The Shape of Participation

A Theology of Church Practices

L. Roger Owens

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781606085196
  9781498211581
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621893196
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The Shape of Participation is a work of constructive theology addressed to theologians, seminarians, and thoughtful pastors. Owens engages and deepens recent popular discussions of church practices by approaching practices from the church Fathers' understanding of the church's participation in God. Through a wide-ranging engagement with theologians, both ancient and contemporary--including Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Herbert McCabe--Owens argues that the embodied practices of the church are the church's participation in the life of God, making the church Jesus' own continued, peaceable embodiment in and for the world. This book is for theologians, pastors, and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how the visible presence of God's church is extraordinarily good news in a violent world.

Part One

1

Rediscovering the Embodied Church

This book is about how church practices are the church’s embodied participation in the life of God through the union of our bodies with God’s. As I showed in the Introduction, for the Wesleys and the early Methodists we are joined “body, soul, and spirit” with God through the practices of the church, especially the Lord’s Supper. Growth in this union occurs through the sociality of the church. For the people of Mt. Level, God inhabits the church’s praise and corporate proclamation of the gospel. The Holy Spirit irradiates their common life so that they shine with God’s glory like an icon of Christ. These communities press us to begin to think about participation in terms of the peculiar visibility of the church, whether conceived in terms of Wesleyan holiness or in terms of the community as icon.

My description of these two communities raised three important questions: First, how should we understand the relationship between the human activity and the divine activity as these two activities are mutually constitutive of church practices? Second, how can a theology of church practices display the material conditions of the church’s participation in God by taking with utmost seriousness the embodied nature of these church practices? Finally, how do church practices, fully embodied and constituted by both human and divine activity, point the rest of creation to participation in God’s life?

The fundamental issues these questions address are not new. Part of what I am doing in this book is bringing an ancient way of talking about the church—as participating in God—into conversation with those recent approaches to ecclesiology that talk about the church in terms of corporate practices. Therefore, I begin my approach to the question of the church’s participation in God by closely considering Cyril of Alexandria’s account of the church in his commentary on the Gospel of John, for Cyril represents just one of those ancient ways of talking about the church’s participation in God. The discussion of Cyril serves two purposes. First, Cyril offers a tantalizingly beautiful picture of the church, which shows how an account of the church’s participation in God must be thoroughly christological. My hope is that these few pages on Cyril whet the reader’s appetite for a deeply christological account of the church’s embodied practices that the rest of the book intends to offer. Second, however, Cyril serves as an example of how accounts of the church that are theologically rich and centered on the church’s participation in God often do not have the resources to describe the embodied, visible sociality that is the church’s life. Thus, the discussion of Cyril opens the door for an engagement with those thinkers who have tried to recover for ecclesiology the church as embodied in its social processes and practices.

Cyril of Alexandria and the Church
of the Triune God

The few pages in Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary on John that remark upon John 17:20–21 are useful because they clearly and succinctly show the heart of reflection on participation and the church in the patristic era. More importantly, they show how Cyril’s reflections on the church are directly related to his theology of the unity of Christ. Since throughout this book it will become increasingly clear that Chalcedonian orthodoxy is crucial for overcoming inappropriate dualisms and for understanding divine and human activity in the practices of the church, I begin with Cyril of Alexandria to give us our first glimpse of a theological account of how the church, through the Father’s gift of the Son and the Spirit, participates in the very life shared by these three.

Cyril begins his commentary on these verses by emphasizing the strength of the unity, which Christ expects among those who make up the church, a unity that Christ himself made possible, by comparing the unity of the church to Christ’s own unity with the Father. Cyril writes, “He thus expresses his will that in the strength of the holy and consubstantial Trinity, we too should be as it were commingled with one another.”1 Citing Ephesians 2:14–16 in which Paul pronounces the unity of the church as the breaking down of the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles in the body of Jesus, Cyril remarks that the church is like the union of two people “moving in Christ” towards the “constitution of a perfect single whole.”2 Cyril is clear, however, that this unity is not a hidden unity, but a concrete unity, lived by the church in its obedient pursuit of the good:

And this purpose is actually accomplished when those who put their trust in Christ are of one soul with one another and receive as it were a single heart; and that comes from the total affinity which true religion gives, from the obedience which is implicit in faith and from the mind that is set on the good life.3

The unity of the church in Christ is, for Cyril, the church’s practicing true religion, the concrete obedience of faith and the common pursuit of the good life.

When Jesus says that as “you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” (John 17:21b), Cyril believes that Jesus is moving to a deeper, more profound expression of the church’s unity, which is more but not other than the church’s obediently practicing a common life of faith. The unity of the church is a unity in the triune God. Cyril explores how this deeper unity, “which does not exclude unity even at the bodily level,”4 is made possible by the gift of Christ and the Spirit in the church’s eucharistic celebration first by reiterating the Christology that has come to be recognized as distinctly his own:

The Only-begotten has shined on us from the very substance of God the Father; having his own nature and fullness of the one who begat him, he became flesh . . . and mixed himself as it were with our nature by virtue of an inexpressible conjunction and union with this earthly body. So he who is God by nature was called—indeed actually became—a heavenly man. . . . So he was God and man in one. He made a sort of union in himself of two things which are utterly distinct and remote from one another in nature, and thereby made man to share and participate in divine nature.5

Several things are worth noting about this passage. As I said in the Introduction, I want to talk about the church as constituted by its practices, and indeed later I will say that the church rightly understood is where Christ practices himself in the Spirit. Here Cyril gives an important safeguard to any solipsistic understanding of what it might mean for Christ to be practicing himself in the church. The “himself” which is Christ is not a “himself” that is in “himself,” but Christ’s very self is constituted by his “shining on us from the very substance of God the Father.” That is, whatever it means that Jesus performed or practiced his identity as it is recorded in the Gospel narratives or as Christ continues to do in the practices of the church, it cannot be understood in a way that is closed in on itself, precisely because such practicing is the showing forth of a life that comes from another, from the Father. Second, Cyril here expresses succinctly his christological position over-against Nestorius, so much so that Eutychian language, the very thing the Antiochenes feared, creeps into his description when he says that the Son “mixed himself, as it were, with our nature.” Nonetheless, Cyril still articulates what is known as Chalcedonian orthodoxy when he writes, “So he was God and man in one. He made a sort of union in himself of two things which are utterly distinct and remote from one another in nature.” It is not enough to note that Cyril here reiterates his position on the unity of Christ. What matters is that his notion of participation—how humans have come to share the nature of God—is determined precisely by the hypostatic union. Participation for Cyril is not an abstract, ontological reality, but a soteriological implication of the incarnation in which humans share.

But how do humans share? How is our participation in the divine nature actualized? Cyril’s answer to these questions makes one more move that shows how this notion of participation is fully Trinitarian. It is commonplace to say that the church participates in God through the Spirit, and this is usually understood in terms of the distinct missio of the Spirit in the church.6 But Cyril’s pneumatological account of our participation does not begin with a discussion of the distinct mission of the Spirit in the church. Instead, he turns to the Spirit’s work in the incarnation itself as the only way to make intelligible the Spirit’s work in the church. Cyril writes:

The participation in the Holy Spirit and his abiding presence which began through and in Christ has also been transmitted to us. When he appeared at our level, that is as man, he was the first to be anointed and sanctified, even though in his nature, as he comes from the Father, he is God. With his own Spirit he sanctified his own temple and the whole creation that was brought into being through him, for which the act of sanctification was appropriate. Thus the divine plan was effected in Christ as a beginning of the road whereby we too might receive a share both in the Holy Spirit and in union with God. For we are all sanctified in him in the way that we have just described.7

Only after Cyril has said how the Spirit was himself at work in Christ’s incarnation, how the Spirit actualized the incarnation, can he begin to say that we ourselves are sanctified by the Spirit just because we participate in that holy flesh of Christ.8 However one understands the distinct mission of the Spirit in the church, it cannot be viewed as abstracted or separated from how the Spirit worked in Christ’s own life. For Cyril, this participation in Christ through the Spirit is constitutive of our own sanctification. We are sanctified as we participate in the sanctified flesh of the man Jesus, whose flesh is nothing other than the body of God. Likewise, that very participation in the flesh of the man Jesus is a sharing in the nature of God, christologically understood.

Finally, Cyril accounts for our sharing in the divine nature in two ways. First, this sharing in the nature of God and the bodily unity of believers occurs through the eucharistic practice of the church in which the church partakes of the very sanctified body of Jesus. “With one bod...

Table of contents

• The Shape of Participation
• Preface
• Introduction: Practicing Communities
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index