“body theology begins with the concrete” and not with doctrines or creeds or problems in tradition. It begins with the concrete and “the fleshly experience of life — with our hungers and our passions, our bodily aliveness and deadness…with the bodyself making love with the beloved and lovemaking with the earth”

If I have to search for a turning point in living a life in this body of mine, it should be when I read these words.  When I eventually forced open the doors of the suffocating closet in my final year at the theological seminary, I took a long detour from theology and the church. I’m not exactly sure how the book, Embodiment: An approach to sexuality and Christian theology (1978) of James B. Nelson ended in my hands about two years after leaving the seminary. I made photocopies of the book, so it must have been a library loan. But it had a profound impact on my life. Reading it, I could feel the pent-up guilt, anger, shame, and confusion releasing.

James Nelson is the father of contemporary body theology (“theology of the body” is a horse of another colour and I’ll blog about that as well).  What he wrote, was just in total opposite to everything I was taught in church and by my very devout Christian parents. He wrote this book in the era of sexual and political liberation between the 1960s and the 1980s, fuelled by his personal involvement in the cause of LGBTIQ persons. The question is not simply what theology has to say about the body, but about what it means to participate in the reality of life and God through the bodies we are.