About the Author

The Rev. Dr. Kyle Rader is an Episcopal priest serving as Pastor of All Saints Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He earned his MDiv and PhD from the University of Chicago, where his research focused on St. Augustine of Hippo and the sometimes fraught co-existence of modern and pre-modern ways of knowing.

What Kind of Body? A Meditation on Ephesians 4:4

What sort of body is this “one body,” acclaimed by the author of Ephesians (4:1–6) as undergirding the “unity of the Spirit” and the “bond of peace” that are the “hope of our calling” as Christians?

Among the questions St. Gregory of Nyssa takes up in his treatise “On the Making of the Human Being” is why human beings, who are supposed to subjugate the earth and rule over its creatures, have pretty useless bodies. We are weaker than the oxen, slower than the leopards, clawless, fangless, wingless, and do not even have enough hair to keep us warm in the winter. This is the sort of body that the bearer of God’s image is supposed to have? Gregory does not answer that our much-developed brains give us a competitive advantage, though he is aware that much of what we would call cognitive function depends on that organ. Instead, he says that what seems like a “deficiency of our nature” is actually well-suited to God’s purpose for us because it makes us depend on the other creatures. Human beings would not enter into relationships with the ox and sheep if our own bodies were strong and warm enough.

We could imagine all sorts of ways that human bodies might be improved, including human brains. But the human being is the image of God, and as Gregory says, “the Divine beauty is not adorned with any shape or endowment of form, by any beauty of color.”

While Gregory located the virtues by which human beings receive and express the fullness of God’s goodness in the nous, he conceived of the body and soul as a unity that could only be undone by death (and that, in light of the resurrection, only temporarily). He was, after all, a Christian, and it would be a strange Christian indeed who could disparage the body, however much they might exalt the soul.

In his musician metaphor, the mind cannot express itself all in music except on the instrument of whatever body it has. In a prior century (and a different language), Tertullian coined the term “incarnation” in his rebuke of Marcion (at least as Tertullian imagined him), arguing on the one hand that Jesus had to be born with a real human body if our real human bodies need saving and, on the other hand, that we have no right to be ashamed of any part or function of our bodies that the Word of God was not ashamed to be joined to: “If these things are part of the human being whom God redeemed, will you render what he redeemed shameful to him? He would not have redeemed what he did not love.”

It is a longstanding habit of Christians to see some bodies as even less suitable than others. This is perhaps a limitation of the dominant imagery in the Bible of Jesus healing those whom we would today call disabled. Particular limitations are realized as disabilities in the time and place where people happen live, but there is nothing inherent to particular limitations that them as neurodivergence (this is especially common of autism, ADHD, and increasingly dyslexia, Tourette syndrome, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and others). Neurodivergent people may or may not consider ourselves disabled.

When we use the term “neurodivergent,” we mean that human brains function in a glorious variety of ways, none of them better or worse than the others, but some of us fit patterns that do not fit what is considered normal by people around us. We have “superpowers,”  but cannot do things that are expected, or cannot communicate or work in ways that are expected (or if we can, we struggle). When we imagine the church as the body of Christ, do we imagine an able, neurotypical body? In my experience, the answer is most often yes.

This does not just restrict neurodivergent and disabled people in the exercise of their gifts and opportunities to lead. It deprives the whole church of the treasures God has given us, especially the ways we discern how to live in times when we seem to be failing. When we ask what makes for a healthy body, we need to be able to imagine more ways of being healthy than just being able and neurotypical.

I have ADHD. My brain does not produce very much of the chemical that enables so-called “executive functioning,” the activity of our frontal cortex that regulates our other processes and emotions, allowing most people to integrate their various functions toward goals. This includes things like planning, keeping track of time, inhibiting impulses, noticing the stimuli and emotions that promote relatively seamless functioning, not being bothered by others, remembering what you are supposed to be doing, and getting stuff done with an eye to strategy. These are all wonderful things, and I can, in fact, do them, though at much greater cost than other people. When I have to lead with these ways of being and communicating and inhabit them for long periods of time, it feels like walking in someone else’s shoes. I dream of being able to do them out of charity rather than fear of being silenced.

We are all learning all the time, and adapting in all of our relationships with one another, but the adaptation should not be one-directional.

We expect priests and other church leaders not just to plant and harvest grain, thresh it and mill it, and make and serve bread out of it, but to devise systems to do this at minimal cost and on as large a scale as possible. I cannot help but remember a parable about a strategic visionary who wanted to build a bigger storage facility rather than feed people at his door (Luke 12:16-21). There are other gospel passages that commend good stewardship and management, if not necessarily along the lines that our management theories imagine. I, too, would like to have not only enough food for this winter, but also seeds and a plan for the next one. But we would do well to remember that the only winter survival strategy Jesus commends is that of the birds (Matthew 6:26). When I say this, I am mindful that birds are not lazy. They are among the most hardworking animals, but organization and strategy (if they have any) is secondary to trust. I have come to imagine my ADHD brain as another hardworking animal: the squirrel. Squirrels are very busy animals, in fact they are almost always working. In contrast to Jesus’ birds, they do store seeds. They never eat many of the nuts they cache themselves, just as many plans and projects I have begun in fits of dopamine-fueled enthusiasm are unfinished, if never formally abandoned. But then those seeds may be found by other hungry animals, or sprout and become trees. The animal that never devises a producing and distribution strategy helps the forest grow, feeding not only themselves, but many others.

What looks at first like a failure of my body to be normal, or my failure to make it do what normal people make their bodies do, might not be a failure at all. We still don’t know at the end of the day what bodies are, how exactly they determine or are determined by minds and wills, nor really what they are supposed to look like and do.

Before we reproach ourselves for our failures to be the sort of embodied animal we think we should be, we must remember that according to Satan’s standards, Jesus failed to be the Son of God (Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13). And since the image of God in human beings is – as the church’s greatest teachers all agree – as impossible to define as its Archetype, we do not have much to go on in imagining what a healthy human being is like other than what we see of Jesus in the Gospels and in the dazzling variety of ways he is refracted in his saints.

And the same is true of how we imagine the body of Christ, the church. What sort of “one body” are we, or are we becoming? And what do we measure ourselves against to know if we are doing it right, if we are healthy? Even the most ardent lovers of the church as we know it do not have to work hard to find reasons to be discouraged. The mere fact that the quest for visible unity is still a work in progress comes quickly to mind during each Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

While we may certainly celebrate the ways that many churches have been willing to learn from each other, we encounter animosity or indifference to one another over gender, our relationships with other religions, and our approaches to geopolitical conflicts and conflicts in our own countries. All the while, as Christianity continues to grow in places once considered mission fields, we find not only our numbers but also our credibility shrinking in what were (perhaps nominal still are) Christian-majority countries. The roles to which we had grown accustomed in many of our countries are now beyond our resources, and seldom valued or desired by the societies and states we served through them.

I know of many a church with negative membership growth that lacks the funds or the organizational capacity to get a youth group or capital campaign off the ground. Are they failing to make disciples and present a vibrant witness? Tell that to the man who starts seeking a Higher Power in the AA meeting in the fellowship hall, and later finds it in the sanctuary. Perhaps the congregation really does need some new practices and organizational tweaks, but what they are called to become will not look the same as what they were thirty years ago, or what some other church might currently be. Zooming out, we might continue to repent of the sins and lament the missed opportunities that led to the church’s lack of integration, but is the lack of integration the same as the lack of unity? I am quite convinced that my Episcopal Church is missing a gift God wants to give us, which some form of communion with the Pope and the Orthodox patriarchs would enable, and likewise that we generally do not yet have the institutional or perhaps even spiritual capacity to learn humbly from African-initiated churches or Chinese churches (whether official or underground). But to do that, must the body of Christ start acting in all cases like a neurotypical body? Or can the body of Christ only sometimes and in some ways be neurotypical? Can it also be an ADHD body that cannot integrate and orient all its activities toward seamless production?

Could it be an autistic body that does not and cannot produce expected output according to an implicit rule? Can it be dyslexic? Or, broadening our considerations to other sorts of bodily diversity, can it move with wheels instead of legs? Can it be deaf? Intersex? Fat?

It is not executive function, memory, ability to read, or ways of processing sensory and social input that make the human being fit for communion with God any more than claws, a shell, wings, or greater speed or stamina would. Just as each human body mediates the human mind differently, we can imagine many different ways that the one body of Christ can mediate and express the mind of Christ. The harmony, coherence, and productivity of those ways may not be apparent in this life. This is not to say that discord and disharmony are impossible. They are common, for we are sinners. Still, when deciding what the church’s best and brightest features are and what its shameful failures are, we do well to remember that no body as large and complex as the church is going to operate in a way that maps onto any age’s concept of a healthy body and brain. Its unity and its power are not in the smoothness of its operation, its measurable productivity, or even the coherence one does or does not perceive, but in what the One Spirit does in and through this one body. Its one calling is not a process of production and sale, not growth for profit’s sake, and not a bigger barn.

Joined to Jesus Christ, whose flesh is bread for the life of the world, the church’s calling is to nourish every body and soul through the winter of this age, in the hope of a spring that will have no end.