I'm picking up this thread from the comments running at The Radical Business of Original Sin . Thanks to Tony Woodlief for joining in there. I'm fairly certain that Tony's Sand in the Gears was the first blog I ever looked at, and I still admire the style he uses there. I would like for this space to become more transparently personal... something I'll aspire to!
Anyway, I was asked in a comment to explicate the statement that "the church is the body of Christ." Gerry Gleason is correct in identifying the Pauline origins of this understanding. The classic exposition of this is in Ephesians, where Paul discusses the unity of the church (ch 4) and again in ch 5 where the identification of Christ and the church is posed as a mystery of faith (5:32).
I was discussing this issue today with my pastor, and he confirmed that Christ speaks seldom of His church but very often of His Kingdom. I pulled the concordance out tonight and found only two instances where the term for "church" is used in the Gospels. They are the passage to which Gerry refers us, Matthew 16:18 (...you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church...) as well as Matthew 18:15-20.
However, dismissing the authority of Paul will not get Gerry where he seems to be headed, to the dismissal of most (any?) earthly ecclesiastical authority. If we look contextually at these two passages, it is clear that Christ is acknowledging authority for the church in each instance.
At Matt 18, this authority extends to the disciplining of a sinning brother by the church. The church is here loosely defined as "where two or three have gathered together in My name."
In Matt 16, the authority mentioned is that of the keys of the kingdom (the famous foundation of the Roman Papacy). As a Protestant who denies that the Roman Church stands athwart the gate to salvation, which is truly nothing but the Cross and Christ crucified, I see a different ecclesiology in this passage. This passage as a whole, Matt 16:13-20, is known as Peter's confession of Christ. Christ asks the disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" And Peter answers: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Christ replies that this revelation came to Peter not from the flesh but from the Father. So the "rock" on which Christ will build the church may be seen as Peter's witness, which came from the authority of the Father.
This may raise for some the question about verifiability of such a witness, which points us again to the standard of Matt 18, "by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed." There is little room for solipsism in the Christian life. We are to rely for interpretive help not only on the Word but also on the church--marked not only by our fellowship with our brothers in Christ but by the teaching of the Word by apostles of the church and the administration of the sacraments.
Clearly, what Christ called the disciples to--and empowered them for--was to be his witnesses (not his keepers). Christ's final injunctions all point to the authoritative and missional nature of His call:
"you are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending forth the promise of My father upon you..." (Luke 24:48-49)
"Tend my lambs" "Shepherd my sheep" "Tend my sheep" (John21:15-17)
"follow me!"
"you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses..." (Acts 1:8)
The death of Christ on the cross was accompanied by a tearing of the veil of the Temple in two. The significance being that God had left the building, thus supplanting the old covenant with the new covenant, fulfilled in Christ's birth, death, and resurrection and the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost upon the church. So, the church is in this age the body of Christ infused by the Spirit, equipped with the Logos, and the testimony to the kingdom to come.
J I Packer puts it this way: "The task of the church is to make the invisible kingdom visible through faithful Christian living and witness-bearing. The gospel of Christ is still the gospel of the kingdom."
Hope that helps. Ecclesiology is not typical blog fare, I suspect!
What is truly remarkable in the context of conversations about decentralization and the displacement of hierarchy by wirearchy, is that the ecclesiology of the modern church continues to undergo reformation
Just arriving in my mail today were two books pointing in these directions:
Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shape of Things to Come: innovation and mission for the 21st-century church
and Darrell Guder, ed. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America
I'm looking forward to exploring these texts, and I'll close what has grown to be a very long post with a teaser from Guder:
"This trinitarian point of entry into our theology of the church necessarily shifts all the accents in our ecclesiology. As it leads us to see the church as the instrument of God's mission, it also forces us to recognize the ways in which the Western church has tended to shape and fit the gospel into its cultural context and made the church's institutional extension and survival its priority. As we have used the tools of biblical scholarship carefully, we have begun to learn that the biblical message is more radical, more inclusive, more transforming than we have allowed it to be. In particular, we have begin to see that the church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the gospel, but rather its instrument and witness." (5)