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In the World But Not of the World: The Liminal Life of Pre-Constantine Christian Communities

Abstract

This study has used Victor Turner's model of liminality as a heuristic framework for understanding the beliefs, behavior, and self-understanding of the early Christian communities. Unlike other groups in liminality who experience communitas in rites of passage separated from the broader society, and ultimately return to reinforce structure, this study proposes that the unique characteristic of the early Christian communities was that they lived in communitas within the structures of society and extended those relationships to people outside the community.

There were three aspects of liminality that were studied through four different sets of writing in the pre-Constantine communities of Christ followers: the Jesus tradition represented in Luke's narrative of Jesus' life and teaching, the formation of the community represented in Luke's narrative of Acts, and writings to Pauline communities and post-Pauline communities. In these writings, liminality was expressed as a temporal liminality, embodied liminality, and the liminality of the social body. The liminality of the social body was exhibited through the characteristics of anti-structure for inclusion in the community, interpersonal relationships, and authority in the community. Finally, the relationship of the anti-structural community to structure was examined.

There were several areas of continuity throughout the four sets of writings. First, consistently throughout this period, the early communities of Christ followers understood themselves to be living between the times. For them, the new age had begun, while the old was still present. Second, the followers of Jesus saw themselves as embodying this liminality through the in-dwelling of the Spirit in their physical body. Through the Spirit, the followers of Jesus believed they experienced new life in Christ. And third, consistently across traditions followers of Jesus believed they were incorporated into a new community that had a common identity marker, the Spirit. This identity marker transcended structural statuses of gender, ethnicity, wealth, and social rank. The Spirit did not erase these statuses but early Christians were to relate anti-structurally within their structural statuses. Although there was commonality among the communities in this study, how they related to the broader structures of their surrounding societies was a function of their particular situational context.

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