There is a phrase in Ephesians that has become so familiar in translation that its strangeness is easy to miss. Paul says that the ascended Christ gives apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers for the equipping of the saints and the work of ministry, and that this work continues until all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, εἰς ἄνδρα τέλειον, εἰς μέτρον ἡλικίας τοῦ πληρώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ—“unto a complete man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:13). Modern translations generally give us “mature manhood” or “a mature man,” while the older English tradition preferred “a perfect man.” The modern rendering has an obvious advantage, since “perfect” now suggests moral flawlessness, which is not what Paul means. Yet “mature” introduces a subtler difficulty of its own. To modern Protestant ears, Christian maturity tends to suggest the progressive improvement of the individual believer: greater doctrinal knowledge, steadier judgment, increasing virtue, greater resistance to error and temptation. Paul certainly has these things in view; in the following verse, he contrasts the destination he has described with remaining νήπιοι, infants tossed about by every wind of doctrine. But the language he chooses is considerably larger than the moral and intellectual maturation of individual Christians.
Τέλειος belongs to the semantic world of τέλος: end, completion, fulfillment, the condition reached when something has become what it was ordered to become. The τέλειος thing is not simply better than it once was; it has attained the form appropriate to it. That distinction becomes particularly important because Paul does not say that the ministries of the Church are producing a collection of mature men. The noun is singular. Οἱ πάντες, all of us, are moving toward ἄνδρα τέλειον, one completed Man, and Paul immediately supplies the measure of that Man: τοῦ πληρώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ, the fullness of Christ. The question latent in the passage is therefore larger than how Christians become mature. Paul is describing the completion of humanity, and he tells us that humanity can be measured in its completed form only by Christ.
Once the question is put this way, the old Greek relationship between φύσις and τέλος becomes philosophically useful. There is no reason to turn Paul into a covert Aristotelian, and Paul does not use φύσις in Ephesians 4. Yet we can see a connection to Aristotle’s conception of nature.. Aristotle gives unusually precise expression to the problem raised by Paul’s language when, in the first book of the Politics, he writes ἡ δὲ φύσις τέλος ἐστίν, “nature is an end,” explaining that what each thing is when its process of becoming has reached completion is what we call its nature. The point is not that φύσις and τέλος are interchangeable terms but that the nature of a thing becomes fully intelligible in light of the end toward which its characteristic development is ordered. An undeveloped thing cannot entirely interpret itself because its present condition does not yet display the form toward which its becoming tends. The completed form reveals what the immature thing was becoming all along.
Telos, Nature, and Anthropology
The anthropological implications are considerable. If man possesses a φύσις, then human nature cannot finally be discovered simply by cataloguing what human beings presently happen to be. Fallen humanity cannot serve as the normative interpreter of humanity, nor can an unfinished creature fully explain itself. To ask what man is necessarily opens onto the question of what man is for. Classical philosophy attempted to reason from human nature toward the human end, asking what kind of life fulfills the capacities and relations proper to the creature. Paul makes a more astonishing claim. The human end has appeared within history, and because the τέλος has appeared, the φύσις can now be interpreted retrospectively. The measure of man is Christ.
This use of φύσις need not be imposed upon Paul from outside his conceptual world. Paul can speak in Romans of what occurs κατὰ φύσιν and παρὰ φύσιν, according to and contrary to nature, and of Gentiles who do φύσει the things of the law; in 1 Corinthians, he can ask whether “nature itself” teaches, Galatians speaks of Jewish φύσει, and Ephesians itself describes fallen humanity as τέκνα φύσει ὀργῆς, “children by nature of wrath.” None of these passages proves that Paul has Aristotelian metaphysics in mind in Ephesians 4, and nothing is gained by asking them to bear that weight. The connection establishes the more modest point that nature is not foreign to Paul’s theological vocabulary. More important for the present argument is the unmistakably teleological character of Paul’s language elsewhere. In 1 Corinthians 13, the coming of τὸ τέλειον, “the complete,” is immediately illustrated through the movement from childhood to manhood: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Cor 13:11) In the following chapter, Paul again tells his readers not to be children in understanding but to become τέλειοι. Ephesians repeats the movement. The alternative to ἄνδρα τέλειον is remaining νήπιοι. Paul is indeed speaking about maturity, but maturity in the stronger sense of a thing being brought toward its proper form.
Hebrews makes the point more striking still. I proceed here from the judgment that Paul wrote Hebrews while recognizing the familiar dispute over its authorship. The theological argument does not depend upon resolving that dispute because Hebrews remains an early Christian witness to the same conceptual grammar, but Pauline authorship makes the continuity particularly suggestive. Even if Paul is not the author, the author is at least someone who knew Paul personally and likely interacted with him on these topics (Heb 13:23). Hebrews applies the language of perfection to Christ himself. God, in “bringing many sons to glory,” makes the founder of their salvation τέλειον through suffering (Heb 2:10). Later, Paul describes Christ as τελειωθείς, “having been brought to completion,” and thereby becoming the source of eternal salvation (5:9). The language plainly cannot describe a transition from moral defect to moral purity. Christ’s perfection is vocational and historical. The incarnate Son passes through obedience, suffering, death, resurrection, and exaltation, completing the human and messianic course appointed to him.
The context of Hebrews 2 makes the significance of this language especially clear because the argument begins with Psalm 8 and the vocation of mankind. Man has been made for a little while lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor, and appointed over the works of God’s hands, with everything placed beneath his feet. Hebrews then acknowledges the obvious empirical difficulty: “At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.” The world as we encounter it does not seem to display the human dominion that Psalm 8 describes. The answer comes in one of the great turns of biblical anthropology, βλέπομεν δὲ Ἰησοῦν, “but we see Jesus” (Heb 2:9). We do not yet see mankind generally exercising the dominion promised to man; we see the Man who does. Jesus has been crowned with glory and honor and has passed through suffering into the royal destination assigned to humanity, while the same passage describes God as “bringing many sons to glory.” Christ, therefore, does not complete the human vocation as an isolated exception to humanity but as ἀρχηγός, pioneer and founder. He goes where man was made to go and brings mankind after him.
The fullness of Christ serves as the measure of the completed man in Ephesians because Christ has himself completed the human course. The first Adam reveals humanity in its origin and failure; the last Adam reveals humanity at its end. This is already implicit in Paul’s language of the image. Man is created according to the image of God; Christ is εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου, “the image of the invisible God.” Redeemed humanity is renewed according to that image and predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son. The question “what is man?” consequently cannot finally be answered apart from the question “who is Christ?” Christ does not merely repair man after the Fall. He interprets man by revealing in himself the completed form of the creature.
This makes the singular form of Ephesians 4 all the more significant because two chapters earlier, Paul has already described the work of Christ as the creation of a new humanity. Jew and Gentile are reconciled so that Christ might create the two in himself εἰς ἕνα καινὸν ἄνθρωπον, “into one new man” (Eph 2:15). The language anticipates chapter 4 with remarkable naturalness: the ἕνα καινὸν ἄνθρωπον, “the one new man,” is growing toward ἄνδρα τέλειον, “the completed man.” The new man is being brought to maturity. Paul’s anthropology cannot be reduced to the moral improvement of discrete individuals. The Christian does not first become a completed religious individual and then elect to join an association of other completed individuals called the Church; incorporation belongs to the completion itself. Adamic humanity is corporate, and Christic humanity is corporate. Salvation is not simply the alteration of the legal or moral condition of isolated persons but their incorporation into the new humanity constituted in Christ and the maturation of that humanity toward its proper form.
Paul can move almost without explanation from ἄνδρα τέλειον in verse 13 to the body in verses 15 and 16 because the images are not competing metaphors. The completed Man is a body. The saints grow “in every respect into him who is the head, Christ,” and from this Head πᾶν τὸ σῶμα, “the whole body,” is συναρμολογούμενον καὶ συμβιβαζόμενον, “joined and held together,” while each individual part acts ἐν μέτρῳ, “according to its proper measure.” The vocabulary is remarkable because it describes not merely organic existence but ordered agency. The mature body is differentiated without being fragmented; its members acquire their proper relations to one another, and the result of this fitting together is ἐνέργεια, “effective activity.” The body becomes capable of acting precisely because each part has been brought into the measure appropriate to it.
The Political Body
The political character of the passage begins to emerge here without requiring Paul to leave ecclesiology for some separate discussion of politics. In the older and more fundamental sense of the word, politics concerns the ordering of differentiated human beings within a common life: the relation of ruler and ruled, the distribution of offices and functions, the coordination of parts, and their orientation toward a common good. Paul’s body possesses precisely these characteristics. Its members are not interchangeable, and their differentiation is not an imperfection to be overcome. The flourishing of the whole depends upon each part performing its appropriate work in relation to the others. Unity is therefore not sameness but ordered differentiation, and maturity is not the dissolution of distinct functions but their harmonious exercise.
Yet Paul introduces something that classical political philosophy could never discover simply by reflecting upon the nature of political association: he identifies the Head. To understand the force of that identification, we have to return to the opening movement of Ephesians, where Paul has already described the resurrection of Jesus as an enthronement. God raises Christ from the dead and seats him at his right hand in the heavenly places, “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion,” placing all things beneath his feet and giving him “as head over all things to the church, which is his body” (Eph 1:20–23). By the time κεφαλή reappears in Ephesians 4, it is therefore impossible to hear it as a mere anatomical metaphor. The Head into whom the body grows is the ruler whom God has enthroned above every principality and authority and beneath whose feet all things have been placed.
The architecture of the letter begins to appear. The enthronement of Christ precedes Paul’s account of the maturation of his people, while the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile creates the one new man upon whom the ascended Christ bestows his gifts. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers equip the saints so that this new humanity may be brought toward its completed form, and the completed Man appears as an articulated body whose members acquire the measure necessary for coordinated action. That action does not originate in the body itself but proceeds ἐξ οὗ, “from the Head.” Ecclesial maturation is consequently inseparable from the kingship of Christ because the body being brought to maturity is the body of the King.
The Church is political because Jesus is King. This claim neither requires the Church to become identical with the civil magistracy nor makes its political character dependent upon gaining control of the state. Both conclusions would allow the categories of modern sovereignty to determine in advance what counts as political. The prior question is whether human beings have been constituted as a people, ordered beneath a ruler, differentiated according to offices and functions, and directed toward a common end. Ephesians answers each of those questions before the modern problem of Church and state even arises. Christ does not merely save a collection of individuals who subsequently discover that they possess common religious interests. He constitutes a people, distributes gifts among them, orders their differentiated activity, and brings them toward a common maturity whose measure is his own fullness. The Church is political, not because it has acquired the coercive powers of the state, but because the salvation accomplished by a King necessarily assumes the form of a people ordered under his rule.
The Body and the Great Commission
Seen in this light, the ecclesiology of Ephesians follows naturally from the premise with which the Great Commission begins. Before Christ commands the apostles to disciple the nations, he announces the cosmic and political fact upon which that commission rests: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” The οὖν that follows—“therefore, go”—matters. The mission to the nations proceeds from an accomplished enthronement. Christ does not send his disciples into the world in the hope that their success will eventually establish his authority; he sends them because that authority has already been given to him. The Great Commission is consequently not first a program for increasing the number of private believers but the historical mission that follows from the universal kingship of the risen Man.
Ephesians can be read as a sustained ecclesiological exposition of that premise. What kind of humanity must be formed if the risen Christ truly possesses all authority in heaven and on earth? Paul’s answer moves with remarkable coherence from enthronement to incorporation, from incorporation to maturation, and from maturation to coordinated action. The Christ who possesses universal authority is seated above every ἀρχή, ἐξουσία, δύναμις, κυριότης; estranged peoples are reconciled in him into ἕνα καινὸν ἄνθρωπον, “one new man” (Eph 2:15); the ascended King distributes gifts and offices for the equipping of the saints; this new humanity grows toward ἄνδρα τέλειον, and the completed Man appears as a body whose differentiated members become capable of effective action proceeding from their Head. The ecclesiology is not an addition to the kingship claim. It is the human and political form that the kingship claim assumes within history.
In this respect, Ephesians might profitably be thought of as the Romans of ecclesiology. Romans presents Paul’s great sustained exposition of the gospel’s movement through sin, justification, incorporation, Spirit, Israel, and transformed human life; Ephesians performs something analogous for the people created by the enthronement of Christ. Its movement through election, enthronement, reconciliation, incorporation, gift, office, maturation, and body is not evidence that the gospel has been displaced by a later interest in “the Church.” The Church is what the gospel of the enthroned Christ produces. What can appear from within modern categories as an unusually “high” ecclesiology follows quite naturally once the opening claim of the Great Commission is taken with full seriousness: the Man to whom all authority in heaven and on earth has been given is forming a people capable of acting under that authority.
Nor does this require us to imagine a political Christ alien to the rest of the Pauline corpus. Philippians locates the Christian πολίτευμα, the commonwealth or civic order to which the saints belong, in heaven and immediately identifies Jesus Christ as the κύριος (“lord”) whose coming they await. 1 Corinthians 15 describes Christ as reigning until every enemy has been placed beneath his feet, abolishing every ἀρχή, ἐξουσία, and δύναμις before delivering the kingdom to the Father. Romans opens by identifying the gospel with the Son descended from David and declared in power through resurrection. Ephesians does not need to invent a new political theology in order to arrive at its account of the body; it gathers recognizably Pauline claims into a sustained account of the humanity appropriate to the reign they announce.
The object of the Great Commission makes the point still more suggestive. Christ commands the discipling of τὰ ἔθνη, “the nations,” through baptism and instruction in obedience to everything he has commanded. Nothing is gained by making the text say less than this or by making it crudely political in the modern sense. Yet baptism and teaching occur within the prior fact of Christ’s universal authority. The nations are not being offered an inward religious experience detached from the ordering of human life; they are being summoned into obedience to the One who possesses authority over heaven and earth. Ephesians supplies the corresponding anthropology. The instrument through which this discipling proceeds is itself being made into an ordered people, a body whose members are equipped, fitted together, differentiated according to gift and measure, and made capable of acting from the King who is its Head.
Once this is seen, Paul’s argument reaches naturally backward to Genesis, where the creation of man in the divine image is immediately joined to the commission to exercise dominion: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion” (Gen 1:28). Image and rule appear together. The image is royal, not because man possesses sovereignty independently of God, but because he is appointed to image God’s own rule within creation. Human dominion is derivative from the beginning. Man rules because he represents the King. The Fall disorders this vocation without abolishing it. Man remains a ruling creature but a creature incapable of ordering himself rightly cannot exercise dominion rightly, and human rule therefore degenerates into rivalry, domination, impotence, and disorder. The image-bearing vocation persists even as the image-bearer becomes unfit for its proper exercise.
Psalm 8 nevertheless repeats the original vocation, describing man as crowned with glory and honor and the works of God as placed beneath his feet. Hebrews does not respond to the apparent failure of this promise by spiritualizing it away; it acknowledges that we do not yet see everything subjected to man, and then it directs our attention to Jesus. The connection with Ephesians 1 is difficult to miss. Psalm 8 speaks of everything beneath man’s feet, Hebrews sees the human vocation fulfilled in Jesus, and Ephesians announces that God has in fact placed all things beneath Christ’s feet. The Man has reached the throne. Christ, therefore, does more than repair Adam’s guilt; he completes Adam’s vocation, and he does not complete it in order to leave the rest of humanity behind. God is bringing many sons to glory; the saints are being conformed to the image of the Son; the one new man is growing toward the completed Man; the body is growing into its Head. The Great Commission now appears within the same movement: the One in whom Adam’s royal vocation has been completed possesses all authority in heaven and on earth and sends his people to disciple the nations. Humanity is being made fit again for rule.
Salvation by Perfection
This is the larger sense in which Christ saves humanity by perfecting it. “Perfecting” must retain its teleological force. Christ does not merely manufacture morally impeccable individuals but brings humanity toward the condition and vocation for which humanity was created. Justification belongs indispensably within this salvation, but justification cannot exhaust it. The forensic question—how can guilty man stand righteous before God?—is essential, yet Scripture asks a question logically prior to guilt, and therefore larger than acquittal: what was man made for? The biblical story begins before the courtroom, with an image-bearing creature commissioned to exercise God’s derivative rule within creation. The Fall makes man guilty, but guilt is not the only thing the Fall produces; it disorders a creature who already possesses a vocation. Forgiveness restores the sinner to God, but the restored creature must still become capable of doing what man was made to do.
It is precisely this larger horizon that Ephesians supplies. The saints are equipped so that the new humanity constituted in Christ may grow toward maturity; that mature humanity assumes the form of an articulated body whose members, having acquired their proper measure and relation to one another, become capable of effective and coordinated action. Yet this action is never autonomous. It proceeds from the Head, and the identity of that Head determines the character of the whole: he is the Christ whom Paul has already described as raised from the dead, enthroned above every rule and authority, and given to the Church after all things have been placed beneath his feet. Ecclesial maturation is inseparable from the kingship of Christ because the body being brought to maturity is the body of the King.
This also clarifies the purpose of the ministries with which the passage begins. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers are not principally vendors of religious knowledge to private consumers. They equip the saints εἰς ἔργον διακονίας, “for the work of ministry,” toward the building up of the body. Their object is a capable people. The saints themselves are being prepared for work, and the body matures as its members come to perform their proper functions in relation to one another. Christian formation therefore possesses a political τέλος, not because religious formation is eventually redirected toward partisan activity or state power but because the creature being restored has always possessed a political and royal vocation. The maturation of the saints is preparation for the coordinated action of a body whose Head already rules.
Political Man
Aristotle’s description of man as φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον, “political by nature,” becomes particularly suggestive at this point. Paul need not be consciously answering Aristotle for the comparison to illuminate his anthropology. If man is by nature a creature of ordered common life, then human completion cannot take the form of perfected autonomy. A completed human nature must possess a completed form of association, and Ephesians gives us precisely such a form in the body: neither the autonomous individual nor the undifferentiated crowd, but a differentiated whole whose unity consists in the coordinated action of its members beneath a common Head. Christian revelation does not abolish the classical political question so much as transform it by identifying both the ruler and the end. The Head is Christ, the measure is the fullness of Christ, and Christ has already been enthroned above every rule, authority, power, and dominion.
The mature body consequently participates in the rule of its Head, although this must be stated with the grammar of Ephesians firmly in view. The Church does not acquire independent sovereignty and then exercise power on behalf of an absent Jesus. Its activity is ἐξ οὗ, “from whom,” for its agency derives from the Head. The body participates in the rule of Christ because it is the body of Christ, just as Adamic dominion was always intended to be derivative rather than autonomous. Nor should dominion be reduced immediately to controlling the coercive institutions of the state, since that would make the modern state rather than Scripture the measure of political action. Christ’s rule extends wherever human life and action are brought into proper order beneath him—in teaching and judgment, cultivation and creation, reconciliation and administration, service and protection, discipline, and authority—according to the proper measure of the members through whom the body acts. The fundamental question is not first whether Christians possess the machinery of the state but whether human life is being ordered under its King through the mature activity of his people.
Flesh and Nature
It is at this point that John’s warnings concerning antichrist acquire a significance that can otherwise seem disproportionate to the doctrinal formula being defended. John’s test is strikingly concrete: every spirit that confesses Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα, “Jesus Christ having come in the flesh,” is from God, while the deceivers are those who refuse to confess Jesus Christ coming ἐν σαρκί (1 Jn 4:2). His gospel account supplies the proposition upon which the whole structure rests: ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο, “the Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14). John’s immediate concern is anti-docetic, and that historical polemic should not be dissolved into an abstract metaphysical principle. Yet the severity of the warning makes sense precisely because much more is at stake than whether Jesus possessed a genuine physical body. The question is whether the Logos has actually entered the human condition.
John says σάρξ, not φύσις, and the distinction should be preserved. Yet the Johannine insistence upon flesh necessarily bears upon human nature because, if the Son has not genuinely become what we are, then what we are has not genuinely been assumed. A Christ who merely appears human may visit humanity, teach humanity, or even appear to suffer for humanity, but he cannot carry humanity itself to its appointed end. If human nature has not truly been assumed, it has not obeyed in him, suffered in him, died in him, risen in him, or been enthroned in him. The denial of Christ ἐν σαρκί severs humanity from the event in which its τέλος has appeared. The King must truly become Man because it is human nature that must be brought to the throne.
The resurrection prevents us from treating the incarnation as a temporary divine expedient. The Logos does not borrow a human body (because sacrifice requires one) and then discards humanity once the sacrificial work has been accomplished. The risen Jesus remains Man. Christian salvation cannot be described as a movement from flesh through death into escape from flesh; its movement runs from creation through incarnation, obedience, death, bodily resurrection, glorification, and enthronement. Human nature is not discarded but brought through death into glory. John’s statement that “what we shall be has not yet appeared,” followed immediately by the promise that “when he appears we shall be like him,” is therefore profoundly teleological (1 Jn 3:2). Humanity remains in a process of becoming, but the measure of that becoming has already appeared. What we shall be has not yet appeared fully in us because what we shall be has already appeared in Christ.
Irenaeus provides an important early witness to precisely this conjunction. He need not be made into a retroactive proof of Pauline intention; his significance lies in showing how early Christians confronting anti-incarnational teaching understood what was at stake. His doctrine of recapitulation insists that Christ assumes the same humanity that was lost in Adam. The humanity that disobeyed must become obedient; the image distorted in Adam must be restored; the human history that went awry must be taken up and faithfully traversed in Christ. Salvation cannot consist in replacing Adamic humanity with another kind of creature because Adam’s humanity is what God intends to save. Yet recapitulation is more than a return to the starting point. Christ does not merely restore mankind to an untouched Eden. Adam begins a vocation that he fails to complete; Christ takes Adamic humanity into himself, retraces its course in obedience, and carries it beyond Adam toward the glory and dominion for which it was created (AH 3.18.1–2; 3.21.10; 5.14.2; 5.16.3; cf. 4.38.1–3).
The anti-docetic and teleological claims belong together. If Christ does not possess our humanity, our humanity has not been recapitulated; if it has not been recapitulated, the human vocation has not reached its end. Irenaeus thus gives early theological expression to the same basic structure that emerges from Ephesians, Hebrews, and John: creation, incarnation, human completion, resurrection, and rule belong to one economy. The incarnation is not simply the means by which an otherwise divine drama becomes visible in human history. It is the assumption of human nature by the One who will carry that nature to the destination Adam failed to reach.
Seen from this vantage point, a certain contraction within later Protestant thought becomes easier to identify. The Reformation recovered indispensable truths concerning justification, grace, faith, and the sufficiency of Christ, and nothing in this argument requires diminishing those achievements. Yet Protestant theology has often allowed the forensic question to become the organizing question of Christian anthropology, so that salvation is habitually conceived from the problem of the guilty individual standing before the divine judge. The question is essential, but it begins after Genesis 1. Before man is guilty, man possesses a nature and a vocation; he is made in God’s image and commissioned to rule. The Fall produces not only guilt but the disordering of a creature whose existence was already directed toward an end. Redemption must answer both realities. The sinner must be reconciled to God, but the reconciled man must also be restored to the vocation for which reconciliation makes him fit.
The Heavenly City
Ephesians 4 supplies that larger horizon without weakening the forensic dimension of Paul’s gospel. The saints are equipped so that the new humanity constituted in Christ may grow toward the completed Man. That mature humanity appears, not as a collection of perfected private persons, but as an articulated body whose members have acquired the proper measure and relation necessary for common action. Because the Head from whom that action proceeds is the enthroned Christ, the political character of Christianity is not a secondary application of an essentially private salvation. Neither does recognizing this political character require collapsing the Church into the state. Both reductions mistake the level at which Paul’s argument operates. The Church is political at a level prior to the modern state because salvation itself constitutes a people and orders that people beneath a ruler toward a common end. The state does not confer political significance upon the body of Christ; the kingship of Christ does.
There is, at this point, a final classical resonance worth noticing, because Plato’s inquiry into justice arrives at a place surprisingly close to the questions Paul has forced upon us. The Republic investigates the just man through the just city because the two illuminate one another: justice in both consists in a proper ordering of the parts, with each performing the work appropriate to it beneath that which is fitted to rule. The resemblance to Paul’s differentiated body should not be exaggerated into dependence, but neither should it be ignored. Plato’s inquiry into the best regime ultimately produces something difficult to identify with an ordinary historical city. Near the end of Book 9, Socrates speaks of the true city as a παράδειγμα ἐν οὐρανῷ, “a pattern laid up in heaven,” available to the man who wishes to behold it and, beholding it, to order himself accordingly. The just city has become a transcendent measure of human order.
Christian revelation makes an extraordinary claim in relation to precisely this philosophical longing. The perfectly just Man is no longer merely the object of philosophical contemplation or the hypothetical citizen required by the argument about justice. He has appeared in history. Christ is the righteous Man in whom desire, reason, body, vocation, obedience, and rule are perfectly ordered toward the Good who is God, and because this perfectly just Man is also the enthroned King, the question of the just man and the question of the just polity converge in him. Plato can contemplate the paradigm of the rightly ordered city in heaven; Paul announces a heavenly commonwealth whose King has entered history in the flesh, completed the human vocation, returned to his throne, and now orders a people toward his own fullness.
Yet “heavenly commonwealth” must not be allowed to become a euphemism for an ephemeral spiritual realm because Paul’s political vocabulary points in precisely the opposite direction. When he writes in Philippians that ἡμῶν τὸ πολίτευμα ἐν οὐρανοῖς ὑπάρχει, “our politeuma is in heaven,” the term is often translated “citizenship” but is broader: it belongs to the language of civic order and political belonging. The commonwealth is a regime: an ordered political reality under rule, possessing a sovereign, a citizenship, and claims upon the allegiance and conduct of those who belong to it. Its location in heaven does not make it less real or less political; heaven identifies the seat of its government. The King whom Ephesians describes as enthroned above every earthly and heavenly power rules from there, while those joined to him are already described in the same letter as συμπολῖται τῶν ἁγίων, “fellow citizens with the saints.” Heaven is not an escape from earth but the throne from which earth is ruled.
Indeed, the preamble to the Great Commission prevents any easy opposition between a heavenly regime and an earthly vocation. The same Christ who possesses all authority ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, in heaven and upon earth, commands his people to go among the nations. The sovereignty is centered in heaven but explicitly claims the earth. The distinction between the location of the throne and the extent of the kingdom is therefore built into the commission itself. To call the Christian commonwealth heavenly is not to expel it from history; it is to identify the source from which its authority descends into history.
The language of ambassadorship follows naturally from this political ontology. Paul can describe himself and his fellow ministers as πρεσβεύομεν ὑπὲρ Χριστοῦ, “ambassadors for Christ,” because an ambassador belongs to a polity whose sovereign authority is centered elsewhere while remaining operative in the place to which he has been sent. The ambassador neither invents the policy of his king nor derives his authority from the jurisdiction in which he presently resides; his office consists precisely in representing another sovereign order within it. The Church’s heavenly citizenship, therefore, does not withdraw Christians from earthly political existence but gives them a prior allegiance and a governing measure by which earthly orders may be judged. Its commonwealth is heavenly in sovereign seat and earthly in extension: the King reigns from heaven while his body acts on earth.
In this qualified sense, the old language of a colony becomes useful. The point is not the extractive or dominating colonialism of modern empires, but the older political phenomenon by which the life, law, allegiance, and order of a mother polity are extended into another place by citizens who remain members of the originating commonwealth. The Church inhabits the nations as a people whose political identity is derived from the heavenly regime of Christ and whose earthly vocation is therefore neither political homelessness nor the construction of an autonomous sovereignty alongside his. Its task is to embody and extend within history the order of the King to whom it already belongs. The same ἐξ οὗ that governs the body in Ephesians 4 governs its political existence: its life and action proceed from the Head.
Seen from this angle, the Platonic and Pauline questions unexpectedly meet, although their answers remain decisively different. Plato asks what justice would look like if a man and a city were truly ordered according to the good, and he directs the philosophic man toward the paradigm of such a city laid up in heaven. Paul announces that the perfectly just Man has come from heaven, taken flesh, passed through death into resurrection, and been enthroned again. More remarkably still, he announces that this Man is forming a people whose citizenship is already located in the heavenly regime over which he rules. The Platonic paradigm can be contemplated and imitated. The Pauline King acts. He gives gifts, constitutes offices, equips saints, joins members, establishes measure, and, through the effective working of each part, brings his body toward maturity. The heavenly regime is therefore not merely the transcendent standard against which earthly disorder is exposed. It is an active sovereignty whose King has commissioned the discipling of the nations and whose order enters history through the mature action of his body.
Conclusion
We can therefore return to εἰς ἄνδρα τέλειον with a better sense of the scale of Paul’s claim. The phrase certainly includes the ordinary virtues of Christian maturity, but it cannot be contained within them. Paul is describing the destination of humanity itself. Classical teleology helps recover what modern ears easily miss: if the completed form of a thing discloses the nature toward which its development was ordered, then human nature cannot finally be interpreted from Adam in his failure, from fallen humanity in its present disorder, or from the autonomous individual abstracted from the ends for which he was created. Man must finally be read from Christ, for Christ is not merely the redeemer of human nature but the revelation of its completed form.
This is what gives the relationship between φύσις and τέλος its distinctly Christian transformation. The philosopher may reason from nature toward the end appropriate to it, asking what kind of creature man is and therefore what form of life constitutes his flourishing. Paul begins, as it were, from the opposite direction. The end has appeared. Christ is the true Image; he has fulfilled the human vocation, passed through death into resurrection, been crowned with glory and honor, and been seated above every rule and authority, with all things placed beneath his feet. Because the τέλος has appeared historically, the φύσις can now be understood in its light. Man is an image-bearing creature made for derivative rule, and the royal vocation given in Genesis is disclosed in its completed form in the enthroned Christ.
Yet the remarkable claim of Ephesians is that this completion does not terminate in Christ considered as an isolated individual. The Man who has reached the human end is given as Head to a body, and the many who belong to him are themselves being brought toward ἄνδρα τέλειον. Human completion is embodied and corporate because human nature was never ordered toward autonomous existence in the first place. The completed human being is a member of an ordered whole. Completed humanity is a body whose differentiation is preserved rather than erased, whose members act according to their proper measure, and whose common activity proceeds from the Head. The political character of this body follows from precisely this conjunction of differentiated membership, ordered action, common end, and rule.
John’s insistence upon ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο guards the point upon which this entire account depends. If the King has not truly become man, then human nature has not actually been taken up into the history that runs through obedience, suffering, death, resurrection, and enthronement. The denial of Christ ἐν σαρκί therefore threatens more than one proposition within Christology; it severs humanity from the very event in which its proper end has appeared. The force of the incarnation is that the τέλος of humanity has appeared, not outside human nature as an abstraction to be contemplated, but within it as the incarnate Son who completes the human vocation and draws his people into that completion.
Paul’s εἰς ἄνδρα τέλειον can thus be heard in its full register. Christ saves humanity by bringing it to completion—not by abolishing nature, but by carrying it to its end; not by delivering man from embodiment, but by raising embodied humanity into glory; not by perfecting isolated individuals in their autonomy, but by incorporating them into a body whose members become capable of coordinated action under their Head. The Adamic vocation to image God’s rule over creation is neither forgotten nor replaced. It is fulfilled in the Man beneath whose feet all things have been placed and extended through the body that grows into him.
The philosopher could reason from φύσις toward τέλος; the apostolic proclamation makes the more extraordinary claim that the τέλος has entered history and thereby revealed the meaning of the φύσις. The perfectly just Man whom philosophy could contemplate has appeared in the flesh, and the city laid up in heaven has become, in the apostolic proclamation, the regime of an enthroned King whose authority encompasses heaven and earth. In the incarnate, risen, and enthroned Christ, we therefore see both what man was created to be and the end toward which redeemed humanity is now being brought.
Ephesians 4:16 completes rather than merely follows the thought of ἄνδρα τέλειον. The completed Man is the whole body, joined and coordinated, each member acting according to its proper measure and receiving its life and activity from the Head. Its end is not maturity considered as an end in itself, nor even the perfection of the individual believer considered alone, but a humanity made capable of acting in and from Christ. Human nature reaches its maturity as the body of the King, a people whose commonwealth is the regime of heaven, whose commission extends to the nations of the earth, and whose coordinated earthly life makes visible the order of the sovereign to whom all authority in heaven and on earth has already been given. The King became Man so that man might finally become what he was created to be: the mature image of God, fitted together as one body and made capable of participating in the righteous rule of the perfectly just Man.
Ronald Dodson is CEO and Portfolio Manager of Dallas North Capital Partners, a private fund management firm. He also frequently writes on geopolitical developments and global risk. He has worked with the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. His interests include the Noahic Covenant gentile believers in the ancient world, continental theology and coaching soccer. He is a deacon in the PCA.