years of experiencing this discrepancy between religious teaching and realized truth led to intense research about the phenomenon of human nakedness, not just by a careful review of Scripture, but by a laborious investigation of various historical, aesthetic, and psycho-social disciplines. The resulting fruits of this educational pursuit was nothing less than a major paradigm shift in my thinking. That bold intellectual endeavor helped me see the heretical Gnostic influences behind the “body shame” issues in the typical modern church. It led me full circle, back to the awesome implications for human destiny in those two doctrines, Christ’s Incarnation and His Resurrection.

Some people do personal journaling. I do poetic journeying. My poetry often records personal experiences of love and truth during my earthly sojourn. The title of this fourth book of my poetry, Poems Between Birth and Resurrection, describes the source of many of the themes in my poetry since the turn of the century. Much in the world has changed, especially in this last decade, and much has changed in me. A poet’s poems cannot help being autobiographical, but I’ve always wished mine to be prophetic, in the sense of proclaiming truth that corrects and reforms.

Contemplating the truths of the incarnate birth and resurrection of God’s Son have brought my theological thinking “down to earth,” where it belongs. I’ve gained a new awareness of humanity’s original, God-given responsibilities as body-spirit beings, and of our duty to recognize the God-pronounced goodness of this physical world, even while it still groans under sin’s curse. These twin doctrines have dramatically changed my attitude toward the wholesomeness of the human body, with or without man-made, fig-leaf dress.

This shift in attitude toward human embodiment led me into taking art classes, learning massage therapy, and trying to practice natural ways of health maintenance. These involvements, overflowing into my poetry, reveal the direction and depth of this conceptual shift. If I sometimes sound radical and startling, it’s on purpose. Shocking minds to alertness is often the only effective prelude to dislodging long-believed lies and sacred half-truths. If the surprising reality about the human body hadn’t jolted me awake, I couldn’t share some of these poems. I felt consciously called to write them, and now feel relieved of a prophetic burden in publishing them. Through them, I hope my readers can experience an epiphany similar to what gave them birth.

God bless your journey between birth and resurrection! May these poems inspire your life as they have mine. Don’t miss any of your life’s mission in the here-and-now by an otherworldly focus on the hereafter. God intends our eternal life in Christ to be lived out with overflowing abundance in these “fearfully and wonderfully made” earthen vessels from the cradle to the grave, and beyond.

— David L. Hatton

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GOD’S NAKED LAMB


When Jesus died stark naked on the Tree
Prescribed by Roman minds for cruelty,
Shrewd Pilate had his will against the hoard
Who pushed his hand to crucify our Lord.
Above Christ’s head he made the placard stay
That said, “Here dies the King of Jews today.”

Stripped to the skin of every Jewish thread,
His body, bare, had one thing left they read
That marked His place distinctly by the sign
Of promise in the Abrahamic line:
That tender cut received eight days from birth
To seal God’s vow of blessing all the earth.

But we, who like to cover up His loins,
Forgetting how He went for thirty coins
The way nude slaves did in the marketplace,
We blush to look, so miss the glow of grace
That shines from His exposed humanity
To light salvation’s path to sanity.

The unclad body of our Lord displayed
That God took up the very flesh He made
To show by sacrifice without His robe
That every human tribe around the globe
Was purchased in a body like their own.
We see this in God’s naked Lamb alone.

— David L. Hatton, 2/14/2008
(Poems Between Birth and Resurrection,  © 2013)

For more single poems from this volume, visit my website's “Poetry Page.”

PORNOGRAPHY IN THE PULPIT

Michelangelo's David 

How can American Christians not fall into porn problems, when they’ve sat for years under preaching that paints a pornographic image of the body on the video-screen of their minds?

Among the questions addressed in one of the 700 Club’s “Bring It On-Line” sessions (link) was this art student’s concern:

I am pursuing a Fine Arts degree, and I am having trouble reconciling my Christian faith with this environment. Specifically, I have been asked to draw nude models and peruse through nude artwork. I know that many Christian artists, even ones during the Renaissance, painted nude portraits (including Michelangelo). But I think it’s pornographic and shouldn’t be portrayed as “art.” What’s your perspective? – K. R.

Pat Robertson’s response was excellent:

Life Drawing Class

Pornea has to do with sexual intercourse. That’s what the Greek word means. The human body is not pornographic. It was made by God, and Adam and Eve didn’t have any clothes on, when they were first created. So God Himself doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the human body. And you look at the David that Michelangelo did, and it’s so magnificent . . . a statue of a naked man, but it’s a magnificent piece of art. So, I don't think it’s pornographic. If you think it’s pornographic, then don’t do it. . . . But the truth is, you know, male and female models have been doing art forever, and I don’t see anything wrong with it.

As an L&D nurse, I see real-life pregnant bodies as nude as artist’s models are in “life drawing” classes. But when I made the following artistic representation of pregnancy, a devoted sister-in-Christ called it “pornographic.” My firm reply to her was that nothing in God’s beautiful design of the human form is indecent or pornographic.

Pregnancy by DLH

Why is this pornographic view of the naked human body so popular and widespread among Christians in America? Pat Robertson’s hint that pornography “has to do with sexual intercourse” gives us a clue. But a quote from Madeleine L’Engle’s book, Walking on Water (pp. 187-188), offers even more insight:

I would not hide the human body . . . , as though it was something to be ashamed of—though neither would I flaunt it. Let it be natural and holy. The incarnation was a total affirmation of the dignity of this body, and Paul goes on to emphasize that we are, moreover, the temple of the Holy Spirit, and if we abuse or reject or ignore our bodies we are abusing and rejecting and ignoring this temple. // I was both amused and appalled in a rotunda in the Prado, filled with Greek and Roman statues, to see that all the genitals had been removed, and covered with some kind of leaf. This prudery is in itself a form of pornography. (bold emphasis mine)

Her observation nails it! God did not create porn. We did, by creating a sexual focus when it comes to the nude body. In the beginning, this was not so.

Scripture’s very first description of humans implies gender-distinguishing genitals: “male and female He created them” (Gen 1:27). We still identify newborns as “him” or “her” by looking between the legs. God’s first command was for us to use that equipment properly: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28). By creating us naked, God made our procreative and gender-identifying anatomy fully visible. He included human nudity in evaluating “all” His handiwork as “very good” (Gen 1:31). Believers overlook this at great cost to themselves and to society, and they do so with the same diabolical help that misled our first parents into adopting a pornographic view of their own bodies.

The Original Sin (Sistine Chapel)

I challenge anyone to find a Bible commentary that honestly addresses what God asked Adam when He found him “afraid” of his nudity: “Who told you that you were naked?” (Gen 3:10-11). Great Bible scholars either entirely skip over it or boldly change His words to mean “What made you conscious of nakedness?” Why did they avoid God’s direct implication that Satan played a role in the adoption of body shame by the first human sinners? Does this divine question embarrassingly expose the deceptive source of our own fear of nudity? What could salvage Christian prudery if it was actually a liar “who told”our first parents that naked genitals should be hidden (with fig-leaf “loincloths,” Gen 3:7)? Is our religious devotion to a sexualized view of the nude body so sacred that even Christian teachers feel free to ignore the light God shed on its satanic origin?

Judging from modern body-image dysfunctions, our society’s porn-addiction epidemic, the objectification of the body in human trafficking, and the contemporary trends of gender-confusion in politics, Satan had an extremely far-reaching strategy in his original deceit. Hiding gender-distinctive body parts objectifies them, creating a sexual focus on what’s hidden. Satan knew this would create a doorway for pornea. His informational influence after getting humans “opened” to decide “good and evil” on their own—apart from divine guidance (Gen 3:5)—has been the fountainhead of human sexual waywardness ever since.

The root-word definition of pornography relates to a picture (imaged or written) of fornication. God’s own portrayal of the human body is very clear: “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psa 139:14). So, who is the gatekeeper on depicting it as a stimulus of unholy passions? The success of those who shoot and sell nude sex scenes depends on a much more fundamental portrayal of the body’s obscenity: the view held and promoted by popular Christianity. Society’s investment in Western Christendom’s perpetuation of Satan’s original lie is the sustaining power behind our culture’s exploitation of nudity. Commercial pornographers exist for business only because conceptual pornographers persist in painting this perverted picture.

From art students claiming this porno-prudery as part of their “faith” to preachers exhorting men to “bounce their eyes” at women, the bulk of American believers need to abandon this ungodly, Creator-dishonoring deception. Only by eliminating what porn profits from—the church’s pornographic fantasies about the nude body—can we effectively fight the naked obscenities of the porn industry. Either we stand with the Original Designer of beauty and glory in the unclad human body or we join as accomplices of the original pornographer who deceived us in the first place.

(for further reading, see my blog article Prudery and Porn Addiction, my website article Incarnational Truth about Humanity’s Sexual Nature (Doing Body-friendly Theology Free from Gnostic Prudery) or read my novelette Meeting at the River to explore the biblical research behind my reason for treating this issue of body acceptance so seriously.)

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.

PRUDERY AND PORN ADDICTION

Prudery portrays nudity as a stimulus for sexual lust. That’s exactly how pornography sees it. This pair—born from the same sex-obsessed conception of our fleshly embodiment—are twins. Both obscure a holy vision of the physical human form with “vain imaginations.” As two sides of the same coin, together they buy an ungodly distortion of our “fearfully and wonderfully made” anatomy.

Prudery hides the body, calling God’s “temple” a lustful indecency. Profiting from that definition, pornography flaunts the Creator’s handiwork to stimulate the lust prudery predicts. Both ways of treating the body are unnatural, unrealistic and abusive. Purported to be opposites, they are conceptually identical. Both of them dishonor God by turning the incarnation of His image into a lustful temptation.

Christians have notoriously maintained the worst of these two viewpoints, which I stigmatize as porno-prudery, because it lays the essential groundwork for our “pornified” culture. Whenever a wholesome, godly view of the naked body is rejected and a shameful, obscene view embraced, the zeal of prudery inevitably plunges society into the hellish depravity of pornography.

Why do modern mission agencies train interns not to mix Western dress with their Gospel to naked people groups? History’s painful lesson is that such “modesty” devastated undressed cultures with the same lascivious chaos raging in the dressed-up West. Why no official apology for this infamous error committed by Victorian predecessors? Is it because the same erroneous attitude of body shame still survives and thrives in their supporting churches?

Sadly, its allegiance to porno-prudery condemns the modern church to struggle with porn addiction to the same degree as the surrounding culture. Its legalistic methods to curb this epidemic fail miserably, because none of them address the real problem: a pornographic view of the body. As long as Christians treat the sight of certain body parts as the source of lust, they miss the real target. The human heart is where Jesus focuses His attention and healing power. When His followers seek help against porn addiction by applying external measures derived from a porno-prudish view of the body, it’s like using gasoline to put out a fire.

The way to combat the dehumanizing porn problem is to eliminate its symbiotic twin. Without porno-prudery, the power and momentum of porn is lost. Nakedness alone cannot hold the addict. Pornography's hook is the fantasy, the perversion, the lie. Jesus said the truth would set us free (John 8:32). The “Naked Truth” of the ancient fable can quickly undo the chains of bondage forged by porn and prudery. Unadorned Truth shows us the body the way its Creator sees it. Truth soberly instructs us to replace body shame with body acceptance.

It took porno-prudery years to indoctrinate us. Naked Truth wins her converts in a few moments. Among them are painters and sculptors of the human form, who copy the Ultimate Artist's original design from nude models. Millions of them work in healthcare, where the sight of naked bodies is a daily routine. Some live and serve as cross-cultural workers among tribal people who have treated nudity as a social norm for thousands of years. Whatever porn and prudery long and laboriously taught these groups of fellow citizens, Naked Truth quickly and easily untaught them.

Such normal, nonsexual responses to nudity clearly undermine the credibility of those who support porno-prudery. As a desperate maneuver, its defenders may trivialize these examples as “merely contextual.” But, as for as the naked body itself, context is nothing; as for how it's presented, context is everything. Of this crucial difference between the body's moral and immoral presentations, porno-prudery seems stubbornly ignorant. For that fault alone, it deserves removal from all minds claiming to uphold morality. It certainly has no place at all in the hearts of those who believe the human body is the one structure in all of physical creation that our Maker calls a Self-portrait (Genesis 1:27).

(For a more thorough understanding of prudery's direct relationship to porn addiction, visit “My Chains Are Gone.”)

INTRODUCING MY BLOG

I like to learn, but I must teach. Discoveries delight the mind, but sharing them fulfills the heart. When I gain new perspectives on God, His Word, creation, or our place in it, I feel compelled to express them. This usually comes through prophetic prose or poetic verse, but occasionally in the form of visual artwork. This blog is my way of passing along those insights and inspirations to those interested.

In introducing my blog, let me first break apart and explain the wording of my name for it: “PastorDavidRN's DANCE with NAKED TRUTH.” Its long title is an important description.

My parents named me “David,” which means “beloved.” I’ve always appreciated that. Knowing my name’s literal Hebrew meaning helped me grow up with gratitude. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always felt thankful for being “beloved,” not just by my parents, but by God.

I really am a pastor, an ordained minister in The Wesleyan Church. Since 1996, I’ve served a small retirement community church sponsored by Faith Legacy Church. Many of the sermons I’ve preached there can be listened to on “My Sermons” webpage. Some of the insights shared on this blog came during this pastoral ministry to seniors.

I’m also really an RN, which now stands for Retired Nurse after I left hospital work in 2015. I got my nursing degree in 1981 and worked the ER for almost a decade. Then, cross-training to OB in 1991, I helped multiple thousands of mothers give birth and breastfeed their babies. Meditation on the physical realities of life—so dynamically obvious in nursing—shaped much of my thinking about the embodied nature of our humanity.

Dance is a meaningful metaphor. Life rarely marches in a straight line. It spins and whirls, jumps and twirls. Also, we rarely dance solo. The dance floor of life is relational. I first used this illustrative term in my talk called, “The Dance of the Sexes.” All humans are in a dance, because we are made in the image of a Trinity Who have danced together forever.

Naked is another term with metaphorically rich meaning. Its reputation today, however, is smothered by prudish fear and sullied with pornographic filth. Hopefully, from time to time, I will offer an array of historical, cultural, theological, and psycho-social insights on nakedness that will help restore its human-friendly significance.

Truth is foundational for true love. Without it, love becomes wishful sentimentality, at best, and addictive fantasy, at worst. Jesus said “the truth” can liberate those enslaved to sin (John 8:31-36). We get the phrase “the naked truth” from an ancient fable that beautifully illustrates the nature of truth: “While Truth was bathing in a river, Falsehood stole her clothes, and rather than wear the rags Falsehood left behind, Truth went about thereafter naked and unadorned.” I wrote a poem about this fable to expand upon its concepts.

Insights are epiphanies, realizations that are usually sudden and unbidden. Since they seem to come more frequently with age, I believe most of them arise from the workings of human reason. But they can also be God-given revelations. If so, they must always be checked against God’s Word, His authoritative revelation to us. Part of the reason I’m starting this blog is that I seem to have so many of them. If they touch on Christian doctrine, I won’t share them unless they can be shown not to contradict Scripture.

Inspirations are much like insights, but to me they serve as ignition points for creative expression. I have been writing poetry since early childhood. My love for proverbs, epigrams, and aphorisms has made me a collector of quotes and lured me into the challenging task of whittling ideas down to short, pithy and catchy sentences. Since 2006, I’ve begun to fulfill my dream doing of artwork. Some of all these areas of inspiration will appear on the blog.

God is my King. My life and my thoughts revolve around Him. If I hear His existence doubted, my reason goes into gear to prove Him real. If I hear Him maligned, my thoughts line up in ranks to defend His character. My goal is to love Him more. So, I can’t help but bring God into this blog, since He is not only its Lord but the motivation behind it.

Creation is everything else—all reality other than God. I have many insights and inspirations both about the handiwork of God and about His creative will in the continuity of human creativity. But there is one place where God and creation personally meet: the Incarnation. If you find my blog heavy on the implications of that doctrine, it’s because it has captivated the bulk of my thinking for years, and I will never tire of its riches in contemplation nor exhaust its depths by writing about the God-Man Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.

So, welcome to my blog—my dance with “the naked truth”—as it tries to offer my insights and inspirations concerning God and creation.