Body, Kingdom and Church

March 14th, 2010

The diktuon.info -site has lots of material about the Kingdom of God, but the Kingdom itself is left quite vague. I had thought that it would be somewhat clear to the people interested, but apparently there us some confusion about the topic. Therefore I’m at the moment writing a page about the issue, and I wanted to share for comments some thoughts that I’m planning to include on the page.

There are three closely related idioms we should understand in this context: the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of God and the Church. The key idea is that these three are essentially three angles to the same thing: they all refer to the same people, but take different approaches. In the following I try to clarify how I understand these concepts and their relationship.

Body of Christ

The (mystical) Body of Christ is about being. First, there is the precondition to be in the Body in the first place. Per definition we could say that whoever is connected in Christ by being in Christ and by Christ being in him belongs to His Body. Even though this in itself is deeply connected with baptism, it has very little to do with water or churches as such. Rather the baptism we are talking about here is the act of Holy Spirit where He immerses us into the death and resurrection of Christ. From this it does not necessarily follow that the person in question would be part of any church, neither nominally nor in practise.

But this is just the beginning. We need to abide in Christ, by letting His word abide in us. From this it follows that we carry His kind of fruit, not by our own efforts, but by staying attached to Him and letting Him do His work in us. But more about this in the Kingdom -part.

Another aspect about the Body is that in it we are united with the Son of God, becoming His children ourselves.

A very important part of the Body of Christ is that bible equates the man’s body and his wife. Eve was made out of Adam’s body when Adam was in deep sleep, and similarly every relationship between man and wife reflects the relationship between Christ and His body, which was created in His death and resurrection, and to which we are joined in our baptism.

Kingdom of God

Some othe possible translations to the word kingdom are “kingship”, “reign” and “queen”. Especially Matthew makes a connection between kingdom and queen. If we think of that word in the light of what was said about the body of Christ, we see the strong connection between these two. Like the body of Christ, the Kingdom is essentially corporate body of people spanning over all places and times.

Public Domain On the other hand kingdom of God is the domain of His reign. Whoever obeys Him belongs to the Kingdom to the extent of his obedience. It is important to understand that He does not expect us to obey Him in all His will at once. He often gives us just one thing at the time, and if we are obedient in that then we have been completely obedient. And He may give us something new.

The precondition for obeying his will is that Christ lives in us. For we in ourselves are incapable of doing anything but sinning – even when we try to follow His will our attempts rise from our sinful nature. The only way we can act obediently is by Christ – who is obedient – acting through us. Therefore true obedience is surrendering, letting the Holy Spirit work in us and through us.

When the Holy Spirit works in us, He actually makes more space for Christ to live in us, and room for Christ to act through us. All we need and can do to it is to not step on the way. When Christ gains room in our hearts and minds, we become a more integral part of His body and He truly becomes our king. As He gets to govern us, He will cause His fruit to grow in and from our lives. And this is how the will of God is obeyed.

The Kingdom of God is a very dynamic concept. It is not just about entering it, but living in it. Both of these have to do with metanoia, change of mind. Kingdom is about God changing us into the likeness of His Son, by letting His Son have more room in our lives.

Church

With the word “Church” we can refer to one of three possible things: the universal church, the local church or the administrative church. The universal church is simply the corporate body of all members

of the Body of Christ anywhere and at anytime. The local church is group of people who consider themselves a gathering of Christians and a local church. A very important aspect of this type of church is that it is a community where people participate and know each other. The administrative church is a collection of people considered by someone to form a church.

The Greek word for Church is ekklesia, an assembly of people. In the Body idiom the focus is completely in Christ, and Kingdom is very centered the the ruler, in this idiom the focus is in the people. This means that it is the most tang

ible of these three concepts. On the other hand it means also, that it is at least theoretically possible that the people gather together even without their King.

It is also possible that in this assembly there are people who are not really subjects to the King, and therefore do not really belong to the Body of Christ. This leads to the problem that the Churc can be defined in two ways: the internal understanding states that only those people who both belong to the body of Christ and are obediant to their King belong to that assembly, and the rest are just bystanders. External underdstanding states that everyone who can be seen as a member of the same crowd belongs to the assembly. In practise it is humanly impossible to differentiate between these two, simply because we have so few reliable measures as of who belongs to the Body or is obedient to the King.

For example, the universal church above is per definitio understood internally, while the administrative church is understood externally. The local churches may or may not be subgroups of the universal church and may or may not be administrative churches.

An important aspect of the humancentricity in this idiom is that the local churches are autonomous. They are free to arganize their administration independent of others. There are, however, some things God wants to be present in this organisation. Traditionally this autonomy has meant hierarchial organisation into various denominations. While this method has its advantages, it has also its disadvantages, one of which is that the very thing that was meant to create unity has become a source of division.

Second coming

All these three idioms have a very important thing in common: they are all incomplete now, but will become complete at the second coming of Christ.

As for the Body, we have already been born to it and thus belong to it already. But despite the fact that we are already dead in Christ, we still need to face the end of our physical lives. There are still branches in the tree that need to be cut down because the bear no fruit, but when He returns, there will be no barren brances. We are alredy God’s children, but not yet His children in Glory.

Since we still live in the flesh, there’s still sin living in us and we cannot be completely obedient. But when He comes, He will fill us completely and there will be no more temptations, but we only want to be obedient.

In the church there are still people, who are not obedient, but when He comes, one will be taken and one will be left. He will clean and purify His bride for the wedding, cleaning all sin away from her.

When he comes, all things will change. What we refer to as heaven, is in other words the Kingdom of God completed. And through our choises to be obedient today, He will purify His bride and we are preparing the way for Him to return.

Final thoughts

So why have I chosen the Kingdom to be the carrying element of this project? If these three are essentially about the same thing, it would seem more natural to talk about the very essence of the thing, the Body, or about the most tangible aspect, the Church. However, Body of Christ is a somewhat abstact concept, and quite static – as opposed to dynamic. It is the vital core of the paradigm, and the base of everything that happens. However, it in itself, but it does not call us into the action. And while the Body of Christ describes well the nature of our relationship with God, it says very little of what this means in practise. Here’s where the idioms about the Kingdom and the Church come into play. The concept of Church has similar problem of stagnation. In addition it carries the danger of confusing the term understoon externally and internally and has much other potential sources of confusion.

Ultimately I chose Kingdom for this project because it calls us into change, metanoia. It says that something needs to happen – and often change – both in our individual lives as our Christian communities. But this is just the nature of Kingdom. Ultimately the purpose of Kingdom is to reflect the active component of the same corporate body of people, and therefore building the Kingdom is building the Body of Christ and both the universal and local churches.

Of course all this means that I’ll need to do dome refining in the other material on the site, to make it reflect this organisation even more clearly. In particular, I intend to create a strong parallelism between