The Material Reality of Christ's Lordship

In his new theological commentary on Philippians, Stephen Fowl shatters the notion that the people can be isolated Christians, separate and apart from a local community of faith. He writes:

"What Paul's language here simply presumes, but what contemporary Christians must remember, is that if Christ's lordship is to have any material reality in the present, then there must also be a community of people whose faith and practice, whose hopes and desires, whose very life and death, are shaped by their allegiance to their Lord. Apart from this, language about being in Christ and attempts to call Christ Lord, begin to lose their coherence. As G. Lohfink notes, 'being in Christ means living within the realm of Christ's rule--and that realm is the church.' Clearly, Christians are divided over how the church should be ordered and what its constitutive practices are. This divisiveness is itself a profound wound in the body of Christ. Nevertheless, to follow Paul and to speak of the church as the body of Christ or, as in Philippians, of 'saints in Christ' demands the real material presence of a community of Christians, not simply individual Christians enjoying discrete inner transactions with God. The central confession that Jesus Christ is Lord calls forth and requires that community known as the church" (19).

In a world where religion is privatized and church rhetoric is often about individuals and their personal relationships with Jesus, Fowl reminds us that it is foreign to the New Testament to think about having a relationship with God in Jesus that is not forged in and fostered by relationships in a community of faith. It is foreign to think of a personal relationship with Jesus without the corresponding personal relationships with those in the body of Christ.

May God bless our relationships with one another and mold us into the material reality of Christ's presence and lordship this year....