Tag Archives: Body of Christ

Christ vs. Belial?

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Believers would be baptized in this ancient Christian baptismal font, stepping down three steps into the water. The font was kept supplied with “living water” (i.e. running water) by a series of pipes and plumbing–the first directions (in chapter 7 of the Didache, written AD 60) for how to baptize said that it was always better to use living/running water for baptism. Baptism is what distinguished the Church from the pagan world. There could be no agreement between the Church and the world, between believers and the Devil, between Christ and Ceasar because–as Tertullian said in the 2nd century–if Ceasar were to be baptized he would have to renounce being Ceasar!



What fellowship does light have with darkness? What does Christ have in common with Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God …. (2 Cor. 6:14-16)

I have heard many preachers use this passage to insist that believers should not marry unbelievers. But there is no direct mention of marriage in this passage. The passage itself seems to suggest that there should be a radical separation between the Church and the society in which believers live. St. Paul seems to be saying that outside the Church there is nothing but darkness and devils; what could that world have in common with the Church, the Body of Christ and the light of the world?

The great teachers of the Church have understood this passage to condemn a person’s efforts to have two opinions in their own mind.

There cannot be two contradictory loves in one person. Just as there is no harmony between Christ and Belial, between justice and iniquity, so it is impossible for one soul to love both good and evil. You that love the Lord, hate evil, the devil; in every deed, there is love of one and hatred of the other. “He who has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me…” [John 14:21] You that love the things that are good, hate the things that are bad. You cannot love good unless you hate evil.

St. Jerome, Homily 73 on the Psalms

The Church understands that our baptism cannot be something that we put on or take off, depending on whether it is convenient on any particular day or not.

Neither the wetness of the water in which we are baptized not the oiliness of the oil with which we are anointed remain with us…. But the Holy Spirit, who is mingled in our souls and bodies through the oil and water, does remain with us, both in this life and after our death.

Philoxenus of Mabbug, On the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit

A person can try to have a foot in two camps but that never works. Not in the long run. If we are the temple of God because we are baptized and anointed, then we cannot also worship idols. Most baptized people don’t think they worship idols. But anytime we put ourselves first–before God’s command to love–we are making an idol of ourselves. Anytime I prefer injustice–because it is convenient for me–I am not loving my neighbor and I am worshipping the idol of myself.

If the Church cuts herself off from society, she cannot be the Church–the fountain of health, the fountain of salvation for the world. We cannot hide from the world and refuse to participate in it and still call ourselves followers of Christ. Even the hermits and monks in the desert did not cut themselves off from the world. They cut themselves off from distractions so that they could pray the more earnestly for the world and the people living in it. Scrooge in his counting house on a busy London street cut himself off from the world more completely than any monk or hermit ever did.

Jesus didn’t tell the apostles to teach all the nations so that the nations would believe what he said; he told the apostles to teach the nations so that they would obey what he said. (Matthew 28)

Obey. Do. “Love is the soul of justice; justice is the body, the flesh, of love.” (M. Borg and J. Crossan, The Last Week)

Can the Eye Say to the Hand, “I Don’t Need You”?

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The depiction of the hand of God stood in the presence of God himself, as in this hand of God the Father seen above the Cross, clutching a wreath of victory, San Clemente, Rome, AD 1140–43. Read here for more about the Hand of God in ancient-medieval Jewish and Christian art.


For just as the body is one and has many members and all the members of the body, although many, are one body, so also is Christ…. If the foot says, “Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body,” is it for this reason less a part of the body? (1 Cor. 12:12-15)

St. Paul was not the only one to talk about the Church as if it were a body. St. Jerome wrote

The Church has real eyes: its teachers and leaders who see the mysteries of God in the sacred Scriptures…. The Church has feet: those who make official journeys of all kinds. The foot runs that the hand may find the work it should do. The eye does not scorn the hand, nor do the eyes, hands, and feet scorn the belly as if it were idle and unemployed.

Homily 85 on the Gospel According to St. Matthew

I think the best example of body imagery is what St. Augustine wrote:

Aren’t the hairs of your head certainly of less value than your other members? What is cheaper and more despicable and lowly than the hairs of your head? Yet if the barber gives you a bad haircut, you become angry at him for doing a bad job and cutting your hair unevenly. But you are not as concerned about the unity of the members of the Church as you are about the hairs on your head.

On the Usefulness of Fasting 6

How new was all this body imagery? Philosophers who were writing at the same time as St. Paul also used body imagery as a way to talk about society. Seneca wrote:

What if the hands should desire to harm the feet or the eyes the hands? As all the members of the body are in harmony with one another because it is to the advantage of the whole that individual members be unharmed….

On Anger, 2.31.7

A Roman fable told the story of hands, mouth, and teeth rebelling against the stomach, with the result that the whole body is harmed. (Livy, History of Rome 2.32.7-33.1) Other fables and philosophers compared political unrest to disease or self-harm (such as cutting).

Jewish writers like Josephus and Philo also used body imagery. “As in the body, all the members get sick if the principal members are inflamed….” and the high priest asks for blessings in order “that every age and every part of the nation be regarded as a single body, united in one and the same fellowship, making peace and good order their aim.”

A few decades after St. Paul wrote, St. Clement of Rome also write to the Corinthians. St. Clement also used body imagery to appeal to the Corinthians to embrace harmony and set aside discord.

Let us take our body as an example. The head without the feet is nothing; likewise the feet without the head are nothing: even the smallest limbs of our body are necessary and useful for the whole body; but all the members conspire and unite in subjection, that the whole body may be saved.”

1 Clement 37

I highly recommend Raymond Collins’ commentary on First Corinthians in the Sacra Pagina series.

Spiritual Milk

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Madonna di San Gugliemo, 12th century (Sienna, Italy). This depiction of the “Madonna Lactans” (Nursing Madonna) is a eucharistic image as much as it is an image of a mother caring for her child. Read more about this type of image here and see more examples here.

And I, brothers and sisters, was able to speak to you not as spiritual people but only as carnal people, as infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not substantial food, because you were not yet capable, nor are you capable until now, for you are fleshy people. (1 Cor. 3:1-3)

In the ancient world, milk-blood-semen were all thought to be the same liquid but warmed to differing temperatures by different internal organs. Blood was the coldest of these and the basic, most natural form of this liquid. Milk was blood, warmed and made frothy in a woman’s breasts. Semen was blood, made even warmer and frothier in a man’s testes. According to this biological idea, when a mother was nursing her child, she was feeding the baby with her own blood.

Because blood and milk were identical, the correspondence of the Virgin’s milk and Christ’s blood was important to early and medieval Christians. The Virgin’s blood becomes milk in her breasts; she nurses Christ, feeding him her warm and frothy blood; he drinks this frothy blood, which becomes the blood in his own veins. Medieval images of the Nursing Madonna (Madonna lactans) are fundamentally eucharistic images, celebrating the identity of the Virgin’s milk with Christ’s blood; she feeds him with her body which becomes his Body and he feeds the Church with his Body and Blood in the Eucharist.

There is no more vivid and elaborate exposition of 1 Corinthians 3 in early Christian literature than that found in Clement’s Paedagogus 1.6…. By combining Galatians 3:28 and 1 Corinthians 3, Clement sets the foundation for his argument that all Christians are already spiritual…and, as a result, milk-drinking infants cannot be viewed as equivalent to “carnal” Christians. Rather, milk is the food of all Christians who “seek our mother, the church.”

John David Penniman, Raised on Christian Milk

Not only did a mother’s milk (blood) provide sustenance to her baby, the infant received religious and ethnic formation as well by ingesting his/her mother’s identity via the milk-blood. This is why receiving Holy Communion was so important: to receive Christ’s blood was to be shaped and formed by his identity, according to St. Gregory of Nyssa.

Discover more about this fascinating subject in Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity by John David Penniman (Yale University Press, 2017).