The Incarnation of Christ Through His Body, The Church

We may be a good church, but we still "represent Christ badly often". How do we handle it with unbelievers when we don't represent Christ the way we should? Romans 12:

1 Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.
2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

What was the purpose of Christ's actual human body?

So what does the metaphor of the "Body" of Christ mean for us?

Romans 12:

3 For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.
4 For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function,
5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.
6 Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith;
7 if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching;
8 or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.

I Corinthians 12:

12 For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ.
13 For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
14 For the body is not one member, but many.
15 If the foot says, “Because I am not a hand, I am not a part of the body,” it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body.
16 And if the ear says, “Because I am not an eye, I am not a part of the body,” it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body.
17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?
18 But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body, just as He desired.
19 If they were all one member, where would the body be?
20 But now there are many members, but one body.
21 And the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”; or again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”
22 On the contrary, it is much truer that the members of the body which seem to be weaker are necessary;
23 and those members of the body which we deem less honorable, on these we bestow more abundant honor, and our less presentable members become much more presentable,
24 whereas our more presentable members have no need of it. But God has so composed the body, giving more abundant honor to that member which lacked,
25 so that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.
26 And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.
27 Now you are Christ’s body, and individually members of it.

Perhaps the most important observation from the metaphor is that the body must be subject to the head. You want to know how to have unity in the church? Listen to this next clip. If we shouldn't think to highly of ourselves and be in submission to one another, how much more should we be in submission to Christ?

The Incarnation of Christ - Thinking Too Highly of Ourselves

One factor that applies to any consideration of living out the incarnation of Christ and making it real is Paul's admonition that we not think too highly of ourselves. This applies both to marriage:

...as well as dealing with our brothers and sisters in Christ:

Next we'll see how this applies to the metaphor of the Church as the Body of Christ.

The Incarnation of Christ in our Marriages and Families

I had Ephesians 5:22-33 read at my wedding. Verse 25 is my husband verse. In this next part of the lesson, David talks about the incarnation of Christ in our marriages. I've included the scripture for your benefit:

22 Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord.
23 For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body.
24 But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her,
26 so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word,
27 that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.
28 So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself;
29 for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church,
30 because we are members of His body.
31 For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.
32 This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church.
33 Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.

The passage doesn't end with marriage, but continues as the incarnation of Christ in our lives expands to our families in Chapter 6:

1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 Honor your father and mother (which is the first commandment with a promise), 3 so that it may be well with you, and that you may live long on the earth. 4 Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

As a hint of things to come, David mentions the thought in the back of every parents mind that considers our own inadequacies at being responsible for the lives that have been entrusted to us.

Making the Incarnation Real

I've introduced my Sunday School professor, David Moss, to you before. I think I've referred to him as a Sunday School teacher before, but that seems a little silly. Most adult classes are beyond flannelgraph and coloring books. Some adult classes even drop the trite denominational publications designed for adult Sunday School classes. David's teaching has been attracting a few students from other churches. I've never seen this before and it's an odd situation when you see faces in Sunday School that you don't see in church. What are you going to do - tell them to go home? Nevertheless, it speaks to the high caliber of his teaching. Therefore, I call him a Sunday School "professor".

Most recently he has been teaching a series on holiness using a book by Francis Schaeffer as a framework. The past few Sundays he's gone through a section concerning the incarnation and what it means for us today. This is appropriate here as we celebrate the Resurrection this weekend. While we celebrate the incarnation at Christmas, there is no separating the incarnation from the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And while this is understandable on one level, we often miss the fact that there are practical implications for us as believers. I'm editing the audio of some recent classes to post here because I think this is an important lesson that is often not well absorbed and I think David does a great job expounding on just how we should be living out the incarnation as the Body of Christ.

Warning: there's a lot of meat here. If you're a spiritual vegitarian, you might not want to listen.

The two ways that he gives for us to live out the incarnation is 1) in our marriages (and, by extension, our families), and 2) in our churches. I'll post edited lessons on these as I get them edited.

Made In the Image of God – Just Another Speculation

From Genesis 1:

26 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."

27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.



There has been much speculation as to what qualities of God has He duplicated in us that important enough for Him to have seen fit to comment here in scripture that He made us in His image. And speculation it is. We are given no real clues for a defensible answer and yet there is no shortage of opinions.

For example, one can consider that God is one God in three persons: The Father Who is the visionary, the Son Who is the visible manifestation, and the Spirit Who is the motivator. Well, one may notice, man can be broken similarly into three parts: the spirit of a man is receptive to God and other spiritual forces that motivate us, the mind of a man is rational and can develop and implement plans and visions, the body of a man is the part of the man we see and can detect. This seems like a likely candidate as to how we are like God. However, a trichotomic view of man has a modified hierarchy than the Trinitarian formula we can derive from scripture. Most importantly, this view of man in the image of God is completely absent in this passage and is therefore exegetically completely unsupported. And it’s a stretch to consider that God referring to Himself in the plural is some indication that this is what the passage means.

Here are some other examples:

Man is like God in that we are intelligent.

Man is like God in that we have volition.

No, these aren’t supported here either.

God does talk about creating and then he goes on to mention that He created us “male and female” after which He issued the edict to be fruitful and multiply. Perhaps procreation is how we are like God. Of course we give that up when we leave this world for the next. In that case we would no longer be in the image of God. That doesn’t seem likely.

Oh! How about this one: God gave us dominion. He has ultimate authority and gave us a little authority. That’s in the passage. We are also told that we will reign with Him in the next world. The hermeneutical link is a little weak, because it would also seem to hold true for the “male and female” phrase. Unless we are prepared to say that God is male and female, we may want to consider that the weak link just isn’t strong enough.

As an aside, all that I have mentioned thus far are contingent to scale. We appear to possess no qualities in the same magnitude as similar qualities of God, and that includes our volition.

Here is another concept that just occurred to me as I type. This actually seems the most likely and would not be mutually exclusive from other direct comparisons between God and man. God creating man knew that He would be incarnate in the Son of Man. Therefore, His plan was for mankind in a sinless state to be an accurate representation of God.

Now, it has been debated whether God would have become incarnate if man had not fallen. It has also been debated whether the possibility even ever existed for man not to fall. In order for you to follow my answer to this as well as understand the speculation I have regarding another way we may be mad ein the image of God, you have to read and understand two key concepts I have elaborated on before. The first is the logical disparity between eternity and temporality. That is to say that the univalence of God devolves into paradox when viewed through the bivalent lens of our temporal reason. The other is the multiplicity of our motivations. That is to say that we have many sets of competing inclinations fed by a variety of physical and spiritual drives within a cognitive context shaped by our senses and perceptions.

The way that univalence devolves into paradox is through multipicitous iterations of the core substantive univalent truth creating a bivalent dimension to exist between iterations. In other words, once the truth is manifest multiple times, each iteration has it's separate identity which defines a bivalent system. It's a simple concept that has no simple way to say it. We are in the image of God in this way that we have the capacity to take a single basic presupposition and apply it to different contexts to derive conflicting inclinations. The reason is that basic presuppositions tend to be absolute and context tends to be temporal. The process is essentially the same for one thing: God needs no context.

So what about the incarnation? The way for a univalently absolute God to create temporal bivalence is to become incarnate in this creation. Therefore, I argue that God's creative intent involved the incarnation and the pattern of man was created to provide a suitable vessel for the incarnation. Inasmuch as God creates bivalence from univalence, He would create bivalent man with the capacity to harbor a univalent presupposition and derive apparently conflicting inclinations.

When doing philosophy from a Christian worldview, it’s important to recognize how one’s philosophy comports with scripture. That said, understand that my musing here doesn’t have any more scriptural basis than any of the other speculations on how we are made in the image of God. However, I believe I haven’t contradicted any scripture. Nevertheless, I prevail upon any who read this to check whether my thinking comports with scripture. Please let me know if you find otherwise.