I became annoyed, reading James Nelson.

His work is still reverberating through my own research, thoughts, body, 25 years after reading his words.

But James was flip-flopping between sex and the body, alternating between sexual theology and body theology, only to later equate sexual theology with body theology. Reading his last book, I ended up with the distinct impression that there was an unease living in his own body. Theologians (and for that matter therapists) and their bodies, and the naïve idea that their words of theology and counselling are disconnected from the bodies they preach in…

He was spot-on, pioneering embodiment in theology in 1978. Disciplines like sociology, psychology, philosophy and other strands of theology followed track in the late 80’s and 1990’s. But James was first of all a Christian ethicist (sometimes called moral theology), and flip-flopping between sex and the body, illustrated that approach and his own ambiguity. A theology focussing on the sexual conduct of human beings, easily leads down the path of moralism and the policing of the bodies, sexuality and the sexual expression of people. This is what the church did to people like me, people that are different, the Other and I just got tired and irritated by it.

I inserted body theology into the wider context of theological anthropology, which ask questions about personhood: what it means to be a human person, what makes us as humans unique – or not. I eventually developed a model as the embodied sensing of meaning. It is from this perspective that I “do” theology and narrative therapy. My idea of bodytheology (one word) is one with a deep sensitivity for the body and how to make meaning as a person – a theology in the flesh.

James Nelson considered “lived experience” to be the most neglected in theology. That’s the reason why oppression and poverty are considered to be a cardinal principle in liberation theology, forcibly and uncomfortably highlighting the daily experiences of marginalised people. For many, theology [and religion] is a second moment. The first moment is life itself. Theology comes afterward, “attempting to understand and serve life”. There are no universal theologies, but only theologies as attempts by ordinary people to make sense of life’s challenges and trying to respond to them in faith. Theology as ‘second moment’ involves understanding our ‘first moment’ experience, as fully as we can”. Liberation theology reminds us that “all theologies are bound to specific histories and life experiences” and that theology is, in its core, a social enterprise. It is not primarily an intellectual task of an individual person, but an authentic “outgrowth of life in community” (Nelson 2004).

Desire is at the heart of spirituality, a desire which is expressed in the hunger for wholeness, a yearning for completion, and a craving for certainty. This desire can also be experienced as a thirst and “since spirit is neither ethereal nor disembodied, both God and alcohol can be sensuous and spiritual experiences”. Spirituality has always been “a matter of the total self — the body and its desires included”. To desire can mean to know, and to know can mean to love.

It’s not possible any longer to maintain that “faith has received its truth quite independently of our body experience” or believe that “spirituality is a disembodied state”. Where this awareness of feeling and bodily attitudes is absent, a person is torn between a “disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body” (Nelson 2004).

On a Tuesday afternoon in April 1993, a middle-aged man called Jim climbed into his car in a neighbourhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota and drove to a local hotel a few kilometres away from his home. On the way to the hotel, he stopped at a liquor store and bought a few bottles of vodka. He locked himself up in his hotel room and went on a drinking binge for five and a half days. On the evening of Monday, 19 April 1993 he ran out of alcohol. He phoned his wife and the following day they started to make arrangements for him to go for treatment at the Hazelden Centre.

In 1992, the year before this incident, he published his follow-up book titled, Body Theology, in Louisville, Kentucky. In an interview in 2007 James Nelson described himself as “a Christian ethicist (retired) and a recovering alcoholic (from which there is no retirement).” In his last book Thirst: God and the alcoholic experience (2004) he explains that he writes from an “insider perspective” for people who “want to use the lenses of theology to look at their own addiction and recovery…who want to think ‘theologically’ about life and its important events…who know that their personal stories…are best understood as part of a larger faith story”.  Autobiography has the potential to be a theological statement. John Barbour writes that “at its heart lies bios. “Bios” in autobiography does not simply mean the temporal span of organic existence, but the ‘sense of life’ of an individual: all that gives meaning and purpose to a person’s experience in time”. A narrative approach infuses theology with passion. We need a theology that “creates connective tissues among us”, that reminds us of our vulnerabilities and struggles instead of a theology characterised by “coolness and detachment” (Nelson).

“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.