The Body of ChristНамуна

This study was written by Rachel- Missionary in Europe

Paul was the first person to describe the Church as the body of Christ, and the metaphor isn’t found anywhere else in the Old or New Testaments. So where did Paul get the idea from? Perhaps he was building on the Hebrew concept of corporate personality, where the community is more important than the individual members of it. Perhaps he was thinking of the biological, organic union described when Jesus told his followers, “I am the vine, and you are the branches” (John 15:5). Paul might also have been thinking about the way in which the Greek and Roman culture of his day described nations and governments as a ‘body politic,’ with the government as the ‘head’ of the nation’s ‘body.’ Whatever his influences from Scripture and culture, we can see from the repeated use of the phrase that it was a key part of Paul’s theology about the Church.

We can find passages about the Church being the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians, and Colossians. In the first two of these, Paul uses the idea to teach about unity in the Church despite the diversity of its members, and in the second two, his main point is about the relationship of the Church to Christ. This metaphor of the Church, therefore, helps us understand how we should relate to fellow believers in the Church and how we relate to Christ as the head of the Church, both of which we will explore further over the next five days.