Saving Bodies

In “Pornography & Christology”, I put forward the argument that part of the cultural pull of pornography comes from its mimicry of theological motifs. Pornography is not simply the crassly materialistic exercise in sexuality that popular critiques of pornography lob at the practice of consuming pornography.

Instead, the argument that I put forward, both pieces like “Pornography & Christology” and elsewhere, is that the cultural stranglehold pornography wields has a lot to do with tapping into our God-given spiritual desires, playing on those desires and presenting distortions of what would satisfy those desires. In the case of the article, the argument was that pornography played on our need for a saviour, in particular a saviour from the banality of our everyday lives. To the extent that pornography preys on this need, pornography puts forward a soteriology and christology.

In focusing on dispensing my burden on this argument, I neglected to answer a crucial but related question. Given the role that bodies play in the trade of pornography, and given the crucial role bodies play in our salvation (I have touched on this topic in my book Redeeming Flesh), the question to be asked concerns what is happening to bodies when they effect its soteriological role. Put another way: what is happening to the body that is doing the saving?

It was in a re-reading of Graham Ward’s Cities of God, and finding a passage that I had often only glanced over, that I came across an answer. The short version is that it has everything to do with the way bodies are stretched in relation to other bodies.

In Cities of God, Ward makes much of the fact that, in the economy of salvation, the stretching of Christ’s body plays a central role, and the crucial event during which this stretching takes place is in Christ’s Passion, death and resurrection.

This stretching of Christ’s body is analogous to the stretching that takes place between the persons of the Trinity during the passion. For Ward, the crucifixion represents an extension of the distance between the persons of the Trinity. The passion therefore is, in Ward’s words, when “the Father [and the Spirit] is most separated from the Son and when the distance between them embraces the lower regions of hell”. In this distancing between the persons of the Trinity, Ward also observes that there is also “the expansion of the identified Word to embrace all that is other” (105).

In other words, as the persons of the Trinity extend and expand in their relation to one another, the body of Jesus (who is the fullness of revelation of the Triune God) also becomes extended and expanded. While there is a visual manifestation of this extension via his hanging on the cross, there is also another extension taking place within the economy of salvation.

As Ward argues, during His Passion (and I argue in Redeeming Flesh that this takes place in the events leading up to his Passion), Christ’s body becomes extended, distributed, and in the process, it becomes complexified and transgresses all distinctions we take for granted, the most fundamental of which is the distinction between one self and another. On the Cross, Christ’s body breaks into ours. Or more accurately, Christ’s crucified body opens up what Ward calls a liminal space into which our bodies are invited into a union. The broken body of Christ becomes a site of unity between one and another, and we are invited to ourselves become stretched and extended beyond our own world of concerns.

In short, it is precisely the body of Christ, stretched on the Cross, that becomes the site of union (that will in Christ’s words “draw all things into myself”), and it is precisely in that gathering into a union that our salvation is located.

A blessed Pasch to all.

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