Human Sexuality in a Fallen World: An Economy of Mercy and Grace1

Mercy and truth have met together; justice and peace have kissed each other.

—Psalm 85:10

Although God may be surpassingly merciful, his mercy in no way obviates his justice. For a mercy that removes justice deserves much more to be called stupidity rather than virtue, and this does not befit God.

—Thomas Aquinas, In III Sent. d. 1, q. 1, a. 2, ad 4

Introduction: Divine Mercy, Human Sexuality, and the Dominant Self-Images of the Age

This is a theological essay about divine mercy and human sexuality—much more, though, about the former than the latter—and about the ways in which divine mercy comes to inform human sexuality. The following is, therefore, as much an exercise in dogmatic theology as it is an exercise in moral theology. Incidentally, the article will make plain that dogmatic and moral theology cannot be separated meaningfully from each other, for they are two integral parts of one single discipline, or science: sacred theology. And because one of the theologians who exemplified in his theological work the integration of dogmatic and moral theology was Thomas Aquinas, I shall draw upon him in the following as my central resource and interlocutor.

Quite likely, there has been no other age compared to ours—the age of the late-modern consumer capitalist societies of the Western Hemisphere—that has been as obsessed with sex and, at the same time, as confused about it as ours, especially since the invention and widespread use of biochemical means of contraception. It is far from an overstatement to characterize these later modern consumer societies as being in the iron grip of an unrelenting pan-sexism that increasingly subjects all religious, political, social, and cultural discourses to an ever more comprehensive and aggressive policing of all aspects of public and, increasingly, also private life. This state of affairs constitutes a considerable challenge for the Catholic Church, her mission, catechesis, and preaching in these societies, a challenge that remains largely unaddressed because too many Christians are all too deeply affected by the obsession with, as well as the confusion about, human sexuality in the wake of the principled separation of sexuality from procreation.

In order to address this challenge constructively and effectively, it seems to me to be necessary for the Church first to realize why and how human sexuality has become the ideological battleground for the two dominant competing self-images of the age, angelism and animalism, then second, to find a way to reintegrate human sexuality theologically into the encompassing divine scheme of creation and redemption—the divine economy of mercy and grace—and third, to discover a way to think and talk theologically about divine mercy in a societal context that tends immediately to mistake mercy for an all-embracing and principled divine indulgence and permissiveness. Finally, when operating within these Western or thoroughly Westernized societies held in the iron grip of pan-sexism, the Church will have to make a persuasive case for the following: first, that it is false to assume that human sexuality can be sufficiently understood by, on the one hand, taking it to be a matter of sovereign human self-definition or self-construction or, on the other hand, regarding it as a form of behavior analogous to that of advanced primates; and secondly, that to make such an assumption is nothing but to endorse one or the other of the two dominant but erroneous anthropocentric self-images of the age, angelism and animalism. In order to escape the Babylonian captivity to one or the other of these false self-images, the Church will have to begin to think again in an unapologetically theological and theocentric way about human sexuality.

This essay is a modest proposal on behalf of this fourfold task. I shall first name the modern problematic that turns human sexuality into the battleground between the two dominant, competing, and equally erroneous anthropocentric self-images of the age, angelism and animalism. I will then adumbrate the encompassing economy of mercy and grace into which human sexuality falls when...