The Broken Body of the Whole Christ: Augustine’s Totus Christus and Intra-Christian Ecumenism

Abstract

This essay argues that Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus, the “whole Christ,” provides a fruitful starting point for ecumenical theology. The whole Christ signifies the church as the body joined to Christ its head. I suggest that we must seek where else the body of Christ is manifest in the world, especially upon the cross and in the eucharist, to flesh out the ecumenical import of the totus Christus. In both theological moments, the body of Christ is revealed as broken, crucified on the cross, and fractured in the sacrament. Yet, in both breakings we find grace, salvation, even wholeness. The whole Christ, as it exists in this world, is always, in one way or another, broken, yet this broken body is no less joined to the one head who is Christ. A theology of ecumenism, therefore, can be drawn from Augustine’s totus Christus by expanding our vision of what the ecclesial body of Christ means in light of the broken sacramental and soteriological bodies. The essay examines both Augustine’s theology of the totus Christus and its original polemical context, which suggests the possibilities of the doctrine along with its historical limitations. In expanding the significance of the “whole Christ,” it also engages the author’s own Wesleyan tradition. For the broken body on the cross, it draws from Charles Wesley’s hymns’ imagery for appreciating the depths of such brokenness. For the broken body of the eucharist, it draws upon the liturgies of the United Methodist Church and concludes with a vision of the healed body of Christ that will be fully realized only in the eschaton.