Relational identity and resurrection

According to the account of Raymond Martin and John Barresi in their recent book on the rise and fall of the soul and self, several of the church fathers answered the dilemma raised by personal continuity through death and resurrection by proposing a relational view of identity: “What that means, in the case of the resurrection, is that what ensures personal persistence is not the persistence of an underlying substance but the way in which the body that decomposes and the resurrected body are related to each other. In a full-blown relational account, what ensures the persistence of one’s self, or at least of one’s body, from moment to moment, day to day, and so on, even during one’s earthly life, is the way in which one’s constantly changing body is related to earlier and later stages of itself.” This might equally be considered a narrative account of personal identity.

The resurrection forced this kind of account on Christian thinkers, even Christians with strong dualistic inclinations. Plato didn’t have to worry about it: He could rely on the persistence of an immortal soul, which wouldn’t need a body after death. Because Christians affirmed that even martyrs eaten by wild animals would be raised in “the same” body, they confronted a problem of personal identity that Plato never dreamed of. Martin and Barresi suggest that these early Christian “theories directly anticipated relational accounts of personal identity that would later come to center stage in the eighteenth century.”