Spirituality, Analogy and Desire

What I am suggesting here is that the transcendent body of Christ, the resurrected body, redefines the human body from a more exalted, in fact, glorified position - so that the properties of co-abiding in Christ's body are communicated to the human body and to the church through the Spirit. This does not merely boil down to: I do not naturally as a human body belong to the body of Christ. Though, baptism "by (en) the one Spirit" marks an ontological shift from being in the world to being en Christo (a favourite use by Paul of the dative of location). But then neither members nor Christ are translated out of this world - the use of en suggests rather another level of ontological intensity available in this world but not concurrent with it. There is an incorporation effected by baptism and this incorporation does not leave the human body as such unchanged.

The character of that change we will pursue below and conclude here that the incorporation is made possible because an analogical relation is created and maintained in what I like to call the eschatological remainder.

The return to the world and the new relation in Christ made with it brings us to the place where ecclesiology is located: amid the politics of the city. The body was a favoured political metaphor for the state or cosmic city, Paul's Letter is written to a Roman city, and so in extending the analogy of this term and incorporating it into the resurrected body of Christ then Paul is announcing a new ecclesial politics. The incorporation into Christ brings about two changes that seem to be antithetical to life in the global city and yet offer valuable possibilities for a common human flourishing.

The first change is with respect to social and racial differences: Jews, Greeks, slaves, free are indicators of social tensions and hierarchies. In the Letter to the Galatians, Paul will add "male and female" (Gal. 3.28) and characterise the socio-sexual tensions and hierarchies. Each of these positions was embedded within value systems concerning the human body - class notions of embodiment, ethnic and sexual ideologies etc.. But incorporated en pneumati and en Christo a new social order is announced. The Christocentric body politic constitutes this order. It is not an order where difference is elided - the body is not one organ but many different functions. This is not then Spinoza's monism and the metaphysics of the fascist state. But the differences, functioning as such, live out this polity. Paul does not equate this body with a group of people, not even the church in Corinth. It is a not an object visible in the world. This is not a collection of people so much as a coordination of operations. The body is made manifest in those events in which it is seen to be working. Its only location (which is not a location with either spatial or temporal co-ordinates that can be mapped) is in Christ and the Spirit.