Calvary Road Baptist Church
“THE BODY OF CHRIST:
Metaphor Not Myth” Part 6
This is the sixth of eight messages, continuing something I have never done before in my ministry. I am explaining the contents of the well-written book titled “THE BODY OF CHRIST: Metaphor Not Myth,” written by Baptist pastor Charles L. Hunt.
My purpose in explaining the book to you is based upon two convictions. First, I am convinced Charles Hunt’s book is the best treatment of a matter of significance to a correct understanding of the Biblical doctrine of the Church that I have ever read, the body of Christ metaphor. It’s a good book! I am also persuaded that the incorrect understanding of the body of Christ metaphor is so widespread, it is so pervasive, that when the correct body of Christ metaphor is presented to someone, they may, as likely as not, experience some form of cognitive dissonance.
Allow me to explain again. Cognitive dissonance is the mental state of discomfort felt when two or more modes of thought or ideas contradict each other. The clashing cognitions may include ideas, beliefs, or an awareness of someone behaving in a certain way.
The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people are opposed to inconsistencies within their thinking. It explains why people sometimes try to adjust their thinking when their thoughts, words, or behaviors clash. I believe something like cognitive dissonance takes place whenever someone has an initial encounter with the Gospel, mainly if you grew up in a non-Christian worldview culture, which is, more and more, American culture.
When someone becomes aware of new information that challenges a deeply held or comfortable belief, for example, or acts in a way that seems to undercut a favorable self-image, that person may be motivated to resolve somehow the negative feeling that results—to restore cognitive consonance, to make the conflicting thoughts subside, because people don’t like those kinds of thoughts bouncing around in their cranium. Thus, a temporary peace of mind is restored.
Though a person may not always resolve cognitive dissonance, the response to it may range from ignoring the source of the mental disturbance to changing one’s beliefs or behavior to eliminate the conflict of incompatible and troublesome thoughts. Cognitive dissonance frequently results when the familiar is preferred to the true. I have found that to be the case with the body of Christ metaphor, with people (and, sadly, many pastors) feeling so much more comfortable with the familiar than with the true. Cognitive dissonance is such a problem concerning the body of Christ metaphor that I can think of no better way to prepare you to help others with this problem than this approach, continuing tonight.
We have committed to dealing with one chapter of the book at a time, giving you ample opportunity to not only satisfy yourself that the material presented to you is accurate but also to help you reflect on how to help others who have been taught the prevailing but incorrect understanding of the body of Christ metaphor in the New Testament.
If this is your first time with us in the book, or if you have missed some of the previous chapter explanations, I urge you to review the sessions on YouTube, and I will provide the video links to you upon request. I will also make a copy of the book available upon request.
Please turn to the book’s final chapter, chapter 6, where we begin reading.
Chapter VI
Summary and Conclusion
The Church is “the body of Christ.” The nature of this Pauline metaphor has been the subject of this book. The main point that has been developed is that this metaphor (“a figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another”[1]) teaches the functional relationship of Christ to each and every assembly of which He is [the] head. This metaphor neither teaches an organic union of the individual believer to Christ nor the organic union to Christ of any group of believers. [In other words, the figure on the left shown above is incorrect!] Rather, it pictures Christ’s relationship to His assembly as a husband nourishes his relationship to his wife although they are not organically one being but two becoming one in function, unity, goal and purpose. (Just as husbands and wives exist before their marriages and their existence is not dependent on their relationships to each other except in quality and enjoyment, so the Savior and believers are who they are before a believer becomes a member of the body of Christ. The thief on the cross believed in Christ while never becoming a member of the body of Christ.) In the same way, each church is not organically one in being with a supposed mystical body of Christ but two, Christ and His assembly becoming one by a process of sanctification. Through His functional Headship relationship, He cares for and enriches the church so that there is unity, oneness of goal and purpose between Himself and His assembly, the assembly being the congregation, such as we are and have here. It is called His body because it is His by possession, creation, and relationship. The church manifests the gifts of Christ as He possessed them in His body while upon this earth. Therefore, the corporate organized unity of His gifts is the essence of the church.
One may question, if the view proposed in this book is true, why doesn’t the New Testament speak of the bodies of Christ instead of consistently referring to the body of Christ? If each church is a body of Christ, then why is there no reference to the bodies of Christ? The answer is found in realizing that the word church (the Greek word ἐkklesίa. Then Jesus called his disciples unto him, and said, I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat: and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way. Then Jesus called his disciples unto him, and said, I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat: and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way.) is never used in the New Testament in a metaphorical sense. Every time Jesus used the word church or churches in Matthew and the book of Revelation it is used in its ordinary sense. Not one time! The Apostle Paul does not alter Christ’s usage of (ἐkklesίa).35 Its usage is always in either a concrete or generic sense in every passage. Therefore, there is no possibility of conveying the wrong meaning of (ἐkklesίa) by using it in the plural-churches. On the other hand, body in the Pauline ecclesiology is used in a metaphorical sense i.e. Christ’s gifts organized in an assembly is analogous to the diversity of the several parts of a human body which exist in the perfect unity of the whole body. To speak of the bodies of Christ would confuse the metaphor. The fact that there is a consistent use of the word body in the singular in reference to the church neither establishes nor necessitates the existence of a universal invisible body of Christ. It establishes a careful use of the word so that there is no idea developed that would infer that there can be more than one kind of body of Christ.
There is one people of God, one kingdom of God, one fold of the sheep of God. Becoming a child of God, entering the kingdom and entering the fold of God all picture the believer as entering into the salvation of God. One entering into the body of Christ is not picturing entering into salvation but a relationship of sanctification. (Is this not pictured when a man and woman are married? Is the marriage not bringing either into existence but establishing a relationship between the two? So here.) Hence, there is no conflict with there being many individual churches and each metaphorically a body of Christ because each body is not a picture of division in Christ. Rather this places the one people of God into corporate relationship with Christ. Remember there is a difference between being placed in Christ and the action of God subsequent to salvation placing us into a body which is Christ’s. Hence, it is not that Christ has many bodies, but He has one place in which the people of God can experience a corporate sanctifying oneness to each other.
One might ask why there cannot be one invisible body if there can be one unseen fold or kingdom. The reason is that the body metaphor does not depict salvation, it depicts sanctification. When one is placed in the kingdom or fold of God, he is saved. He is entering the “in Christ” reality of salvation. A believer is not saved by being placed into the body of Christ; he is sanctified unto God corporately with other believers. All will experience the blessing of corporate unity and full sanctification in glory, but presently only those who submit themselves to God’s action of placing themselves into an assembly experience the progressive sanctification this corporate relationship brings. Such sanctification does not create division in Christ, but rather it creates Christ-likeness in a way that cannot be accomplished by the believer in isolation, and which presently brings glory to God and will have an eternal weight of glory in heaven. (Thus, the importance of Christ’s body and Church membership is implied.)
The teaching of our union with Jesus Christ should be guarded tenaciously. Refuting a metaphor that weakens the teaching of this truth has been one of the purposes of this book. We are one in Christ as we formerly were in Adam. Yet, being in Adam is not pictured as the sinner being a member of one universal invisible flesh. We are the branches of Jesus as the vine. We are the branches of His salvational fullness as the grafted branches of an olive tree. Our spirit is one spirit with Christ’s Spirit as He indwells the believer, but we are not one member in a mystical body because such a metaphor is not taught in regard to our union with Jesus Christ. In such a metaphor Christ would be a subordinate part of His own body. Our salvation would not just come from the head but also from the other vital members of the body. We could boast that we bear the head. Those of Paul’s day would not have understood the metaphor in this way because according to their thinking the life of the body is in the blood not the head. They did not understand the brain as the central nervous system but rather the heart and belly region as the region of the mind.36 When the Bible refers to the body of Christ it does not mean the mystical body of which He is the organic Head, but rather the metaphorical body of Christ that is His by possession, creation, relationship, and Lordship. It is built on the qualities of an ordinary human body, and then applied to the assembly of Christ as depicting His many and various spiritual gifts existing in a particular locale in unity and visible corporate manifestation.
This concludes the main body of the book. Next time, we will examine Addendum I and then conclude with Addendum II and my concluding thoughts and applications in a subsequent week.
What have we learned? Let me summarize. I have asserted in connection with this book that resistance to the Biblical truth of the body of Christ metaphor is caused by cognitive dissonance, a natural commitment we tend to possess that is inclined to that which is familiar and comfortable in preference to that which is true and would result in admitting past errors in doctrine and practice. We do not like to do that. Nobody likes to do that.
That is what happens, by the way, every time a scientist proposes a hypothesis. If his hypothesis is true, the scientist must overcome the cognitive dissonance of every other scientist in his field because they [scientists] do not want to go against what they have based their professional reputation and career on.
Let me give you an example. I wasn’t planning on this, but I am going to. Who was the most important, sophisticated, and accomplished 20th-century cultural anthropologist? Margaret Mead, Columbia University.3 Margaret Mead went to the South Pacific to the Samoan Islands (among other locales). There, acting on her belief that Jean Jacque Rousseau4 was right, and man in the wild, man out on his own, is a better man than civilized man, that civilization, society, corrupts and makes people evil, wicked, mean, and nasty, and when you get back to nature, especially when you start peeling your clothes off, you’re free!
She didn’t go to Tahiti, where they actually did peel their clothes off (I may be wrong), but she did go to Samoa, where they are less covered than they are here, except in Huntington Beach. So, she studied them and found all kinds of scandalous things. She interviewed teenage girls and boys. She came back and wrote down her findings. Every cultural anthropologist on planet Earth has based their professional reputation, building on the premise of Margaret Mead’s works.
There is a guy at Cal State Stanislaus [Derek Freeman]5 who decided, after fifty, sixty years, he was going to go back to those same Samoan islands, and he was going to try and find those same people (the ones that were still alive) that Margaret Mead had interviewed when they were 13, 14, 15, 16 years of age. He went back and found them and interviewed them. And they are now all grandmothers and grandfathers.
And he asked each of these women, “I would like to talk to you about what you told Margaret Mead about your sexual exploits as a teenage girl.” They responded, “We never actually did those things!” He said, “What do you mean?” “I never actually did what I told her [Margaret Mead] I did!” He [Derek Freeman] said, “I don’t understand.” “Well, it became clear to me and all the other girls that she wanted us to give her really racy stuff. She wanted us to titillate her. She wanted us to excite her. She wanted us to stimulate her. So we looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s give the old gal what she wants. Okay?’”
And so, they invented stuff. Margaret Mead’s entire professional reputation was based upon fiction. And when this guy [Derek Freeman] up at Cal State Stanislaus discovered that and wrote his findings, guess what happened to him professionally? He was destroyed. Why? Because of the cognitive dissonance of the cultural anthropologists throughout the world. They were not about to change everything they had based their professional reputations on for the sake of truth.
They had tenure! They had [written] books! They had reputations! And if you don’t think that same kind of thing is true throughout the scientific world, you are naive. We’ve just been through about three years of that demonstrated with the COVID lockdown. I can show you books in my library written by scientists, where they will basically attest that every time a pharmaceutical company takes a study in for analysis, they presume that one out of every two thorough, deeply researched, and peer-reviewed studies is a lie.6 One out of every two.
So, if anybody says, “Trust the science. Trust the science.” If you say, “Trust the science,” you are not a scientist, because no scientist would ever say, “Trust the science.” A scientist would say what? “Verify. Verify. Verify. Verify. Verify.” Cognitive dissonance does not want to verify. They want to continue whistling through the cemetery at night. They don’t want to turn. They don’t want to face it. They don’t want to deal with it. They want to get away from it [the truth that disturbs their sense of tranquility].
Sadly, that is so often true in the realm of Christianity and their understanding of the doctrine of the Church. I believe that we have at least one member of our Church who indicated to me that my admission of error and my request to the congregation that you forgive me for my error was used by God to break down resistance to the Gospel. I use that to appeal to you as I would appeal to pastors.
You say, “Well, what do you mean?” Was I scared of admitting error? Oh, absolutely. Was I terrified by asking your forgiveness? Of course, I was. I’m a normal human being. But I think pastors should be unafraid of embracing Scriptural truth and practice. And yet, we [pastors and people] are often afraid to do right, and we seem to have little fear of continuing to do wrong. Shouldn’t we be fearful of doing wrong? And should we not be those who are openly, eagerly, and willingly ready to embrace the truth rather than continue in error? [The truth makes us free, not what we have always believed or how we have always done it.][2]
What have we learned from the book? In marvelous fashion and with a keen eye for grammar and figures of speech, the author has demonstrated his commitment to the verbal inspiration of Scripture by meticulously showing his trust in what the Bible says the Bible means. What it says it means! Strictly observing the parameters of the figure of speech known as metaphor, we learn that the universal, invisible body of Christ understanding is not Scriptural. That ought to be enough for us.
Just as the Greeks of Paul’s day would never have conceived of an ἐkklhsίa as invisible, they would also have never understood the use of the body of Christ metaphor to refer to an organic union of the believer to Christ as is necessitated by the universal, invisible body of Christ concept.
Why not? Because it is blasphemous in its implications of a co-dependency between the body (as it is wrongly conceived) and the Head. Look once more at the left figure in the diagram above. That is the view that most Protestants believe represents the relationship between Christ and the universal invisible body. Yet, that [representation] shows that the Head depends on the body. The health of the body determines the health of the head. Is Christ so dependent upon us? The Lord Jesus Christ does not depend upon anyone or anything, and to suggest that He does [with diagrams or words], even to imply or leave the door open that He does, in my opinion, denigrates Him.
Therefore, to see the Lord Jesus Christ concerning the body of Christ as the Bible portrays it, to exalt Him pertaining to a Church congregation properly, we must know the body of Christ as a local, visible group of believers who are Scripturally baptized and organized to carry out the Great Commission, administer the Church ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, while maintaining a Biblical approach to Church discipline and discipleship.
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[1] Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1996), page 1132.
[2] John 8.32
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