By DONALD DeMARCO
In December 1987, a group of distinguished Christian leaders, mostly evangelical, formed The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. An important factor that led to its formation was what these leaders perceived as “The widespread uncertainty and confusion in our culture regarding the complementary differences between masculinity and femininity.” The group’s first meeting took place in Danvers, Mass., and led to the production of a collection of 31 essays, appropriately called The Danvers Statement. Its final form was published the following year.
The CBMW expressed the hope that “the noble Biblical vision of sexual complementarity may yet win the mind and heart of Christ’s church.” To this end, the group was committed “To study and set forth the Biblical view of the relationship between men and women, especially in the home and in the church.” In addition, its members pledged “To encourage the confidence of lay people to study and understand for themselves the teaching of Scripture, especially on the issue of the relationships between men and women.”
Denial of the fundamental principles concerning the biblical views of the complementary relationship between men and women, according to the 30 members of the group, “will lead to increasingly destructive consequences in our families, our churches, and the culture at large.” The group was indeed prescient.
The Christian leaders of the CBMW group, despite the timeliness of their publication, had no idea of the extent to which the notion of the relationship between men and women would deteriorate, far beyond the level of “uncertainty and confusion” to what we have on display in 2022. Transition from one sex to another, even for children, is now mainstream and its proponents do not tolerate any discussion on the matter. Those who support the Biblical vision of the sexes are out on the defensive. In some instances, they have lost their jobs.
A simple example of the mainstream character of transgenderism provides an accurate snapshot of how it has been granted power and prestige. A Master Charge commercial portrays a transgendered person who is elated that his new name now appears on his credit card. “At last,” he happily exclaims, “my card shows the name I have chosen.” Transgendered people have a freedom of choice that is not readily available to those who populate the world of the non-transgendered. Master Charge, not Scripture, is now in charge!
A few years prior to the Danvers Statement, in September of 1979, Pope John Paul II launched his Theology of the Body. The first of four sections of this monumental work consist of twenty-three items of catechesis, drawing on the theme found in a phrase from Christ’s dispute with the Pharisees concerning the impermissibility of divorce: “Have you not read that He who made them from the beginning made them male and female?” (Matt. 19:4). John Paul expands on this theme in a way that is both scholarly and eminently readable.
The 130 texts in John Paul’s Theology of the Body concluded on November 1984. George Weigel, author of Witness to Hope, the authoritative biography of the Pope, has stated that if this work receives the attention it deserves, it “may prove to be the decisive moment in exorcising the Manichaean demon and its depreciation of human sexuality from Catholic moral theology.” Human sexuality is not, in itself, shameful; it is God-given.
Few theologians have taken the distinctiveness and relationship between the sexes as seriously as Pope John Paul II has. In the opinion of Weigel, the Theology of the Body is “a kind of time bomb set to go off, with dramatic consequence sometime in the third millennium of the Church.” It is, of course, still early in the millennium, though one might hear the faint sound of ticking.
While John Paul II affirms the Biblical vision of the sexes, he is careful to include a well-thought out anthropological realism that answers the question, “What is man?” In this case, theology and philosophy are perfectly in tune with each other. A human being is made to love and does not fulfill his humanity when he does not love. For John Paul, the “complete and definitive creation of ‘man’ occurs only when God created Eve. Men and women are made in the image of God not only intellectually and emotionally, but above all “through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning. . . . Man becomes the image of God . . . in the moment of communion.”
The Danvers Statement and Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body are in perfect mutual agreement. Moreover, they give added credibility to each other. They have reached a kind of ecumenical consensus. Together they make for timely reading, if one wants to understand the relationship between men and women on a level other than soundbites and mass media propaganda.
The complementarity between the sexes is critical for marriage and the family to fulfill their obligations. There is hardly anything more important in today’s confused world than getting right what is most essential.
Although the now sainted John Paul II completed his Theology of the Body some 28 years ago, it has not aged and remains timely reading. It is worth revisiting.
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