The Body of Christ and the New Israel

The New Testament describes the Church with a cluster of images — body, temple, bride, household, vine, flock — of which one is not merely an image: the Church is the Body of Christ, and the Fathers read this as a statement about what she is rather than about what she resembles. The same Church takes her name from the LXX word for the assembly of Israel and understands herself as the Israel of God into which the nations have been grafted, on terms St Paul lays down in Romans 11 and which forbid any simple account of replacement.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Word Itself

The Greek ekklēsia was ordinary civic vocabulary — the summoned assembly of the citizens of a Greek city. Its theological weight comes from the Septuagint, where it is the standard rendering of the Hebrew qāhāl, the assembly of Israel convoked by God: the qāhal YHWH, the congregation gathered at Sinai and at the feasts (Deuteronomy 4:10; 23:1–8; 1 Kings 8:14 LXX). When the apostolic writings call the Christian community ekklēsia, they are not coining a term for a new religious society; they are claiming a continuity, and the claim is made in the vocabulary of Israel’s own Scriptures.

This is why the Church’s self-understanding runs through Israel’s categories rather than around them. She has a priesthood, a temple, a passover, a covenant, a people, an inheritance, and a diaspora — all of them terms taken over, not invented. St Peter’s compression of the point is exact: “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (1 Peter 2:9), a sentence assembled almost entirely out of Exodus 19:5–6 and Isaiah 43:20–21.

The Body of Christ

The dominant Pauline image is the Body of Christ (sōma Christou), and it carries the theological load that the other images distribute among themselves.

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 12:12–13)

“He is the head of the body, the Church.” (Colossians 1:18)

“[God] has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (Ephesians 1:22–23)

Two features of Paul’s usage resist reduction to metaphor. First, the incorporation is effected sacramentally and not by consent: it is “in one Spirit” and by baptism that the many become one body, and it is by the one loaf that the many are one — “because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17). Second, the identification runs in both directions: the risen Christ addresses Saul on the Damascus road not with “why do you persecute my followers” but “why do you persecute me” (Acts 9:4). The Church is not Christ’s organization; she is his body, and what is done to her is done to him.

The Fathers read the image accordingly. St John Chrysostom, commenting on Ephesians 1:22–23, presses the astonishing implication of Paul’s word plērōma:

“The fullness of Christ is the Church… For the fullness of the head is the body, and the fullness of the body is the head.” (Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians 3; trans. NPNF I/13)

The head, he says, is not complete without the body — which is not a claim that Christ lacks anything in himself, but that he has willed to be the head of a body and to be reckoned incomplete without it. Chrysostom’s rhetoric is deliberately extreme because the doctrine is: the Church is not an appendage to the work of Christ but its extension in history.

The consequence, drawn out repeatedly in the tradition, is that the Church is a divine-human reality on the pattern of the Incarnation itself. She has a human, historical, fallible, and often disgraceful side, and a divine side which is Christ’s own life communicated by the Spirit; and these are not two Churches, any more than the two natures of Christ are two Christs. The analogy is not exact — the Church’s human side sins, and Christ’s humanity does not — and the tradition marks the limit rather than pressing the parallel past it (see The Marks of the Church on the holiness of a body of sinners).

Temple, Bride, Household, Vine, Flock

The other images are not decoration; each carries something the body-image does not.

Temple. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16); the faithful are “built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God” on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ himself being the cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20–22). The temple image supplies what the body image leaves implicit: the Church is the place of God’s indwelling, and therefore the place of worship and sacrifice. It is also the image that most directly asserts continuity and replacement together — the presence that filled the Jerusalem temple now fills a people.

Bride. “Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25); the marriage of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7, 21:2, 21:9). The bridal image supplies distinction where the body image supplies identity: the Church is not simply Christ, but the other whom he loves, who can be faithful or faithless, and who is being made “without spot or wrinkle” rather than being so already (Ephesians 5:27). Every honest account of the Church’s holiness depends on holding the body-image and the bride-image together.

Household and city. “You are… members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19); “the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). This is the image that grounds order: a household has an ordering, and the Pastoral Epistles move without embarrassment from the household image to the qualifications of bishops and deacons (1 Timothy 3:1–13; Titus 1:5–9).

Vine and flock. “I am the vine, you are the branches; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5); “there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:16). These supply the note of dependence and of pastoral care, and they furnish the Church’s language for her clergy — poimēn, pastor — and for what happens to a member cut off from the whole.

The Israel of God

The New Testament’s relation of Church to Israel is neither simple continuity nor simple replacement, and the tradition has generally been more careful here than popular presentation suggests.

St Paul calls the Church “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6:16) and describes the Gentile Christian as a wild olive shoot grafted into a cultivated tree whose root he did not supply:

“But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the rich root of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you.” (Romans 11:17–18)

The image is precise and it is a warning. The Gentiles are not a new tree; they are grafted into an old one, and the graft is by faith and can be undone in the same way (Romans 11:20–22). Paul then closes the question in a sentence the tradition has not been free to set aside: “for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29).

What the New Testament does claim is that the covenant is fulfilled and opened: the dividing wall is broken down and the two are made one new humanity (Ephesians 2:14–16); the promises to Abraham reach the nations in Christ (Galatians 3:14, 3:29); the new covenant of Jeremiah 31:31–34 is enacted at the Supper (Luke 22:20; Hebrews 8:8–13). The Church’s claim is not that she has taken Israel’s place by displacement but that she is the assembly of the Messiah in which Israel’s vocation reaches the nations — and that the criterion of belonging has become faith in the Messiah rather than descent (Romans 9:6–8).

Read this way, the phrase “new Israel” is a claim about fulfilment and about the ingrafting of the nations, and it becomes a falsehood the moment it is used to imply that God has repudiated his people — a proposition Paul raises explicitly and answers with mē genoito, “by no means” (Romans 11:1–2). The distinction matters for ecclesiology and not only for charity: an ecclesiology that treats the Church as a replacement institution has already begun to think of her as an organization rather than as the covenant people, which is the error the rest of this collection is written against.

Why This Is Not a Metaphor

The claim that the Church is the Body of Christ, rather than being usefully compared to a body, is the load-bearing assertion of Orthodox ecclesiology, and it has three concrete consequences that recur throughout this collection.

First, the Church is entered sacramentally. One becomes a member of a body by being incorporated into it, not by agreeing with it. Baptism and chrismation effect the incorporation and the Eucharist sustains it (see The Holy Mysteries). This is why the question of the boundaries of the Church, treated in section 06, is inseparable from the question of what baptism outside her bounds amounts to.

Second, the Church is one because Christ is one. The unity of the Church is not a goal to be constructed by negotiation but a given to be manifested, because a body is not made one by the cooperation of its members. This is the precise ground on which the Church has declined the “branch theory” — the proposal that the one Church subsists divided among several confessions — as stated by the Eastern patriarchs in their Encyclical of May 1848 in reply to Pope Pius IX (Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, 1848).

Third, the local eucharistic assembly is not a fragment. If the Church is the Body of Christ and Christ is wholly present in the Eucharist, then the assembly gathered around its bishop at the altar is not a branch office of a larger corporation; it is the whole Church in that place. St Ignatius states this before any of the technical vocabulary exists: “wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church” (Ignatius, Smyrn. 8.2; trans. Ehrman, LCL 24). Nicholas Cabasilas draws the sacramental conclusion in the fourteenth century: the Church, he writes, is signified in the holy mysteries — not merely symbolized by them but made visible in them (Cabasilas, Commentary on the Divine Liturgy 38). The development of that point is section 03.

See Also

References

  • Scripture: 1 Corinthians 10:17; 12:12–27; 3:16–17; Ephesians 1:22–23; 2:14–22; 5:25–32; Colossians 1:18, 24; Romans 9:6–8; 11:1–29; Galatians 3:14, 29; 6:16; 1 Timothy 3:15; 1 Peter 2:9; John 10:16; 15:1–8; Acts 9:4; Revelation 19:7; 21:2, 9. LXX ekklēsia / qāhāl: Deuteronomy 4:10; 23:1–8; 1 Kings 8:14 LXX.
  • Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8; Letter to the Ephesians 5; ed. and trans. Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
  • John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians, Homily 3 (on Ephesians 1:22–23); trans. NPNF I/13.
  • Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haereses III.24.1 (“where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church”); trans. ANF 1.
  • Nicholas Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, ch. 38; trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960.
  • Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (reply of the four Eastern patriarchs and their synods to Pope Pius IX’s In Suprema Petri Apostoli Sede). Constantinople, May 1848.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, ch. “Two Aspects of the Church.” London: James Clarke, 1957.
  • Florovsky, Georges. “The Church: Her Nature and Task,” in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works I. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1979.