Images, Models, and Metaphors in Ecclesiology: Recent Critiques

Avery Dulles, in his 1974 study Models of the Church, outlined five models of the church and their strengths and weaknesses for ecclesiology. Distinguishing a model from an image, he states that “when an image is employed reflectively and critically to deepen one's theoretical understanding of a reality it becomes what is today called a ‘model.’”Footnote ¹⁶ A metaphor, like an image, can be employed as a model as well. For Dulles, models have both explanatory and exploratory uses. In their explanatory function, models “serve to synthesize what we already know or at least are inclined to believe”; they account for biblical, traditional, historical, and experiential data. In their exploratory or heuristic use, through the ongoing work and experience of grace, they can “lead to new theological insights” that have not been made conscious in the past.Footnote ¹⁷ As a work in comparative ecclesiology, Models of the Church demonstrated how different ecclesial models express different, and sometimes opposed, theological commitments and ecclesiological values. To resolve this tension, Dulles maintained that one must “harmonize the models in such a way that their differences become complementary rather than mutually repugnant.”Footnote ¹⁸ Dulles initially proposed that the model of the church as sacrament best integrates and preserves the strengths of other models; in the 1987 edition of Models of the Church, he suggested instead that the “community of disciples” model had the most promise as “a basis for a comprehensive ecclesiology.”Footnote ¹⁹

Although Dulles’ work was an important step forward in ecclesiological method in its day, theologians in recent decades have shifted away from, and at times argued against, the use of models and metaphors (especially a single metaphor) as starting points for ecclesiology, for several reasons. The most common critique is that metaphors tend toward an idealized, abstract image of the church, one that is removed from history and the concrete reality of the communities of the faithful. This is the core of Nicholas Healy's evaluation of “blueprint ecclesiologies.”Footnote ²⁰ By this phrase he means ecclesiologies that use a single metaphor or image to envision the ideal church to which we all would like to belong, and then apply this “blueprint” to subsequent questions or problems in ecclesiology. The problem, in Healy's judgment, is that a blueprint ecclesiology conceives of the church abstractly. It begins with the imagined ideal rather than studying and evaluating the church's concrete historical reality, its practices, and its institutional structures. As such, it does little to “aid the concrete church in performing its tasks of witness and pastoral care within … its ‘ecclesiological context’” (which, for Healy, is the purpose of ecclesiology).Footnote ²¹ Similarly, a blueprint ecclesiology lacks an appropriately eschatological sense of the church's perfection. It “does not make a sufficient distinction between the church militant and the church triumphant,” between the pilgrim church concretized in history and the heavenly church in its fullness.Footnote ²² Thus, a models approach or blueprint ecclesiology can fail to take seriously or account for the ongoing presence of sin and imperfection in the church in history.Footnote ²³ Neil Ormerod agrees with Healy's judgment here and also critiques ecclesial metaphors as being idealized to the point of obscuring the historical, empirical church and ignoring “the discrepancy between the idealized form and the historical facts.”Footnote ²⁴

The second major argument against the use of a single or central metaphor in ecclesiology is that different ecclesial metaphors suggest different ideals of the church and convey different values; as such, they risk ideological usage. Each metaphor has its own strengths and weaknesses, highlighting certain problems and clarifying certain aspects of the mystery of the church, while obscuring or hiding others. As Dulles himself acknowledges, the values associated with different metaphors can conflict with and contradict one another, and the evaluation of ecclesial models is too easily reducible to one's own values and personal taste. “Pursued alone, any single model will lead to distortions.”Footnote ²⁵ Brian Flanagan, in particular, warns against the tendency for metaphors to be used ideologically. He has found that “people of God” and “bride of Christ” have been “rallying cries for conflicting factions” in the church, conveying values of equality, common dignity, and participation on the one hand, and hierarchical authority and obedience to Christ on the other.Footnote ²⁶ Healy suggests similarly when he points out that there is no consensus as to which model is foundational and that models lack the power of conviction; any given theologian will choose an ecclesial model or metaphor on the basis of their own prior theological commitments. If theologians disagree on which model is best for thinking through a particular ecclesiological problem, they will likely disagree on the practical outcomes derived from that model as well.Footnote ²⁷ Herwi Rikhof's work in theories of metaphor supports this concern from a theoretical perspective: because metaphors are ambiguous and do not have clear criteria of normativity and authenticity, “an exclusive narrative or metaphorical theology is not able to counter the charge that it is a form of ideology.”Footnote ²⁸ Ultimately, these authors point out that a metaphor does not have inherent ecclesiological meaning, but is ascribed meaning and consequence based on any given theologian's broader theological agenda. Susan Ross has shown how this is true with regard to the metaphor of the church as bride, which has been used to justify and explain the church's opposition to the ordination of women and to same-sex marriage.Footnote ²⁹

Third, metaphors are seen to be insufficiently systematic. Because they do not, in themselves, offer resources for adjudicating the tensions that come into play when implicated in ideological discourses, nor do they elucidate their connection to other theological and scientific fields of study or contain explanatory power, they cannot yield a “comprehensive ecclesiology” as Dulles suggests. Flanagan finds that “ecclesial metaphors provide suggestions, starting points, broad pictures of the values embodied in ecclesial relationships, but cannot on their own explain the relationships between these metaphors or relate them to other theological and social scientific theories.”Footnote ³⁰ Because of this inherent imprecision, “narrative or metaphorical theology necessarily has to be supplemented by argument” and systematic explanation, and therefore cannot stand on its own in a systematic ecclesiology.Footnote ³¹ Unfortunately, of the two methods identified by Flanagan for dealing with the plurality of metaphors—juxtaposing them, or choosing a dominant metaphor—neither has proven to be an adequate methodology.Footnote ³² Because there is no consensus as to which metaphor or model is or ought to be foundational, and preference for one model over another varies over time, there can be no singularly “right” model, or “supermodel.” Thus, no complete systematic ecclesiology can be deduced from any single model.Footnote ³³

Finally, metaphors are also criticized as “prescientific” and as belonging to religious language or first-order discourse rather than to theological or second-order discourse.Footnote ³⁴ Flanagan, Healy, Ormerod, and Rikhof acknowledge that metaphors can be useful and even necessary in preaching and the functional specialty of communications, and they find value for metaphors in the liturgical and spiritual life of the Christian community. But the tasks of systematic ecclesiology are not the same as the tasks of preaching and prayer, for systematic ecclesiology, according to Flanagan, “requires defined categories and concepts, foundational positions, and relatively stable definitions of terms and of the relations between those terms.”Footnote ³⁵ In Ormerod's view, a systematic ecclesiology must be empirical/historical, critical, normative, dialectical, and practical, and metaphors alone do not meet these criteria. Although metaphors contribute “open-endedness,… conceptual and experiential richness, and … symbolic depth” to theology, they resist the stable definitions and consistent terminology that are necessary for a systematic understanding of the church.Footnote ³⁶

For all of these reasons, such theologians urge systematic ecclesiology to “move beyond” metaphorFootnote ³⁷ in order to describe the church in more precise theoretical or analytical language, whether to avoid ideology, answer particular questions about ecclesial life, or adjudicate between competing values communicated by various metaphors.Footnote ³⁸ In response to the perceived problem that metaphors are too abstract and ignore the historical reality of the church, many ecclesiologists have argued for greater use of ethnography, social theory, or other empirical studies in order to better understand the concrete historical church. Healy, for example, argues for an “ecclesiological ethnography.” In order to help the church perform its tasks of witness and pastoral care, the theologian must engage in a critical analysis of “ecclesiological context” using both theological and nontheological tools (such as sociology and ethnography) in order to offer a practical-prophetic ecclesiology that responds to this context and is not simply an abstract or overly theoretical doctrine of the church.Footnote ³⁹ We also see this turn to ethnography and empirical studies in Roger Haight and James Nieman's development of an ecclesiological model that incorporates congregational studiesFootnote ⁴⁰ and Paul Murray's search for a “transformative systematic ecclesiology” that can analyze and account for concrete ecclesial and sociological realities, such as the sexual abuse crisis, in a truly integrative way with systematic theological reflection.Footnote ⁴¹ Joseph Komonchak and Ormerod, drawing in various ways on their Lonerganian foundations, have each sketched a methodology for ecclesiology to engage social sciences and the data of history as it seeks to understand the church in the concrete.Footnote ⁴² More recently, Paul Avis has advocated the use of ethnography in ecclesiology while refuting some mischaracterizations of the methodology of either field.Footnote ⁴³ Putting method into practice, Mary McClintock Fulkerson's ethnographic study of a multiracial Methodist church is one example, among many others, of this kind of ethnographic ecclesiology.Footnote ⁴⁴

But with regard to the other perceived limitations of ecclesial metaphors—their potentially ideological use, their lack of inherent or stable meaning, and their inappropriateness to second-order theological discourse—the critics of ecclesial metaphors offer no better alternatives other than simply to disavow metaphor as a foundation for ecclesiology and forgo the search for a supermodel or central metaphor. And yet many of them do continue to invoke metaphors in their own work in ways that go unacknowledged and untheorized. For example, drawing from the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Healy uses the extended metaphor of the drama or play to describe salvation history and to model the divine–human relationship in which any ecclesiology takes root. This is not an idealized or blueprint ecclesiology of which Healy is so critical, but it is a metaphor, which is applied systematically as a model (what Healy calls a theodramatic horizon, as distinguished from inclusivist, exclusivist, and pluralist horizons) in order to understand the reality under investigation.

Similarly, Ormerod admits a role for models in ecclesiology, even in systematic ecclesiology as he defines it, for theological reflection upon the church

Ormerod identifies the “biblical symbol” of the kingdom of God as the teleological orientation of the church and the norm against which the history of the church can be made intelligible.Footnote ⁴⁶ This teleological element “gives ecclesiology theological depth, ensuring that it is not reduced to being simply a critical history of the Church. It adds something new, for the introduction of an explicit teleology based on the kingdom of God provides us the norms for evaluating the life of the Church.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Of course, these norms may not always be fully or adequately realized in history, and so “a truly systematic ecclesiology will seek to understand the ways in which such systematic breakdowns occur”; “it will diagnose a sickness, and supply the prescription for the needed medicine.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Flanagan and Rikhof use metaphors as well. Rikhof, after reviewing the decades of disagreement about the central metaphor of Lumen Gentium, and despairing the lack of clarity regarding a “metaphor” versus a “concept,” asserts that communio is the one fundamental concept and “basic statement” for ecclesiology (though without explaining why communio is a concept rather than a metaphor, or resolving the debates following Vatican II regarding whether “body of Christ” and “people of God” are metaphors, images, concepts, or something else). In Flanagan's latest book, he uses the extended metaphor of the church as pilgrim—one who walks or journeys purposefully toward a meaningful destination—to describe the church, in its sinfulness, as “stumbling,” as well as other Catholic Christians as “fellow pilgrims” who together “walk along the road with our God.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Flanagan's work demonstrates that the use of a central metaphor for envisioning the church 1) does not necessarily reify an idealized notion of the church (the metaphor of pilgrim ably captures the realities of failure and sin, as well as holiness), 2) is not necessarily at odds with an analysis of the church's concrete historical reality, which Flanagan so aptly analyzes, and 3) is not necessarily at odds with the coordinate task of “attending to our concepts, their definitions, and their relationships” in systematic theology (at which point Flanagan utilizes the “definition” of the church as the congregatio fidelium).Footnote ⁵⁰

For all their caveats against models and metaphors, then, such forms of speech and thought appear to be inescapable—useful, and perhaps even necessary. In fact, Healy admits:

What's more, though they typically do not assert a single metaphor as the supermodel or foundation for all ecclesiology (Rikhof is the exception here), they do operate with their preferred metaphor, symbol, or concept—theodrama, kingdom of God, pilgrim, or communio—as the center of their own ecclesiological imagination and investigation. This suggests, in other words, that they also have not found a way out of the problem they identify that each theologian will utilize whichever image, model, or metaphor suits their broader theological agenda. Even Ormerod's turn to the “symbol” of the kingdom of God as a telos for ecclesiology or the history of the church does not avoid the critique that metaphors are prone to bias or have no internal mechanism for adjudicating between them, for one could just as well select “bride of Christ” or “body of Christ” as the “explicit teleology” or norm against which the life of the church is measured. And even the turn to the concrete historical church and the analysis of the concrete church's successes and failures relies on a normative vision for the church, one that is often expressed in metaphors of a “pilgrim people,” “communion,” or the “kingdom of God.”

In short, those who have most thoroughly articulated the shortcomings of metaphors in ecclesiology cannot avoid using ecclesial metaphors in their own work—yet they lack a full account of how and why metaphors continue to play a useful role in ecclesiology. I share the aforementioned concerns regarding the risks of ideological uses of ecclesial metaphors and the need for a rigorous method that can analyze and account for concrete ecclesial realities in a truly integrative way with systematic theological reflection. For precisely this reason, we need a theory of metaphor that can resist ideological usage and that is open to other, nontheological sources of knowledge about the human and social condition. I also agree that, given the very nature of divine mystery and the ongoing dynamism of human history, it is neither possible nor desirable to settle on a single correct supermodel that would define the church for all times and places. However, the professed turn away from metaphor and toward the empirical, ethnographic, and historical does not actually resolve two of the main concerns with metaphor—their risk of functioning ideologically and the lack of stable meaning and evaluative criteria. Moreover, the arguments summarized previously undervalue the unique role that ecclesial metaphors clearly continue to play in theological speech, not simply in religious speech or in the context of prayer and preaching. More can and must be said about the positive function of metaphors in ecclesiology. What is needed is a theory of metaphor that 1) explains how a metaphor generates new theological insight, relevant to second-order discourse and the task of understanding the church, 2) enables interaction between an ecclesial metaphor and other fields of knowledge, and therefore 3) offers the possibility of evaluating the adequacy of various metaphors and multiplying their interpretations in order to resist their ideological usage.

The Positive Function of Metaphor in Ecclesiology

The arguments reviewed above suggest that metaphors may serve a valuable role in religious speech and the task of preaching, but systematic ecclesiology must “go beyond” metaphor to more precise definitions of the nature and structure of the church and a more practical analysis of its concrete manifestation in history. These arguments, however, reveal inadequate theories of metaphor that underestimate their cognitive power. In Metaphor and Religious Language, Janet Martin Soskice identifies two theories of metaphor that ultimately fail to provide an adequate account of how metaphors function—an ornamentalist or substitutionist theory, and an emotive theory. The substitutionist theory sees metaphor as a decorative substitution for a literal term, as “clothing tired literal expression in attractive new garb, of alleviating boredom, and, as Aquinas says, of being accessible to the uneducated.”Footnote ⁵² In this view, a metaphor simply substitutes an improper word for a proper one as rhetorical flourish; it adds no new meaning and “could equally well be expressed in non-metaphorical terms.”Footnote ⁵³ In fact, metaphor may muddy our thoughts rather than lead to new insights and perhaps should be replaced by more literal or conceptual language, according to this substitutionist account. An emotive theory of metaphor supposes that metaphors simply achieve a certain affective impact; they do so through “deviant word usage,” combining terms in such a way that, because the expression is not literally meaningful, a greater emotive meaning is evoked.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this theory, a metaphor does not add any new meaning that a literal statement would not—it simply has a greater affective impact on the hearer. The claim that metaphor is suited to preaching or spirituality but not to systematic theology reveals this assumption that metaphor only achieves affective impact rather than revealing new cognitive insight. Similarly, the notion that systematic ecclesiology ought to set metaphor aside in order to achieve conceptual clarity and intellectual rigor indicates an operative substitutionist theory—as if metaphorical language could be substituted, indeed surpassed, by literal speech.

Soskice argues that substitutionist and emotive theories of metaphor fail in three ways to provide an adequate account of how metaphors function linguistically and cognitively. First, they fail to see that metaphors add meaning and understanding—otherwise, authors would simply use words literally. In a good metaphor, a particular meaning is accessible only through that metaphor.Footnote ⁵⁵ Second, these theories fail to recognize that metaphor does not simply substitute one term for another (and indeed may not even include two terms or subjects within the metaphorical utterance) but “enables one to see similarities in what had previously been regarded as dissimilars.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Third, they forget that emotive meaning is reliant upon the perception of cognitive meaning. Soskice's own “interanimation theory” of metaphor provides a more adequate basis for understanding the unique role that metaphor plays in theological speech and therefore in ecclesiology.

In Soskice's definition, a metaphor is “that figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another.”Footnote ⁵⁷ She argues that metaphors are cognitively unique, not merely ornamentalist or emotive, and disclose new information about their subject that cannot be expressed in any other way. A metaphor accomplishes this by uniting its subject with the associative networks of meaning of another term, object, or concept. Three aspects of Soskice's theory of metaphor are especially pertinent to the study of metaphor in ecclesiology.

First, Soskice emphasizes that a metaphor is a figure of speech. It is a form of language use, a linguistic event—not a physical object or a mental event. It is an utterance. A word or phrase in itself is not a metaphor, but can be used metaphorically. Consequently, words do not have metaphorical meanings in isolation. The meaning of a metaphorical use of a term can only be discerned within the context of the complete utterance.Footnote ⁵⁸ For example, the term “body” is not itself a metaphor for the church. Rather, the metaphor is the utterance “the church is a body” or “the church is the body of Christ.” By understanding metaphor as a form of speech, Soskice emphasizes that to identify an utterance as a metaphor is not yet to offer a theological or metaphysical evaluation of the metaphor. To illustrate the importance of this distinction, Soskice offers the example of Jesus’ claim that “this bread is my body”:

Likewise, to say that the church is a body or that it is the body of Christ is to speak in metaphor. It is to speak about one thing—the church—in terms suggestive of another—an enfleshed, living organism. But we must still ask “what the metaphor is doing,” or what it signifies. It is the theologian's task to interpret and evaluate the ecclesiological and Christological claims being communicated by the metaphor. Those who dismiss ecclesial images as simply metaphors, as well as those who dismiss metaphors as second-rate descriptions of the church, fail to notice that to identify something as a metaphor is a grammatical judgment, not an ontological or theological judgment. To say that the statements “the church is the body of Christ” or “the church is a pilgrim” are metaphors is indeed an accurate assessment of the form of speech; the church is obviously not a body or a pilgrim in the literal use of those terms. But this fact alone does not pass judgment on or lead to any particular conclusions about the meaning and role of this metaphor in ecclesiology. The recognition of this point ought to ease the somewhat frantic debates about whether certain terms are metaphors, concepts, symbols, or definitions of the church.Footnote ⁶⁰

Soskice further clarifies that there is no “metaphorical truth” as opposed to “literal truth,” or “metaphorical meaning” as opposed to “literal meaning.” There is, however, metaphorical usage versus literal usage. Literal usage is accustomed usage that requires no imaginative strain for the native speaker; the literal sense(s) of a word may be found in a dictionary, whereas the metaphorical sense of a word is discernible only within the context of a particular utterance. Through the process of catachresis (the application of a term to a new context where a term is lacking), a metaphorical usage of a word can become “lexicalized” and take on a literal sense. In this way, metaphor has the “capacity to expand our lexicon, and in so doing, it expands the conceptual apparatus with which we work.”Footnote ⁶¹ Likewise, there are not two meanings to a metaphor, a “literal” meaning that is false and a metaphorical meaning that is true. As Soskice straightforwardly says, a metaphor has “but one meaning; the alternative is nonsense. Either we understand [a] passage as a metaphor or we do not understand it.”Footnote ⁶² This is not to say that a metaphor can only evoke one network of associations. In fact, what makes the metaphor “the church is the body of Christ” so rich is that there are, as I will show, multiple networks of meaning associated with the term “body.” Soskice's point here is simply that within the whole speech context, it is typically a misunderstanding of the speaker's intent to construe a metaphorical utterance as a literal utterance. Metaphors must be understood within their context, and the truth or falsity of a metaphor can only be judged in connection with the reality to which the metaphor refers.

The second important aspect of Soskice's account is that metaphor discloses unique cognitive content. To describe how this occurs, Soskice draws from I. A. Richards’ interactive theory of metaphor, especially his terms “tenor” and “vehicle,” which name the two “ideas” that are united in a metaphor.Footnote ⁶³ The tenor is the underlying subject of the metaphor, and the vehicle is “the mode in which [the metaphor] is expressed.”Footnote ⁶⁴ For example, in the metaphor “the church is a body,” the tenor is “the church,” and the vehicle is “body” and its associated meanings. Another example that illustrates Soskice's theory is the statement that the sacrament of penance is “a saving medicine” that provides for the health of the body and removes all danger of contagion.Footnote ⁶⁵ The tenor is the grace of the sacrament, and the vehicle is medicine. Soskice expands Richards’ theory by showing that metaphors rely on an underlying model or models that are shared by the speaker and the hearer of the metaphor. To be clear, she does not mean “model” in Dulles’ sense of a systematic heuristic tool. By “model” Soskice means the “associative network” of a term, the plurality of meanings, visualizations, and descriptions that come to mind when a word is heard. She describes “the associative network of a term” as “its placement in a semantic field where the “value” of the term is fixed not simply by the terms for which it might be exchanged … but also by the entities of which the term would customarily be predicated.”Footnote ⁶⁶ She gives the example of the metaphor of a “writhing script”: “one might associate with ‘writhing’ not only action similar to writhing such as twisting and squirming, but also entities which are known to writhe, such as snakes or persons in pain.”Footnote ⁶⁷ To continue with the example of penance, the “models” or “associative networks” underlying the vehicle “medicine” are the strengthening and healing functions that medicine performs within a human body.

In a metaphor, tenor and vehicle unite and “interanimate” one another, disclosing new meaning and interpretive possibilities. It speaks about a single subject matter by drawing upon one or more sets of associations.Footnote ⁶⁸ It is by uniting tenor and vehicle and their associative networks “that a metaphor is genuinely creative and says something that can be said adequately in no other way, not as an ornament to what we already know but as an embodiment of a new insight.”Footnote ⁶⁹ By speaking of penance as a medicine, our minds are taken beyond the form or practice of the sacrament to its healing effects and its necessary administration to a sick body. Furthermore, the metaphor invites our minds beyond the words at hand to consider God (through the mediation of the priest) as a compassionate doctor who desires our fullness of life or to consider ourselves as dependent upon God's wisdom and care for our healing and flourishing. As Soskice says, “A good metaphor may not simply be an oblique reference to a predetermined subject but a new vision, the birth of a new understanding, a new referential access. A strong metaphor compels new possibilities of vision.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Third and finally, Soskice argues that a metaphor's cognitive uniqueness is irreducible to “words proper” or strictly literal usages. The interanimation of tenor and vehicle takes us beyond the dictionary definitions of the terms within a metaphor to the world of meanings associated with those terms. This is not simply a combination or identification of two previously understood terms. Rather, metaphor invites us to consider a relatively unknown (e.g., the grace of a sacrament) through a relatively known (e.g., medicine and its functions). Thus, in contrast to theories such as Rikhof's that suggest that metaphors redescribe a reality, Soskice shows that good metaphors “are used not to redescribe but to disclose for the first time.”Footnote ⁷¹ Because metaphors are not simply ornamental descriptions of an already-understood reality, they cannot be translated into literal terms without loss of meaning and cognitive (and so also affective) content.

By explaining the way in which a metaphor generates new vision and insight, Soskice's interanimation theory shows the positive role that metaphor plays in ecclesiology. Metaphors are not simply decorative flourishes that could otherwise be replaced by literal, conceptual speech. They do not simply prod at our emotions through their creativity or shock value. Rather, they link various associative networks and in so doing open up new imaginative horizons. Metaphors communicate from and to the depths of the human imagination and therefore have a communicative and disclosive potential unique from that of conceptual, controlled speech. Pope Francis’ metaphor of the church as a field hospital has done just this—by speaking of the church and its ministers as a nimble construction designed to rapidly respond to critical needs, Francis has sent theological reflection and pastoral practice in a new direction, focusing not on condemnation of or withdrawal from the world, but on diving into a messy, hurting world in order to heal wounds. Soskice's theory provides an explanatory account of how such an ecclesial metaphor can generate new energy and insight and, therefore, more adequately indicates the role that metaphor has played and can continue to play in systematic ecclesiology than what is admitted by Healy, Flanagan, Rikhof, or Ormerod. A mere critique of metaphor in systematic ecclesiology or a careful delineation of its limits cannot account for the way in which, for example, the metaphor of the field hospital has caught on among theologians, church authorities, pastoral ministers, and journalists.

It is true that metaphors are not self-explanatory. All metaphors require interpretation. But this is not a shortcoming of metaphors, as critics argue; rather, it is their strength. It is precisely because metaphors lack a single, static interpretation or rigorous control of meaning—for reasons that will be identified below—that they can continually open up new insights and possibilities for ecclesiology. It is the task of the theologian to undertake this interpretation—to explore the possible meanings of an ecclesial metaphor and to evaluate the “new possibilities of vision” it offers through dialogue with the ongoing human experience from which it is derived and in the context of which it makes meaning. In addition to providing a more adequate account of the linguistic and cognitive function of metaphor, Soskice's account also provides the theoretical foundation for this exploratory and evaluative work and so enables us to meet one of the critiques of metaphors outlined above—that they lack evaluative criteria and risk ideological usage.

Evaluating the Associative Networks

Soskice's theory highlights the role that both context and other extra-theological fields of knowledge play in interpreting the meaning of a metaphor. Metaphors rely on underlying networks of associations, meanings, visualizations, and descriptions that are shared by both the speaker and the hearer. For example, the metaphor “man is a wolf” “relies on both speaker and hearer having a shared body of knowledge or assumption about the nature of men and the nature of wolves, for example that the latter are clannish, cruel and so on.”Footnote ⁷² If one were to speak this metaphor to a person who has no familiarity with or basic knowledge of wolves, the metaphor would be meaningless; it would fail to offer new insight about the “tenor” of the metaphor (“man”) to the hearer. As a person grows in knowledge and understanding of the world—perhaps encounters a wolf in the wild or studies the habits of wolves in an environmental science class—her associative networks expand and metaphors can open up new, different, or richer meanings for her.

Soskice's theory indicates, therefore, that metaphors do not have a single, enduring, or inherent meaning apart from the speaker, hearer, and their contexts. The meaning of a metaphor is shaped by the world of knowledge that already exists in the minds of the speaker and hearer prior to the metaphorical speech-act. This has been true of ecclesial metaphors throughout their history. Images of the church in the New Testament are drawn from the common and familiar world of the original speaker and audience—images of flocks and shepherds, land and seeds, buildings and cornerstones, vines and branches, households and mothers, bodies and brides. As societies and peoples advance in knowledge or shift worlds of meaning, metaphors may gain new meaning or lose their prior significance along the way. As Sandra Schneiders points out in her treatment of metaphor in theology, some metaphors remain living and evocative for long periods of time, while other metaphors eventually die due to banalization, losing their capacity to spark the imagination and generate new insight.Footnote ⁷³

To be clear, when Soskice says that the interpretation or meaning of a metaphor relies on shared knowledge or associative networks, she notes that “the efficacy of the metaphor does not depend on the factual accuracy of these commonplaces but simply on the fact that roughly the same set of associations are made by speaker and hearer.”Footnote ⁷⁴ It is on this point that I will take us beyond Soskice in applying her theory to ecclesial metaphors. Though it may be true that the efficacy of the metaphor does not depend on the factual accuracy of underlying assumptions or shared knowledge, I propose that those associative networks can be examined, critiqued, and judged for their factual accuracy or adequacy in light of contemporary thought. This is where other tools and fields such as natural sciences, social theory, and philosophy can help the theologian evaluate the prior meanings of ecclesial metaphors and reinterpret them in light of new or different associative networks, thereby challenging past ideological usages. To illustrate this process, let us turn to the metaphor of the church as a body, or the body of Christ, as a test case.

This ecclesial metaphor has a storied history. Originating in the Pauline texts of the New Testament, the metaphor of the church as the body of Christ was commonly used by patristic authors, most notably by Augustine in a number of his sermons on the Eucharist.Footnote ⁷⁵ By the eleventh century, theologians began referring to the church as the mystical body to distinguish it from the Eucharist, the true body.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the early nineteenth century, Johann Adam Möhler's Unity in the Church revitalized ecclesiology by conceiving of the church as an organic body enlivened by the Spirit. In the early twentieth century, dozens of books and articles were published on the topic of the church as the “mystical body of Christ.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The mystical body movement culminated in Pope Pius XII's 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi, which defined the image of the mystical body as the most “noble,” “sublime,” and divine” description of the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ⁷⁸ Nevertheless, the metaphor of the church as a (mystical) body was critiqued by theologians, exegetes, and ecumenists in the decades leading up to Vatican II, with the result that the conciliar texts situate “body of Christ” among a variety of other, more central metaphors or concepts such as “people of God,” “sacrament,” and “communion.”Footnote ⁷⁹ But the history of the metaphor of the church as a body is not simply a tale of it being favored in one era and neglected in another. The metaphor itself has had multiple, and sometimes quite disparate, interpretations over the past two thousand years, precisely because the associative networks linked to the “vehicle” of the metaphor (the term “body”) have varied, often in close relation to the philosophical and social-ecclesial context in which the metaphor was used.

In Paul's use of the metaphor in his major epistles (Romans and Corinthians), the meanings, visualizations, and descriptions associated with the body are those of diversity as well as unity. For Paul, likely influenced by Greco-Roman and especially Stoic thought, a body is a whole made up of many distinguished parts—an eye, a hand, a foot, an ear. Each part, member, or organ has a particular function—sight, hearing, smell—that belongs to it and no other. There are greater and weaker or inferior body parts, but Paul emphasizes that they are all necessary to the functioning and well-being of the whole.Footnote ⁸⁰ The deutero-Pauline captivity epistles (Colossians and Ephesians) add a new dimension of meaning to the image of the body. In these texts, “body” signifies “trunk,” the organic mass connected to, yet subordinate to, the head. The body derives its identity from the head, which is the source of the body's life and growth. With this added meaning of headship within a body, the metaphor of the church as a body is used to express its relation of total dependence on Christ, its head and source of unity and life.

The meanings associated with the body continued to develop throughout the church's history. In the Middle Ages, the primary meaning of the body was that it has one head—it is neither acephalous nor a “two-headed monster.” This explanation of the image of the body was utilized by Boniface VIII in Unam Sanctam (1302) to assert the supreme spiritual and temporal authority of the pope alone over the church, as the one head of the one mystical body.Footnote ⁸¹ The conciliarist debates in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were expressed through conflicting interpretations of the body as well. For the papalists, the relationship between the head and the members of a body was one of superiority and subordination, respectively. For the conciliarists, it was the opposite—the body orders the head and ensures that its power and rationality is used for proper ends; moreover, the unity among the members enables the body to function even without a head.Footnote ⁸²

With the dawn of modern ecclesiology, the meaning and descriptions of a body shift once more. Influenced by German Romanticism, Johann Adam Möhler brought the root metaphor of the organism into Catholic ecclesiology. In Unity in the Church, he describes the church as an organic body—a living, growing organism, a material expression of a spiritual reality that continually develops over time yet always in relation to its original form. In his later work Symbolism, however, Möhler moves away from this organic interpretation of a body and instead sees the body as the visible presence or exterior expression of a transcendent person or identity. To say that the church is the “body of Christ” is to say that it is “the Son of God himself … the permanent incarnation of the same.”Footnote ⁸³ Instead of signifying a living, growing, and changing organism, “body” is equivalent to “self.”

Möhler's work influenced subsequent generations of theologians who fueled the mystical body movement in the early twentieth century, yet they too held diverse understandings of the body. For Karl Adam and Romani Guardini, “body” signified a community of diverse members united as a stable whole; each individual believer “is a ‘cell’ in this great living organism, carried, arranged and united by the molding force which proceeds from the sacred Head.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Similarly for Émile Mersch and the early Yves Congar—the body is a visible living organism animated by a single principle of life; in this body, the members share in the life of the one head. Moreover, a body is the instrument and manifestation of the soul, the principle of the body's life.Footnote ⁸⁵ In distinction, for the Dutch theologian Sebastian Tromp, a body is inherently hierarchical—it has diverse organs, each of which serves a particular function within the whole, but all of these organs are ordered by and under the head of the body, which as the seat of the nervous system is the source of sense-perception and self-movement. Tromp also specifies that a body is “something real, concrete,” as opposed to a shadow; it is “material and visible and needs to be quickened”; and it can also mean “person.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In Pius XII's encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (ghostwritten by Tromp), the associative networks underlying the metaphor of the body are directly stated—a body 1) is an unbroken unity, 2) is definite, visible, and perceptible to the senses, 3) has a multiplicity of members linked together, 4) has organs with diverse functions that are structurally united and ordered, 5) provides for its own life, health, and growth, 6) has definite members, some healthier or weaker than others, and 7) these members work toward a common end.Footnote ⁸⁷

Unsurprisingly, these various images of the body have different ecclesiological consequences. For Paul, the metaphor of the church as a body highlights the diversity of functions and charisms within the one church, the importance of each Christian, and the intimate unity among all Christians within the church. In the Middle Ages, the image of the body was used to either justify or refute the supreme authority of the pope as head. Möhler's idea of the body in Unity in the Church provided a rich theology of tradition and the diachronic unity of the church, whereas in Symbolism it served to equate the authority of the church with the authority of Christ himself. Mersch's and the early Congar's use of the body–soul metaphor supported their identification of the institutional church as the visible manifestation of the “mystical body” and so their position that salvation is found only in the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁸⁸ Tromp's and Pius XII's description of the body as united under and hierarchically ordered by a visible head was used to shore up the authority of the church's hierarchy and to justify membership in the church as applying only to those who are united with the Roman pontiff.

In other words, Flanagan, Healy, and others are right that ecclesial metaphors are interpreted within a theologian's broader agenda and are susceptible to ideological use. Theologians have always interpreted the corporeal metaphor in light of the philosophical, social, and scientific understandings of the body of their time. This is true even of the apostle Paul himself—his biblical image of the body is not acultural or ahistorical, but is rooted in Greco-Roman and Jewish notions of embodiment and corporate personhood and is used metaphorically to address his own particular ecclesial context. Moreover, the meaning of this metaphor is not static or controlled because the meaning of “body” is not static—not even in the (deutero) Pauline texts, as we have seen. My argument is that these are not reasons to do away with metaphor in systematic ecclesiology altogether, but to interrogate the associative networks attached to the vehicle of the metaphor so that the historical particularity of those interpretations can be identified, ideological usage can be resisted, and new visions can be unveiled.

It is precisely at this juncture that fields such as the natural and social sciences or various philosophies can aid the theologian and integrate the use of metaphor with the broader “empirical turn” in ecclesiology. As seen in the history I have outlined, the meanings typically associated with the body have been 1) visibility, 2) clear boundaries and criteria for membership, 3) members or parts ordered by and obedient to a single head, and 4) coterminous with “self.” With these networks of meaning, the metaphor of the church as a body, and as the body of Christ in particular, has served anti-Protestant polemic and strongly papocentric accounts of ecclesial order and authority. The theologian can and must ask whether these past meanings associated with the body are scientifically, philosophically, or anthropologically adequate today, and explore what other networks of meaning are attached to the image of the body that might open up new visions for ecclesiology. In other words, what Paul did in his time—drew on the common philosophical and social meaning of the body in his day in order to say something about the Christian community—is, I suggest, precisely what we are to do in ours.Footnote ⁸⁹ The abundance of literature on the body generated over the past sixty years—broadly known as “body studies”—provides a wide range of new associative networks that contain rich possibilities for reinterpreting the metaphor of the church as the body of Christ in our present ecclesial contexts.Footnote ⁹⁰

As one example of this, let us briefly consider a few of the meanings, descriptions, and visualizations of the body that we find in the writings of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.Footnote ⁹¹ Although Merleau-Ponty does not set out to study the body as the direct subject of his analysis, his studies of behavior, perception, and language in Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible reveal the absolute centrality of the body in human experience and undermine any dualistic understanding of the body as separate from the world. Merleau-Ponty describes embodied life as “intercorporeal,” that is, as constituted by its engagement with other bodies and the world. Perception is a fundamentally embodied phenomenon, structured by our “being-in-the-world.” Perception is therefore always perspectival; to see an object is always to see it from somewhere. The embodied, perspectival nature of perception also means that my body can never be simply an object of perception for me, for it is the ground of possibility of my perceiving anything at all. I always observe myself as observer, as both subject and object simultaneously; I can never see or know myself and my body as pure object.

Merleau-Ponty's study of perception also reveals that there is a “motor intentionality” or a directedness to our bodily existence; we are not just being-in-the-world but being-toward-the-world. This motor intentionality is, Merleau-Ponty argues, the source of our bodily unity; the body inhabits the world, acts in the world, and interacts with objects in the world without passing through an explicit cognitive function or needing guidance or direction from the “head.” The body exists for the subject as a unity (of limbs, parts, sensations) when and because it is engaged in meaningful, task-oriented action in the world. Our bodily being-in-the-world and motor intentionality also yield a “body schema,” a lived awareness of one's phenomenal body-as-subject, which is the result of habitual action in a meaningful world. The body schema may or may not be continuous with our bodily morphology and can change over time. It can be expanded, rearranged, and renewed through the cultivation of habit, allowing a person to incorporate nonorganic objects into her body image and bodily existence. In Merleau-Ponty's example, the blind person's cane is part of his body—not an object that he perceives, but an extension of his body through which he perceives. This is not an organic unity as we typically think of the body, but it is nevertheless a unity of existence, of being-toward-the-world.

Finally, Merleau-Ponty points out that a body is not simply or straightforwardly visible or a total presence to the world. The body is the surface of an inexhaustible depth, both revealing and concealing its subject. It manifests personal existence and opens up to the world in self-transcendence, but can also be the site of our withdrawal from the world. To describe this, Merleau-Ponty considers the case of a young woman who, after being forbidden by her mother to see her lover, cannot sleep, loses her appetite, and loses the use of speech. Her body withdraws from the world and refuses to express personal existence or coexistence with the world. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “Bodily existence which runs through me, yet does so independently of me, is only the barest raw material of a genuine presence in the world.”Footnote ⁹² In other words, the body expresses total existence, but can also obscure, hide, and contract that existence. Personal existence is not identical to or reducible to biological existence. The body must be in the world, toward the world, open to the world, and lovingly received by the world in order to manifest personal presence.

Merleau-Ponty's work can enable the metaphor of the church as a body to “compel new possibilities of vision” regarding the unity of the church, its membership, its practices of dialogue and consultation, and its relationship to Christ. First, the unity of a body is not the result of having a single head but of habitual inherence and intentional action in a world. This invites us to consider the mission of the whole people of God, rather than papal governance, as the foundation of ecclesial unity. This understanding of bodily unity contests one of the most enduring and anti-ecumenical interpretations of the metaphor of the church as a body in modern ecclesiology. Moreover, this bodily unity need not be thought of as a strictly organic or structural unity as it has been in the past. The body schema is dynamic and flexible, and incorporates within it whatever enables it to accomplish its task. Baptism and Eucharist admit a kind of substantial unity with Christ, incorporating us into his body in a particular way. But we might also think of other people of goodwill, members of other religions, and all those who participate in one way or another in the church's mission, regardless of religious affiliation or non-affiliation, as incorporated into the body of Christ.Footnote ⁹³ Merleau-Ponty's challenge to dichotomies of subject/object, interior/exterior, and self/other urge us to reject exclusivist interpretations of the ecclesial metaphor of the body that presume that a body has clear and static boundaries.

Second, Merleau-Ponty's insight into the perspectival, embodied nature of perception urges the church to expand its practices of synodality and consultation (still limited even within the church!) to include non-Catholics, and perhaps especially former Catholics, in order to gain critical insight into its own bodily reality or institutional existence. The church may enjoy the fullness of the means of salvation, but as Gaudium et Spes and now Pope Francis emphasize, the church stands to learn much from the world—from the natural sciences, from psychology and trauma studies, even from business management.Footnote ⁹⁴ The metaphor of the church as a body, limited in its own perception of itself, invites us to dwell on and develop these insights. A church that is truly in and of the modern world must humbly consider the possibility that its own perspective on itself, on the world, and on revelation is limited and that other religious bodies might offer a unique contribution to the common quest for truth.

Finally, Merleau-Ponty's work invites us to rethink the relationship between body and self toward a more nuanced reading of the ecclesial body of Christ as mediating, but not being identical with—and sometimes even impeding—the presence of the Savior. The body, especially when suffering trauma, injury, or illness, can inhibit the self's engagement in the world and with other subject-selves. The church as the body of Christ is likewise capable of mediating but also inhibiting the presence of Christ. It is the necessary biological substratum, so to speak, but at times may be “only the barest raw material” of Christ's presence in the world. At the same time, the “self” also extends beyond the biological bounds of the body. As Anthony Godzieba puts it in his application of Merleau-Ponty's work, the body's intentionality toward the world is grounded in “its material-empirical substratum” but “thrusts us beyond” this as well.Footnote ⁹⁵ Jesus’ resurrected body is a sign of this duality: his resurrected body still bore his self-identity and his relationships, yet went beyond the materiality with which we are familiar. The body, as a biological-material substratum, bears and incarnates the “self,” which ultimately exceeds the body. Extending this account to ecclesiology, we can affirm that the glorified Christ exceeds his ecclesial body; the church body can mediate Christ to the world, but Christ is not limited to and stretches beyond this biological or social-institutional reality, even at its best.

Phenomenology is not the only field that opens up new associative networks for this ecclesial metaphor; other perspectives on embodiment are also being brought into dialogue with the metaphor of the church as the body of Christ. Drawing from disability studies, Nancy Hale envisions the ecclesial body as a disabled body, such that the church exists in a marginalized yet critical relationship to the world.Footnote ⁹⁶ Anne Hillman turns to womanist, feminist, queer, and disability theologies, their disruption of hierarchy, and their attention to bodily difference to reinterpret the metaphor of the body of Christ in light of religious pluralism.Footnote ⁹⁷ Brianne Jacobs uses Judith Butler's gender theory and the theological work of Johann Baptist Metz and M. Shawn Copeland to argue that the body “is shaped at the level of ontology not by sex, but by history.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Though she does not make explicit links to ecclesiology, her work offers rich possibilities for understanding the ecclesial body as constituted by its history—a useful correction to the critiques in the 1940s that mystical body ecclesiology was insufficiently attentive to the church in history, thus the preference thereafter for the “people of God.” Soskice's interanimation theory of metaphor provides the theoretical framework and impetus for continuing to explore the broad range of associative networks surrounding the body that might yield new insight into the church as the body of Christ.