In a much published murder case here in Sweden, featuring members of a small town Pentecostal community, one of the principal players is labeled ‘the Bride of Christ’. According to newspaper reports, this is her own designation.
It’s bothered me for a while that it’s being reported like ‘BoC’ is a concept everyone should be familiar with, especially since I’m not. So I started searching. Now I think it’s being reported in such an off-hand way, because the reporters don’t know what ‘BoC’ is.
So far, I’ve managed to uncover some mumbo-jumbo on very biased website, that raise my bs-detector to alarming levels. The sites seems to be by fairly “radical” maybe even fundamental Christians, who patch together quotes from different parts of the Bible in order to make a case - that being that the Body of Christ, i.e. all believers, are surpassed in a race by those being the ‘Bride of Christ’, i.e. Christians who are more devout and mature in their spiritual beliefs than run o’ the mill Christians. This smacks, to this unreligilous poster, as being close to heresy. Or a way for a congregation to separate the elite from the sheep who’re forking up the money.
But, as so often before, I could be seriously mistaken.
So is there a basis withing theology for the concept of ‘BoC’? And are my suspicions about why it’s being used correct?
I thought the term referred to nuns. Maybe this woman was a nun, wanted to remain anonymous, and it was clumsily reported. Or maybe she thinks she’s a super-nun or something. Another one that can fly?
Answer posted at http://www.usccb.org/catechism/quizzes/church9.htm
I don’t know how Pentacostal churches would view the term, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out they have a rather different interpretation than does the RCC.
Perhaps when it’s all in caps, it might refer to your cite Gaspode, but the general term is also used to mean nuns, and the church itself. Here’s one cite.
I know it’s sometimes used to refer to nuns. Don’t some even wear a wedding ring. However, from context, it seems to mean something else. And I’m trying to figure out what.
I think the Church (the community of faithful Christians in all ages) is the Body of Christ and the Bride of Christ, the Body in its relation to the world as Jesus’s “Embassy”, the Bride in its relation to JC Himself. Some try to make a distinction- that one group refers to the larger Christian assembly & the other refers to a more spiritual elite of super-C’tians; or that the Bride is the Jewish Church of the Apostolic era & the End Times while the Body is the primarily Gentile Church of most of C’tian History. I think both those versions take the distinct terms too distinctly L
Btw, I think the “Church” may also include the Old Testament Saints.
Yup. At least the ones who taught at the same diocese I did (taught at two different Catholic schools).
As an aside, most of them wore (modest) street clothes with their veils, while the full habit was more for special occasions (i.e., high holy days, as well as an evening performance of the touring production of Nunsense - it was a sea of habits and colors: brown, blue, black, gray and white).
There are many competing metaphors here. One metaphor used by Paul is that Christ is the head , and the church is the body. Another metaphor used by Paul is that in marriage, the husband is the head, and the wife is the body. Elsewhere, the Church is called “the Bride of Christ” (I think it’s from the Revelation of St. John), referring to the final completion of the church, as a bride is “completed” by her husband (hey, I didn’t write this stuff). Finally, nuns are called “brides of Christ” because they have sworn themselves to him, forsaking all others, much as a bride does in her vows. The unwillingness of some churches to acknowledge the use of metaphors in the Bible, as with this use of two metaphors to describe different facets of a single relationship, does not astonish me.