To Think God as Love

Jesus’ eucharistic body and Jesus’ mystical body 1 – the church – are not male, or female for that matter.  2 The eucharistic body is sub-sexual, so to speak, and the mystical body is supra-sexual: ‘neither male nor female in Christ’ (Gal 3.28). This speaks to the fact that Christ, without in any way lessening [...]

But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the [...]

Is the Spirit’s groaning different from the groaning of the creation and the believer? Moo thinks so. He writes, [W]hile there is an obvious literary parallelism between the “groaning” of creation (v. 22), the Christian, and the Spirit, the groaning of the Spirit is very different in its nature and purpose from the other two [...]

Turning to Paul’s Romans, we (perhaps) find a biblical reference to the Spirit’s suffering. As Paul has it, ‘the Spirit…groans’ (Rom 8.26). Whatever we take these ‘groans’ to be – more about that in a moment – we know this description of the Spirit’s eschatological activity carries significant weight in Paul’s overall argument, for it climaxes a [...]

Because they are failing to rightly discern Christ’s body,  1 Paul directs the Corinthians to ‘examine themselves’ (1 Cor 11.28). But for what are they directed to look? What should they excavate themselves to find? In short, whatever obscures their vision of Christ in the Meal and in the Community. Their sins are blinding them [...]

The Corinthians, Paul insists, are suffering because they are failing to discern the Lord’s presence, both in the Meal and in the people gathered around the Table. They are participating in the Eucharist too Romanly, so to speak. Class conscious, they eat and drink in order of rank, so that the poorest among them have nothing. [...]