In September, Protestants gathered in Washington, D.C., to discuss, in a first-ever conference of its kind, what a Protestant theology of the body might look like. Topics ranged from singleness and celibacy to CRISPR and surrogacy, with much in between. I lectured on the history of contraceptive technology, considering Protestant theology for the female body. And there was much we could have covered but did not in our short time: disability, infertility, abortion, adoption, suffering, death, and so much more. There is rich ground to till. The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
In a recent essay for First Things, Carl Trueman said that we exist today in “a battle for the body.” “The status of the body as it relates to us as human persons,” Trueman posits, “seems to be the issue that lies, often unseen, behind many of the other more prominent debates of our age.”
Take, for example, the debate about what a woman is. Or, to be more church-centric, the many denominational splits that occur over issues of sex and gender, including the issue of same-sex marriage. Likewise, consider one of the primary reasons Christians (some of whom identify as “ex-vangelical”) “deconstruct”: The church’s teaching on sex, marriage, and gender. Debates about abortion, or IVF, or surrogacy—all these are related to Christian teaching on the body. Trueman is right: There is a battle for the body. But Protestants are late: the battle has been raging for a very long time. If we are to meet our secular, post-Christian culture with grace and truth on these matters, it will be the defining task of our age to embrace a robust and comprehensive theology of the body.