Christopher West on Redeeming Human Sexuality through Theology of the Body

Join hosts Karen Potter and Theo McManigal in this powerful episode of the Covenant Eyes Podcast as they welcome renowned Catholic speaker and author Christopher West of the Theology of the Body Institute. In this inspiring conversation, Christopher unpacks the Theology of the Body, shares his personal story, and explores how Christian parents can raise their children with a biblical understanding of sexuality in today’s oversexualized culture.

🔥 Topics Covered:
✔️ Christopher's personal awakening and faith journey
✔️ The truth about Eros, Agape, and God's plan for love
✔️ Why sexuality is under spiritual attack
✔️ The difference between redemption from sexuality and of sexuality
✔️ Parenting advice on instilling biblical sexual ethics in children
✔️ How to combat pornographic culture with Gospel-centered truth

📖 Mentioned in this episode:
Theology of the Body Institute: https://www.theologyofthebody.com
Books by Christopher West
Saint John Paul II's teaching on human sexuality
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#TheologyOfTheBody #ChristopherWest #CovenantEyes #ChristianSexuality #ParentingTips #FaithAndCulture #PurityCulture #AntiPorn #ErosAndAgape

CHAPTERS:
00:00  | Intro – Welcome Back to the Covenant Eyes Podcast      
00:24  | Guest Introduction: Christopher West’s Background      
01:50  | Christopher’s Journey from Desire to Redemption        
06:40  | What is the Theology of the Body?                      
10:15 | Eros vs. Porn: Reclaiming Sexual Desire                
14:00 | The Wedding at Cana and the Symbolism of Wine          
18:00 | Teaching Kids About Biblical Sexuality                 
21:00 | Gird Your Loins with Truth – Raising Resilient Children
25:00 | Satan’s Envy of the Human Body and Co-Creation         
29:20 | Final Message of Hope & Redemption                   
30:45 | Closing Remarks & Resources

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Transcript

0:06

Hey, welcome back to the Covenant Eyes podcast. We're so glad to have you joining us again today for a great episode, Theo. Welcome back to the podcast. I know we're excited about today's conversation, Karen. As always, it's great to be hosting with you. Yes, we got a fantastic conversation coming up today. Absolutely. We are going to be talking with Christopher West with the theology of the Body Institute, and he never disappoints. He brings the he he brings the truth. I love it every single time he joins us. So Theo, with that, would you mind introducing Christopher and giving his bio? Absolutely. Christopher West co-founder, president and senior lecturer of the theology of the Body Institute and professor of Theological Anthropology and the jointly sponsored master program with Pontifex University. His global lecturing, bestselling books, multiple audio and video programs, and popular podcast co-hosted by his wife Wendy have made him one of the world's most recognized teachers of Saint John Paul the Second's theology of the body. Christopher West is the author of more than a dozen books, including Word Made Flesh, cycles A, B, and C theology of the Body Explained theology of the body for beginners, and Good News About Sex and Marriage. His work has been featured in The New York Times, on ABC news, MSNBC and Fox News, and on countless Catholic and evangelical media platforms. Christopher West. Thank you for joining us today. How are you? I'm well, Theo and Karen, it's great to be with you, and I so appreciate the good work you guys are doing and happy to be part of it. Well thank you. You know, we like to start off by just letting our guests know a little bit about how you got started, why you got started with the theology of the body and where did that passion come from? So many years back? Yeah, well, I have to take you back to my childhood days in the 70s. I had this experience one night, lying in bed, and Bruce Springsteen came on the radio singing his 70s anthem Born to Run, and it cracked something open in me. I don't it set me on a journey. And. And years later, I read Bruce Springsteen say when he wrote Born to Run, he said I wanted people to feel something and that they had to go chase after something. And that's exactly what happened to me. I was eight years old and and I, I awakened I that song awakened in me a yearning I can't explain it, a yearning that set me on a journey to seek happiness, to seek fulfillment, to seek love. One of the lines in the song is I want to know if love is wild. I want to know if love is real. Well, yeah, I wanted to know that and I, I was raised in the Catholic Church in the 70s and 80s, and, and I was raised when it came to that yearning, that hunger, that desire. I was raised on what you might call the starvation diet gospel. The basic message was your desires are bad. They're only going to get you in trouble. You need to repress all that. But follow all these rules and you'll be a good, upstanding Christian citizen. Well, that wasn't going to cut it for me. I was a hungry dude. So I became a quick convert in my teenage years to what I've come to call the fast food gospel, which is the secular culture's promise of immediate gratification for the hunger. And I don't want anybody to lie to me. Those chicken nuggets taste pretty good going down, especially when you're really hungry. But if that becomes your steady diet, as it did for me in my teenage years, eventually the grease and the sodium is going to catch up with you. And that's a picture of me in my college years in the late 80s. I fell on my knees in a college dorm saying, God in heaven, if you exist, you better show me why you gave me all these desires. Because they're getting me and everybody I know into a hell of a lot of trouble. What is your plan? And I kept seeking and seeking. And a few years later, now I'm in my my early to mid 20s, I discovered the teaching of this crazy Polish guy, known to the world as Pope John Paul the Second. He was the pope of my childhood. This teaching called theology of the body. And and I remember reading it for the first time. I was 24 years old, and I felt like he was speaking right to my heart and saying, Christopher, do you remember that yearning that God awakened in your heart when you heard that Bruce Springsteen song? Do you remember that awaken that yearning that God awakened in your heart when when Stacy Reed sat next to you in third grade? Yeah. Yeah, I sure do. Well, there's a name for that. And he says the church borrows her language from the Greeks and calls that yearning for for true joy, for true love, for true happiness. It's called eros. Eros. And I remember hearing getting introduced to this word in the Greek. And I thought, well, in my mind, the erotic realm is synonymous with the pornographic realm, right? That's that's the fast food I had been bingeing on. And the Pope was saying to me, no, no, no, no, do not confuse the Greek word eros with the Greek word poornima, right where we get the word pornography. Porn is a twisting, a distortion of God's plan for erotic love. And God gave us eros. This is my analogy, but I got the idea from Gpt2. God gave us Eros to be like the fuel of a rocket that is, that that has the power to launch us towards the stars. But here's the tragedy. With Original Sin, our rocket engines got inverted. And so we go out into the world looking for love, looking for happiness. But it backfires on us. And what I learned from John Paul the Second was Christ came into the world not to condemn those with inverted rocket engines. He came into the world to redirect our rocket engines to the stars. I learned from him that Christianity is not a starvation diet. It's an invitation to a wedding feast. And Karen and Theo, when I discovered that in my mid 20s, I knew I had found certainly the answer to the crisis of my life, but also the answer to the crisis of our times. And I knew then I would spend the rest of my life studying this, teaching and sharing it with the world. And and I've had the privilege to do that over the last 30 plus years. Wow. That's amazing. Thank you for sharing with us. Wow. Those stories. And, you know, it's impressive. The, you know, how vividly you're able to recall all of that, but that is the beauty of, an authentic encounter with Christ and with ourselves. That that is a way of sticking with us. As we. And then, of course, leading us forward. Tell us a little bit more about how theology of the body can help us understand God's design for, human sexuality. I think the key to the whole thing is to recognize that Christ invites us not to experience a redemption from our sexuality, but to the experience, to experience the redemption of our sexuality. Right. That's the key. Not redemption from sexuality, redemption of sexuality. And if I could give you a visual here, this is my favorite visual. This is I want everybody to imagine if you're watching this, that this painting, this paper I'm holding up is a painting of man and woman. Just as God created us to be, right? When we were naked and felt no shame. Why were they naked without shame? John Paul the second tells us they were naked without shame because they experienced erotic desire as nothing but the desire to love as God loves, right? We're made in the image and likeness of God as male and female. This painting is an image of how God loves naked without shame. They realized they were called to love in the gift of self, right? Christ will ultimately reveal this in his own flesh by saying, this is my body given for you. That was the sentiment of erotic desire in the beginning. That's self-giving love the enemy. However, he hates this painting because this is an image of heaven. What does Saint Paul tell us? He tells us that the union of men and woman in one flesh is a great mystery that refers to Christ in the church, right? This painting is a great mystery that points us to heaven. That opens a window to heaven. That's why the enemy hates it. And this is what has happened to the painting. With the original sin, it got terribly twisted up and distorted. And here is the classic mistake of I'm going to put this in quotes. Spirit. Sure, people, because I put it in quotes because this is not authentic Christian spirituality. This is a, a false spirituality, but spiritual people in quotes discover this in its crumpled up form and they say, well, that's just looks like garbage. Throw it away. And so they're trying to experience a redemption from the body, redemption from sexuality. They throw the crumpled painting away. This is, not Christianity at all. That's a puritanical, fearful approach to Christianity. No, no, listen to this. Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, says in 1953, I started Playboy magazine as my personal response to the hurt and hypocrisy of Puritanism in my strict Christian upbringing. This is what, largely the culture has been raised on a puritanical, fearful approach to sexuality when it comes to what people typically think of Christian. And I'm putting that in quotes, right? Reject the body. We don't know what the body's for. I don't know why they're balloons floating behind my head, but I think it's because I went like this and it activated some weird program on myself. I wonder what that. So that's great. Hugh Hefner reaches into the trash can, calls this out, and starts saying to the modern world, you mustn't throw this away. And guess what? On this point, he was right. We shouldn't throw this away. But where was he wrong and wrong with horrific consequences for us all. He left the painting just like this in its crumpled up form, and he started celebrating this crumpled up, distorted picture of sexuality. And because most of us were raised on that starvation approach, throw it away. It's bad. When Hugh Hefner started showing us the greasy chicken nuggets, he's like, don't you want some of this? And we're like, yes, I'm hungry. Give me some of that. But you feast on that. And just like my life demonstrates, you're going to get really sick. Well, here's what John Paul the Second did for me. And this is what he's doing for the whole world. And this is why it is the answer to the crisis of our times. Right at the same time, Hugh Hefner started Playboy magazine, when John Paul the second was a young Polish priest. He also pulled this out of the trash can and started saying to the modern world, you mustn't throw this away. But he did something Hugh Hefner didn't do by reflecting on God's original plan for making us male and female, and by reflecting on what Saint Paul calls in Romans chapter eight, the redemption of our bodies, not redemption from redemption of our bodies. This young Polish priest started, crumpling this painting for the modern world and showing us who we really are restoring for us that original, beautiful, wonderful, glorious, pure vision of our humanity, male and female. This is called the redemption of the body, not redemption from the body. Redemption of sexuality, not redemption from sexuality. Right? If we're just throwing it all away, we aren't entering into the very reason Christ came into the world. So think about it from this perspective. Where did Christ perform his first miracle? At a wedding? At a wedding? And what did he do? What did he do with that wedding seal? He turned water into wine. So there's a married couple here who's run out of wine. Well, okay. They actually ran out of wine. It was a real celebration, and they actually ran out of wine. But there's a deeper symbolic meaning here in John Paul. The second says running out of wine is the symbol of original sin. Wine poured out for us is God's agape, sacrificial love right in the beginning, men and woman were naked without shame because they were drunk on God's wine. They were filled to overflowing with divine love. So in the beginning, eros or erotic love expressed agape divine love. This is what enabled them to be naked without shame. Well, what's going to happen to the sexual relationship if we all run out of wine? You cannot give what you do not have. The purpose of the sexual relationship, and God's plan is to share the love of God, to share the wine of God. But if you've run out of wine, when Eros gets cut off from agape, what you have is lust. What you have are two people using each other for their own selfish pleasure. The very first miracle of Jesus is to restore God's wine to erotic love. The very first miracle of Jesus is to redeem Eros by restoring agape. Only in this context can we understand when Saint Paul says, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church, and what does he say? Just a few verses earlier, he says, don't get drunk on wine, get drunk on the spirit, get drunk on the spirit. And what did they accuse the apostles of on Pentecost day, when the Holy Spirit fell on them? They thought they were drunk, and guess what they were? They were drunk on God's wine. The goal of the Christian life to live the redemption of our sexuality, not redemption from our sexuality. We have to be drunk on God's wine. There's no other way to live it. That's the goal of the Christian life, is to get totally drunk on God's wine. Only then can we learn how to love as we're called to love. That was a really good explanation, and I think that's a really interesting way to look at it. I think culture, you know, around us really is impacting how so many view, sexuality in general. Most people don't know how to measure whether porn is a problem. Well, now you can. Hi, I'm Mike Stone, producer of the Covenant Eyes podcast. At Covenant Eyes, we have created a short, free and confidential assessment called the Pause Test. That's porn addiction use severity. It's not about judgment. It's about understanding. So in just a few minutes, you'll get clarity on where you stand and what your next step could be. So take the free test now at 70 Aiso forward slash test. That's 70 year SCO forward slash test. Super short super simple. Now you've got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Now back to the show. I think culture, you know, around us really is impacting how so many of you, sexuality in general. I know that we hear a lot from parents. You know, they're really struggling on, you know, they don't want to expose kids to things. How do I protect them? Like, what do I need to teach and equip them with to be able to navigate the world? I'm sure you guys are confronted with those same challenges. So for the parents out there, what advice do you have and how can theology of the body help parents teach their children a biblical version of sexuality in an age appropriate ways, of course, but how do we use that? So I would say to all parents what I was just saying a moment ago, we we cannot give what we do not have. It is our responsibility as parents to do all that we are capable of doing in unfolding the beauty, the splendor, the glory, the dignity, the astounding wonder of what I've been calling the banquet, the banquet, the wedding feast, the wedding banquet of God's plan for man and woman. If we are not leading our children to the banquet, they are going to take their hunger to the fast food because the fast food is on display everywhere, right? But again, you can't give what you don't have. We have to immerse ourselves in this banquet. We have to take it in. We have to let it inform us and transform us to be able to pass it along to our children. It's it's kind of like if I were to draw an analogy, you know, people who eat a lot of garlic, they smell like garlic. It like, comes out their pores. Right? We have to take in this vision so deeply and so continually, regularly. We gotta eat a lot of garlic. And if we do, it will come out of our pores to our children. And, you know, I could. I have five children. My wife and I have raised five children. Most of them are in their 20s now. Some of them are already married and have children of their own, and all of our children would would have plenty of things to say about what we got wrong, what my wife and I got wrong. But I think they would also recognize that we we we tried to speak of God's plan for sexuality in the context of everyday life. It wasn't just this nervous conversation that we gathered around and said, now you're old enough and we have to have a talk, and we're really nervous about it. It was it was everyday life. Like putting our kids to bed for years and years. We would tuck our kids into bed and say something like this. Thank you, Lord, for this day. Thank you for making mommy to be a woman. Thank you for making daddy to be a man. Thank you for calling Mom and Dad to the sacrament of marriage. Thank you for bringing John, Paul and Thomas and Beth and Isaac and Grace into the world through Mommy and Daddy love. Thank you for making the boys to be boys. Help them to grow into strong men. To give their bodies away in love. Thank you for making the girls to be girls. Help them to grow into strong women. To give their bodies away in love. If they're called to marriage, please prepare them for their future spouse and wherever their future spouse we. We lift that person up right now in prayer. So I mean, that was that was every night for 20 whatever years that our kids grew up with and that that, you know, that putting it in the context of the holy, the sacred, this is where you come from. You came into the world through mommy and daddy love. And that that's a beautiful and wonderful thing. We have to find a language, a vocabulary, and a peace and comfort in ourselves so that we can open up these mysteries. And we have to frame it in the context of the battle between good and evil, right? Saint Paul tells us in Ephesians five that this is a great mystery that reveals the greatest good in the universe. Christ's love for the church. And then he says in the next chapter of his letter, you want to live what I was just telling you about. Get ready for a war and you want to win this war. You got to put on the armor of God. And the very first piece of armor Saint Paul says we have to put on to win this battle is to guard our loins with the truth. If our loins are not girded in the truth, boom! We're going to be taken out. We are going to be taken out. Gird your loins with the truth. It's the first thing we must do to win this battle. If we are not fighting the good fight ourselves, what hope do we have to equip our children to fight the good fight? We have to help them understand the difference between good and evil, and to understand, as John Paul the second says, that the truth of human sexuality takes us to the very center of the battle between good and evil, between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love. We're in a battle, but that battle has already been won by Christ on the cross. It isn't. The crucifixion isn't all about war against the value and dignity of Christ's body. And where is the dragon in revelations 12? He's right before the pregnant woman, and he wants to devour the child. The enemy from the very beginning has aimed all his diabolic fury at our creation as male and female, and our ability to bring new life into the world. Hey, we have to understand what is at stake. We have to understand who we are, whom we are fighting. We're not fighting flesh and blood. We're fighting principalities and powers that hate our sexuality. Scripture says that Satan fell out of envy. Well, what do we have that the fallen angels don't have bodies? And what do we get to do that the angels don't get to do we get to co-create with God. The good angels are an absolute all of our bodies in our fertility. When the angel Gabriel came to Mary, he wasn't absolute or that the God he worshiped was about to take flesh through this woman's fertility, right through this woman's womb. He was an absolute all but the fallen angels are an absolute envy of our bodies. And envy is not just, oh, I wish I had what you had. That's jealousy. But envy says, I hate that you have it, and I want you to hate that you have it too, right? There is a lot of body hatred. The end result of pornography is body hatred, because pornography invites us into idolizing the body, but we will eventually despise whatever we idolize because our idols never satisfied, they never give us what we want. And so we start to hate the thing that we once worshiped the sexual revolution, which is really I don't even like the term. It wasn't a sexual revolution. It was a pornographic revolution. It was a pornographic and contraceptive and abortion revolution. That's what it was. That's not a sexual revolution. That's a hatred of sexuality. Those who go to pornography don't love sexuality. They actually hate it. Those who use contraception and revert to abortion don't love sexuality. They actually hate it. They're trying to alter it. They're trying to change it into something. It's not right. If you really love sexuality as God created it to be, you would. You would honor it. You would honor it as God made it to be. And that that, that idolatry of the sexual will turn to a hatred of the sexual. And that's where we are now. The pornographic revolution began by idolizing the body. Now it's ending by despising the body. We have to teach our children the narrow way between idolatry and that despising or hatred of the body. There's this narrow way where we come to honor the body. We Revere the body. As Saint Paul says, those parts of our body that we think are less honorable. These parts of the body deserve all the greater honor, because God has bestowed on these parts of the body the greater glory. That's our marching orders right there to learn how to bestow on the sexual parts of our body the greater honor. Because God has bestowed on these parts of the body the greater glory. Why the greater glory here? Because this is what reveals that we're made in the image and likeness of God. God is not sexual. He's pure spirit. But in the life of the Trinity, the the God the Father, in a non-sexual way, in a purely spiritual way, a divine way. He is generating the sun for all eternity. He's generating the sun. God's love is generous. It generates. And this is where the fallen angels go. They hate this. They hate this about us, and they want us to hate it to. Blessed are those who take no offense at me. Jesus says, how do we take offense at our own bodies? Do we take offense that God as a body? Do we take offense at the fact that God wore diapers? Do we take offense at the fact that God was born of a woman and suckled that the breast of his mother? Does that make us cringe? Does that make us go ill? Gross. Why? Who told you that was gross? Who told you the body was pornographic? Who told you you were naked? Right. We've been listening to an enemy inform us about the meaning of our bodies since original sin. And we have to stop. Stop listening to that enemy informing us about our bodies. And we have to listen to the Holy Spirit, who is the third person of the Trinity, created all that exists, and God the Father, the son, and the Holy Spirit looked at everything they made and said, behold, it is very good. We overcome evil with good, and we have to understand, I'm sorry, I'm going on and on here, but I'll close with this. We have to understand this basic bedrock biblical principle. The devil doesn't have his own clay. The devil does not have his own clay. All he can do is take God's clay, which, behold, it's very good. And the enemy gets his hands on God's clay and twist it all up. We have to give our broken, twisted lives as they are to the living God who took flesh as a male child, born of a woman to redeem in masculinity and femininity. We have to give him our diseased images. We have to give them our disease ideas. We have to give him all those pornographic lies just as they are in our hearts and our minds, and say, here I am, Jesus. Come, Holy Spirit, into this twisted mess and untwist it in my life so that I might rediscover who I really am. That's the journey. And if parents aren't on that journey, there's no way possible that they could lead their children on that journey. The theology of the Body Institute exists to lead people on that journey. And if anybody wants to learn more, please watch our YouTube channel. Listen to our podcast, come to our courses either online, in person. We we are here to help people, help lead people on that journey. I love that. And what is the website address for you? The theology of the body.com. Great. We're going to put that in the show notes for all of our listeners. Well Christopher, we could probably go on for three hours with you. You are so knowledgeable and this is such a good conversation. I'm just loving it. But unfortunately, we have to bring today's episode to a close, and I do want to leave our listeners with just a message of hope. You know, it can seem overwhelming. You have shared so much wisdom with us. There's a lot to be done, a lot of work here, but we have God on our side. But let's leave our listeners with some hope of, you know, listen, thanks for the to look forward to. He will bring to completion the work he has begun in us. That is our hope and it doesn't matter where we are on that journey, we all have more to do. We all have to keep going. We're all pilgrims. I'm just a fellow pilgrim on the journey. I'm a broken man. I'm as broken as they come. I can look back and I can say thank you, Lord. By your grace I've come a long way. But I still have a long way to go. And our hope is this he will bring to completion the work he has begun on in us. And we just have to ask also for the grace to cooperate with that work. So, Lord, we ask right now, wherever we are on our journey, help us to treasure your promise in our hearts that you will bring to completion the work you have begun in us, and give us the grace today and tomorrow and the next day and every day of our lives. Just to say yes. To say yes to what you are already at work doing in our lives, wherever the obstacles are, Lord, wherever the fears are, we ask that your perfect love would cast out that fear where those disease and pornographic images have have warped our minds and our hearts and our capacity to love. We invite this great gift of the redemption of our bodies into those lies and into those diseased images, uncomfortable at all, and show us who we really are, Lord, and help us, help us in our weakness to unfold the beauty of this banquet for our children. We ask all this in the name of Jesus a. That is a perfect way to bring today's episode to a close. Christopher. Thank you so much for joining the Covenant Eyes podcast. It is always such an honor to speak with you. We hope that you'll come back and join us. Then maybe we can do a little longer segment so we can really dive into more of your wisdom. Karen and Theo, it's a pleasure. Thanks so much. All right. Well, thanks, Theo, for joining us too. It's been a great joy having you back and the the shotgun seat here of the podcast, I love it. You're always a pleasure to work with. And to all our listeners out there, thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Covenant Eyes podcast. We'll see you next time. Take care. God bless.