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BODY OF CHRIST

Metaphor for the community of Christians. The “body of Christ” derives from the words of Jesus at the Last Supper when he offered the bread to be shared as “my body which is for you” (1 Cor. 11:24; Luke 22:19). Here “body” (Gk. sṓma) refers to the ongoing personal presence of Christ within the community. In the sharing of the Lord’s Supper, the gathered community celebrates the presence of the risen Christ in their midst “until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). No other term or metaphor can convey as adequately as sṓma the corporate reality that Paul defines as “the body of Christ.”

Paul uses sṓma to refer to both the individuality — it is as “body” that we will be resurrected and transformed at the end of time to be like Christ’s “glorious body” (Phil. 3:21) — and the corporateness of human existence, but it is union with God “in Christ” that marks the corporateness of Christian existence. Just as the Hebrew Scriptures had spoken of Israel as a “corporate personality,” so too, for Paul, the “body” retains this essentially corporate character. Paul uses the metaphor to counteract the divisive effects of the factionalism present at Corinth but expands its meaning in extraordinary ways (1 Cor. 12:12-31), affirming his conviction about the “body” of the risen Christ and identifying this body with the Christian community (v. 27) made up of “many members” (v. 12). Baptism marks the believer’s entrance into this body, and sharing in a common spirit is its distinctive character. To share the “Lord’s supper” (1 Cor. 11:17-34) without “discerning the body” is to disregard the presence of the Lord in the community and therefore to bring judgment upon oneself. “Discerning the body” is nothing other than recognizing in the community the body of Christ. Authentic existence for a Christian, therefore, is lived only as a member of the one body, who is Christ (Rom. 12:5).

The analogy of the human body as image for the social body was ubiquitous in antiquity (in classical texts, cf. M. Aurelius Med. 7.13; Livy Urb. cond. 2.32).

Barbara E. Bowe






Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)

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