The Community of Believers

Christian and Muslim Perspectives

Lucinda Mosher, David Marshall, Lucinda Mosher, David Marshall

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781626161962
• eBook ISBN: 9781626161955
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Community of Believers offers the proceedings of the 2013 Building Bridges seminar, a dialogue between leading Christian and Muslim scholars under the stewardship of Georgetown University.

These essays consider such themes as the Church as mystical body of Christ versus the Church as proclamation; the roots and uses of the term ummah and its development over time; Christian desires for communion, experiences of division, and approaches to unity; the history of Muslim disunity; twentieth-century Christian ecclesiology and its responses to a post-Christendom and post-Christian world; and the Arab Spring as a case study for contemplating accommodationism, conservatism, reformism, and fundamentalism as Muslim strategies to address the pressures of modernism. The volume also includes texts and commentaries used in the seminar’s discussions of each topic and a concluding essay summarizing the tone, content, and style of participant exchanges throughout the seminar.

PART I

The Nature and Purpose of the Community

The Nature and Purpose of the Christian Community (the Church)

GAVIN D’COSTA

To answer the question of the nature and purpose of the Church would require an extensive historical and chronological examination to look at how different groups of Christians have answered it. The significant differences between these answers are addressed at this seminar by my colleague Lucy Gardner.¹ The differences are often seen as operating between denominational groups (Anglicans, Orthodox, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Free Church), but there are actually many internal differences within each single denomination.² This makes it difficult to give a single answer: “For group X, such and such is the nature and purpose of the Church.” Difficult, but not impossible. One other difficulty presents itself: why not go back to the Bible and give a biblical answer? Surely all Christians are united on the authority of the Bible? However, Paul Minear, in Images of the Church in the New Testament, shows how ninety-six biblical images bring into focus differing aspects of the Church, and I am not convinced that Christians are united on the “authority” of the Bible.³ While the plurality we find in different Christian denominations is a partial reflection on biblical pluralism, all Christians are called to be “one.” From a certain point of view, which I share, divided Christian churches are a “scandal.”⁴

I should also declare my own starting point: I am a Roman Catholic Christian who is married to a Quaker. That presents me with lots of challenges but a wonderful opportunity to learn about radically different ways of trying to be “church.”

I’d venture that two guiding themes encompass all the models of the nature and purpose of the Church, even when there is severe tension between some of them: (1) The nature and purpose of the Church is for Christians to grow more Christlike through following and submitting to the call of God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and through mutual support, prayer, and praise—i.e., the Church as a school of friendship: with God and with neighbors; (2) the nature and purpose of the Church is for Christians to share this Trinitarian gift through word and deed, and to share this in a Christlike manner. Each submodel gives a particular flavor to the two themes and draws them out differently. The actual history of the Church can be criticized by both themes at different times. This is inevitable and reflects the Church as a human community. But it is not just a human community.

In an attempt to be as ecumenical and “mainstream” as possible, given the limits of time, I’ve decided to oversimplify and focus on two major “models” of the Church that have lasting currency—and submodels within the main: (1) the Church as mystical body of Christ and (2) the Church as proclamation.⁵

The Church as Mystical Body of Christ

The Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches are often associated with this model, although by no means exclusively. The model stems from a number of New Testament passages that identify the community of Christians with the “body of Christ.” For example, in Ephesians 4:16, St. Paul says: “speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” This became a key organic metaphor upon which the notion of “body of Christ” was developed, including sometimes associating the “head” with the “episcopacy” (bishops), or even a particular part of the episcopacy (the Pope).⁶

The power of metaphors is precisely in generating new ways of seeing things.⁷ We can notice this dynamic in virtually all the key biblical images: they can be read in one way, and then another. Further, Paul, in the account given in Acts 9: 3–4, makes this interesting identification of the Christian community with Christ himself at the point of his conversion. He had been persecuting Christians, you will recall. He was good at it. Then, on the road to Damascus, “suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ ‘Who are you, Lord?’ Saul asked. ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ he replied.” The “voice” does not identify the historical Jesus with his body while on earth, but with his body the Church takes on a function of Jesus after his resurrection. I hope you can see the seed of the idea present. The seed would lead in many directions.

Before proceeding, it might help to make a tentative distinction between the horizontal dimension (sociological and historical snapshots of Christian communities) and the vertical dimension (God’s dealings with his community). When asked, “How could any group that acts like that (that being apartheid, slavery, etc.) claim they are the body of Christ?”, the question, if not anachronistic, operates on using the horizontal to judge the vertical dimension. If asked too often, the vertical dimension is rightly called into question. But logically the vertical’s veracity is not dependent on the horizontal’s alignment. The vertical and horizontal always intersect so things are more complex, but these models work primarily on the vertical dimension.

If the Church “is” the “body of Christ,” does it mean that in some sense Christians are claiming divinization—as they believe Christ was both human and divine? One has to answer this carefully, even if there were not so many Muslims in the room. The Greek Orthodox Church does speak about theosis, divinization, but it does not mean that the created order loses its created status. It means that the created order participates with, lives out of, and is transformed by the divine energies (not the divine essence). Participating in the divine life, the invisible energies of God, turns the created order like wood and pigments that make paint into an icon, a holy image, a sign that can point us to a reality. But it also turns the created order, persons, into saints whose lives fully reflect God’s life. The body of Christ here is a deeply material model, which indicates that by looking at these bodies, the performed lives of the saints, their relics, and the places they lived and acted, we glimpse the Christlike power that we also can share and inhabit. The daring word theosis is used to bring out the nature and purpose of the mystical body: that in our becoming part of that body we begin, or try, to make an ascent toward the saving and redeeming God. The ascent is finally dependent on grace but also requires human actions.

This is why a cognate image also became so important to Christians: the Church as the spouse of Christ. If we have body images, we have the possibility of erotic images! The scriptural text of The Song of Songs explores the complex moves of the lover’s burning heart and bodily senses in a quite remarkable fashion. Some of the commentaries domesticate the text, but traditionally the Church is seen as the lover being united to Christ. He is the male; the Church becomes female. He gives his body in the Eucharist; those who receive him continue in this state of marriage. This nuptial imagery was central to the early Church and was revived by recent popes but had always been strong in the Orthodox traditions.⁸

But the body image also evokes the material source of all bodies: the maternal. This maternal thematic also arose from the scriptural account in John’s Gospel, where Jesus on the Cross “gives” his mother into the care of the beloved disciple and the beloved disciple into the care of Mary (John 19:26–27).⁹ From very early on Mary was understood as the archetype of the Church: the maternal body that nourishes and feeds her children, who guides them by example: the contemplation of the divine within and without.¹⁰

I’ve given attention to these images because they bring out vividly the personal and affective elements of “church belonging” that relate to such primal human instincts: love, affection, nurture, and growth as well as discipline, punishment, trial, and struggle. And beyond these: peace and rest. But the personal always requires structures, rituals, discipline, and formation.¹¹

Another trajectory out of the mystical body of Christ led to the view of the Church as the “Sacrament of Christ” or “the sacrament of salvation.” The invisible God must communicate to people through visible signs. Visible signs start with creation, and the story of the history of revelation runs from creation to Israel, and then finally to Christ.¹² If a sign points to other than itself, Christ is a symbol or icon—where the sign is also the signified. This is a Latin way of putting it. The Greeks prefer icon, drawing on Paul’s assertion that “Christ is the icon of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” (Col. 1:15) They both get at the same thing: the Church is the visible sign of Christ to the world. You clearly need glasses in careful focus for this to work!

The early Christians believed that Christ had left them rituals and signs that shaped them into being more Christlike: what would later be called sacraments. Both the East and West eventually held that Christ instituted seven sacraments, rituals that confer special grace, “essential,” even “necessary,” aids for the spiritual journey. These sacraments related to the earthly pilgrimage: birth—baptism; adulthood—confirmation; Eucharistic meetings; confession; marriage; religious consecrated life and priestly ministry—holy orders; illness and death—last rites. The two repeatable ones become central: confession, for the forgiveness of sins; and the Eucharist, as Christ’s gift of himself for our salvation.¹³ For each and every sacrament there has been considerable dispute as to its form (the words and materials used), when it is to be conferred (baptism for infants or only adults), its meaning (a sign, a symbol, an ontological transformation of matter, etc.), and whether Jesus really instituted it. The Reformation intensified some existing earlier disputes but also raised new ones.¹⁴

Rituals can easily become rote and mechanical. Rituals can lead to near obsession to performing the liturgy “correctly.” In reaction we find some Christian communities dispensing with liturgical form almost altogether. This can be seen dramatically in unstructured Quaker “worship.” No sacred text is read, no rituals are conducted. Rituals can also minimize the interior drama and complexity of how God’s grace works as the focus becomes fixed on external rites. In reaction we find some communities that emphasize personal transformation. Here religious worship might consist of numerous testimonies of how people’s lives have been changed by God and be punctuated by spontaneous prayers and singing and even ecstatic dance and joy. Finally, sacred rituals can allow those who control the dispensing of sacraments, priests, to abu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Participants
• Introduction
• Part I: The Nature and Purpose of the Community
• Part II: Unity and Disunity in the Life of the Community
• Part III: Continuity and Change in the Life of the Community
• Part IV: Reflection
• Index