The Loss of Corporate Imagination

The New Testament church understood itself as a body, a household, a temple under construction, a royal priesthood — corporate images every one. The calling described in Regenerate, Not Degenerate is not an individual calling to individual transformation. It is a corporate calling. The empty thrones of Psalm 82 were not vacated by one ancient being who refused. They were vacated by the whole council. The response God chose was not one person being elevated. It was a people being formed — a community of image-bearers formed from clay being made into the kind of beings who could carry the love the council refused to carry.

Theosis in its fullest form is not a solo project. The iron does not glow alone in the fire. The branch does not bear fruit in isolation from the vine and from every other branch on the vine. The formation of the Christian is intrinsically communal because the love being poured through the Christian is intrinsically relational — it requires a receiver, and the receiver requires the community.

Modern evangelical ecclesiology has lost this. The dominant model of the evangelical church is a collection of individuals on parallel personal journeys who gather weekly to receive content and then return to their individual lives. The pastoral relationship is primarily one-directional: the pastor speaks, the congregation receives. The small group is the most communal instrument remaining in most evangelical churches, and even the small group model tends toward relational support for individual journeys rather than genuine mutual formation in the communal life of God.

This is not a small gap. You cannot teach "we are being conformed to the image of the Son" as a corporate reality to a room of people who understand themselves as solo projects before God. The imaginative and structural framework required to hold that teaching is simply absent. Until the church recovers a genuinely corporate anthropology — understanding that the calling is to a people, that the formation happens in community, that the love being poured out is a community of branches giving to a world, not isolated individuals achieving personal transformation — it will not be able to transmit the high calling the tradition carries. The theology will sit in the books. The pew will remain uninformed about what it is.