Christ's Pneumatic Body
It was conference season at the beginning of the year over in this little corner of the world.
In January, my submission for the University of Notre Dame Australia’s conference on the theological legacy of Benedict XVI was accepted for presentation, and later in February, I will be presenting at the Eschatology at the Beginning of the Third Millenium conference at the same university.
Regular readers might remember that a couple of years ago, I also had the pleasure of presenting at the Pneumatology at the Beginning of the Third Millenium conference.
My paper there, entitled “The Net and the Pneumatic Body of Christ” canvassed the turnaround in my thinking concerning the presence of the Body of Christ on the internet. Initially, I took a hard line against the notion of Christ’s body being really present in something as disembodied as the internet. The hard border lay, so my initial line of argument went, where the body begins and the digital enviornment begins. The theological underpinning for this line of argumentation was a sacramental one. Because of the sacramentality of the body of Christ, I argued, it would be impossible to conceive of the disembodied context of the internet as being able to sustain any kind of sacramental presence, never mind the sacramental presence of Christ Himself.
As I put forward in my paper, I soon realised that this initial line of argumentation, rather than protect the sacramental nature of Christ’s body, actually placed limits on it. The idea of sacramentality, as I put in that paper, rested on the idea that Christ’s body stretches beyond his biological body to encompass other material realities. If I affirm that, as the Catholic Church teaches, that Christ is sacramentally present in the material realities of Bread and wine, to suddenly say that other material realities - including the seemingly disembodied ones like the internet - was to make an artificial distinction. Unwittingly, I realised that in the name of defending sacramentality, I had actually undermined it with my initial line of argument.
The alternative, as I have written in other places, is to realise that sacramentality is what Graham Ward called a “dissemination” of Christ’s biological body into other realities, including non-biological ones. This dissemination is one that is facilitated by the Holy Spirit (hence my notion of a “pneumatic body”), so that Christ’s body might fulfil the mandate given to it by the Father, which is to be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28) and in so doing, make all one (Jn 17:21-24). This dissemination extends even in contexts that, on the face of it, might erase bodily presence altogether.
The upshot of this is that if Christ’s presence is to be affirmed even on the internet, then it is feasible to argue that true encounters with the body of Christ are indeed possible in that environment. The proviso, of course, is that these encounters are real because they are always anchored in Christ’s body, the Church.
This was the gist of the paper, and I am now pleased to say that the paper is now a chapter in the volume Pneumatology at the Beginning of the Third Millenium, published this year by Wipf and Stock.
Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.
