The Body

Paul’s description of the church as the body of Christ parallels in both its basic conception and in its details the social theory of ancient moralists. Seneca, for instance, wrote, “What if the hands should desire to harm the feet, or the eyes the hands? As all the members of the body are in harmony with one another because it is to the advantage of the whole that the individual members be unharmed, so mankind should spare the individual man, because all are born for a life of fellowship, and society can be kept unharmed only by the mutual protection and love of its parts” ( Anger 2.31.7). Livy ( History of Rome 2.32.7-33.1) records the parable of Menenius about the body’s rebellion against the belly (which was employed by Shakespeare in Coriolanus ). Epictetus asks “what is the profession of a citizen?” and answers “To treat nothing as a matter of private profit, not to plan anything as though he were a detached unit, but to act like the foot or the hand, which, if they had the faculty of reason to understand the constitution of nature, would never exercise choice or desire in any other way but by reference to the whole” ( Discourses 2.10.4-5). Examples could be multiplied. When Paul uses “body” as a description of the church, then, he is assuming that the church is a functioning social entity to herself. She is a new “society” or new “city.”

But this new city functions in Paul differently than it does in other ancient writers. It is a genuinely new body. As Raymond Collins points out in his Sacra Pagina commentary on 1 Corinthians, “Paul attributes the diversity of the various members of the body and the order among them to God . . . rather than to nature.” Further, while many ancient writers used the image of the body to make a hierarchical point – the belly in Menenius’ parable represents the patrician classes who receive the firstfruits of Rome’s produce, and then mediate benefits to the rest of the body – Paul emphasizes (as some pagan writers did) the interdependence of all the members of the body. Finally, Paul “states that it is the supposedly weaker (and presumably less honorable) members of the body that are to be honored and that this is in accordance with the divine ordinance in arranging the body.” So, in one sense, the church is a social body like other social bodies; on the other hand, it is a social body that functions differently from other social bodies, in that it functions as a genuine body (or, at least, is called to do so).