Joseph Lenow: The Mystical Agency of Christ in the Letters of Cyprian

Cyprian of Carthage displays a clear understanding of the church as the mystical body of Christ (ep.63.13). Joined to this understanding of Christ’s mystical body is a sense of Christ’s mystical agency—his continued work in the world as mediated through the activity of this community. This paper considers the theology of Christ’s mystical agency as encountered in Cyprian’s letters, with special attention to how shifting emphases in his deployments of this theme may be attributable to the ecclesial circumstances of his writing. In the relatively early ep.10, written to the confessors of the Carthaginian church likely before the controversy with the laxists, Cyprian exhibits a strong sense of Christ actively struggling and conquering in the witness of the martyrs and confessors (ep.10.3-4). Later letters generally move away from a direct identification of Christ’s work with the activity of the martyrs and confessors, likely so as to undercut the belief that the readmission to the fellowship of peace by Lucian and other confessors was itself properly identifiable as Christ’s own work of forgiveness. Instead, later letters tend to emphasize Christ’s agency as (i) spectator of the martyr’s combat, rather than himself an active combatant; (ii) continuing to legislate the church’s communal life through the commands delivered in scripture; (iii) mystically active in the work of the bishops and clergy, to whom he has entrusted the care of his body the church; and (iv) patiently awaiting his return in judgment.