A Note on Retrieving Church

Just a note. In my last post, on sacramental community (“Retrieving Church”), I missed what might be the most important point. In the somewhat wonky center section of the essay (the part I suggested you can skip), I described a shift in medieval thinking about the body of Christ. In medieval theology there were three senses of the body of Christ: the body of Jesus of Nazareth (physical, historical), the sacrament of the Eucharist (bread and wine), the gathered community of the church (people). The shift occurred with the middle of these: the sacrament. In earlier medieval theology, according to Henri de Lubac (Corpus Mysticum) and others, the sacrament and the community were united. Together, they formed the mystical body of Christ in the world. It was not the sacrament by itself or the assembled community by itself but the two together. In the sharing of the Eucharist, the community became the body of Christ.

In later medieval theology, this shifted. It was no longer the sacrament in community, the act of eating together, but the idea of the sacrament as the actual flesh of Jesus: bread and wine transubstantiated into flesh and blood. With this new idea about the elements, sacrament and community were functionally separated. The theological argument that ensued in the time of the Reformation was largely about this: about what was happening in the sacrament. Were the bread and wine actually changed—transubstantiated—into body and blood, or is Christ present in the sacrament some other sense? You probably know the argument. In this focus on the sacramental elements, what got lost was the community, the community as the body—the real presence—of Christ.

This had consequences. The church started to think of itself as a body in its own right, apart from Christ. Christ was no longer the immediate head of the body but the pope. And, taking its cue from the church, the state started to think of itself in the same way, as a body with the king as its head, using “mystical body,” language borrowed from the church. In this way church and state came to share this idea about what they essentially were. The state claimed divine privilege, and the church began to think of itself as entity of its own, apart from Jesus. 

Both of these theological moves remain crucial in our time. The rise of Christian nationalism in our own and other countries (along with Hindu nationalism in India and Muslim nationalism in other places) claims the legacy the state as a mystical body with a king or, these days, a dictator at its head. And churches, in turn, have separated themselves as a body from Jesus. They define themselves in their own terms, with, perhaps, the pastor as the head of the body. They claim to be Christian without much of either scripture or tradition. Jesus, frankly, embarrasses them.

Putting the sacrament back together with the worshiping community means that we must think of ourselves differently. It’s this mystery that defines the church. 

And if we are in this sacramental sense the real presence of Jesus in the world, then we are called to live out the Jesus life. As Jesus says in John 14:23, if he is to abide in us, we must keep his way—his logos. We are called, in the old cliché, to be what we are: Christ embodied, not individually but together. In this holy mystery we are shaped and altered, transubstantiated into a new people, a new creation. Believe this, and the church will change the world.

Clay

(An acknowledgment: hese thoughts were prompted in part by a paper by Euntaek Jung read at the recent meetings of the American Academy of Religion in Boston. Euntaek kindly sent me a draft of his paper but asked me not to quote from it until he finishes it.)