WHEN THE BODY OF CHRIST IS THE BODY OF CHRIST
18/12/20 08:22
Humans have ‘being’. Thus we call ourselves human beings. As beings we have self-awareness and agency. Our being comes from God. We achieve the fullness of our being in God which is to say that we become the best of who we are in the Being of God.
‘For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring’ Acts 17.28 NIV. Being is realised as sons of God and sons of God are sons in spirit and truth in union with God.
NOT JUST WORDS
It means little to talk of the Body of Christ in the legality of words when the Word of God is not words but Being. Christ The Word of God is God’s statement of who God is – the Who is three persons one God. This is the archetype of community – a oneness in which we are part of each other yet fully ourselves. This is the Trinitarian Communion that is God and the Communion that is the Church in Christ: Perichoresis.
KOINONIA
Koinonia can be a word that is something and nothing or it can denote the actuality of the Body of Christ who are a manifestation of the Christ because they live in the incarnation.
Myk Habets writes, “The term Torrance uses is koinonia, and it too has a double reference. First, vertically, it represents our participation through the Spirit in the mystery of Christ’s union with us.
Second, horizontally, it is applied to our fellowship or communion with one another in the body of Christ. At the intersection of the vertical and horizontal dimensions of koinonia is the church, the community of believers united to Christ, who is himself united to humanity through the incarnation.
“Torrance asserts that ‘in and through koinonia the divine prothesis enshrining the eternal mystērion embodies itself horizontally in a community of those who are one with God through the reconciliation of Christ’. It is this theology of union with Christ by means of fellowship or participation in God that links Torrance’s doctrines of soteriology [the nature and means of salvation] and ecclesiology [the nature constitution and functions of the church].”
YOUR INCARNATED BODY
This tells us that koinonia is much more than an element of church growth theory. It’s not a legalism or a bit of Christian social science. To have any agency is has to be an expression of the new covenant which means a manifestation of the incarnation – which is Christ in us and as us.
Churches do not come alive as institutions. They are living expressions of the person of Jesus as those in them live Christ their life. This is the church built out of us, yet bult without human hands.