I’m going to propose a full-blooded organic understanding of the Body of Christ. This is intended as an expansion of the teachings of St. Paul rather than a new way of thought about that Body. It would seem appropriate to expand those teachings now that we have a deep and wide knowledge of organisms, including the ways in which complex multi-celled or multi-organ organisms evolved from simple cellular organisms.
An interesting question along these lines is:
Is the Christian Church Herself but one organ in the Body of Christ?
It’s better for now to be a little vague about the definition of the Church, but it’s clear the Church is the center of worship and communion with Christ and, through Him, with the Father and the Holy Spirit as well. The Church is the organ in which and through which the community of Christ’s chosen brethren can share the life of God. Yet, there are other human needs met by other forms of human community which overlap with the Church but are most certainly not fully subordinate to Her though subordinate in terms of moral and spiritual guidance. Those other needs, economic and artistic and political, are lesser than our need for communion with God, the very Source of our being, but they are true needs and noble in their own lesser way. In terms which might seem to contradict some of my prior discussions, there are many human needs which can be met only by entering the marketplaces, the regions in which individuals can interact with many of the organs of which they are members.
I’ve spoken against the marketplaces in the modern world, especially in my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand, but I’ve also spoken against the Church Herself in acting strongly outside of the region of Her competence in the Galileo affair and many other cases. But the problem doesn’t come so much from one organ of the Body of Christ intruding into the regions of other organs but rather from one organ not recognizing the proper functions of other organs. In fact, a Christian should be able to realize, once the idea is broached, that the Body of Christ will be like the Holy Trinity, but with far more individuals and — at least in my current proposal — with some intermediary organs. That possibility is raised by the very presence of Jesus Christ in the Body of Christ. He’s with us, but He’s also above us and outside of us. While the Body of Christ might be much like the Holy Trinity, three Persons in one God, it can’t be exactly like it because the Son of God, Himself God, will be in that Body.
To diverge for just a single idea: we need geometric descriptions of individual entities which inhabit ‘spaces’ which have no surfaces as such. Those spaces overlap completely and yet the individual entities would retain their own identity. In the view I’m now exploring, those entities would also form organs of multiple individuals but those organs would be part of an entity which might well be the entirety of the world in which they exist.
I’m forced to speculate far ahead of more specific and better-formed theories just because Western Christians and all others with responsibilities for Western Civilization have failed to respond properly to the enterprises of gathering modern empirical knowledge. Those enterprises have opened fantastic possibilities for understanding God’s Creation and have also demolished old ways of understanding the nature of man, the possibilities of resurrection, and other aspects of Creation and relationships between God and His creatures. My way of looking at created being as multi-leveled, going from abstract truths to concrete being, gives ways for human thinkers to ascend to higher abstractions for both more general understanding but also for a descent towards particular, or concrete, being which might exist. To reach some speculative understanding of the world of the resurrected, a human thinker ascends from this realm of growth and decay to high levels of abstraction and then tries to find a path down towards a world made of the same stuff as this one but a world in which growth might be possible but decay doesn’t occur.
In any case, Christian thinkers are behind two centuries or more in their understanding of God’s Creation. We have a lot of ground to make up.
Let me return to a more limited line of thought for now… I’ve spoken in the past of Western Civilization as being a home which the Christian Church (in the West) built for Herself. This is a metaphor used by Joseph Ratzinger (currently Pope Benedict XVI). Cardinal Ratzinger went on to note that Christians of the West hadn’t properly maintained their home. From there, I went on to claim that Western Civilization isn’t in trouble because of invasions by pagans or Satanic agents but rather because Western Christians were morally irresponsible in their duties towards their own civilization. Pagans and others didn’t invade the West. They wandered into vacated public spaces.
With that as background, I’ll move to the possibility that Western Civilization wasn’t so much a house as a unstable colony of human communities which could be viewed as a first try at developing the Body of Christ. Some of those organisms, individual or communal, grew into parasites or cancers prospering for a while at the expense of the earthly Body of Christ as a whole. The functions of those organs, such as governments which destroy their own underlying communities, are important but have their proper limits. The evolutionary pathways of multi-cellular organisms, such as bipedal apes, passed through similar rough spots. I imagine there were paths which dead-ended when parts of organisms began to prey on other parts. A family line of creatures which develop fatal cancers near the onset of the age of reproduction will disappear pretty quickly.
If we believe there is a forward thrust in this development of the Body of Christ, then the organism as a whole — however primitive it might be at this stage — will eliminate the diseased organs and new organs might grow in its place but maybe different sorts of organs will grow. Let’s consider this a process of a presentation and selection sort — natural selection is a specific such process.
And I return to my speculative claim that the Body of Christ is made of multiple organs and the Church is the most important of those organs because it is by way of the Church that we are united with the Lord Jesus Christ and, through Him, with the Holy Trinity. Given this hypothetical understanding of the Body of Christ, history doesn’t speak of a struggle of a righteous Church against worldly powers which serve un-Godly purposes. It tells us of a struggle in which the various organs of the Body of Christ are developing in themselves even as the greater Body also develops. The Church Herself has at times begun to take on the functions of other organs, threatening to turn cancerous, but She was returned to Her proper functions and proper boundaries, as if God truly does act to discipline Her but also to save Her. There is some reason to believe she’s now the most mature of the organs in the Body of Christ — at a time when her worldly power has shrunk greatly relative to that of cancerous and parasitical political and economic organs. Yet, those organs, no matter how diseased at present, also fill important roles in the Body of Christ — they meet human needs. The question is: are those merely needs in this human realm or are they needs of any being truly human, even a human being living in the world of the resurrected? I’m betting that human beings have political and economic needs and those will be met in the world of the resurrected.
We have to keep in mind that individuals are also developing, as individuals, as members of various organs, and as members of the entire Body of Christ. This is one of the reasons for my current speculations. If we are to be truly saved, as our own selves, then it must be true that grace completes and perfects nature rather than overriding it in any way. Our political and economic needs are to be completed and perfected when we rise from the grave to live for time without end with the Lord Jesus Christ. We human beings naturally form communities and institutions for several of our major categories of needs. I don’t see the Church as being capable of satisfying all these needs. And — to repeat — I don’t see those needs as disappearing in the world of the resurrected, not if we’re to remain human beings.
If viable in light of Christian revelations and what is known of Creation and human creatures in particular, my current speculations make it possible to discuss the Body of Christ coherently. We can speak of life after death and still sound sane but we have to adjust to speak in terms consistent with those realms of Creation we can directly perceive or can reach by the proper exercise of our all-too human minds.
This program of thought would force us Christians to work hard to grasp difficult lines of thought, to be capable of thinking of the Body of Christ as a fantastically complex organism, not the simple choir in heaven of Amazing Grace but rather the embodiment and realization of an awful lot that’s good about human life including many things we can’t quite realize in this mortal realm. Political relationships would remain as would cultural traditions — all brought to their fullness but remaining alive and growing. The implied developmental processes and the resulting complex structures might be describable by tools similar to those used by Einstein to develop his general theory of relativity — differential geometry and the closely related tensor calculus. Or those processes might be similar to those of quantum mechanics. In any case, they don’t seem likely to be well described in any meaningful sense by existing modes of theological or mystical discourse. This doesn’t mean that mysticism would disappear, only that a valid mysticism would point to realities beyond perceptible realities as we best understand them. This is to say that reality defines certain frontiers and the lands beyond those frontiers. Mysticism that speaks of what lies byond the frontiers of the empirical world as understood by ancient and Medieval thinkers becomes no better than nostalgia at best, the babbling of a lunatic at worst.
The question I raised to start is:
Is the Church Herself but one organ in the Body of Christ?
My best speculations right now indicate this to almost certainly be the case. Moreover, the Church Herself has acted in recent centuries, especially through the Papacy, as if She is to play the role of moral and spiritual guide for the economic and political and social powers, in addition to playing Her primary role in directly communicating with God through worship and praise. The Church in recent centuries, through the Popes and through the bishops sitting in council, hasn’t claimed any right to rule directly, only to play the role of conscience, a role not yet acceptable to most of the other organs of the Body of Christ.
If the Body of Christ is forming now in this mortal realm, though the process might not get close to the final result in the world of the resurrected, then it becomes possible to explore that process and to come to some significant understanding of the Body of Christ and how it develops. More than that, the effort to understand the Body would seem to be the duty of those who claim to be Christian thinkers, theologians or philosophers or historians or creative writers. Pursuing this line of thought would seem the best way forward (in fact, out of the ghetto built by Christian thinkers over the past 200 years or more) for Christian theology and would provide a solid foundation for those very important topics in Christian theology: the nature of the union of God and man and the Eucharist.