Body Of Christ Research Articles

Ekklesia and Ecumenism in the Body of Christ: Unity from the Ground-Up

This article explores the implications for Christian unity from the perspective of the lived faith community, the ekklesia. While bilateral and multilateral dialogues have borne great fruit in bringing Christian denominations closer together, as indeed it will continue to do so, considering how the ecclesiological identity of the faith community both forms and reflects its members may be helpful in moving forward in our ecumenical efforts. This calls for a ground-up approach as opposed to a top-down approach. By “ground-up” it is meant that the starting point for theological reflection on ecumenism begins not with doctrine but with praxis, particularly as it relates to the common believer in the pew. The ecclesiological model “Body of Christ” provides a helpful vocabulary in this exploration for a number of reasons, none the least that it is scripturally-based, presumes diversity and employs concrete imagery relating to everyday life. Further, “Body of Christ” language is used by numerous Christian denominations in their statements of self-identity, regardless of where they lie on the doctrinal or political spectrum. In this article, potential benefits and challenges of this ground-up perspective will be considered, and a way forward will be proposed to promote ecumenical unity across denomination borders.

Eucharystyczne trwanie z perspektywy nauk ścisłych

The paper is an attempt to put the Eucharistic Miracle into its proper linguistic and cultural context, which points out the Last Supper and death on Golgotha as simultaneous events. Both biblical text and documented earliest interpretation of Eucharist emphasize that Jesus really was breaking and giving to Apostles the bread as His true body, not as a symbol of His body. The scientific expertize of the Eucharistic Miracle at Sokolka (Poland) reveals how the Holy Host may be simultaneously the bread and the Body of Christ. Additionally, the paper discusses the issue of simultaneous events from the perspective of physics. It was emphasized that there are infinite number of reference systems in the Universe, where these two events (Jesus’ Last Supper and agony on the cross) took place at the same time. Thus, it is possible and reasonable to assume, that there is a reference system that views any of today’s Holy Mass as a simultaneous event with the Jesus’ death on the cross, and the faithful are true participants of this very offering.

Righteousness of God

The purpose of this article is to provide insight to what extent our conceptualization of the dikaiosyne theou shapes our way of understanding ourselves as Christians being the Body of Christ and living holy lives. Strongly influenced by the epistle to the Romans, we perceive holiness as being in right relation to God and righteousness being a practical consequence of this relationship. Holiness as the inner nature of God brings fruits of His righteousness, which is God’s saving activity. However, in the light of Christ and his sacrificial death and resurrection, relational, and eschatological perspectives of the dikaiosyne theou concept become crucial. This concept stands at the heart of Paul’s gospel and anticipates several layers of meaning, primarily God’s redeeming and saving activity, but also covenantal faithfulness and restorative justice brought by God and made available for all. Wider perspective is provided through the faithfulness of Jesus and his obedience to the Father in fulfilling salvific purposes. For us, it means a transformational and relational way of living in an eschatological perspective. Christian ethics are deeply grounded in the concept of dikaiosyne theou, and Christian conduct represents its practical and necessary expression. People living in genuine Christian community are marked by the righteousness of God expressed as agape and progressively transformed by the presence and involvement of his Holy Spirit. Such people involve themselves in a continuous process of discovering new opportunities to affirm God’s righteousness. Thus, the Christian community of faith needs to be inclusive in its nature.

Theologians of the Roman College in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Some Aspects of the Theology of the Mystical Body of Christ in the Ecclesiology of Giovanni Perrone, Carlo Passaglia, and Clemens Schrader

Theologians of the Roman College in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Some Aspects of the Theology of the Mystical Body of Christ in the Ecclesiology of Giovanni Perrone, Carlo Passaglia, and Clemens Schrader

The Flesh Made Word: Bodily Inscription and Religion in Celine et Julie Vont en Bateau

In Celine et Julie Vont en Bateau Jacques Rivette works through his discomfort with the theological function of the author, a discomfort stemming from the material effects of authorship on the bodies of his actors. Examples of bodily incision and bruising proliferate throughout the film, part of a process of violent characterization imposed by an authoring demiurge. The film explores several methods of escape from this process, starting with exotic travel and fairy tales, but culminates around repeated allusions to the crucifixion of Christ. The film advances a heretical Christology by positing God as a sadistic author and the wounded body of Christ as the paradigmatic example of being inscribed as a character against one’s will. As this characterization obviously engenders being inscribed in a narrative as well, the structure of the film probes at the notion of both Christianity and narrative cinema as means of escape.

Visible and Invisible: George Tyrrell and Christ's Bodies

AbstractStarting with the laying to rest of George Tyrrell's body in an Anglican grave, outside the bounds of the Catholic Church, this article considers how Tyrrell could yet understand himself to be within the Church, within the body of Christ. Tyrrell developed a distinction between the visible and invisible Church in such a way that a person like himself could be included within the latter. In this, Tyrrell's theology anticipated later ideas of the anonymous Christian and the Church as sacrament, his thinking incorporated within the body of more orthodox, conciliar theology.

The decay of western liberalism and the christological alternative: a reply to Ben Wood

The rise of populist politics presents a range of challenges for the future of democracy. The religious dimensions of populism merit further investigation, not least insofar as appeals to ‘Christian identity’ feature within right-wing, nationalist rhetoric. Theological discourse needs to critique such a misappropriation of Christian discourse both in theory and in practice. First, it must substitute associations of Christianity with exclusive and fixed accounts of ‘the people’ with alternative accounts of the body of Christ as knowing no boundaries. Second, it must be countered by practical, public demonstrations of the churches as communities of practice that embody values of openness, inclusion and hospitality.

From Conversion to Ritual Murder: Re-Contextualizing the Circumcision Charge

Abstract In the 1230s, Christian authorities prosecuted Norwich Jews on charges of having seized and circumcised a five-year-old boy in an effort to convert him to Judaism. In the same decade, English chroniclers began to depict this case as an attempted ritual murder. According to Roger Wendover and Matthew Paris, Jews circumcised the boy with the intention of crucifying him at Easter. This article explores what the near simultaneous development of these two intriguing and seemingly disparate narratives suggests about thirteenth-century Christian perceptions and portrayals of circumcision. In so doing, it ushers research on medieval Christian attitudes toward circumcision into new spheres, deepens understandings of thirteenth-century Christian anxieties about conversion to Judaism, and brings to light a marginal note in the autograph copy of Matthew Paris’ Chronica majora that may constitute evidence of evolving Christian views of the relationship between the bodies of Jews’ alleged victims and the body of Christ.

Training the Porous Body: Evangelicals and the Ex‐Gay Movement

ABSTRACTIn this article, I examine how US evangelical opposition to LGBT rights stems from a unique understanding of sexuality and the person. As my respondents explained to me in over sixteen months of field research, evangelical rejection of LGBT individuals and practices is rooted not simply in prejudice but also in a culturally specific notion of personhood that requires Christian bodies to orient themselves to the divine. In evangelical Christianity, the body, along with its capacity to feel and communicate, is understood as a porous vessel receptive to communication with God. In contrast to a dominant idea that sexual orientations shape individual identities, sexuality within this religious world instead facilitates the movement of moral forces across individual bodies and geographic scales. Sexual desires and sexual acts are broadly understood in evangelical cosmology as communicative mediums for supernatural forces. This understanding of sexuality as a central component of moral agency shapes widespread practices of ostracism of people who identify as LGBT within evangelicalism and often leads to anti‐LGBT political positions. Claiming an LGBT identity is seen as making one a distinct kind of person incommensurate with evangelical porosity. [evangelical, sexuality, embodiment, United States]

The Jews and the Body of Christ: An Essay in Hope

The Jews and the Body of Christ: An Essay in Hope

Bodily communions: An eschatological proposal for addressing the Christian body problem

AbstractThis article is a programmatic proposal for providing a theological and existential (experiential and practical) framework for addressing the problem of the body in Christianity, specifically by examining the body against its eschatological horizon. It outlines the character of the problem, specifies an eschatological approach for addressing it, and begins to unfold a number of topics regarding embodiment that have new salience when apprehended in eschatological terms. It concludes by providing a preliminary agenda for carrying such a project forward.

The forgetfulness of gentrification and the pilgrimage of protest: Re-membering the Body of Christ

This article asks what it means to remember in the context of the erasure and exile that are the strategies of gentrification. What can we learn from protest and pilgrimage about what it means to “do this in remembrance” of Christ, that is, to re-member the Body of Christ, and how can this remembering address the injustice of racially-biased displacement? If we consider the dynamics of gentrification, the exile and erasure upon which it relies and the ways in which it creates a landscape of forgetfulness in cities whose neighborhoods no longer remember the communities of color who inhabited them, then is seems clear that a Christian theological response requires embodied practices of remembering. Through an exploration of the theological concept of anamnesis and the practices of Holy Communion and stational liturgy, I explore the characteristics of theological remembering that point toward Christian responses to gentrification. I argue that protest as pilgrimage offers us one avenue through which we might counter the forgetfulness of gentrification and remember our way into the future, by re-membering the body of Christ.

Mercy triumphs over judgment: James as the social gospel

The pericope in Jas 2:14–17 has become iconic in our modern church culture. Although we quote from it regularly—“faith without works is dead”—we do not live it faithfully. In reimagining the body of Christ, the theme of this issue, it seems that the book of James and Luther’s response to it reflect the tensions we live in today. We are a society with a legal system built off the ideology of retributive justice. We are a society that claims to be built on Christian principles, yet James points to a very different justice system. James 2:13 states that “Mercy triumphs over judgment!” Although James never condones breaking the law (2:10–11), he does encourage mercy in place of judgment (2:13), especially when engaging the poor. Luther called biblical James a “book of straw,” as he touted his own mantra, sola fide, leaving us with a very significant dilemma. How should we understand saving faith? Does it simply require praying “the sinner’s prayer and shaking the pastor’s hand?” or ought it to be coupled with “works” becoming to one who has chosen to follow Jesus?

Grasshopper theology: Heading to the Promised Land instead of climate disaster

Today’s climate crisis provokes dystopian and utopian narratives of the future faced by humanity. To navigate the theological terrain between the present and an uncertain future, this article explores passages pertaining to the journey of Moses and the Israelites to the Promised Land. The guiding point of orientation for this exploration comes from a verse that captures the seeming powerlessness of the Israelites in the face of the giants inhabiting the Promised Land. Numbers 13:33 reads, “To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” Of crucial importance in coming to terms with such honest self-assessment is the period of discernment and growth that comes from being in the wilderness with the presence of a God who loves and empowers grasshoppers in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Because the future of the Body of Christ is inseparable from how the climate crisis is confronted, the journey through the wilderness becomes not merely a story for self-coping but rather a story about churches finding a way forward, even as some dystopian narratives place churches on the road to irrelevance and ultimately extinction. This article explores how the story of exodus provides a sacred ground for imagining a different, even if difficult, future.

Liturgical undoing: Christ, communion, and commodified bodies

During the years of chattel slavery in the USA, Black bodies were commodified. This article pays particular attention to the commodification of female Black bodies and the way in which the participation of the Christian community in Holy Communion undoes the capitalistic, free market enterprise of commodification by setting bodies and communities of faith free from the abuse and bondage as we begin to live into the fullness of the body of Christ. At the table of Communion, we are undone and through the gracious gift of Christ’s body we are reclaimed as the creation of the divine—a creation that God looks upon and calls good.

Enhanced learning in the parish context: a learning community approach

ABSTRACTThe author undertook a research project with parishes in the Anglican Diocese of Adelaide, South Australia, 2013–2014 to find evidence, if any, as to whether a learning community approach enhanced learning outcomes in parishes. The three learning processes of holism, collaboration and theological reflection define this approach. The image of the ‘body of Christ’ provides a biblical foundation for the approach. The article explores the effectiveness of a learning community process in relation to the enhancement of learning outcomes. Research participants reported much growth and enhancement of their knowledge, understanding and practice of the Christian faith where parishes practised all three learning processes. Implications of the research results for parish ministry practice today are discussed.

“Now you are the body of Christ, and members in particular” (1 Cor. 12:27): Pentecostalism and its Mission

AbstractThe paper presents Pentecostalism that is primarily a mission movement more than a hundred years old. It reflects on the place and role in World Christianity of this still young and growing church tradition, and the relationships between Pentecostalism and the ecumenical movement. The challenges that Pentecostalism is facing are discussed, with special attention to the Eastern European context.

Would St. Thomas Aquinas baptize an Extraterrestrial?

AbstractThis paper will attempt an investigation of hypothetical intelligent extraterrestrial life from the perspective of the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Section I will feature an overview of St. Thomas's relevant philosophy of human nature and the differences between human and extraterrestrial natures (even though both have material bodies and immortal souls). Section II will, with special attention to St. Thomas's De malo, treat some possibilities regarding the need for salvation (or lack thereof) in our hypothetical species. Section III will outline relevant aspects of Thomistic soteriology, especially the reasons behind the Incarnation and the role of human nature in Redemption. Section IV will feature a critique of representatives from the two major schools of scholarly thought on this issue, showing that they either disregard the necessity of a human nature for incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ or deny the magnitude and singular importance of the Incarnation. Section V will sketch some possibilities for the soteriology of extraterrestrial life using the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas as a framework.

The Iconographic Method Applied in the Design of Products with Cultural Demostration in the Creation of the Tourist Destination

The popular festivity known as Corpus Cristi is a clear manifestation of culture in Ecuador. It is considered a crosscultural expression of the cosmovision and iconographic symbolism of religious fusion making an evident imaginary connotation of the population. Where evident, catholics are of a vernacular world and end up being a praise in honor of the favors received from the Body of Christ and the indigenous roots of spirituality. It represents gratitude for the successful harvests obtained in the year by the Pachamama and Taita Inti. The present study aims to provide furnishings with designs of this festival, the park 13 de abril in Pujilí, which is also commonly known by locals as the Danzante Park. The methodology used was an analysis of the artistic projects developed by Panofsky where the work is reinterpreted from a designer perspective. This method is used to propose a method of extracting the iconographic and iconological elements of cultural demonstrations resulting in the innovation of the canton. Taking advantage of the values and cultural heritage of the nation and showcasing its aesthetics, a greater flow of visitors to the area is ensured as well as the dynamics of the local economy.

The Interpretation of the Sacrament of the Eucharist as Palingenesis According to Foix-Candale

AbstractBy means of a dialogue between Hermes, also known as Mercury, and his son Tat, the thirteenth treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum explains how Hermes learned from God what is meant by “palingenesis,” usually translated as “rebirth,” and how, in the aftermath of this explanation, Tat’s soul was transformed. In his lengthy commentary on this treatise, the sixteenth-century Christian Hermetist François Foix-Candale interprets the Hermetic palingenesis as a foreshadowing of the Christian doctrine of rebirth by means of the sacrament of the Eucharist, and explains how this sacrament, which at the time had been rejected by the Lutherans among others, may contain the transformation of the body of Christ and the regeneration of those partaking of it through Communion.