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“Plainly, for Paul the concept of personal embodiment is not itself a biological concept. We may discover what sort of concept it then is, and simultaneously declare our own usage, by first recalling our general interpretation that for Paul a person’s embodiment is his or her availability to other persons and thereupon to her or himself and by then again introducing German idealism’s subject-object distinction. That the church is the body of Christ, in Paul’s and our sense, means that she is the object in the world as which the risen Christ is an object for the world, an available something as which Christ is there to be addressed and grasped. Where am I to aim my intention, to intend the risen Christ? The first answer must be: to the assembled church, and if I am in the assembly, to the gathering that surrounds me. Thus the primal posture of Christian prayer is not involution with closed eyes but an open posture, with eyes intent upon those speaking for the gathering. Yet we cannot rest with this first answer. In the New Testament, the church and risen Christ are one but can also be distinguished from each other; thus, for example, the church is the risen Christ’s ‘bride’ so that Christ and the church are joined as a couple. We may not so identify the risen Christ with the church as to be unable to refer distinctly to the one and then to the other. Protestants have for just this reason often feared such language as appears in the previous paragraphs. If we say only that the church is personally identical with Christ, it may seem that the church can never need reform or be open to it… Within the gathering we can intend Christ as the community we are, without self-deification, because we jointly intend the identical Christ as the sacramental elements in our midst, which are other than us. Yet again invoking the distinction between community and association, we may say that the church as community is the object-Christ for the world and her own members severally, in that the church as association is objectively confronted within herself by the same Christ… But now a question can no longer be repressed: Why must Christ be embodied for us at all? Why is not a ‘spirital’ – in the vulgar sense – communion enough? That is, why is it not enough privately to think and feel Christ’s presence and to know that others in their privacies do the same? Why do I need to live in the assembled church? Or indeed why is it not enough that the bread and cup move me to inward awareness of the risen Christ and to a deeper feeling of communion with him – as is the understanding of most Protestants and not a few Catholics, whatever the official teaching of their churches? Why must we say the bread and cup are his objective intrusion, his body? Few have probed this question with such passion as Martin Luther. Were Christ’s presence in the assembly disembodied, it would be his presence as God but not his presence as a human, for as a human he is a risen body. And to the posit of Christ’s presence as sheer God, abstracted from his embodied actuality as Jesus, Luther can react only with horror: ‘Don’t give me any of that God!’ It is God’s hiding in human embodiment that is our salvation: Christ’s naked deity – were there in actuality such a thing – would be ‘nothing to do with us’ and just so destruction for us. Our salvation is ‘God incarnate… in whom are all the [divine] treasures… but hidden [emphasis added]’… The church with her sacraments is truly Christ’s availability to us just because Christ takes her as his availability to himself. Where does the risen Christ turn to find himself? To the sacramental gathering of believers. To the question ‘Who am I?’ he answers, ‘I am this community’s head. I am the subject whose objectivity is this community. I am the one who died to gather them.’ And again: ‘I am the subject whose objectivity for this community is the bread and cup around which she gathers’… The metaphysics of Mediterranean antiquity, and for the most part those of subsequent Western tradition, of course do not allow for this simplicity. Therefore they are in error. The usual metaphysics suppose that what can be and what cannot be are determined by abstractly universal principles and never by a particular; thus the question of how the church with her sacraments can be the actual body of the individual human person Jesus can be settled only by argument that does not itself mention his particular personhood or the specific communion of the church. But this supposition of the Greek pagan thinkers is neither revealed nor an otherwise inevitable position. If the gospel is true, precisely the specific personhood of the individual human person Jesus is, by the initiative of the Father and in the freedom of the Spirit, the material determinant of what generally can be and cannot be.”[1]
[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology Volume 2: The Works of God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213-15.
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