Indwelling Christ, Indwelling Christians: Living As Marked‪.‬

I want to explore both sides of indwelling: the way Christ dwells in us, and also the less-explored side of indwelling, the way we dwell in Christ. We Christians are marked women and men because of that mutual exchange. I want to probe two marks on our body. In the Eucharist, we take Christ's body into our own and literally become what we eat. It transforms us. Much of the literature on the indwelling Christ, from both the Finns and the Americans, explores Luther's eucharistic theology to unpack this side of indwelling. Christ dwells in us. (1) But there is another side of indwelling, the way we dwell in Christ. In baptism we are taken up into the body of Christ, making us dwell in that marked body. We transform the world. This "other side of indwelling" is less discussed, and I argue that it has equal, perhaps even primary, importance as we think about that mutual exchange between the body of Christ and the body of believers.