Daily Archives: February 11, 2010

Rowan Williams on the body of Christ, ctd.

Posted by on February 11, 2010 Comments Off

What I have been proposing is that the empty tomb tradition is, theologically speaking, part of the Church’s resource in resisting the temptation to ‘absorb’ Jesus into itself, and thus part of what its confession of the divinity of Jesus amounts to in spiritual and political practice. Jesus is not the possession of the community . . . The freedom of Jesus to act, however we unpack that deceptively simple statement, is not exhausted by what the community is doing or thinking – which allows us to say that Jesus’ role for the community continues, vitally, to be that of judge, and that those who are charged with speaking authoritatively for or in the community stand in a very peculiar and paradoxical place . . . They remain under the judgement of the Risen One, along with the rest of the community, and their task is to direct attention away from themselves to Jesus, to reinforce the community’s awareness of living under Jesus’ judgement. The point at which they claim to foreclose the judgement of the risen Jesus is the point at which they occlude the reality of the continuing life or freedom of Jesus. Their rationale is to remind the community of the danger of swallowing Jesus up in its own life and practice . . . .

The tomb tradition, then should be the ground of certain kinds of questions put by the Church to itself, especially as regards its attitude to institutional authority . . .

Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Blackwell, 2000), 192f.

Rowan Williams on the body of Christ, ctd.

Posted by on February 11, 2010 3 comments

More from Rowan Williams’ Resurrection:

The resurrection faith is bound up with the existence of the community, then; but that does not immediately answer the question of the source of both faith and community. . . . That is to say: there is something prior to the community. . . . [Thus] it is and is not true to see the Church as “identified” with the risen Jesus: the Church is where Jesus is met, where bodily grace and reconciliation are now shown, it is the “body” of Jesus’ presence; but the Church still meets Jesus as an other, a stranger, it never absorbs him into itself so that he ceases to be its lover and judge. (p. 94-95)

Rowan Williams on the body of Christ

Posted by on February 11, 2010 1 comment

Rowan Williams’ wonderful book, Resurrection has some very helpful thoughts on the nature of the church as the body of Christ, and, specifically on the relationship between the church and the risen, personal body of Jesus.

We have already noted that Jesus as risen is a Jesus who cannot be contained in the limits of a past human life; the corollary of this is that Jesus as risen cannot be contained in the legitimating and supporting memory of a community. The Church is not “founded” by Jesus of Nazareth as an institution to preserve the recollection of his deeds and words; it is the community of those who meet him as risen and the place where all the world may meet him as risen. . . .

So the void of the tomb and the unrecognizable face of the risen Lord both speak of the challenge of Easter to a God who is primarily “the God of our condition.” The Lordship of Jesus is not constructed from a recollection but experienced in the encounter with the one who evades our surface desires and surface needs, and will not subserve the requirements of our private dramas. The Church is not the assembly of the disciples as a “continuation” of Jesus, but the continuing group of those engaged in dialogue with Jesus, those compelled to renew again and again their confrontation with a person who judges and calls and recreates. The Church may be Christ’s “Body”, the place of his presence, but it is entered precisely by the ritual encounter with his death and resurrection, by the “turning around” which stops us struggling to interpret his story in light of our and presses us to interpret ourselves in the light of the Easter event. The “Body” image is one of many. We need to be cautious about any tendency to see the Church as a simple “undialectical” extension of Christ; and we have already explored something of the way in which the Eucharist enshrines the dialectic by both confronting us with our victim and identifying us with him. The Church is where Christ is because it is where persons find their identity through him and before him. Christ is with the believer and beyond the believer at the same time: we are in Christ and yet face to face with him. Christian worship and spirituality wrestles continuously with what this means, as it both addresses Christ directly, and speaks in his name to God as “Abba.” Jesus grants us a solid identity, yet refuses us the power to “seal” or finalize it, and obliges us to realize that this identity only exists in an endless responsiveness to new encounters with him in the world of unredeemed relationships; to absolutize it, imagining that we have finished the making of ourselves, that we have done with desire and restlessness, is to slip back into that unredeemed world; to turn from the void of the tomb to the drama of a cheapened Calvary for the frustrated ego. (p. 74, 76)

It should be noted that I am not interested here in identifying targets for Williams’ critique so much as receiving and appropriating his constructive statements about the nature of the church as the body of Christ. And, more importantly, the tendencies he describes here seem to me to be temptations. Temptations that we are all prone to in our attempts to live out the life of the church in the world. As such they constitute a powerful and helpful exhortation. I know I find it arresting and often needed in my own ecclesial life.

The bride, not the wife

Posted by on February 11, 2010 32 comments

It is interesting that the church is described by Paul, not as the wife of Christ, but as the bride (2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:27). Clearly there is something important about this distinction. A spouse stands in a settled and determined relationship. The vows have been made, the union has been actualized, the relationship has been consummated. The relationship between two betrothed however is quite different, at least in biblical understanding.

The relationship between a groom and a bride is one of promise. They are bound to one another by vow, but their relationship is not yet consummated, though it is a binding and real relationship. Inherent in the notion of betrothal is the element of anticipation, of deferred longing, of unactualized union. The betrothed live from promise towards a future in which they will be given to one another in a full and decisive way.

This image of the church as bride seems to me to be a necessary qualification towards how we interpret the metaphor of the body of Christ. Or rather, this is the question I am interested in seeing discussed. Should the image of the bride have priority in our understanding of the image of the body or vice versa? To my mind the image of the bride is preferable as a controlling metaphor because, 1) it is much clearer in meaning, 2) it is rooted substantially in the Old Testament’s language, 3) it is clearly the controlling metaphor for the union of God and his people in Revelation, and 4) it is clearly attuned to the whole framework of eschatological anticipation that the New Testament as whole presupposes.

Is the church a subject?

Posted by on February 11, 2010 3 comments

The notion of the church as the totus Christus, a notion commonly connected to the image of the body of Christ seems to imply that the church is an entity, a subject. However, is this the case? Volf says no:

The church, both as the universal communio sanctorum and the local church, is not a collective subject, but rather a communion of persons, though the latter are indeed not self-contained subjects, but rather are interdependent in a twofold fashion. First, they live only insofar as Christ lives in them through the Spirit (see Gal. 2:20; 1 Cor. 6:19). Second, the Christ lives in them through the multiple relations they have with one another (see 1 Cor. 12:12-13). Yet even though Christians are bound into this complex network of relationships, they still remain subjects; indeed, their being subjects is inconceivable without these relationships (see Gal. 2:20). This is why one must conceive the “one” who Christians are in Christ (Gal. 3:28; see Eph. 2:14-16) not as a “unified person” who has “transcended all differentiation,” but rather precisely as a differentiated unity, as a communion, of those who live in Christ.

Accordingly, the universal church is not a subject that is actualized and acts within the local church, nor is it indeed identical with the local church. Christ, however, who is present in the local church through his Spirit and in this way makes it into the church in a proleptic experience of the eschatological gathering of the entire people of God, connects every local church with all other churches of God,  indeed with the entire communion of those who through the Spirit are “in Christ.”

In other words, on this view, the church is not a collective subject, let alone a sort of “total person” co-constituting Christ. Rather the church is a nexus of relationships actualized by the gracious presence of Christ in the Spirit that is an eschatological anticipation of the final union of of all created reality in Christ (cf. Eph 1:10). Thus the church is seen as a Trinitarian event (of the radical outpouring of grace), which always takes the form of persons being given to one another in and through Christ’s own agape.

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