I’ve been reading Robert Jenson’s systematic theology for fun lately. I read the following passage this morning, where he talks about the body of the resurrected Jesus and how Paul can speak of both the bread and cup and the congregation as the “body of Christ.” I thought it was interesting.
But what can Paul mean, speaking so of Christ’s body? Neither the bread and cup nor the gathering of the church look like a human body or react as one.
The obvious first suggestion, which turns out to work perfectly on the texts, is that he speaks of the “body of Christ” as he speaks of “bodies” generally. In Paul’s language, someone’s “body” is simply the person him or herself insofar as this person is available to other persons and to him or herself, insofar as the person is an object for other persons and him or herself. It is in that Paul is a body that persecutors can mark him as Christ’s (Gal 6:17); it is in that Paul is a body that he can be seen and interrogated by one of his congregations, or be remote from this possibility (1 Cor 5:3); it is in that Paul is a body that he can discipline his own self (1 Cor 9:27). In Paul’s ontology, such personal availability may or may not be constituted as the biological entity moderns first think of as “a body”; for Paul, a “spiritual” body, whatever that may be, is as much or more a body as is a biological body (1 Cor 15:44).
The church, according to Paul, is the risen body of Christ. She is this because the bread and cup in the congregation’s midst is the very same body of Christ. Paul’s first statement on the matter does not extend quite to this equation. “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:17). But Paul then applies this doctrine to the behavior of the Corinthian congregation: because the Corinthians eat and drink disrespectfully of one another, they fail to “discern” the body of Christ (1 Cor 11:29). We want to ask which body Paul has in mind, the bread about which he has just reported the dominical words “This is my body,” or the congregation that is in fact the offended entity and which he has just earlier called Christ’s body. Paul’s text makes sense only when we grasp that he means both at once, and would reject our question as meaningless.
It is time for theology . . . to let what Paul meant by “body” teach us also what to mean by “body.” . . . We must learn to say: the entity rightly called the body of Christ is whatever object it is that is Christ’s availability to us as subjects; by the promise of Christ, this object is the bread and cup and the gathering of the church around him. There is where creatures can locate him, to respond to his word to them.
No metaphor or ontological evasion should be intended. Sacrament and church are truly Christ’s body for us, because Christ himself takes these same things for the object as which he is available to himself. For the proposition that the church is a human body of the risen Jesus to be ontically and straightforwardly true, all this is required is that Jesus indeed be the Logos of God, so that his self-understanding determines what is real.
The subject that the risen Christ is, is the subject who comes to word in the gospel. The object—the body—that the risen Christ is, is the body in the world to which this word calls our intention, the church around her sacraments. He needs no other body to be a risen man, body and soul. There is and needs to be no other place than the church for him to be embodied, nor in that other place any other entity to be the “real” body of Christ. Heaven is where God takes space in his creation to be present to the whole of it; he does that in the church.
(Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, I.205-06)
So, for Jenson, Christ’s body is who he is in his availability to us. In my estimation, this might be a good way of explaining how we can speak of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist (especially for a Lutheran like Jenson), and how we might similarly speak of the church as the bodily presence of Christ on earth. What do you think?
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