In light of this week’s focus on the body of Christ, I should point readers to a couple posts I did almost three years ago where I took up some of these questions. I would definitely modulate and revise some of the language I tended towards at the time, when I was drawn to speak of the church and Jesus as “one organism, one entity.” I am now firmly convinced that this language, while attempting to do something good, namely to articulate the profound nature of Christ’s union with the church, is ultimately wrong and misleading, and in my opinion can, at times serve ideological ends.

In my first post I raised the question of whether or not the image of the church as the body of Christ was a metaphor. At the time I was perhaps more inclined to say that it, in fact is not. Since then I have found this to be untenable.

In my second post,  I examined the nature of Christ’s embodied presence to the world with a mind toward exploring how the church can rightly be called his body. I stand by most of what I wrote there, but with some important caveats and changes that I think need to be made  to the formulation I put forth at that time. I concluded that post  thusly:

Because the Trinitarian Son is the man Jesus, the reality of his bodiliness participates in the infinity of the Triune life, thus enabling Christ to, so to speak, ‘enflesh’ his embodiment under different modalities through the work of the Spirit. Thus, the Trinitarian Son is the man Jesus who was born of Mary, he likewise is the earthly-historical community that he joins to himself by the Spirit, and he likewise is the one who is with the Father in the Spirit, who is coming to bring all creation into the fullness of the Triune Future. In short, he is the One who was, who is, and who is the come. The First and the Last. The Alpha and the Omega.

The place where I go off track here is precisely in the second “is” that I articulate. Here’s how I would iterate what I was getting at three years ago in a way that I think is much more, well, true:

Because the Trinitarian Son is the man Jesus, the reality of his bodiliness participates in the infinity of the Triune life, thus enabling Christ to, so to speak, ‘enflesh’ his embodiment under different modalities through the work of the Spirit. Thus, the Trinitarian Son is the man Jesus who was born of Mary, he likewise is the sovereign Lord, who binds the earthly-historical community of the church to himself in the Spirit, and he likewise is the one who is with the Father in the Spirit, who is coming to bring all creation into the fullness of the Triune Future. In short, he is the One who was, who is, and who is the come. The First and the Last. The Alpha and the Omega.

Really, this is trying to express what I would now call the way in which the radical particularity of Christ — in his bodiliness — irrupts into the world through the mission of the Holy Spirit. This is all understood under the rubric of promise (cf. Acts 2:33, 39). This irruption in the Spirit of Christ’s concrete presence is what calls forth and creates the church, which stands as a sign of the radical grace of God which transfigures and renews the world. As such the church is created by the Son and Spirit as a sign, sacrament, and foretaste of the coming new creation. All of this is pure gift, pure grace, which apocalyptically comes to us from outside ourselves. Only in finding ourselves the recipients of this gift are we given and bound to one another in the Spirit, thus being able to rightly call ourselves the body of Christ.