Body of Christ: Ecumenical and Interdisciplinary Potentials of the Embodied Practice of the Church.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Rebekka Alexandra Klein
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522480360

The research project aims to shed new light on the metaphorical interpretation of the church as the body of Christ and to explore the cross-denominational and ecumenical potentials of a perception of the church as embodied practice. As a starting point, the Roman Catholic and Protestant approaches to embodied anthropology will serve. The project assumes that this approach can be used to set new accents not only in theological anthropology and ethics, but also in Christology and Ecclesiology. Moreover, it will be shown that the potentials of this approach can be developed not only within confessional ecclesiologies, but also ecumenically. The aim of the project is to explore which transformations in the understanding of church and ministry can be initiated with its help. The project questions the implicit assumption in the Christian hermeneutics of word and flesh that the spirit rules over the body and the word inspires and 'animates' the flesh. The corporeality of the church is instead interpreted as an embodied praxis in which the presence of God in the place of the church never exists abstractly and independently of the peculiar materiality and mediality of social being. With regard to the interpretation of the church as the body of Christ, the approach to embodiment in this sense introduces a change of perspective - away from an organological understanding of the body, which traditionally accentuates the inseparable unity of head and members as well as of the members among themselves, but also away from the subject-theoretical and phenomenological concept of bodiliness, which aims at church as a form of perception and testimony community of the presence of God. Instead, being church is conceived as a medially potent form of practice that is able to endow multiple forms of figuration of a presence and absence of Christ in the social places and public spaces of this world. From this perspective, research into the visibility of the church does not begin with its existence as a public institution and with its political action, but already with the conciseness of its medial embodiments, which are characteristic of it as a practice of mediation between God and the world. Theologically, when applying this approach to ecclesiology, it is important to bear in mind that the life of the church is always oriented towards the central embodiment of God in Jesus Christ ('body of Christ') and seeks to legitimize itself from it. To what extent the singular embodiment of God in Jesus Christ is related to the multiple embodiments of the church will therefore be one of the questions to be clarified in the research project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants