Review: Vile Bodies. The Body in Christian Teaching, Faith and Practice.

This review appeared in Sofia magazine issue 152, ‘Resistance’.

By Adrian Thatcher. SCM Press (London 2023) Pbk. 278 pages.

Before reading Vile Bodies, I had no idea how alien the ancient understanding of bodies and sex were to ours. These ancient understandings seem risible to us now – and I did laugh many times reading this book – but the consequences of them are no laughing matter. The vilification of bodies by Christians have led to an awful litany of abuses, all examined in this book: ‘violence against women; spiritual abuse; racism; homophobia and sexual abuse.’

Vile Bodies offers incisive insights from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and other Christian writing into how human bodies are and were perceived in Christian faith and thought. This book reminded me of God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakapoulou, which was reviewed in Sofia issue 143 (March 2022) and well received by readers. The authors of both books are professors in the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of Exeter and Stravrakapoulou is thanked for her suggestions to the book.

Adrian Thatcher, unlike his colleague, writes from the perspective of being an Anglican theologian from the modern, liberal tradition. He is also managing editor of Modern Believing and a trustee of Modern Church. For this reason he goes beyond historical context, and also seeks to offer a more positive theology, This is a ‘post-abusive theology’, drawing on Linda Woodhead and Nicholas Peter Harvey’s book, Unknowing God, reviewed in Sofia 151 (March 2024).

Thatcher introduces the reader to the ancient views of bodies using the example of the Levitical law on female ‘pollution.’ According to Leviticus, women are unclean when they have their periods and after they give birth. If they give birth to a boy, they are unclean for 33 days, if a girl, for 66 days. Apart from the obvious sexism of the whole thing, the specific time difference is odd.

When these laws were codified, there was a ubiquitous belief that male foetuses were two-times ‘more perfect’ than female. By a strange leap of reason, the male foetus would therefore develop in that a boy ‘moved first’ in the womb remained common in Europe well into the 18th century. In ancient times, there was only thought to be one sex: man. Man referred to all humankind, but reviews there were two forms of man, a stronger and more perfect male form, and the weaker female form. Both forms had the same genitals but the female form was ‘inverted’. Males had more blood and converted some of this into sperm, carrying life. Females couldn’t produce sperm, instead losing their excess blood in menstruation or, during pregnancy, to nourish the foetus.

This book is even-handed in its contextualising of scripture. For example, Paul’s statement that ‘there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ is a favourite of progressive Christians for its advocacy of equality. However, this interpretation ‘unfortunately overlooks that unity and equality are very different concepts. Unity is more consistent with hierarchy.’ Paul meant that, ‘the cessation of sexual difference happens by the elimination, not the transformation of the female.’

Whatever Paul meant does not need to stop us from making our own interpretation today. ‘To re vision is to see afresh, with different eyes, and to promote interpretation that engage with such texts with the sexed and gendered understandings of our own time, and with conscious liberatory intent.’

By the 17th century advances in anatomy had led to a view of ‘two opposite sexes’, with arguments about whether the sexes are ‘equal, equal but different, or unequal and different.’ These have been read back into the historical texts. Only in the last half-century have we realised how overstated sex differences have been, and how much more complex the distinction and relationship between the biological and social are than previously thought.

In some ways, we are swinging away from the oppositional binary and back towards a new continuum. I hope this new continuum is the one Adrian Thatcher advocates, in which no bodies are considered vile and all embodiments can be a source of joy and celebration.