Body Politic Meets Body of Christ: Aristotle, Paul, and Communal Flourishing

[Janna Gonwa]

Abstract:

This paper approaches the question of communal flourishing by examining Paul’s metaphor of the ecclesial community as the “body of Christ” against the backdrop of a much older metaphor for civic community, the “body politic,” as exemplified in Aristotle’s Politics. Both Aristotle and Paul suggest that the flourishing of the human individual is only possible when she is embedded within a flourishing community. The body metaphor is meant to capture the necessity of a division of labor: because each person has some gifts and lacks others, flourishing requires that the individual contribute what she has to the communal whole, in exchange for receiving what she lacks. However, a comparison of the use to which the body metaphor is put in the Politics and 1 Corinthians suggests that relationality is only an instrumental good in Aristotle’s civic community but an intrinsic good in Paul’s ecclesial community. The conclusion of the paper examines the significance of this distinction between civic and ecclesial forms of flourishing for the church in the city, which looks ahead to the coming of the Kingdom as a New Jerusalem in which the entire city is a temple and civic and ecclesial communities merge.

The full paper is attached to this post.