Members One of Another
On the Porous Body of Christ
For the first two instalments in this series, visit here and here.
When I began my doctoral studies on Augustine of Hippo, I didn’t anticipate spending several years of my life ploughing through ancient rhetoric. But one of the unexpected gifts of reading writers like Cicero is that it gave me a better ear for rhetoric in general — a growing sense that how an argument is arranged is often as important as the argument itself. Skilled writers and speakers often do their most important work in the moves their readers aren’t expecting.
A good example is the very beginning of 1 Corinthians. Taken at face value, Paul seems to be warmly commending the Corinthian Christians for their eloquence and wisdom — the two most prized disciplines in the Greek and Roman world. It’s roughly equivalent to commending a congregation today for its management expertise and multi-platform communications strategy. Only at verse 17 does the commendation suddenly bite: Christ did not send me to proclaim the gospel with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. Paul puffs them up so he can stick a theological pin into their pride. The pin prick is just as important as the claim.
What Paul does in Romans 12:4–5 fascinates me for a different kind of unexpected rhetorical move. The passage is easy to read too quickly. Paul begins with the familiar body metaphor: as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function. You can see where it’s going. The expected conclusion writes itself: so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of him. Tidy. Hierarchical in the way all ancient body-metaphors tended to be — parts serving the whole, each keeping to its proper function, the whole greater than the sum.
But that isn’t the sentence Paul writes. What he actually says is that we are members one of another.
Not members of a body in general. Not members of a community in some abstract collective sense. Members one of another. The grammar refuses the tidy conclusion and replaces it with something considerably stranger: a belonging that runs not only upward, from part to whole, but sideways — each member constituted, in some real sense, by its relation to the others of which they are members, too. I belong to Christ’s body by belonging to you. You are part of what I am, and I am part of you.
I suspect most of us can wrap our heads around the idea of being members of the Body of Christ. But what on earth does it mean to be members of each other? This, I think, is where the idea of the porous self is helpful.
The Self Paul Presupposes
If the self were the thing modernity taught us it was — sealed, self-originating, complete in itself before it enters into relation with others — then Paul’s sentence would be nonsense dressed up as pious words. You can affiliate sealed selves. You can organise them, govern them, even inspire them. But you can’t make them members one of another in any sense stronger than membership of a club.
The self this series has been describing isn’t that sort of self, though. It’s porous at the edge of the body, porous at the edge of the mind, constituted through a language it didn’t invent, a story it didn’t compose, a place and time it didn’t choose. There is no hidden core beneath these relations where the “real” self waits untouched. The boundary between self and world was never a wall. It has always been something more like a negotiation.
That is the self Paul’s theology requires. Not an autonomous individual who subsequently joins a body and acquires new obligations toward fellow members, but a self already constituted through relation — already the kind of thing that can be genuinely shaped by what it’s joined to, because it was always, even before that joining, shaped by what surrounded it. The porousness doesn’t begin at baptism. But baptism gives that porousness a new centre and a new direction: Christ himself.
Letting Go of Autonomy
Few twentieth-century theologians grasped this more clearly than Michael Ramsey. His much admired The Gospel and the Catholic Church is built around a striking paradox: we only truly become ourselves by dying to our self. Ramsey gets there by way of the Cross — the Church, for him, is a scene of continual dying, patterned on Christ’s own death and resurrection, in which every member and every community learns its dependence upon the whole Body before it can claim to have found itself at all. Discipleship, on this reading, isn’t a gradual improvement of the self so much as a repeated relinquishing of the self’s claim to be its own foundation.
At first glance, Ramsey can sound as though Christianity demands the surrender of the self to the collective — what my wife calls the “blob people.” But that isn’t his argument. What has to die isn’t the person but the illusion of autonomy — the self organised around its own centre, grasping its life as a possession rather than receiving it as a gift to be offered to others. The Church isn’t an optional association one joins after becoming a Christian. It’s the Body in which Christian identity is constituted in the first place. Lose the false autonomous self, and you don’t cease to be an individual. You discover what individuality was always meant to become.
Read this way, Ramsey’s insistence on dependence becomes less austere than it first sounds. The death of individualism isn’t the destruction of relation but its healing. The self doesn’t cease to be porous in baptism; its porousness is gathered into a new pattern of life. The same openness that once curved back on itself is turned again towards God and neighbour. Our individuality is oriented toward fulfilment, not erased by it. The self discovers itself not by escaping relation but by inhabiting it rightly. By grace, we discover how to be members one of another.
What It Costs to Be a Member
Which brings us back to the strangeness of Paul’s grammar, and to what it actually asks of us.
If we’re members one of another — not merely coordinated but genuinely constituted through our relation to one another — then the people with whom I worship aren’t incidental to what I’m becoming. They’re part of the material from which Christ is re-making me, just as the language I think in and the story I inherited helped make me long before I had any say in the matter. I absorb the particular accents of my faith in part from those who teach and irritate and forgive me. That unchosen shaping isn’t incidental to who I am; it is, in the most ordinary sense, who I am. The people beside me in the pew aren’t background to a self I’d have become regardless. They are, in some real sense, among its makers.
That’s considerably more demanding than it first appears.
It’s easy enough to affirm the Body of Christ in the abstract. It’s another thing entirely to reckon with the fact that the particular people I’m joined to — not the congregation I might have chosen, but these people, in this place, with their histories, limitations and irritating habits — are the concrete form that belonging takes. There is no generic membership of the Body that bypasses membership of them. Paul’s grammar simply won’t allow it.
Nor does the porousness run in only one direction. If I’m shaped by those with whom I worship, then they are, over time, shaped by me. The attention I offer, the words I speak, my willingness to be genuinely present, my readiness to be known rather than merely seen — these aren’t private virtues exercised in a communal setting. They’re contributions to a common life that become for us in a particular place and time the reality of Christ’s Body.
The Body as Foretaste
There is one further implication of Paul’s grammar, and perhaps it’s the most surprising of all.
The Body of Christ isn’t simply a community held together by shared beliefs or mutual commitment. It’s a new kind of relation made possible by incorporation into Christ — a participation in the life of the one in whom, as Colossians puts it, all things hold together. The Church is therefore porous in its own life, not a closed society turned in on itself but a people whose identity is continually received from the one who exceeds it, and through him opened towards the world he is reconciling to himself.
A Church that secured its identity by drawing ever tighter boundaries — by defining itself primarily through exclusion rather than reception — would be exhibiting precisely the incurvatus in se that incorporation into Christ is meant to heal. The Body becomes most fully itself not by turning inwards, but by remaining open: to the Spirit who blows where he wills, to the stranger at the door, and to the creation that is groaning towards the same redemption its members have already begun to taste.
The porousness of the self, then, isn’t simply a feature of human nature that the Church happens to repurpose for community life. It belongs to the grammar of creaturehood itself. We exist because we receive our being from another, and we flourish only as that gift is rightly ordered. The Gospel doesn’t replace our relational nature with something new. It restores it by gathering it into the life of Christ, the one through whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together.
The Body of Christ is therefore not only a present reality but an anticipation of the world’s true end — a foretaste enacted in bread and wine and gathered bodies, of the communion towards which the whole creation is moving. The porousness that made us vulnerable to sin’s distortion turns out to be the very openness through which grace heals us, and through which all things are being drawn back into the communion from which they were never, in truth, entirely severed.
Members one of another.
These words turn out to be much more than a curious turn of phrase. They’re Paul’s description of the kind of selves Christ is creating: people whose lives are no longer organised around the illusion of autonomy but received, shared, given and fulfilled in communion with him and with one another. Once we begin to grasp what those words entail, they become not only one of the New Testament’s most beautiful descriptions of the Church, but one of its most demanding invitations.
I’ll be away for the next two weeks on a holiday trekking along the Jakobsweg and the GR65. Well-Tempered will return sometime after my return in August. MFMC.