Sunday, 1 March 2015

Exclusion and Embrace: Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation,
Miroslav Volf, Abingdon Press, 1996, page 48

Rerflecting on Paul's 1 Corinthians 12 image of the body made of many parts, Miroslav Volf talks about the community created by the self-giving of Yeshua:

The resurrected Christ, in whom Jews and Greeks are united in baptism, is not a spiritual refuge from pluralising corporeality, a pure spiritual space into which only the undifferentiated sameness of a universal human essence is admitted. Rather, baptism into Christ creates a people as the differentiated body of Christ. Bodily inscribed differences are brought together, not removed. The body of Christ lives as a complex interplay of differentiated bodies - Jewish and Gentile, female and male, slave and free - of those who have partaken of Christ's self-sacrifice. The Pauline move is not from the particularity of the body to the universality of the spirit, but from separated bodies to the community of interrelated bodies - the one body in the Spirit with many discrete members.