The Church constitutes the body of Christ. When you come to worship, in one way or another, you are connected to the people of God. The Apostle Paul stresses this element in I Corinthians 10. He exhorts us to discern the body of Christ when we come to the Lord’s Table. But, for Paul, this is not a call to intellectually grasp the fullness of the physical body of Christ or develop a precise atonement theology that harmonizes with the writings of the Patristics and Reformers.
Instead, Paul’s entire context has been to unify the Church in Corinth (chpts.11-14), which has been plagued with ethical corruption.
Paul says that these divisions between rich and poor, slave and free, male and female, are contrary to the unifying purposes of God in the world. God sent his Son to reconcile the world unto himself and unite his people to this covenant blessing.
And this leads to Paul’s reference.
Discerning the body means understanding the nature of the Church, and the nature of the Church is to be united together to worship the crucified and risen Messiah. In other words, Paul is not addressing the intellectual inability of a person, but he is directing his warning to the one who is bitter with his brother, to the one who is sowing discord within the church, and to the one who fails to strive for unity.
The Lord’s Table is a reconciliatory table, and all those who live in the nature of that unity, baptized into the Triune Name, are welcome to take and eat and drink, for we are eating and drinking the manna from heaven and the wine of salvation.
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