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Christian Relationships

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

H F Woodhouse
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Extract

This article is an attempt to sketch some salient features of the relationship between Christians. The Christian church is not a crowd, not even a crowd made up of devotees of a particular football club to take an example. It is a community and yet the persons who compose it are persons, because of their interrelationship, and individuals, because often their particular qualities or gifts are intensified.

They are a community ‘in Christ’, the body of Christ and this fellowship is not so much horizontal between the different members as vertical because they are ‘in Christ’ or alternatively we could say they share a common life, that imparted by the Holy Spirit the Life Giver. This viewpoint, while not provable from the New Testament, receives support from it.

The members who share this common life remain persons, indeed their individuality is developed and enhanced. In relationship lies the differentia of being person; this has vertical and horizontal links, with the Holy Spirit and with other people, especially often Christians. Personality, growth to mature persons, is realised in response to Him, and in fellowship with life in all its varied aspects. Aspirations can be met, self-realisation achieved, self-expression maintained. For the Christian, becoming a person is the practice of divine sonship.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 56 , Issue 666 , November 1975 , pp. 516 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 For a discussion see Thornton, L. S., The Common Life in the Body of Christ, Dacre Press, ch. 3Google Scholar.

2 This could be expanded by our exposition of biblical words like ‘fill’; ‘pour out’; see also Thornton, op. cit. pp. 89ff.

3 e.g. Acts 16.7; 2 Cor. 3.17f.: Gal. 4:6; Phil. 1.19 & Rom. 8.2, 9ff.

4 Gal. 5.22.

5 Incarnation and Immanence. Hodder and Stoughton, 1973Google Scholar.

6 op. cit., pp. 180 & 184.

7 'Title of a book by J. MacMurray.

8 R. C. Moberly. Atonement and Personality. 1907 ed., p. 179.