Welcome to a breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of

unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

45 years ago, Pope John Paul II began a series of sermons that would eventually become known as his theology of the body.

Beginning in Genesis and ending with the resurrection, the Pope outlined a biblical understanding of the body and its unique role in

manifesting God's glory in his creation.

The undertaking proved to be quite prescient,

addressing a host of hotly debated issues that had emerged such as birth control and artificial reproductive

technologies, but also anticipated others like surrogacy, the definition of marriage,

sexual ethics, the definition of gender, and the crisis of identity.

Now core to the theology of the body is an understanding that the body is a fundamental,

not incidental aspect of who God made us to be.

From the creation account all the way to the resurrection accounts,

the body's not considered in scripture to be some kind of accident of creation

or an afterthought of God.

Nor is it something that can be shed or graduated from or should be mistreated.

Rather, the body is essential to our design as human beings made in the image of God. At the heart of the theology is an idea that our bodies

are actually good gifts given to us by God. Now of course scripture describes all of

creation this way as an expression of the generosity and good pleasure of God

and in this sense creations neither earn nor is it owed nor is it something that we own

and can do whatever we want with. No creation is something that God owns and

God gives. And as with the rest of creation, our very existence body and soul is given by God. Genesis 2 describes how God fashioned the first human from the dust of the earth, that's physical, and then breathed into him the breath of life, spiritual, and man became a human soul, the text says.

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