What is a Christian body?

This is one question that kept coming to mind as I observed, with some mixture of dismay and weariness, the predictable and performative controversies over human sexuality at the Lambeth Conference. That so much of our global Communion’s time and energy continues to be spent on a debate essentially over whether queer bodies are valid limbs of the Body of Christ suggests the Church still struggles to find a coherent theology of the body itself, both individual and ecclesiastical. It may not be a coincidence that global Anglicanism still cannot settle upon the nature and function of its own institutional body when it continues to litigate, on various fronts of the culture wars, the worth and measure of particular human bodies. If we do not know how to even speak of a Christian body—its parameters, its prerogatives, its promise—how can we ever hope to be the Body of Christ?

This challenge is not unique to Anglicans, of course. Understanding the role of the body has troubled the Church from the beginning. In his landmark work, The Body and Society, Peter Brown describes how a uniquely Christian theological anthropology was born out of the messy collision of Second Temple Judaism, ancient Roman philosophy, and the upending implications of the resurrected body of Jesus Christ. Whereas Romans in the time of Jesus understood the body predominantly as an imperfect vessel of clay in which “the soul had been sent down from heaven for a time to act as an administrator,” (1) the Jewish tradition did not emphasize such a dichotomy. Instead, body, mind, and spirit functioned as an integrated reality, spoken of as the heart, that was indivisibly accountable (and precious) to God. 

Thus the idea of a detachable soul “escaping” the body was antithetical to Jewish—and, therefore, early Christian—reflections on the human person, for “true peace would come to the faithful not when the soul slipped off the alien clay of the body, but when a faceless reluctance had finally melted away within the heart.” (2) Salvation in the Judeo-Christian tradition was always a fully incarnational prospect. The process by which this might happen, viewed in Israel through the paradigm of the Law, was given new, mysterious, and infinitely expanded horizons in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of God in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. 

We see in the writings of the early Church, including the epistles of St. Paul (who was himself both a Jew and a citizen of Rome, (3) and thus an inheritor of their competing paradigms) a real-time wrestling among the tensions of Roman, Jewish, and early Christian understandings of embodiment. Was the Christian body the fragile bearer of “treasure in clay jars,” (4) as the Roman elites might have perceived? Was it the fulfilment of the God of Israel’s promise that “I will put my laws in their hearts” (5) in a manner that would transform the body’s desires and errant tendencies? Or had Christ inaugurated an entirely “new creation” (6) that deconstructed all of the old paradigms of the body’s liabilities and horizons? Paul traverses all of these metaphors and metaphysics in his writings, suggesting that he himself was still working out what it meant to be part of this new, mysterious Body of Christ.

We find later that as Christianity became aligned with the Roman empire and its offshoots in the West, the centuries that followed resulted in a bodily theology that still labored under the awkward alliance of the radical demands of a “single-hearted” discipleship in the Israelite tradition on the one hand (exemplified by the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the saints, mystics, and certain monastics) and on the other the pragmatic and utilitarian agendas of Empire, promulgated by monarchs and bishops who administered social order across a broad and messy landscape of cultures and contexts. These two streams of thought have coexisted uneasily ever since, leaving a question unresolved: is the body something to be transfigured or to be endured? Perhaps our greatest mistake is to presume that the matter was ever a settled one—that we actually know what a Christian body is. On the contrary, just as Paul was searching for an answer in his urgent, improvisational writings to the earliest believers, we are still discovering the body’s meaning and its purpose in and through Christ. All of our definitions are contingent, because “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” (7) Yet we tend to operate under a narrow and rather hubristic certainty whenever we talk about the body, as if we know everything there is to know about the lives of the people around us. 

Those who reject the full inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community into the Church do so because of certain assumptions about what bodies (and certain body parts) “are for” and therefore what is and is not a valid embodiment of Christian discipleship. This is despite the fact that Christ’s incarnation and resurrection have overturned many assumptions about the body and have left more questions than answers in their wake. And even among those bishops and other straight cis allies who support LGBTQ+ Chrisitians in the life of our Communion, I find myself oddly ambivalent at times, if not outright uncomfortable, to be spoken about less as a person with complex and competing desires and more as a blandly virtuous cause célèbre for the “progressive” Church, as if “including” me is more important than knowing me. I do not want to be a bogeyman nor a saint; I simply want to be real. I am a sinner and a seeker like everyone else, and I demand to be accounted as such. We are all still becoming, and in truth we do not know what the piercing grace of Christ has wrought upon our flesh, except “through a glass, darkly.” (8)

What, then? How can we speak of bodies in an honest and life-giving way? Are we stuck with our ancient, unresolved tensions, or is there something else we might say, some other descriptive means of exploration? I believe so.

For the Christian, whatever we might say about the body must be rooted in Christ. No matter what else we are, we are part of His body and thereby find our ultimate sense of possibility in his wounded, risen flesh. And, of course, there are many things we might say about Christ’s body, but what feels most appropriate is to remember that it is a body both accessible and yet unknowable. Christ’s body is broken and given for us on the Cross and in the Eucharistic feast, and we are initiated into it through Baptism. Through all of this, his body is utterly accessible to the one who seeks it. And yet accessibility is not the same as intelligibility. We cannot, this side of eternity, ever fully comprehend Christ’s body—what it means, what it promises, how it operates—for such things are ultimately shrouded in the transcendence of God, “whose thoughts are not [our] thoughts.” (9) Again, we encounter a body that is a mystery, not a proposition; a body that is narrative, but not a conclusion. I have come to think this body might be best described as a parable.

A parable appears to us in terms we can imagine, but it also escapes easy evaluation. A parable’s totality cannot be contained by the hearer; it is an ever-shocking and new thing that is always both familiar and odd, accessible and evasive, stabilizing and unnerving. Its purpose is not the same as a fable, which sets tidy parameters of social order or moral purity. Instead, a parable upends the very notion that our sense of things is universal and sufficient. It disturbs our certainty and creates space for new understandings. A parable suggests that only God sees and knows in full, not us. And our only proper response to a parable-shaped reality is one of humility and openness to the continuous revelation of meaning that is not ours to dictate but to receive.  

And so this was another thought that welled up, unbidden from some secret corner of the heart, as I read the back-and-forth statements from Lambeth, written by people scoring debate points over my most private longings: My body is not a battlefield. My body is a parable. 

How true this feels to me, both about our own bodies and about Jesus’ body. Jesus did not simply tell parables, but was a parable in his very limbs and bones and blood, and his risen body, in which we take part, still functions as such. On the Cross, in the Resurrection, through the Eucharist, and in his promised return, Jesus’ body demands more of us than we can imagine, it offers more than we can understand, and it possesses an integrity that does not depend on whether we “get it” or not.

If this is so, and if we are to understand ourselves in his light, then we must be willing to approach our own bodies as holy parables, too, drawn up through baptism into the accessible and yet inscrutable truth of God. We are not open books for one another to read, analyze, possess and control. We are a still-unfinished story, rich with meanings. We are a mystery to behold with reverence.

So what is a Christian body, then? I still cannot quite find the words. And perhaps that is, itself, the correct answer. Perhaps the way out of the ancient tension between enduring the body and transfiguring it is not to solve the riddle, to try and make the pieces fit together, but to let the body always be slightly unknowable, both clay vessel and holy temple. Perhaps the way forward is to see the Christian body—individually and collectively—not as a battlefield for competing understandings, but as a parable just beyond our grasp. Perhaps we will finally feel salvation deep in our bones when we can gaze upon the body of our neighbor—our queer neighbors included—and to simply say, with wonder, “I do not understand yet, but I want to.”

1. Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 26.

2. Ibid, 35.

3. Acts 22

4. 2 Corinthians 4:7

5. Hebrews 10:16

6. Galatians 6:15

7. 1 John 3:2

8. 1 Corinthians 13:12

9. Isaiah 55:8