The Temple is a Body. The Spirit is a Bone.

 

Examples abound of what practices we are to inhabit when church ‘meets’ – teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, prayer (Acs. 2.42) or providing openings for contributing hymn, instruction, revelation, tongue or interpretation (1 Co. 14.26). But exactly how (liturgy), or where (location), these are to be practised is left open: indeed both temple and home are mentioned (Acs. 2.46); and the temple not commanded, but convenient, for Jewish Messiah-followers to gather; since it is not the ritual elements of temple worship which are practised, but the specific community-forming practises of the messianic community, a sub-culture which would ultimately include gentiles. 

Today this means that the group meeting in a Council flat is as much ‘church’, as the group led by a person in flowing robes, in a set-apart building. Overturned are all the socio-ecclesiological assumptions of superiority held by all traditional forms of church.

The socio-political implications of this levelling is implicit in Scripture’s use of a political term, ekklesia, instead of a religious one. The religious choice would have been ‘temple’ (naos). But in the NT, this term is revised, and does not refer to the meeting place of Christians. Indeed, in the New Jerusalem, there will be no temple (Rev. 21.22). Some interpret this to mean there will be no church, but as we have seen the church not a place but a people.

In fact, ‘temple’ is used in the NT to refer to God’s people. As temple is the dwelling place of (a) god, so we are God’s dwelling place. Temple is thus linked with ‘body’. Jesus compares his own body to the temple (Jn. 2.19-21), himself the meeting point between human and Divine. In addition, temple then refer to the individual believer (1 Co. 6.19), and the church itself (2 Co. 6.16). In all three cases, temple expresses body. It is thus the continuation of the incarnation. We, individually and collectively, are extensions of Christ’s body, and therefore ‘temple’. In a theandric metaphysic, we represent him, as he represented us.

But can embodiment be actualised virtually? Can we be the body online? Does not this disembodied form of communication vitiate the corporeal metaphor? Surely not. Paul comments that, although absent in body, he is with others “in spirit” (2 Co. 5.3; Col. 5.3). If this is more than pious sentiment, it must refer to some spiritual connection across physical distance.

As the church is an ‘extension’ of Christ’s incarnation, perhaps the digital may ‘extend’ the church, and by implication Christ (his body) in to the digital, in a Hegelian “recoil” of Spirit upon itself? As Hegel also said, “The Spirit is a bone”, taking physical form; and also perhaps in the circuits of the computers consituting the world wide web. For the internet, despite metaphors such as ‘the cloud’, is not aetherial, but thoroughly material, incarnated in the concrete reality of data centres throughout the world. Thus it makes real the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, of the “noosphere” girdling the planet.