Response to Thomas Finegan’s “An Unnoticed Body-Person Dualism: A Rejoinder to Lawler and Salzman”

Dr. Finegan’s rejoinder to our response ¹ to his critique ² of our initial article in Irish Theological Quarterly ³ is an analytic error. Since the editor agreed to give us the last word, we will do so only to state that Finegan fundamentally misrepresents our argument and response to his initial essay in order to justify his claims and, by implication, the claims of the New Natural Law Theory and official magisterial teaching. He posits a conclusion in search of an unsuccessful and incoherent argument. His tortured critique of our biblical exegesis claims that we interpret Jesus’s saying that “two become one-flesh” in an exclusively metaphorical sense, “implicitly” grounded in a dualistic anthropology, which denies the metaphysical relevance of the body in sexual acts. Anyone familiar with our extensive writings on sexual anthropology will recognise his portrayal of our position as false and a red herring. His repeated use of “implicit(ly)” and “unnoticed” to portray our argument betrays his agenda and strategy. In absolutely no conceivable and credible interpretation of our anthropology is it dualistic.

All that Finegan does is argue for his sexual anthropology which, along with official Catholic sexual teaching, prioritises a biological ontology over a relational ontology. We reject this anthropology and, instead, argue in our sexual anthropology for a relational ontology over a biological ontology. Not understanding our position, or refusing to understand it, he accuses us of dualism, but not dualism as it is normally understood, i.e., a Cartesian separation of body and mind. There can be a place for the body and its moral relevance in our dualism according to Finegan, but he argues, again without understanding, that our dualism fundamentally rejects the intrinsic bodily meaning of heterosexual reproductive marital intercourse. He uses circular reasoning. His biologically based anthropology is the only acceptable Catholic (and biblical) anthropology. Anyone who rejects this anthropology must be a closet dualist, someone who denies this biologically based anthropology.

Finegan has a very limited use of experience and science in his analysis, two essential sources of ethical knowledge that should inform a sexual anthropology and theology of sexuality. Since he does not in any way engage those sources in depth and has a very narrow definition of tradition, ignoring the contemporary sensus fidelium and the cardinals, bishops, and bishops’ conferences that have argued for, and proposed a revision of, Catholic sexual teaching, especially regarding same-sex couples, his argument lacks depth, credibility, and a holistic anthropology. We stand by our sexual anthropology as articulated and extensively argued for in numerous publications and the proposed norms deduced from that anthropology, which includes the possibility of moral, virtuous, and sacramental same-sex unions.