God’s unified church, the holy temple of his Spirit, thus provides a critical and underutilized component for the discussion. A natural desire is to concentrate attention on personal good and individual roles, leading to well-intended questions that highlight rights or proper positions of authority. But this method can have the unintended consequence of reinforcing our conception that the individual is the central concern. However, if we begin from the perspective of God’s purpose for the church as a whole, we see that these concerns are transcended and put into larger perspective as the
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