From Impasse to Passage - the evolution of Christianity practices and beliefs

Ecumenical Review, The, Jan, 2001 by Isabelle Graessle

The third place of passage concerns the renewal of images. Since the work which has been done on the new rhetoric, but also that of the philosopher Ricoeur on images, particularly metaphor, we know the importance of these figures -- that they are not simply ornamental, but can really twist meaning, thus can create new meanings for the speech in which they occur. In this sense, the images which have been used from the beginning by theologians to speak of the church are revealed as carrying a certain ecclesiology which has sometimes become ideology. The metaphor of the body is a good example of this. The fact that it is biblical -- and has been used copiously throughout the history of theology -- does not change anything. Nor does it help when theologians point out the nuances and the necessary parallel notions of solidarity and complementarity, in relation to the Spirit without which the body would be only a lifeless juxtaposition and not a pluralist diversity. The image of the body to speak metaphorically of the church remains highly questionable today, notably because of the position of Christ in it, and the "carbon copy" of this order of things which is subsequently imposed upon relations between man and woman -- but also because of the sense of enclosure the image implies, and which is the metaphorical reproduction of the spatial "inside/outside" ordering of things.

However, if it is conceded that every New Testament metaphor for speaking about the church has first been the fruit of human experience -- something which even the most conservative theologians recognize -- it would be interesting to know which experiences today lend themselves to being interpreted metaphorically to represent the church. One would then discover that the many New Testament metaphors about "building" (Eph. 2:20; 1 Cor. 3:16-17; Matt. 16:18; 1 Tim. 3:15; 1 Pet. 2:3-5) are not really pertinent, because it is not so much a question of building as of passing to a new way of being.

On the other hand, to the question of what human experiences could serve as a renewed metaphorical model for the church, I know of no other answer than that of passage, which is also eminently biblical in origin. Pesah in the Hebrew Bible and Easter in the second Testament constitute the two essential poles, each in its own tradition, to mark the "before" and "after" of divine intervention. This is not to say that there were no manifestations of the divine before Pesah or before Easter morning! The writers of the Bible spent their time demonstrating the nature, both unexpected and regular, of such events: God is rarely silent in the Bible. But the passage which is accomplished at Pesah, or at Easter, is of another order than that of the theophanies which go before them. Where previously there was encounter between the human and the divine, in these two inaugural moments the passageway stood open from one to the other. In the passage through the Red Sea, as in that of the empty tomb, the human being, collectively or individually, passes from death to life.