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Embodiment

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Gerhard Lohfink

One of the fundamental problems of the church is that faith no longer saturates the whole of life, but only a narrow sector. Out of an entire week we often have no more than sixty minutes on Sunday for “faith.” Our employment has long since become a world in itself with its own rule and ways of behaving. It has scarcely anything to do with Christian existence. All the efforts of Christian societies and church efforts toward a “lay apostolate” have not changed this. In the same way leisure time has also become a world unto itself, as have education, the economy, culture, and all the other spheres of life. Faith is drying up. It no longer has any material that it can transform. It has become unworldly and therefore ineffectual.

For many Christians it would not be a turning point in their lives if they decided, one day, to stop praying tomorrow, to leave off going to church next Sunday, and at the next opportunity to stop the church magazine. Their lives would continue according to the very same social rules, norms, styles of behavior, and models as before. Nothing would change because, long before that, their faith already would have become unworldly, inconsequential, and ultimately futile. It was, in fact, not faith at all. Where faith is really faith it cannot be shoved to the margins of life.

Christian faith, just like Jewish faith, subjects all of life to the promise and claim of God. Its nature is such that it interpenetrates all aspects of the lives of believers and gives them a new form. Of itself it demands that social relationships must change and that the material of the world must be molded. Faith desires to incorporate all things so that a “new creation” can come to be.

At the same time faith tends toward a more and more intensive communion among believers, for only in the community, the place of this communion, only in the place of salvation given by God can the material of the world really be molded and social relationships really transformed. It would therefore be essential to Christian faith that individual believers should not live alongside one another in isolation but should be joined into a single body. It would be essential that they weave together all their gifts and opportunities, that in their gatherings they judge their entire lives in light of the coming of the reign of God and allow themselves to be gifted with the unanimity of agapē. Then the community would become the place where the messianic signs that are promised to the people of God could shine forth and become effective.

All this is part of the tendency of faith to embodiment. Christian faith of itself produces an impulse to bind believers in communion and by way of that communion to draw all spheres of life into God’s new creation. This integrating tendency is a property of faith itself. It is not something added secondarily at some time or place. An individual cannot first begin to believe alone and then, afterward, join the church community. Accepting faith already means desiring the communion of believers. Accordingly, the transformation of world and society is not an obligation that is added to faith as something secondary. Instead, where faith is a living thing, it transforms the world from the very outset.

The communion of believers thus is not something that is merely spiritual and intellectual. It must be embodied. It needs a place, a realm in which it can take shape. Perhaps we must read again, with new eyes, how often Paul’s letters and the Acts of the Apostles speak of “houses.” It is amazing how many houses are known to us by name simply in connection with the apostolic work and journeys of Paul: the house of Lydia the seller of purple cloth in Philippi (Acts 16:14–15, 40), the house of Jason in Thessalonica (Acts 17:5–7), those of Titius Justus and Gaius in Corinth (Acts 18:7; Rom. 16:23), the house of the evangelist Philip in Caesarea (Acts 21:8–14), and the house of Mnason of Cyprus in Jerusalem (Acts 21:15–17).

In these and many other houses of the early Christian era unfolded a crucial piece of the life of the first Christian communities. The natural family, which constituted the central focus of the several houses, was opened and joined into a broader context: the new family of the community. In these houses catechumens were instructed, journeying brothers and sisters in the faith were welcomed as guests, the community gathered for its meetings and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, unemployed Christians found work, and for the most part the first contacts were made with Gentiles who wanted to become acquainted with a Christian community. When they did so they did not learn merely a set of abstract principles of faith, but Christian life.

In this context we should also consider the following: the ancient house cannot simply be compared to modern houses; the function of the latter is almost exclusively to furnish a mere dwelling place. In contrast, in antiquity and for a long time thereafter the house was a larger social unit. It contained not only the family in the narrow sense but also other people who lived and worked there. Frequently the house was also a place of production. Larger production facilities separate from the house were rarely found. This meant that in Christian houses like that of Aquila and Priscilla faith and life, or faith and work, constituted a unity. Priscilla’s family saw how Paul worked with his hands, and those to whom Paul preached the gospel in connection with his artisanal work at the same time experienced a Christian family.

Something else must be added: the houses in which Paul dwelt were often those belonging to the first converts in a given city. This was true of Lydia’s house in Philippi and that of Jason in Thessalonica, and probably also of Gaius’s house in Corinth. It was precisely in the houses of the first converts, then, that the community usually gathered. In that way those houses embodied a bit of living community history that was made present in every assembly – not only in the rooms themselves, but in the people as well. . . .

We would love to have much more detailed information about the lives of those early communities, but our sources for the most part offer us little. Nevertheless, we know enough that we are in no danger of glorifying the community life of those times. Above all, Paul’s two letters to the Corinthians show us a community in which there was uncertainty, arrogance, slanted theology, and serious social conflicts. It would have been no different in other places.

What distinguishes those communities is not their moral integrity or the power of their faith, still less their unanimity. Nevertheless, Paul calls them “the saints” in the introductions to his letters, “the called,” “God’s beloved,” “sanctified in Christ Jesus,” the “ekklēsia of God.” He thus expresses the conviction that what is crucial is not the mistakes that are made; there will always be those. Theological foolishness is also not decisive; there will never be a lack of that. Not even sin and guilt are the most important things, however dreadful they often are; they can be forgiven.

What is decisive, after all, what everything depends on, is that the community knows that God has called it to make the divine plan visible and to be a place of reconciliation in the world as the body of Christ. It is already that body, anterior to any of its own efforts. The spirit of God promised for the end time, the spirit of Jesus Christ, has already been given to it and has made it one body. Nevertheless it must know that its task is still to become that body. ◆