In Romans 12:1, the apostle Paul makes what might be the most radical political statement in the New Testament: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”
Notice what Paul doesn’t say. He doesn’t call us to present our souls, our hearts, or our spiritual intentions. He calls us to present our bodies—our concrete, material, embodied existence—as the form of true spiritual worship. This integration of the physical and spiritual, the material and the sacred, has profound implications for how the church responds during times of political crisis.
The Chilean Story—A Tale of Two Responses
In September 1973, a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Chile’s democratically elected government. What followed was 17 years of systematic torture, disappearances, and state terror. Sympathisers of the previous government, union organisers, church activists, and grassroots leaders were systematically targeted. Many others, perceived to be connected to such activists, met the same fate.
The initial response of the Roman Catholic bishops was deeply troubling. They saw their role as ensuring “continuity” and promoting the “organic unity of Chile.” Several bishops actually supported the new government, believing that both church and state were “twin guardians of the national heritage.” They saw tortures and executions not as intrinsic to the regime, but as “aberrations, excesses which could be corrected by appeals to the Christian consciences of Chile’s rulers.” They opted to stay the course, to shield the church from interference by keeping their mouths shut, and simply to wait out the difficult national moment the regime had ushered in.
This response was rooted in what theologian William Cavanaugh calls a false ecclesiology—a church understanding that created “an autonomous political sphere of arbitrary power by withdrawing to a ‘religious’ terrain in civil society.” The bishops had accepted a division between the spiritual and temporal realms that left individual bodies at the mercy of the state whilst the church retreated to an invisible, purely spiritual role. You do the body, the church said to the state; we’ll handle the souls.
But something remarkable happened. Beginning around 1976, the Chilean church began to awaken to its prophetic calling. By 1977, the bishops were asserting that the church “makes salvation visible through soup kitchens,
cooperatives, workshops, and aid to the defenceless and oppressed.” They
declared that the church “does not let itself be circumscribed only to the ‘religious’ field” and that “absence and silence imply a danger similar to that of word and presence.”
The church created the Vicariate of Solidarity, which established health clinics, job training programs, legal aid, and networks of mutual support. They began documenting and publishing the regime’s abuses and providing almost the only alternative source of information to government propaganda. Perhaps most powerfully, women in sewing workshops began creating arpilleras—tapestries made from scraps of old material depicting scenes of everyday life that became significant forms of social protest.
The focal image of this transformation was knitting—taking diverse strands of rejected material and weaving them into something beautiful and useful. This became a perfect metaphor for how the church responded to torture and disappearance by knitting together a renewed social fabric, refusing to let the state have the final word over human bodies and dignity.
The Problem of Dualistic Spirituality
What changed between the bishops’ initial failure and their eventual prophetic witness? The transformation came through a fundamental shift in how they understood the relationship between faith and the physical world.
Initially, the bishops had accepted a sharp division between “spiritual” and “worldly” concerns. They believed the church should focus on souls and interior matters whilst leaving bodies and material conditions to the state. This seemed pious and proper—after all, isn’t the church supposed to be concerned with eternal rather than temporal things?
But this division created a deadly trap. By retreating to a supposedly “pure” spiritual realm, the church left human bodies completely vulnerable to state violence. The bishops thought they were being spiritual by staying out of politics, but they were actually abandoning people to torture and death.
Cavanaugh argues that what was really at stake wasn’t a choice between focusing on spiritual versus material concerns. Rather, there were two competing visions of how to shape human life—what he calls “competing types of body-soul disciplines, some violent and some peaceful.”
The state was practising a violent discipline—using authoritarian control and torture not primarily to extract information, but to break people’s spirits, destroy their social bonds, and force everyone to conform to the regime’s version of reality. Torture was “a kind of perverted liturgy” designed to claim ultimate authority over both human bodies and souls.
The church’s response had to be equally embodied. They couldn’t defeat torture through abstract moral denunciations or appeals to individual rights. Instead, they had to demonstrate that they were “the true body, a body more significant than either individual or state, a body entered in baptism and shaped by the Eucharist.” They had to practice what Cavanaugh calls competing “body-soul disciplines” rooted in compassion, martyrdom, suffering, and reconciliation rather than violence and domination.
Romans 12: The Theological Foundation
This brings us back to Romans 12, which provides the theological foundation for exactly this kind of embodied, prophetic witness.
Presenting Our Bodies (12:1-2)
The apostle Paul’s call to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” directly challenges any spirituality that tries to escape material reality. The Greek term for “spiritual worship” (logikēlatreia) literally means “reasonable service”—it’s not about transcending the physical world but about offering our entire embodied existence to God.
When Paul calls us to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” he’s not advocating withdrawal from worldly concerns. Rather, he’s calling for discernment—the ability to distinguish between the world’s false claims to authority and “what is good and acceptable and perfect” in God’s sight.
The Chilean church’s initial conformity to Pinochet’s regime represented exactly the kind of worldly accommodation the apostle forbids. Their eventual transformation came through learning to discern between the state’s claims to order and God’s call to justice.
Corporate Body, Not Individual Spirituality (12:3-8)
St Paul’s warning against thinking of ourselves “more highly than you ought to think” (12:3) addresses the pride that enables withdrawal from engagement with injustice. But more importantly, his development of the body metaphor in verses 4-8 envisions the church as a corporate alternative to state power.
This directly challenges conceptions of the church that individualise faith and eliminate “Christ’s body in the world.” When the church retreats to a purely spiritual realm, it leaves only the state to embody social unity and authority.
Paul’s vision is of a church that functions as an alternative social reality, with diverse gifts working together for the common good.
Concrete Practices of Non-Conformity (12:9-21)
The rest of Romans 12 gets remarkably specific about what embodied discipleship looks like: “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good… Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers… Bless those who persecute you… Weep with those who weep… Associate with the lowly.”
This mirrors exactly what the Chilean church eventually practised: soup kitchens, cooperatives, health clinics, aid to the dispossessed and disappeared. These weren’t “worldly” activities distracting from spiritual concerns—they were the concrete form of Romans 12 discipleship, the way of what St Paul calls “overcoming evil with good.”
A Contemporary Missed Opportunity
This brings us to a troubling contemporary example. Less than a fortnight ago, His Beatitude, Metropolitan Tikhon, primate of our Orthodox Church in America, opened the 21st All-American Council in Phoenix, Arizona, with an address.
The context of this is profoundly significant, as we well know. He was speaking as a major American religious leader during this period marked by increasing authoritarianism, systematic oppression of immigrants, the gutting of healthcare and aid programmes, and other serious challenges to democratic norms and human dignity.
Yet the address focused almost entirely on internal church matters: liturgical practices, language use, and the spiritual formation of converts. His central metaphor was mountain climbing—calling the church to “ascend” beyond worldly concerns and focus on “the one thing needful.” He emphasised the “vertical axis” over “horizontal” movement, calling Christians to “leave behind the snares of the fowler and soar aloft with the spiritual eagles.”
Whilst beautifully written and theologically sophisticated in many ways, the address represents exactly the kind of problematic dualism that enabled the Chilean bishops’ initial failure. Metropolitan Tikhon’s call to transcend “time and space” and his emphasis on ascending beyond earthly concerns embodies the false spirituality that Cavanaugh critiques—a retreat to an invisible, mystical realm that abandons the material world to unchecked power.
His tone toward those who bring “social and cultural needs” and seek “belonging and identity” in the church is dismissive. Rather than seeing social, cultural, and political issues as legitimate human needs that the church should address through concrete ministries of justice and mercy, he seemed to view them as distractions from proper spiritual formation.
The Romans 12 Alternative
Romans 12 provides a radically different vision. The apostle Paul doesn’t call us to escape human needs for community, identity, and justice—he calls us to meet those needs through the concrete practices of an alternative social body shaped by the eucharist.
Metropolitan Tikhon speaks highly of the eucharist in his address: “The Divine Liturgy is the summit of our existence,” he says. “It is the place where, laying aside all earthly cares, we receive the pre-eternal God into our very bodies, souls, and hearts.”
But whilst praising the role played by the Orthodox Church in America in reviving the ancient practice of frequent communion, he frames it primarily in terms of individual, private spiritual benefit. His warning about communion becoming “a dread Fire that consumes the heedless” seems focused on personal piety rather than our communal embodiment in Christ and shared participation here and now in the future kingdom of God.
By contrast, St Paul’s integration of worship and justice is a call for corporate rather than individualistic discernment, and his emphasis on concrete practices of love provide the theological framework for what Cavanaugh calls “eucharistic imagination”—the church’s ability to envision and embody alternatives to the world’s systems of domination. Shared participation in the eucharist should form us into a “visible body capable of standing apart from the world” through “considerable discipline” that enables the church to “withstand the power of those forces that refuse the sovereignty of Christ.”
The Chilean church’s street liturgies, which made visible the bodies that the state had disappeared, exemplified this eucharistic imagination. They created what protesters called “spaces of resistance where bodies belong to God, not the state.” They practised St Paul’s call to “weep with those who weep” and “associate with the lowly” in the most literal way possible.
Conclusion: The Prophetic Calling Today
The lesson for us today is clear. Romans 12 calls us to present our bodies—our concrete, material, embodied existence—as living sacrifices. This means we cannot retreat to a purely spiritual realm whilst injustice ravages the world around us. We cannot claim to worship God whilst remaining silent about the suffering of the vulnerable.
St Paul’s vision of the church as an alternative social body provides the theological foundation for prophetic witness in any context marked by oppression and abuse of power. Whether the challenge is torture in Chile, or authoritarianism in America in our own day, the church’s calling remains the same: to embody God’s justice and mercy through concrete practices of solidarity with the suffering.
Metropolitan Tikhon’s address represents a tragic missed opportunity. At a moment when the United States faces serious threats through authoritarian overreach, systematic oppression, gutting of social infrastructure, and other injustices, the retreat by the leader of the American Orthodox Christian church to a disembodied and vertical spirituality, however well-intentioned, represents a fundamental misreading of the apostle Paul’s call to embodied discipleship. The “one thing needful” is not escape from the world’s pain but transformation through engagement with it. True spiritual worship presents our bodies as living sacrifices in solidarity with all who suffer, trusting that God’s mercy is made visible through our concrete acts of love and justice.
This is the prophetic alternative that Romans 12 offers: not a spirituality that soars above earthly concerns, but one that finds God precisely in the midst of human struggle, offering our bodies as instruments of divine mercy and agents of God’s coming kingdom.