Review: Nancy Pearcy, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2018)
What makes someone human?
This question is at the heart of Nancy Pearcy’s most recent release, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. Pearcy brings her unique voice to some of the most important public cultural issues with which Christians are engaged.
After canvassing the classic cultural stoushes over sexual ethics, from same-sex marriage to abortion and euthanasia, Pearcy’s central thesis is that the core of our differences over sexual matters stem from an unspoken, radically opposed anthropology—that is, a deep-seated disagreement over what makes a person a person.
Pearcy asserts that the Christian “biblical ethic affirms a full-orbed, wholistic view of the person that supports human rights and dignity” (p.18). It is one based on a “rich, multidimensional view that says people have moral worth on all levels, physically and spiritually” (p. 48).
In the Christian worldview, every created person is given natural, inherent worth by the very nature of being a bearer of the imago dei, created in the image of God and indeed, knitted together and formed by God (Ps. 139:13). Personhood is not something earned, but given by God to everyone.
You might be surprised at the answers given by our secular elite to the same question. Pearcy summarises by stating that:
Some propose that personhood emerges when the developing organism begins to exhibit neural activity, feel pain, achieve a certain level of cognitive function or consciousness or intelligence, or even have a sense of the future (p.51).
For instance, the bioethicist Joseph Fletcher proposes fifteen qualities to define when human life is worthy of respect and protection (such as intelligence, self-awareness, self-control, a sense of time, concern for others, communication, curiosity, and neocortical function). Score too low on any measure and for Fletcher you do not qualify as a person. You are “mere biological life” (p.53). Hans Küng, the liberal Catholic theologian, muses that “a fertilised ovum evidently is human life but is not a person” whilst Princeton ethicist Peter Singer writes that the “life of a human organism begins at conception”, but “life of a person-…[a] being with some level of self awareness—does not begin so early” (p.53).
If this is true, being biologically human is not enough to be granted the status of “person”. Thus we have a new category of individual: the human non-person (p. 19). Individuals must earn the status of personhood, and the veritable cornucopia of rights that come along with personhood, by meeting an additional set of criteria—the ability to make decisions, exercise self-awareness, plan for the future and so on. Only those who meet these added conditions qualify as people with inherent value and worth.
In other words, who we are has no connection to our bodies. The real us resides in the “spirit, mind, will and feelings” (p. 31). The body is merely a “collection of physical systems—muscles, bones, organs and cells—providing no clue to who we are or how we should live” (p.31).
It is precisely at this point that Pearcy begins to unravel the thread of secular dualism:
If human life does not matter simply and merely because it is human, this means that moral worth becomes subjective and a matter of who has the power to decide.
And we already know what happens then:
History shows that once we create categories of differing worth, those humans denigrated by the political power structure as having less value are exploited, oppressed, and killed (p. 102).
Any definition of personhood that is not connected to simply being human is subjective and arbitrary.
Any definition of personhood that is not connected to simply being human is subjective and arbitrary. Whoever then gets to decide personhood, either the cultural elites through cultural influence or the governing state wields the power between life and death, being personhood and “human non-person”.
How does this play out on the ground floor?
Pearcy turns her Schaeffer-inspired diagnostic tool to six key areas, each of which she claims can be explained and combatted through a correct understanding of the worldview that underpins them.
In “The Joy of Death”, she outlines how the divorce between the body and personhood has led to increased support for abortion despite science clarifying the issue of whether life begins at conception—when personhood doesn’t begin at life, it doesn’t matter when life begins. “Dear Valued Constituent” looks at euthanasia and the difficulty of ascertaining when someone ceases to become a person.
“Schizoid Sex” takes a deeper look at the hookup culture of the sexual revolution and beyond and the devaluation of our bodies. “The Body Impolitic” and “Transgender, Transreality” turn to same-sex attraction and transgenderism and the problems that occur when we remove our bodies as guides to our own sexuality.
The final chapter, “The Goddess of Choice is Dead”, turns from the individual to our culture as a whole and the potential repercussions we may be sowing for ourselves.
If you’re wondering what has happened to the pulse of humanity in the world’s cultural narrative, Love Thy Body puts its finger squarely on the problem. We’ve become “alienated from ourselves. What was meant to be whole and integrated—our mind, body, and spirit—is now deeply fractured” (p. 222). We’ve moved into a form of psychological gymnastics that has led us down a dreary path where the body itself has been drained of its moral and personal significance.
May Pearcy’s words be a helpful guide as to our next steps:
Christians must once again become known as those who honour the whole body . . . People must be drawn in by a vision that attracts them by offering a more appealing, more life affirming worldview. Christians must present biblical morality in a way that reveals the beauty of the biblical view of the human person so that people actually want it to be true.
