Given that so much evangelical energy is spend defending “objectivity” and “objective truth” against postmodern subjectivism, it’s striking to turn to John Paul II and find him placing the emphasis on precisely the opposite side of things. For John Paul, the great need of the church in the modern world is not to defend the objectivity of truth, but to defend the freedom, personality, subjectivity, and intentionality of human action. Sexuality, specifically, cannot be reduced to “drives” and animal instincts; it is an embodied expression of self-gift, a form of knowing, a inter-personal event of reciprocal self-gift intended as such by a man and a woman, human persons.
No doubt, John Paul’s sense of the challenges of modernity has something to do with his setting within Catholicism, where “juridicism” and institutionalism are the distortions to be combated. Still, evangelicals might be challenged by the late Pope’s writings to wonder if our emphasis on “objectivity” is playing into the hands of (especially scientific) modernity.
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