Church as Life

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Who is Jesus, Anyway? | Kevin Basil

I was looking for spam comments the other day, and this thread popped onto my radar again. I would have put it aside without another thought, except the analogy of the Church as a cross of wood that splinters, embedding itself into the flesh of the world and picking up pus and infection, always disturbs me. It inspired me to examine why I find it so wrong-headed.

What strikes me immediately about this metaphor is that assumes the division of Christians as a natural, normal state. Christians of the first millenium would never have conceived of such a metaphor for the body of Christ. Indeed, classical Christianity affirms that the Church is indivisible because she is the body of Christ, and Christ is indivisible.

But beyond this initial disconnect which refuses to recognize this as a metaphor for an essentially indivisible reality, what I realized upon further contemplation is that this metaphor is also essentially one of death — death as an inherent component of the Church’s mode of existence. Yet, the faith of Christians from the beginning has been that the ecclesia (εκκλεσια), the Church, the assembly or congregation of the faithful, is the visible manifestation of the new life in the paschal mystery of the resurrected Christ. The Church is life and not death.

Only a context in which creedal faith in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church has been replaced by a kind of ecclesial agnosticism — or worse, ecclesial cynicism and skepticism — could give birth to such a repulsive metaphor. I’m sure at one time I could have been susceptible of such a misguided attempt at ecclesiology. However, the revelation of Christ expressed in the Creed corrects misguided attempts to explain the Church from a schismatic perspective and replaces it with faith in Christ and his body, the manifestation of his continuing action in history.

Just some thoughts provoked by an old thread.

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