The image of the church these chapters present is extremely ambiguous. For there is a paradox at the heart of the church. It is the painful tension between what the church claims to be and what it seems to be; between the divine ideal and the human reality; between romantic talk about ‘the bride of Christ’ and the very unromantic, ugly, unholy and quarrelsome Christian community we know ourselves to be. It is the tension between our final, glorious destiny in heaven and our present, very inglorious