The idea that the Church is not just a social or physical entity, but also the mystical ‘body of Christ’, its founder, is found many times within the New Testament. This is especially true of the writings of St. Paul, and in particular of the First Letter to the Corinthians. Paul wrote that, “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ...now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular” 1 Cor.12 - 27 . However, this has been a difficult idea for the Church to preach, particularly after the 16th Century Reformation which permanently split the Church.
Robert Jenson, in his article “The Church and the Sacraments” makes the point that the concept of the church as the body of Christ, is heavily connected to the idea of church as sacrament. “Christ, when he was lifted up from the earth...sent his life giving Spirit...and through him he constituted his body which is the church as the universal sacrament of salvation.” In 1 Cor. 10:16-7 and 1 Cor. 11:17-27 Paul rebukes the Church in Corinth for not taking the Eucharist seriously, “when ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord’s supper. For in eating every one taketh before one another his own supper: and one is hungry and another is drunken”. Here Paul plainly states that the bread and wine which are taken are the body of Christ, as is the assembly of people who gather to celebrate it. However, this is not to suggest that the idea of the body of Christ as the Church is merely concerned with the sacrament of the Eucharist, indeed Lumen Gentium above suggests that the Church itself is one of the sacraments, and Jenson suggests that church and the sacraments are inseparably intertwined.
Jenson explains the teaching of the church as the body of Christ by saying that Christ as a human being needs a body, and that that body is the Church. He defines a body as being that part of a person which is accessible to other persons. Hence, “the Church is the object as which the risen Christ is available to be found, to be responded to, to be grasped” . However, an attitude which the Church has sometimes taken up in previous years has been that of ‘ecclesial triumphalism’ because of thinking of the church as the body of Christ - it has sometimes been assumed that the Church is the Kingdom of God on earth. Jenson makes the point that only as the Church points to Christ, can it be said to be Christ. The Church anticipates the Kingdom of God, but does not realise it.
Daniel Migliore concentrates on the role of the community in the Church. “The community participates in one Lord, one Spirit, one baptism, and thus becomes ‘one body’” . He concentrates on mutual dependence and of church members, thus following Paul’s lead in using the metaphor of the body’s various parts, each of which is vital for the coherent working of the whole.
However, problems with the idea of the Church as the body of Christ have been highlighted. A major problem for scholars has been the dislike of the physical body by the early church, an idea from Gnosticism which held that the fleshly body was a prison for the divine spark in the soul. Interpretations of the writings of the two most important fathers of the church, Saints Paul and Augustine have been held most responsible for this. This idea has been carried on in more recent times in the philosophy of Rene Descartes. He placed more emphasis on the mind than the body, in his famous statement of how he knew he existed - “I think, therefore I am” he places importance on thought rather than physical presence, which he held to be not provable. In the earliest churches, there was no suggestion of the body being in any way sinful, indeed it was a symbol of the interdependence of Christians with each other and with Christ in the church.
There is also a problem in that the Biblical texts do not always agree with each other over the idea of the Church as the body of Christ, and indeed there is some evidence to show that early churches did not in fact adhere to this idea. In particular the Johannine church is thought by Raymond Brown to have been more concerned with individual members than with a unified church/body. “Unlike Paul’s image of the body and its members which is invoked in 1 Cor. 12 to accommodate the multitude of charisms, the Johannine image of the vine and branches places emphasis on only one issue: dwelling in the vine or inherence in Jesus.” To Johannine Christians, the individual believer would ‘indwell’ in Jesus, but the Gospel of John, in particular, has no concept of the Church being the body of Christ, that is a Pauline idea, and it is thought that the Johannine community was one separate from the mainstream churches, and may indeed have had some sort of split with the disciples of Paul.
There are many ways to think of the idea that the church is the body of Christ. It is possible merely to see it as merely a useful metaphor to show Christ as the head of the church and to explain the importance of even the most insignificant members of it to the overall running of the church. However, most people would take a more complex view, which while acknowledging that the concept is a useful one in terms of language, also states that it has a wider meaning. This includes the concept of the Church as a sacrament and the way in which to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist, and also that as the church is the body if Christ, it is also the way for all people to gain access to Christ. As all members of the community are therefore part of Christ themselves, it allows participation for all members. It is evident that there are some problems with the concept, particularly as the Reformation clearly showed that the church is not united in being part of Christ at all, indeed there are many different churches and the relationships between them have not been always amicable. However, a way to combat this is to take on Augustine’s idea of the church invisible and visible. This allows the church visible to be both flawed and split, but the church invisible, the perfect church, is present in all churches, no matter how diverse, and as such is the true ‘body of Christ’.