Intercommunal Ecclesiology: Re-Envisioning the Church as God's Response to Intergroup Disunity

This dissertation offers a soteriological reimagining of the Church in light of the reality of intergroup relationship. Using the interrelated phenomena of group formation and intergroup dynamics as hermeneutic key and category of analysis for examining the Church, this dissertation argues that the Church's relationship to salvation (i.e. God's saving activity) and the Church's relationship to the historical fact of intergroup or intercommunal disunity are highly correlated. This correlation is the basis for the central thesis of this dissertation: Within God's plan of historical salvation, the Church functions as God's communal response to intercomunal disunity, a role it fulfills with integrity only when and where it enacts itself as a counterperformance to aggression, conflict, and indifference between human communities.

The first part of the dissertation relates the Church to human community'the material, human foundation apart from which there is no Church. Chapters 1 and 2, respectively, draw attention to the phenomena of (1) group formation relative to the emergence of collective wholes, and (2) intergroup dynamics relative to biopyshosocial, situational, and cultural processes. The Church's uniqueness (its seity) as a community is situated in relation to these general phenomena.

The second part of the dissertation relates the Church to God's plan of salvation. Chapter 3 serves as an introduction to the second part, and establishes connection between the Church and other premodern communities for which a sense of the sacred is integral, highlighting communal models for interaction that are rooted in formative experiences of non-human, life-giving forces. Chapter 4 foregrounds the pattern of salvation that discloses God as preeminently concerned with preservation of life and creation of right interrelationship. Chapter 5 frames the Church's constitution and task in relation to this pattern of God's salvific interaction.

The third part of the present work relates the Church to Jesus Christ. Chapter 6 examines Jesus as the initiator of the group that would eventually be called the Church, and draws attention to how the resurrected Christ's association with ecclesial community points toward the broadening of Jesus' ministry to include the realm of intergroup relations. Chapter 7 makes a case for understanding the Church as the Body of Christ as the primordial ecclesiological percept, one that has radical implications for the Christian community's intercommunal performance.