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How has it been, then, from the beginning? God created us male and female—as individuals, naked and unashamed. We were created for relationship, reflecting his Trinitarian essence. We were designed to be given, spent, and poured out to others, not to use and abuse others to gratify ourselves. The hardness of our hearts in sin and separation has made abuse of the other ubiquitous. Through marriage, we participate in a mystery, reflecting how God relates to and loves himself in the Trinity, where each person mutually submits to and loves the other fully. Therefore, we are called to withhold nothing from our spouse in the same way the Godhead does—not just by God's law, but by our very design as humans in the image of God.
In the "becoming one flesh" of sex, "each takes the other in, expanding the meaning of self." Only in such self-giving marital love can a man or woman make sense of himself or herself as a gift; it is a perversion of marriage—God's creation of marriage—to do otherwise. We are not our own. Procreation, God's invitation for us to join him as co-creators, is the procession of life springing from the mutual love of the two who are one flesh, in the same way that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Although this volume does not address contraception directly, the theo-logic flows from here—to deny one another by refusing to be open to procreation points to deeper spiritual trouble. It is a withholding of self from the one person with whom you image the Trinity. It is to deny the nature of God's creation of marriage and "being known."
The parallel is not exact, but it may be helpful to think of this teaching as typology, much in the same way that Jonathan Edwards saw Scripture and history as packed with typologies of Christ's work of redemption, with salvific types poking out all over. Catholics reading that last sentence will bristle, and they should. Sacramentality is not symbolism. It is the real thing—the invisible made visible. Or, as this text puts it: "Our bodies are sacramental—they make the invisible visible." And our bodies/ourselves only make sense as images of the divine. Torode's John Paul delivers this punch line early in the exploration: "Ultimately, man can only be understood in relation to God," and our lives as images of God.
In Purity of Heart, Torode unfolds John Paul's reflections on how the Sermon on the Mount bears on these relationships—man and woman to God, and man to woman. It is in our bodies that our "nuptial meaning" is revealed. By virtue of our capacity for physical unity, we learn that we can be a gift and even develop in our capacity to give ourselves. But the battle remains not in the body, but in the body's command center—the heart. Lust distorts the nuptial meaning of the body, makes objects out of subjects, and appropriates rather than unites. It is in the heart where that nuptial meaning is either nurtured and celebrated, or (as it's put in the original) "habitually threatened."
This is a "total vision of man," a comprehensive theological anthropology. The theology of the body expands the boundaries of our theological imagination, going beyond the "Christian gender debates"—who's in charge, who sinned first, and who gets to make the decisions in a family—and way beyond the debate of equality versus complementarity. Finally, the theology of the body gives an ethic to marriage as part of God's plan for our lives. It is not just a "chosen lifestyle." In the end, marriage and sex are God's, and we had better think of both as such.
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