Ernst Käsemann’s understanding of the Church as the body of Christ, as we saw in chapter 1, turns on the meaning of the word ‘body’ - namely that it should be understood as a person’s ‘Wirklichkeit der Kommunikation’.8He argues that while we should categorically
deny any idea of the church as Christus prolongatus9at the same time we should understand
it as ‘sein gegenwärtiger Herrschaftsbereich’.10To describe the church as the ‘body of 5In particular we will see that Christ’s bodily presence is consistently qualified with a reference to the Spirit.
So, while believers’ bodies may be members of Christ (1 Cor 6:15), being joined to Christ in this way means that they are one spirit with him (6:17). The Corinthians may be the body of Christ (ὑμεῖς δέ ἐστε σῶμα Χριστοῦ [12:27]) but they were baptised into this body by the Spirit (ἐν ἑνὶ πνεύματι [12:13]). Finally, while Paul describes the breaking of bread as a participation in the body of Christ (10:16), he does so in the context of speaking about spiritual (πνευματικός) food and drink (10:3-4).
6In this section we will not address the issue of the origin of the ‘body of Christ’ concept. This question has
been extensively discussed and any kind of thorough treatment is ultimately beyond the scope of our question. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 550 is probably right to argue for the simple solution: ‘Much the most plausible source of the imagery is the use of the metaphor of the body elsewhere in precisely the way that Paul most consistently uses it – the body as a vital expression of the unity of a community despite the diversity of its many members’. He points (as do many others) to a similar use in the Menenius Agrippa fable (recorded in Livy Hist. 2.32). Cf. Michelle V. Lee, Paul, the Stoics, and the Body of Christ (SNTSMS 137, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9 n.38 for a list of those who have held this position.
7Robinson, The Body, 58.
8Käsemann, ‘Das Theologishe Problem’, 198.
9To do so would be to confuse the different bodies of Christ and to deny the primacy of Christology over
Ecclesiology (Ibid., 209 cf. Käsemann, An die Römer, 276).
Christ’, then, is fundamentally to assert that it is the means by which Christ communicates his Lordship and is present to the world. So, the Body of Christ is the ‘Bereich, in dem und durch den Christus sich nach seiner Erhöhung irdisch als Kyrios erweist’.11It is the ‘Raum
seiner Ubiquität und Omnipotenz’.12
While the church is not an extension of the incarnation, it is the means by which Christ exercises his lordship over the world. This understanding of the body of Christ is a theologically promising way of holding together the different body language in Paul and in particular in understanding how we relate the bodily absence and bodily presence of Christ. However, there are problems with Käsemann’s understanding. As we saw in chapter 1, Käsemann’s analysis of the body of Christ is not actually based on exegesis of the specific passages where Paul refers to the motif.13Thus, it needs to be asked whether Paul does, in
fact, use the imagery of the Church as the ‘body of Christ’ to emphasise the ongoing relation of an (otherwise absent) Christ to the world? Gundry argues that when Paul
actually uses the phrase it is purely to discuss ‘the inner structure and workings of the body in the interrelationship of its various organs and limbs’ and Paul ‘nowhere relates the Body of Christ to outward activities in relationship to others’.14This certainly seems to be the
case when one looks at the texts where Paul discusses the Church as the body of Christ. So, in Romans 12:5 Paul’s point is deliberately focussed inwards. Having pointed to the fact that a body has many members (12:4), he states that we who are many (οἱ πολλοί) are one body in Christ (ἓν σῶμά ἐσμεν ἐν Χριστῷ). He then discusses the use of the different gifts within the church. It is only at verse 14 that we begin to move outside the church with Paul’s command to ‘bless those who persecute you’ but by this point in the argument we have moved away from the concept of the body. Similarly, throughout 1 Corinthians 12 the focus is on the internal structure of the body.15The fact that though it is a unity it is made up of
many parts that should be concerned for one another (12:12-26); and that each of them has different roles within the body (12:27-31).
11Ibid.
12Käsemann, ‘Leiblichkeit bei Paulus’, 48. 13As noted by Way, The Lordship of Christ, 71-72.
14R.H. Gundry, Sōma in Biblical Theology with Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology (SNTSMS 29, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), 226; Cf. R.Y.K. Fung, ‘The Body of Christ’ in DPL (1993), 81.
15As others have observed, Paul nowhere thinks of the Body of Christ as ‘his instrument of the working of his
Spirit in the world or as his visible form of manifestation in it; he is concerned rather with the significance of the limbs for one another’ [A. J. M. Wedderburn, ‘The Body of Christ and Related Concepts in I Corinthians,’ STJ24.1 (1971): 82]. Cf. Ernest Best, One Body in Christ: a Study in the Relationship of the Church to Christ in the Epistles of the Apostle Paul(London: S.P.C.K, 1955), 113.
Eduard Schweizer presents a slightly different argument for why the church as the Body of Christ should be understood as a fundamental aspect of Christ’s presence in the world. He suggests that ‘body’ for Paul means ‘man as a whole when his physical-psychical corporeity is stressed’.16With reference to Christ, Schweizer argues that ‘body’ means his
person ‘given for the sake of the world’ specifically ‘Christ himself in his “for-our-sake- ness” (Rom 7:4)’.17This prior understanding of ‘body’ points to the possibility that ‘body of
Christ’ in Paul may be a ‘means in which the church would be considered as the instrument by which Christ did his continuing service to the world’.18However, even Schweizer is forced
to concede that this thought does not yet appear in the undisputed letters.19Nonetheless he
argues that in Romans 12, ‘Paul shows that the members of the body of Christ are rendering their services to the world as well as to one another’.20However, in Romans 12, as we have just
pointed out, though ‘Paul cannot separate service for the community and service for the world’, ‘he does not seek to express the latter idea in terms of the “body of Christ” language’.21Further, even in the later epistles, the concept of the Body of Christ does not
seem to be explicitly described as the instrument of mission.22
Käsemann and Schweizer both understand the motif of the ‘body of Christ’ to speak of Christ’s place, his embodiment within the world. However, it seems that the ‘body of Christ’ motif is not employed by Paul to describe the interaction between Christ and the world. Certainly the church does fulfil that function in some sense (as we saw, for example, in the description of the Church as the ‘letter of Christ’ in 2 Cor 3:1-3), but Paul does not express it with this particular motif. The idea of the ecclesial body of Christ is a motif employed by Paul to speak of the relationship between Christ and the Church, not between Christ and the World through the Church. But what exactly is the nature of this Christ- Church relationship? In the following example we see one recent interpretation that argues that this relationship should be regarded as ‘literal’ and physical.
16E. Schweizer, ‘The Church as the Missionary Body of Christ,’ NTS 8 (1961): 4. 17Ibid.: 5.
18Ibid. Emphasis added.
19When we turn to the disputed epistles of Ephesians and Colossians, Schweizer argues that (particularly in
Col 1:15-23) the author may be correcting the idea that when Christ fills the world he is not doing so like ‘like the Stoic world-soul or like some divine atmosphere wrapping in the whole world’ (Ibid.: 9). Namely, that the argument in this passage was developed to correct those who had (10): ‘reinterpreted Paul’s term of the body of Christ in a way familiar to every Hellenist: Christ is the world-soul permeating and ruling the whole cosmos’. Rather, argues Schweizer, the author of Colossians shows that Christ permeates the world by the preaching of the gospel (Col 1:23).
20Ibid.: 5-6.
21Wedderburn, ‘The Body of Christ,’ 81. 22Ibid.