The Dutch philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd, of Calvinist background (but I think he says philosophically what Orthodox Christians experience liturgically), has this to say about the human body: "I have explained in another work that the human body, as the individual whole of a man's temporal existence, shows a very complicated interlacement of different typical structures which are combined in a form-totality, qualified by the so-called act-structure...The unqualified act-structure of the human body is quite different from the traditional conception of a "rational soul", in the sense of an immortal spiritual substance which is the metaphysical "form" of the "material body". Nor is the human body to be conceived as a "material substance" distinct from the soul, or, in the genuine Aristotelian sense, as the "matter" of the "soul", which has only actuality through the soul as its "form". The human body is man himself in the structural whole of his temporal appearance. And the human soul, in its pregnant religious sense, is man himself in the radical unity of his spiritual existence, which transcends all temporal structures...The human body is no more to be viewed as a "thing" than a human community is, because it is qualified by the general act-structure in the sense briefly explained in an earlier context." Dooyeweerd then immediately adds this footnote: "... Naturally a human body is not to be identified with a corpse." (Herman Dooyeweerd, _A New Critique of Theoretical Thought_, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij H. J. Paris / Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, Volume III, 1957, pp.87-89,198. Are the resurrected bodies in the Bible really resuscitated corpses?)

John D. Zizioulas

John D. Zizioulas writes of the Body from the viewpoint of the Orthodox Holy Tradition. He writes, "*Christ without His body is not Christ but an individual of the worst type*. Our continuity, therefore, with the Christ event is not determined by sequence or response based on distance; it is rather a continuity in terms of *inclusiveness*: we are *in* Christ and this is what makes Him be *before* us, our "first-born brother" in the Pauline sense...Christ's priority over us is not a priority like the one created by our individualized existence and characterised by temporal sequence; it is a priority of inclusiveness; the including one being prior to the included. This is so precisely because the included is already in the including. God as the Spirit, i.e. as communion, is precisely the all-embracing existence which is participated without participating. In the same Spirit of God, Christ contains us in Himself, by His very constitution as Christ in the Spirit. He thus in the Spirit contains by definition the eschata, our final destiny, ourselves as we shall be; He is the eschatological Man--yet, let me repeat it, not as an individual but as Church, i.e. because of our being included in Him. It is in this sense that historical existence becomes in Christ and in the Spirit a continuity which comes to us from the future and not through the channels of a divided time sequence like the one we experience in our fallen state of existence. Thus, when the eschata enter into history in the Spirit, time is redeemed from fragmentation and history acquires a different sense..Obviously this affects the notion of apostolicity in a decisive way. If Christ Himself is the eschatological man and our continuity with Him is not determined by the time sequence which implies distance, but by a concept of time determined by an all-embracing communion, the Apostles themselves cannot be enclosed in a self-defined event, in a closed past... It has done a lot of damage to the notion of apostolicity to think of it in terms of historical prerogatives, be it in the form of the Petrine keys or in that of the apostolic kerygma. For the keys are those *of the Kingdom*, and the kerygma is not an objectifiable norm but the Risen Christ, i.e. a living person; in both cases historical prerogatives are eschatologized. The Apostles continue to speak and proclaim Christ in the Church only because the Church is by her very existence the living presence of the Word of God as person...This makes the history of the Church identical with that of the world and of creation as a whole... Thus to recall that the Church is founded on the Apostles in an eschatological sense makes the Church acquire her ultimate existential significance as the sign of a redeemed and saved creation" (John D. Zizioulas, _Apostolic Continuity and Orthodox Theology: Towards a Synthesis of Two Perspectives_, St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 19(2):75-108(1975), pp.85-87).

March, 1997

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Index