Shalom church Deeper understandings
Being the body of Christ in a nonreligious world By Craig L. Nessan
W
hat do we mean when we call the church the body of Christ? In the New Tes-
tament “body of Christ” has three meanings: • Jesus as God incarnate is the body of Christ.
• The meal of bread (and wine) we share is the real body (and blood) of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16).
• The church is named as the body of Christ (Romans 12:4-8, 1 Cor- inthians 12:12-27). While Lutheran theology has care-
fully defended the “real presence” of God in Christ in relation to the incarnation and the Lord’s Supper, what would it mean for the church in our time to take just as seriously its corporate existence as the real pres- ence of Jesus Christ for the life of the world? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the 70th
anniversary of whose martyr’s death at a German concentration camp was commemorated this year, made a radical claim to transform our imagination about what it means for us to be church. He asserted that the church “is” Jesus Christ “existing as community,” that is, “the collective person Jesus Christ.” In the Apostles’ Creed we con-
fess to believe in “the holy catholic church, the communion of saints.” What would it mean for us as church to inhabit the conviction that we really are the body of Christ in the world? What would it mean for us to believe that we ourselves are likely the only “expression” of the body of Christ that many other people will
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We participate in the very character of
Jesus Christ and are
called to represent him as we relate to other people.
ever encounter in their lives? How might our church be reformed by a new sacramental realism about what it means for us really to be the body of Christ for the life of the world? What would it mean for you to abide by the conviction that you really are the body of Christ for all the neigh- bors you encounter in your daily rhythms—at home, at school, at work, in your community, in global engagement and among creation? The radical claim that we really
are the body of Christ for the life of the world means corporately we par- ticipate in the very character of Jesus Christ and are called to represent him as we relate to other people and to creation itself as the neighbors God has given us to serve. Here, too, Bonhoeffer’s legacy
challenges us to reimagine what it means for us to be the body of Christ in a nonreligious world. Ahead of his time, Bonhoeffer foresaw the onset of a secular, agnostic world that has little or no need for God as an expla- nation of the way things are. He sum-
moned the church to discover an entirely new language for expressing the Christian faith in this brave new “world come of age,” a world that has no apparent need for a God hypoth- esis to explain the way things are. In such a secular, nonreligious
world, Bonhoeffer believed that being the body of Christ had to be stripped down to its essentials: prayer and righteous action for the sake of others. As Jesus Christ is the person who existed only for the sake of oth- ers, so the church is only genuinely church when it’s a community that exists for the benefit of others.
Four character traits If being the body of Christ is the vocation of the church in our time, what does this look like in practical terms? Every person is known by his or
her character. The word character refers to those traits or marks that are engraved on our very person- hood. Human character is formed in two primary ways: by repetition and by undergoing the crucibles of life. Those things we do over and over again in our lives, for example the practices we repeat at worship, become habits that shape our iden- tity as members of the body of Christ. Likewise, how we endure personal times of suffering profoundly shapes
Editor’s note: This series is intended to be a public conversation among theolo- gians of the ELCA on various themes of our faith and the challenging issues of our day. It invites readers to engage in dialogue by posting comments online at the end of each article at
www.thelutheran.org. The series is edited by Michael Cooper-White, president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg (Pa.), on behalf of the presidents of the eight ELCA seminaries.
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