And it is the Son of Man, or Christ in his human capacity, as whose body the Church is regarded. For as the head thereof the apostle designates him who was raised from the dead. The Church here enters into a profoundly intimate relation to the sacred humanity of Christ. We shall seek further profit from this idea in the sequel.
Immediately after having called the Church the body of Christ, he calls her the
. This epithet results from the foregoing. It is because she is the body of Christ that the Church is the
. I translate these difficult words, the fulness of him who filleth all in all. God who filleth all things with his essential presence, in whom we live, and move, and have our being, hath his fulness in the Church. The Church is entirely filled with God. But how? Is not God, in his very nature, present everywhere? How then can the Church be filled with God in a greater degree than the world without? As the body of Christ, she has this capacity. For if the Church, as Christ's body, assumes a special relation, peculiar to herself, to his sacred humanity, then, by that very assumption, she acquires a share in the
of the Deity which dwells bodily in that sacred humanity. She thereby becomes the spot where God is especially revealed and glorified. For while God, in the fulness of his nature, is present over all the world, nevertheless this presence is more largely apparent in the Church than elsewhere. By the Church alone the manifold wisdom of God is known unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places. In him is glory in the Church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Thus she stands approved as his pleroma, as entirely filled with God.
But how are we to understand this repletion of the Church with God? It is well known that Moehler sees in the visible Church the "Son of God continually appearing among men in human form, constantly re-creating, eternally rejuvenating himself, his perpetual incarnation." In this sense he apprehends the scriptural conception of the body of Christ, the "interpretation of the divine and the human in the Church." This proposition, which has become celebrated, was intended, in the first instance, to afford a more profound insight into the visibility of the Church, in addition to which it is inseparable from Moehler's views on the subject of the means of grace. In this twofold light we must make it the subject of examination.