Social engagement has become acceptable in many conservative churches today. But social engagement in the ideologically crowded space of civil society is inherently contentious. The danger arises when Christians, in their eagerness to be “relevant” and to be accepted by wider society, end up following an agenda set by other social activists. Luke Bretherton identifies three processes whereby society may domesticate the church: 1) co-option – the church becoming a client of state patronage, 2) competition – the church is reduced to just another player in identity politics, pursuing its own religious rights, 3) commodification – the market construes the church as a product of consumption as Christianity becomes simply another privatized lifestyle choice.1Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics (Blackwell, 2010), pp. 1-2. Instead of allowing the church to be swept along by fashionable social tides, Christian activists must clearly focus on social priorities determined by Christian values. However, Christian values will remain as ‘ghostly’ abstractions unless they are embodied in a community. Hence, social engagement needs to go beyond mere discussion on personal values and focus more on how Christian values are exemplified in a Christian community.
No Christian activist acts alone. His social identity and social agenda are distinctly shaped by his community which seeks to build relationships and nurture responsible citizens who are ready to serve the wider community. While the church’s goal is to serve wider community, it also sees itself as a community distinct from other social organizations. It is “God’s New Society” under the Lordship of Christ and is spiritually empowered by the Holy Spirit. It exists as a contrast community that critiques wider society. That is to say, while it seeks to be relevant to the needs of wider society, it also maintains a critical distance in its social engagement. Christian social activists should bear in mind Aristotle’s boast that he could lift the world as long as he can find a fulcrum outside it. Likewise, the church needs to be “outside” the world in order to make an impact. Hence, the first requirement of the church is to have a clear and independent sense of theological and cultural identity to ensure its ability to engage the world on its own terms.
The book of 1 Peter gives a concise description of the distinctive marks of the church: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9). But how are these qualities perceived by wider society? How do Christian activists frame and accept the rules, roles and relations that define their identity within their own belief community? How does an individual feel a sense of personal significance (personal identity) and accept his assigned role in this community with its network of relationships (social identity)? This chapter attempts to answer these questions, drawing insights from biblical and sociological analysis.
Identity in Christ
The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) aptly captures the essence of Christian identity in its answer to Question 1, “What is your only comfort in life and death?” The answer reads, “That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” Indeed, Christians do not have their own identity. Rather, they have discarded their old sinful identity in exchange for a new identity in Christ, who first identified with them in his substitutionary death which bore the penalty for their sins. Belonging to Christ means Christians no longer own themselves; instead, they have been transferred from a life of bondage to sin to a life of freedom in Christ.
The words of the Catechism echo the teaching of Paul for whom believers are “in Christ” and the community of believers is “one body”, that is, the body of Christ. Paul elaborates on the metaphor “one body” by likening individual believers to different parts or organs of the human body. Just as the eye or feet do not have independent identities but are controlled by the head of the body, Christian identity is formed under the authority of Christ who is the head of his body, the church…
It should be stressed that the community of believers is more than just a sociological body. It is a spiritual reality. As James Dunn writes, “Every time soma appears in Paul, modern readers need to be reminded that it does not denote the physical body as such, rather a fuller reality which includes the physical but is not reducible to it.”2James Dunn, “The Body of Christ in Paul,” in M.J. Wilkins and T. Paige, eds. Worship, Theology and Ministry in the Early Church (JSNT Sup 87; Sheffield: JSOT 1992), pp. 146-162. The spiritual reality is also emphasized by Paul when he describes the community of believers as the temple of God or temple of the Holy Spirit. The full significance of this metaphor will be explored later in this chapter, but for the moment we need to note that body of believers as God’s temple replaces the physical Jerusalem Temple which was later destroyed in AD 70.
As a replacement of the physical temple, the church is the eschatological community of God which embodies a new pneumatological reality. “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and all were made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:13). The pneumatological reality is inaugurated during the baptism of the believer where he receives divine empowerment to live a new moral life characterized by new freedom in the power of the Holy Spirit. Believers experience both healing and restoration of broken relationships essential for reconciliation in social conflicts as well as the transformation needed to restore wholeness to God’s fallen creation, that is, the present deformed social order.
The church is God’s new society which is inclusive and universal, where there is no longer any “dividing wall of hostility” between the Gentiles and Jews from the moment they believe in Christ (Eph. 2). In this new society, the division of humankind into Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female is transcended (Gal. 3:28). Although the church is spiritually a universally inclusive body of believers, it exists locally as a visible social order where believers accept the authoritative teachings of the apostles (kerygma), re-enact the Eucharistic remembrance of Christ, participate in shared communal life of fellowship (koinonia) and practise the ethos of a covenant community. In effect, the local church is a microcosm of the universal church of Christ and believers are members of the “One, Holy, Catholic Church”…
Identity and Social Theory (Section [1282 words] omitted)
Moral Formation in Community: Pauline Perspectives
The New Testament, when viewed through the lens of identity theory, would present Jesus Christ as the defining prototype for the Christian community. As Paul puts it, “Christ becomes for us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). A new believer puts on Christ when he accepts Christ as his savior. As he grows in his belief, his individual identity becomes increasingly conformed to the “image” of Christ and his social identity is reinforced through interaction with other believers. The moral life of the body is premised on what was first mediated or done for the community by its prototype, in this case, Jesus Christ.
Gordon Fee notes how Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:9 first warns the Corinthian Christians who were still indulging in the sins of idolatry, sexual immorality and swindling thievery that they will not inherit the kingdom of God. He then counters their sinful proclivities by reminding them of their identity in Christ: “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). The past tense of the verbs “were washed”, “were sanctified”, and “were justified” emphasizes what Christ has done for them at the time of their conversion…
The consequence of the work of Christ is not merely to guarantee a life in the hereafter, but to transform the believer so that he lives a holy and righteous life together with his fellow believers. Elsewhere, Paul emphasizes that a sense of identity in the body of Christ determines how believers conduct themselves in all facets of life in the community, such as sharing ritual meals, maintaining sexual purity and harmonious relationships with fellow members of the community (1 Cor. 10:23), and following one’s vocation in life (1 Cor. 7:17-24).
The believers come from a variety of cultural backgrounds and values to create a new social order that is the church. However, Paul’s focus goes beyond institutional processes. The body of Christian believers is not merely a cultural institution but rather a new creation mediated by Christ. Paul regards the conflict of relationships in the Church of Corinth as a symptom of the believers’ failure to understand fully the transforming power of Christ’s work on the Cross that ought to overcome all divisions as believers are incorporated into the one body of Christ…
For Paul, moral conduct goes beyond individual concerns and affects the health and unity of the body of believers as a whole…As the body and its members are inseparable, likewise there is no separation between individual and social identity, and morality. Moral disorder or conflict in the body of Christ or the Christian community (both spiritual and sociological) are inseparable. Moral and community order is achieved only when believers are one in spirit bonded by love (1 Cor. 1). For this reason, Paul intersperses his counsel to resolve theological disputes with warnings against competition for social status and power struggles that threaten the harmony of the body.3Dale Martin, The Corinthian Body (Yale UP, 1995), pp. 55-56.
There should be no dichotomy between social and spiritual existence. After all, the individual finds fulfillment when he recognizes that his physical existence (soma) finds its reality “not in the yearning from the liberation of the divine soul from the body of death but the setting of this body in service and in dedication to God.”4Eduard Schweizer, “Soma”, TDNT vol.7, p. 1065. As such, believers are no longer owners of their personal lives and they must treat their individual bodies and the wider body politic/body of Christ with due reverence and respect. Holiness is not pursued in spiritual isolation but in the rich texture of shared community life, with all its compromises, conflicts and consolations.
Paul accentuates his demand for holiness in the community by using another powerful image – one that portrays believers as God’s temple or the temple of the Holy Spirit: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Cor. 3:16-17). “What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God” (2 Cor. 6:16).
The Greek text uses the plural you in 1 Corinthians 3:16 and 2 Corinthians 6:16, which shows that Paul is here referring to the community rather than to individuals.5We note that the same imagery is used in 1 Corinthians 6:19 to warn the individual believer who indulges in sexual immorality that he is not only defiling his body but God’s temple. There is no contradiction between these verses and 1 Corinthians 6:19 as God’s Spirit indwells both the individual and the community as a whole. Significantly, there is only one temple of God, naos (singular) theou. This being the case, Paul is urging the Corinthians to ensure that the Christian community collectively exhibits a specific spiritual and moral ethos worthy of their status as God’s temple that is indwelt by God’s Spirit. That is to say, a personal holiness that arises from recognition of the sanctity of the Holy Spirit and submission to the Spirit’s authority by the individual will result in righteous action which will suffuse and nurture the life of the entire community.
Paul’s use of the imagery of the temple to define the identity and boundaries of the Christian community is natural since traditional Mediterranean societies typically constructed their temples in a manner which symbolically corresponded to their understanding of the cosmos and which defined the social location and significant roles for individuals in a stratified or class-based society. The architecture and rituals of the temples reflected the identity or core cultural values of society, differentiated the status of members and defined their roles in society – all of which were coordinated as a unified polity. The manifest function of temples was to offer worship to the deities, but the latent function was to bind all classes of the community into one ordered polity.6See Robert K. Merton, “Manifest and Latent Functions,” in Social Theory and Social Structure. Enlarged edition (The Free Press, 1968), pp. 73-138. …
It is highly significant that Paul highlights to the Corinthian Christians an alternative temple (God’s temple or the temple of the Holy Spirit) with clearly defined boundaries of membership. His counsel against idol worship and partaking of food offered to idols (set in the context of temple ceremonies) is a call to the believers to be separated from unbelievers and to have nothing to do with their immoral conduct. Paul gave an alarming and stern warning that would resonate immediately, if not viscerally, with the Corinthian believers: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Cor. 3:16-17).
It is not surprising that Paul invokes divine judgment upon any act of defilement or sacrilege. For him, defilement goes beyond ceremonial impropriety and includes the series of improper or immoral acts that the Corinthian Christians were guilty of. Sanctification is more than just a simple process of self-denial or moral regulation; it is an awareness and expression of reverence for the indwelling of the Spirit in both the individual believer and in the community as a whole. Hence, Paul’s command for abstinence from idol worship is accompanied by a call for a life of purity and holiness (2 Cor. 7:1). Paul’s emphatic teaching that the Corinthian believers constitute the temple of God is to challenge them not only to maintain unity but also to exhibit a social and moral conduct that is consistent with the claim that the holy God is present in their community.
Bruce Winter identifies several immoral social practices which could undermine the integrity of God’s new community in Corinth.7Bruce Winters, After Paul Left Corinth (Eerdmans, 2001), p. 27. These include:
(1) Professional competitiveness among the teachers vying for loyalty among followers (1 Cor. 1-4).
(2) Manipulation of the secular litigation process to gain leniency in legal punishment (1 Cor. 5).
(3) Social elitism that ascribes greater honor to members belonging to the privileged class during hosting of private and community meals (1 Cor. 11: 17- 34).
(4) The practice of patronage to extend dominance and influence in social, political and cultic spheres (1 Cor. 16:15-18).
Since social interaction and social conformity assume greater significance in situations where official functions of the city are conducted in the pagan temple, Paul insists that believers must maintain a critical distance from these activities. But the critical distance is not to be defined by physical withdrawal or isolation. Instead, believers are to be distinguished by an alternative moral ethos consistent with their identity in Christ which can be concretely recognized by people searching for an alternative way of life to that defined by the pagan temples.
To reinforce the new identity in Christ and his body, Paul highlights the Eucharist – which replaces sacrificial worship at the temple and provides an alternative locus of identity – through which believers can express their social identity and unity in Christ. The Eucharist is efficacious for the identity formation of the body of believers since it is not merely a symbolic recollection in the minds of the worshippers. It is a speech-act event that re-enacts and re-presents God’s act of salvation that gave birth to the new people of God.8See Melvin Tinker, “Last Supper / Lord’s Supper: More Than a Parable in Action?” Themelios 26.2 (2001), pp.18-28. Just as Israel once remembered the Exodus event that constituted the nation of Israel, Christians re-enact the Eucharist as the event that constituted God’s new society, the church.
Finally, we should note that the most significant identity marker for the Christian community is that the church is a community shaped by its crucified Lord.9Wayne Meeks writes that the crucified and exalted messiah became for the early church at Corinth and for all times “one of the most powerful symbols that has ever appeared in the history of religions.” The First Urban Christians (Yale UP, 1983), p.180. Membership into this community is through an act of repentance (metanoia) whereby the believer pledges full allegiance to the One God who brings together both Jews and Gentiles and makes them into one people.
As members identify with the Crucified One who reveals the righteousness of God, they must adopt a “cruciformed” way of life, that is, the way of life that judges all social practices according to the work of Christ on the cross.10See Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Eerdmans 2001), pp. 1-18. See also Jurgen Becker, Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles, Eng. Trans. (WJK 1993), pp. 206-208. It is undeniable that the cross has become a universal scandal – a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. By the same token, the Christian community becomes a contrast community that displays the power of God revealed in weakness and turns the dominant values of the world upside-down. Consequently, only as it is identified as a community of the cross is the church able to enjoy its freedom from worldly ideologies and engage society with critical distance…
The Pauline epistles provide a paradigm case study on how Gentiles are to redefine their spiritual identity, inculcate moral values that are consistent with their new-found identity and develop moral practices that will bring together people of different social backgrounds and bind them into a covenant people…
The believer must not only die to himself, but he must also renounce his old loyalties and reject the oppressive ideologies and value systems of the world because he has experienced wholeness and freedom in Christ. Put positively, the first task of believers is not to change the world but to ensure that they are collectively conformed to the image of Christ. Then, willy-nilly, they become an instrument for social change. As one second-century Church Father wrote,
For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity… They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all…They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.11“Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus, chapter 5”, in Ante-Nicean Christian Fathers vol. 1, translated by A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (Eerdmans reprint, 1996), pp. 26-27.
Christians will gain grudging attention, if not respect, and may even win over hostile opponents when they are willing to forgo their rights and serve others. Their witness to the living God and savior is effective not simply because they offer an alternative moral system – which can become another list of oppressive obligations in the long run – but because they represent a new identity that promises new freedom and wholeness in union with Christ the risen savior. In this regard, believers can do no better than to follow Paul’s exhortations so that the witness of the church will be spiritually authentic and socially transformative.
Related Post: Identity in Christ and the Quest for Authenticity
**This post is excerpted from the book, Christianity and the Social Order by Dr. Ng Kam Weng. LINK to webpage on how to order the book.