Is Christ Divided?

Regarding question #1, what are you seeing as the difference between Christ being “divided” and Christ being “schism”-ed?

Regarding question #3, it seems that Radner’s hermeneutic starts with our divided state and looks to the Scriptures for an understanding of that division. This seems to be a problem, as the NT does not assume the division of the Church.

Hi Brendan,

I apologize for letting your question hang for so long. As you know, things have been busy recently, but they are now settling down. I hope it’s not too late to carry on the discussion.

With respect to your first question, I mean by ‘division’ the actual breaking apart of Christ’s body, such that the one body [figurally located in the Creed’s ‘one holy catholic and apostolic Church’] has been divided into what are now properly called ‘two’ bodies, or more. Leaving aside for the moment that this is a very difficult concept to defend in the first place [since when a body is cleaved in two, you don’t then have two bodies; you have one body and one dead or dying limb—or worse, two dying parts of one body], ‘division’ represents a marked incongruity with the story of Christ’s own historical experience, with no clear linkage between it [i.e. ‘division’] and any Christological event that might enfigure it. For example, no bone of Christ’s body was broken, which point the Scripture makes conspicuous. Christ’s garments were divided, but his body was not.

Moreover, the concept of division applied to the Church renders the Creed’s reference to ‘one holy catholic and apostolic Church’ a fiction, because it answers St. Paul’s question, ‘Is Christ divided?’ in the affirmative. But everyone knows that the answer in St. Paul’s mind is, ‘No’, and that he is asking the question rhetorically. Granting that ‘that was then, and this is now’, one still has to reckon with your parting observation that the NT nowhere envisages such a state as the present denominational disarray presents to us. Radner is aware of this, and has an answer to it (on which see below), but whether it is a sufficient answer is precisely our question.

By schism on the other hand, I mean the separation of a part of the body from the body itself. This is quite different from ‘division’ [in which it is understood that the body itself is cleaved in two or more parts], since in a schism, the original body remains the body, although it is injured by the dismemberment of an important part. The most ready figural connection here is the flesh torn from Christ’s body at his scourging, or by the nails and the spear at his crucifixion. While schism hurts the body, the salient point is that unlike the notion of division, the principled marks which identify the body as a body are not diminished by schism. With respect to schism, the body is still ‘one’, while conversely, division destroys this mark of identity, rendering St. Paul’s statement true for him then, but false for us now.

The best piece I have read on the difference between ‘division’ and ‘schism’ applied directly to the question of ecclesiology [i.e. the nature and identity of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church], and the consequences of taking either position, can be found here.

With respect to your second observation about the 3rd question in the blog post above, I agree with what you’ve written, and Radner would as well. His response, however, is to suggest that while the New Testament does not present a development of the Church’s division, there are places which appear to anticipate for the future something like what Radner would call ‘division’. The clearest example is St. Paul’s statements in Romans 9-11, and especially 11:17-22. In Radner’s view, such a passage sends us to the Old Testament to contemplate its protracted narrative of Israel’s division and eventual exile. It is here [in the OT] he thinks we will find the kind of biblical language that will be most helpful in our attempts to describe “the Church’s” present disarray. So it does not refute his position [that the Church is divided] simply to show that the New Testament does not present a development of division on analogy with the denominationalism in front of us today.

On the other hand, my own view is that there are several premises in Radner’s thesis that are problematic:

1. That ‘the Church’ is the kind of thing that can be divided, and that it subsequently has divided.

2. That there is no appreciable difference between ecclesial ‘division’ and ‘schism’ (or at least, I’ve read almost everything he’s written more than once—during a period in which, as you know, I agreed with his thesis wholeheartedly—and I have yet to find it).

Here is perhaps the most important counterpoint: St. Paul’s development in Romans 11, and especially in vv. 17-22, actually distinguishes, by virtue of the particular words and metaphors he uses, between ‘division’ and ‘schism’. The image of ‘branches’ being ‘broken off’ the ‘root’ is precisely what schism means over against division, in which the actual root itself is divided in two or more parts. In St. Paul’s development, the root remains the root, and all the branches—whether the original ones broken off or the wild shoots grafted on—are described at every turn in relation to the root. When he discusses the branches broken off, St. Paul is describing ‘schism’, not ‘division’, because the root itself remains undivided.

But this is not how those who appeal to denominationalism see the Church, because denominationalism by its very definition does not recognize an actual, embodied Church from which all other local churches derive. Instead, an appeal is made to a disembodied concept of ‘The True Church’ which does not exist anywhere in reality as an embodied thing, though some of its members are embodied. Because of this, it does not make sense to call the Church a ‘body’, because bodies are by definition physical and visible, even if they are also spiritual. Moreover, such an appeal [to a disembodied or invisible “True Church”] creates more problems for itself with respect to the Creed, which includes three other marks in addition to ‘oneness’: ‘holy’, ‘catholic’ and ‘apostolic’. It is this final integer [i.e. ‘apostolic’] that is expressly denied by the notion that the Church is invisible or conceptual or spiritual only, without a necessarily embodied manifestation, because a contiguous, embodied lineage just is what it means to call the one Church ‘apostolic’.

3. That the form of Israel’s division and exile as the OT portrays this is straightforwardly applicable to the post-NT Church’s experience of heresy and schism.

I would be interested in hearing other peoples’ thoughts about this last point, although the especially inquisitive will want to be familiar with Radner’s oeuvre.

In the grace of Christ,

Chad