One Lord Jesus Christ

Abstract

AbstractChapter 3 seeks to offer a model for understanding the claim that the Church is the body of Christ. After considering Gregory of Nyssa’s reflections on the Church as the body of Christ, the chapter seeks to offer a philosophical model which can help elucidate his claims. It argues that recent work on the nature of extended cognition in the philosophy of mind can help to shed light on the relation between the one Church and the one body of Christ. As both Richard Cross and James Arcadi have shown, this philosophical literature (which seeks to show that cognition can be extended beyond the human brain into external artefacts) can help provide models for understanding both the Incarnation and the Eucharist. Here, both Cross’ and Arcadi’s incarnational metaphysics are developed to explain how the Church might be thought of as the body of Christ. However, unlike the Eucharist and the Incarnation, the doctrine of the Church does not think of Christ as extended into some artefact or tangible object, but into a social body. To give a metaphysics of the Church as the body of Christ, then, the chapter builds on work in socially extended cognition, which seeks to show the ways in which minds are extended into other minds. This can provide one model for thinking about how the Church as a group agent might participate in the body of Christ.