3. The message
Introduction to the letter
(Ephesians 1:1–2)
The letter to the Ephesians is a marvellously concise, yet comprehensive, summary of the Christian good news and its implications. Nobody can read it without being moved to wonder and worship, and challenged to consistency of life.
It was John Calvin’s favourite letter. Armitage Robinson called it ‘the crown of St Paul’s writings’. William Barclay quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s assessment of it as ‘the divinest composition of man’ and adds his own dictum that it is ‘the Queen of the epistles’.
Many readers have been brought to faith and stirred to good works by its message. One such was John Mackay, former President of Princeton Theological Seminary. ‘To this book I owe my life’, he wrote. He went on to explain how in July 1903 as a lad of fourteen he experienced through reading Ephesians a ‘boyish rapture in the Highland hills’ and made ‘a passionate protestation to Jesus Christ among the rocks in the starlight’. Here is his own account of what happened to him: ‘I saw a new world … Everything was new … I had a new outlook, new experiences, new attitudes to other people. I loved God. Jesus Christ became the centre of everything … I had been ‘quickened’; I was really alive.’
John Mackay never lost his fascination for Ephesians. So, when invited to deliver the Croall Lectures in Edinburgh University in January 1948, he chose Ephesians as his topic. He wanted to anticipate the formation of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam later the same year. The theme of its inaugural assembly (subsequently modified) was to have been ‘The order of God and the disorder of man’. So he entitled his lectures God’s Order. In them he referred to Ephesians as the ‘greatest’, the ‘maturest’ and ‘for our time the most relevant’ of all Paul’s works. For here is ‘the distilled essence of the Christian religion, the most authoritative and most consummate compendium of our holy Christian faith’. Again, ‘this letter is pure music … What we read here is truth that sings, doctrine set to music’. As the apostle proclaimed God’s order to the post-Augustan Roman era which was marked by ‘a process of social disintegration’, so Ephesians is today ‘the most contemporary book in the Bible’, since it promises community in a world of disunity, reconciliation in place of alienation and peace instead of war. Dr Mackay’s enthusiasm for the letter raises our expectation to a high point as we begin our study of it.
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
To the saints who are (at Ephesus and) also faithful in Christ Jesus.
2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.Three introductory matters confront us as we read these two opening verses of the letter. They concern its author, its recipients and its message.
1. The author
In keeping with the convention of his day the author begins by announcing himself. He identifies himself as the apostle Paul.
Now the Pauline authorship of Ephesians was universally accepted from the first century until the beginning of the nineteenth. Why is it, then, that German scholars from the 1820s onward began to question the letter’s authenticity, and that this scepticism about Paul’s authorship of Ephesians is widespread today? To quote only one example: ‘There are many grounds for thinking that it comes neither from his hand nor even from his lifetime.’
Most commentators draw attention to the letter’s distinctive vocabulary and style. They tot up the number of words in Ephesians which do not occur in Paul’s other letters, and the number of his favourite words which are not found in Ephesians. His style, they add, is far less impassioned than usual. Markus Barth, for instance, has written of the author’s ‘pleonastic, redundant, verbose diction’ and of his ‘baroque, bombastic or litany-like style’. But this is a largely subjective judgment. Besides, linguistic and stylistic arguments are notoriously precarious. Why should we expect such an original mind as Paul’s to stay within the confines of a limited vocabulary and an inflexible style? Different themes require different words, and changed circumstances create a changed atmosphere.
Two other and more substantial arguments are advanced, however, to cast doubt on the letter’s authenticity, the first historical and the second theological. The historical argument concerns a discrepancy between the Acts account of Paul’s longstanding and intimate acquaintance with the Ephesian church and the entirely impersonal and ‘hearsay’ relationship which the letter expresses. Although his first visit had been brief (Acts 18:19–21), his second lasted three years (Acts 19:1–20:1, 31). During this period he taught them systematically both ‘in public and from house to house’, they came to know him well, and at his final parting from the church elders their affection for him had been demonstrative, being accompanied by tears, hugs and kisses. It comes as quite a shock, therefore, to discover that the Ephesian letter contains no personal greetings such as conclude Paul’s other letters (no fewer than twenty-six people are mentioned by name in Romans 16). Instead, he addresses his readers only in generic terms, wishing peace to ‘the brethren’ and grace to ‘all who love our Lord Jesus Christ’ (6:23–24). He alludes to his own situation as a prisoner (3:1; 4:1; 6:20), but makes no allusion to theirs. He urges them to live in unity and sexual purity, but he gives no hint of any factions or of an immoral offender such as he mentions in 1 Corinthians. He refers in general terms to the craftiness of false teachers (4:14), but he identifies no particular heresy as in Galatians or Colossians. Moreover, he gives no indication that he and they know one another personally. On the contrary, he has only ‘heard’ of their faith and love, and they of his stewardship of the gospel (1:15; 3:2–4).
This impersonal character of the letter is certainly surprising. But there is no need to deduce from it that Paul was not its author. Other explanations are possible. Paul may have been addressing a group of Asian churches rather than just the Ephesian church, or, as Markus Barth suggests, ‘not the whole church in Ephesus but only the members of Gentile origin, people whom he did not know personally and who had been converted and baptized after his final departure from that city’.
The second argument which is raised against the Pauline authorship of Ephesians is theological. On this subject commentators make a wide variety of different points. It is emphasized, for example, that in Ephesians as distinct from the letters of unquestioned Pauline authorship, the role of Christ assumes a cosmic dimension, that the sphere of interest is ‘the heavenly places’ (a unique expression occurring five times) in which the principalities and powers operate, that the focus of concern is the church, that ‘justification’ is not mentioned, that ‘reconciliation’ is more between Jews and Gentiles than between the sinner and God, that salvation is portrayed not as dying with Christ but only as rising with him, and that there is no reference to our Lord’s second coming. None of these points is more than a comparatively minor shift of emphasis, however. And there can be no mistaking the letter’s essentially Pauline theology. Even those who deny its Pauline authorship are obliged to admit that it is ‘choc-a-bloc with echoes of the undoubted writing of Paul’.
In addition, there is the foreign ‘feel’ of the letter which some readers get. Nobody has expressed this more vividly than Markus Barth in his earlier study (1959) entitled The Broken Wall. He calls his first section ‘Paul’s puzzling Epistle’, and presents it as ‘a stranger at the door’. What is the ‘strangeness’ of Ephesians? He lists the doctrine of predestination, the emphasis on intellectual enlightenment, ‘superstition’ (by which he means the references to angels and demons), an ‘ecclesiasticism’ which divorces the church from the world, and in his teaching about home relationships a ‘moralism’ which he calls ‘patriarchal, authoritarian, petit bourgeois’ and lacking in originality, breadth, boldness and joy. This is how he sums up his initial impression of Ephesians: ‘This strange fellow resembles a fatherless and motherless foundling. He uses a tiresome baroque language. He builds upon determinism, suffers from intellectualism, combines faith in Christ with superstitious demonology, promotes a stiff ecclesiasticism, and ends with trite, shallow moralism.’
When I first read this evaluation, I wondered whether it was really Ephesians which Dr Barth was describing, so divergent was his reaction to the letter from mine. But as I read on, it became clear to me that he was not satisfied with his own judgment. First, he concedes that he may be guilty of a caricature, then he explains that he wanted to shock his readers into feeling what non-Christians feel when approached with a caricature of the gospel, and finally he redresses the balance by depicting ‘the charm of acquaintance’ which people experience who get to know Ephesians better. The letter endears itself and its author to us, he suggests, by three characteristics.
First, Ephesians is intercession. More than any other New Testament epistle, it ‘has the character and form of prayer’. When somebody argues with us, he may or may not persuade us; but when he prays for us, his relation to us changes. ‘So it is with the stranger at the door. Ephesians has gained a right to enter because its readers have a place in the intercession of the author.’
Secondly, Ephesians is affirmation. It is neither apologetics, nor polemics. Instead, it abounds in ‘bold’ and even ‘jubilant’ affirmations about God, Christ and the Holy Spirit. ‘Ephesians makes itself welcome and is a charming document just because it dares to let shine nothing else but God’s love and election, Christ’s death and resurrection, and the Spirit’s might and work among men.’
Thirdly, Ephesians is evangelism. In his survey of the letter’s contents Markus Barth emphasizes its ‘bold assertions’ about God’s saving purpose and action (chapters 1 and 2), about ‘God’s ongoing work in his self-manifestation to and through the church’ (chapters 3 and 4), and about ‘the bold and joyful ambassadorship of the Christians in the world’ (chapters 5 and 6). All this, he says, gives Ephesians ‘pecular significance for all concerned with the evangelistic tasks of the church today’.
What, then, is the state of play in scholarly circles regarding the authorship of Ephesians? Many sit on the fence. They would agree with J. H. Houlden that there is ‘no consensus of expert opinion’, for ‘argument answers argument without clear outcome’.
Others still deny that Paul was the author and propose elaborate alternative theories. Perhaps the most ingenious is that of the American scholar E. J. Goodspeed. He speculated that about the year AD 90 an ardent devotee of the apostle Paul, dismayed by the contemporary neglect of his hero’s letters, went the rounds of the churches he had visited in order to collect and later publish them. But before publication he saw the need for some kind of introduction. So he composed ‘Ephesians’ himself as a mosaic of materials drawn from all Paul’s letters, especially Colossians (which he had memorized), and attributed it to Paul in order to commend him to a later generation. E. J. Goodspeed went further and hazarded the guess that this author and publisher was none other than Onesimus, the converted slave, since somebody of that name was Bishop of Ephesus at the time. Although this reconstruction has gained some popularity in the United States and has been adopted in England by Dr Leslie Mitton, it is almost entirely speculative.
Other scholars are coming back to the traditional view. A. M. Hunter rightly says that ‘the burden of proof lies with those who deny Paul’s authorship’. Markus Barth uses the same expression and applies the maxim ‘innocent until proven guilty’. For myself, I find even these judgments too timid. They do not seem to give sufficient weight to either the external or the internal evidence. Externally, there is the impressive witness of the universal church for eighteen centuries, which is not to be lightly set aside. Internally, the letter not only purports to be written by the apostle Paul throughout, but its theme of the union of Jews and Gentiles by God’s gracious reconciling work through Christ is wholly appropriate to what we learn elsewhere about the apostle to the Gentiles. I do not think G. G. Findlay was exaggerating when he wrote that modern scepticism about the Pauline authorship of Ephesians will in future come to be regarded as ‘one of … the curiosities of a hypercritical age’. The absence of any satisfactory alternative is rightly emphasized by F. F. Bruce: ‘The man who could write Ephesians must have been the apostle’s equal, if not his superior, in mental stature and spiritual insight … Of such a second Paul early Christian history has no knowledge.’
After this brief survey of some modern viewpoints it is a relief to come back to the text: Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. Paul claims the same title which Jesus had given to the Twelve, and whose background in both Old Testament and Rabbinic Judaism designated somebody specially chosen, called and sent to teach with authority. For this ministry he had not volunteered, nor had the church appointed him. On the contrary, his apostleship derived from the will of God and from the choice and commission of Jesus Christ. If this be so, as I for one believe, then we must listen to the message of Ephesians with appropriate attention and humility. For we must regard its author neither as a private individual who is ventilating his personal opinions, nor as a gifted but fallible human teacher, nor even as the church’s greatest missionary hero, but as ‘an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God’, and therefore as a teacher whose authority is precisely the authority of Jesus Christ himself, in whose name and by whose inspiration he writes. As Charles Hodge expressed it in the middle of the last century, ‘The epistle reveals itself as the work of the Holy Ghost as clearly as the stars declare their maker to be God.’
2. The recipients
In the second part of verse 1 Paul uses several epithets to describe his readers.
First, they are the saints. He is not referring by this familiar word to some spiritual élite within the congregation, a minority of exceptionally holy Christians, but rather to all God’s people. They were called ‘saints’ (that is, ‘holy’) because they had been set apart to belong to him. The expression was first applied to Israel as the ‘holy nation’, but came to be extended to the whole international Christian community, which is the Israel of God.
Next, they are also faithful. The adjective pistos can have either an active meaning (‘trusting’, ‘having faith’) or a passive (‘trustworthy’, ‘being faithful’). RSV chooses the passive here, but the active seems better since God’s people are ‘the household of faith’, united by their common trust in God through Jesus Christ. At the same time, J. Armitage Robinson may be right in suggesting that ‘the two senses of pistis, “belief” and “fidelity”, appear to be blended’. Certainly, it is hard to imagine a believer who is not himself believable, or a trustworthy Christian who has not learned trustworthiness from him in whom he has put his trust.
Thirdly, Paul’s readers are in Christ Jesus. This key expression of the letter thus occurs in its very first verse. To be ‘in Christ’ is to be personally and vitally united to Christ, as branches are to the vine and members to the body, and thereby also to Christ’s people. For it is impossible to be part of the Body without being related to both the Head and the members. Much of what the epistle later develops is already here in bud. According to the New Testament—and especially Paul—to be a Christian is in essence to be ‘in Christ’, one with him and with his people.
Fourthly, some manuscripts add that Paul’s readers are at Ephesus. Originally a Greek colony, Ephesus was now the capital of the Roman province of Asia and a busy commercial port (long since silted up). It was also the headquarters of the cult of the goddess. Diana (or Artemis) whose temple, after being destroyed in the middle of the fourth century BC, had gradually been rebuilt to become one of the seven wonders of the world. Indeed, the success of Paul’s mission in Ephesus had so threatened the sale of silver models of her temple that the silversmiths had stirred up a public outcry.
Paul’s description of his readers is thus comprehensive. They are ‘saints’ because they belong to God; they are ‘believers’ because they have trusted to Christ; and they have two homes, for they reside equally ‘in Christ’ and ‘in Ephesus’. Indeed all Christian people are saints and believers, and live both in Christ and in the secular world, or ‘in the heavenlies’ and on earth. Many of our spiritual troubles arise from our failure to remember that we are citizens of two kingdoms. We tend either to pursue Christ and withdraw from the world, or to become preoccupied with the world and forget that we are also in Christ.
The words ‘at Ephesus’ are not to be found, however, in the earliest Pauline papyrus (Chester Beatty 46) which dates from the second century. Origen in the third century did not know them, and they are absent from the great fourth-century Vatican and Sinaitic codices. The matter is further complicated by the fact that Marcion in the middle of the second century referred to Ephesians as having been addressed ‘to the Laodiceans’. Since Paul himself directed the Colossians both to see that his letter to them be read ‘in the church of the Laodiceans’ and that they themselves ‘read also the letter from Laodicea’, some have thought that this so-called ‘letter from Laodicea’ was in fact our ‘Ephesians’, and that he was instructing the churches to exchange the two letters which they had received from him. Certainly Tychicus was the bearer of the two letters.
How then can we reconstruct the situation which led to these variants, some copies having ‘in Ephesus’, others having no designation and one referring to Laodicea? Near the beginning of this century Adolf Harnack suggested that the letter was originally addressed to the church in Laodicea, but that because of that church’s lukewarmness and consequent disgrace, the name of Laodicea was erased and that of Ephesus substituted.
An alternative explanation was proposed by Beza at the end of the sixteenth century and popularized by Archbishop Ussher in the seventeenth, namely that Ephesians was originally a kind of apostolic encyclical or circular letter intended for several Asian churches, that a blank space was left in the first verse for each church to fill in its own name, and that the name of Ephesus became attached to the letter because it was the principal Asian city.
Somewhat similarly, Charles Hodge thought that perhaps the letter was ‘written to the Ephesians and addressed to them, but being intended specially for the Gentile Christians as a class, rather than for the Ephesians as a church, it was designedly thrown into such a form as to suit it to all such Christians in the neighbouring churches, to whom no doubt the apostle wished it to be communicated.’
Such a more general readership would explain not only the variants in the first verse but also the absence from the letter of all particular allusions and personal greetings.
All the same, the circular letter theory is entirely speculative. No manuscript carries an alternative destination. And Colossians, which Paul says he intended for another church as well (Col. 4:16), nevertheless includes some personal greetings. So the mystery remains unsolved.
3. The message
The letter focuses on what God did through the historical work of Jesus Christ and does through his Spirit today, in order to build his new society in the midst of the old.
It tells how Jesus Christ shed his blood in a sacrificial death for sin, was then raised from death by the power of God and has been exalted above all competitors to the supreme place in both the universe and the church. More than that, we who are ‘in Christ’, organically united to him by faith, have ourselves shared in these great events. We have been raised from spiritual death, exalted to heaven and seated with him there. We have also been reconciled to God and to each other. As a result, through Christ and in Christ, we are nothing less than God’s new society, the single new humanity which he is creating and which includes Jews and Gentiles on equal terms. We are the family of God the Father, the body of Jesus Christ his Son and the temple or dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.
Therefore we are to demonstrate plainly and visibly by our new life the reality of this new thing which God has done: first by the unity and diversity of our common life, secondly by the purity and love of our everyday behaviour, next by the mutual submissiveness and care of our relationships at home, and lastly by our stability in the fight against the principalities and powers of evil. Then in the fullness of time God’s purpose of unification will be brought to completion under the headship of Jesus Christ.
With this theme in mind, we may perhaps analyse the letter as follows:
The whole letter is thus a magnificent combination of Christian doctrine and Christian duty, Christian faith and Christian life, what God has done through Christ and what we must be and do in consequence. And its central theme is ‘God’s new society’—what it is, how it came into being through Christ, how its origins and nature were revealed to Paul, how it grows through proclamation, how we are to live lives worthy of it, and how one day it will be consummated when Christ presents his bride the church to himself in splendour, ‘without spot or wrinkle or any such thing … holy and without blemish’ (5:27).
The contemporary relevance of this message is obvious. Karl Marx also wrote of ‘the new man’ and ‘the new society’. And millions of people have caught his vision and are dedicating themselves to its realization. But Marx saw the human problem and its solution in almost exclusively economic terms. The ‘new society’ was the classless society which would follow the revolution, and the ‘new man’ would emerge as a result of his economic liberation.
Paul presents a greater vision still. For he sees the human predicament as something even deeper than the injustice of the economic structure and so propounds a yet more radical solution. He writes of nothing less than a ‘new creation’. Three times he uses creation language. Through Jesus Christ God is recreating men and women ‘for good works’, creating a single new humanity in place of the disastrous Jewish-Gentile division, and recreating us in his own image ‘in true righteousness and holiness’. Thus according to Paul’s teaching the new man and the new society are God’s creative work. Economic restructuring has great importance, but it cannot produce these things. They are beyond the capacity of human power and ingenuity. They depend on the fiat of the divine Creator.
This message of the church as God’s new creation and new community is of particular importance for those of us who call ourselves or are called ‘evangelical’ Christians. For by temperament and tradition we tend to be rugged individualists, and are thought to care little about the church. Indeed, the expressions ‘evangelical’ and ‘low church’ are generally supposed to be synonymous. Yet they should not be. The true evangelical, who derives his theology from the Bible, will be bound to have the very ‘high’ view of the church which the Bible has. Today more than ever we need to catch the biblical vision of the church. In the West the church is in decline, and urgently needs to be renewed. But what form of renewal do we desire? In the communist world the church is always stripped of privilege, often persecuted and sometimes driven underground. Such situations prompt the basic question: what is the church’s essential being, without which it would cease to be the church? Then in several regions of the third world the church is growing rapidly, and in some places its growth rate is faster even than the population growth rate. But what kind of churches are coming into being and growing? Thus in all three worlds—the free world, the communist world and the third world—we need to be asking radical questions about the church. And Ephesians will supply us with answers. For here is Christ’s own specification of his church, the church for which once he ‘gave himself up’ (5:25), the church ‘which is his body’, and even his ‘fullness’ (1:23).
Much of the message of Ephesians is adumbrated in the apostle’s opening salutation: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (verse 2). True, this was the customary greeting with which he began all his letters, a Christianized form of the contemporary Hebrew and Greek greetings. Yet we may safely say that nothing from Paul’s pen was ever purely conventional. On the contrary, both these nouns are particularly appropriate at the beginning of Ephesians—‘grace’ indicating God’s free, saving initiative, and ‘peace’ what he has taken the initiative to do, namely to reconcile sinners to himself and to each other in his new community.
‘Grace’ and ‘peace’, then, are key words of Ephesians. In 6:15 the good news is termed ‘the gospel of peace’. In 2:14 it is written that Jesus Christ himself ‘is our peace’, for first he ‘made peace’ by his cross (verse 15) and then he ‘came and preached peace’ to Jews and Gentiles alike (verse 17). Hence his people are to be ‘eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ (4:3). ‘Grace’, on the other hand, indicates both why and how God has taken his reconciling initiative. For ‘grace’ is his free and undeserved mercy. It is ‘by grace’ that we are saved, indeed by ‘the immeasurable riches of his grace’ (2:5, 7, 8), and it is by the same grace that we are gifted for service (4:7; cf. 3:2, 7). So if we want a concise summary of the good news which the whole letter announces, we could not find a better one than the three monosyllables ‘peace through grace’.
Finally, before leaving the introduction to the letter, we must not miss the vital link between the author, the readers and the message. It is the Lord Jesus Christ himself. For Paul the author is ‘an apostle of Christ Jesus’, the readers are themselves in Christ Jesus, and the blessing comes to them both from God our Father and from … the Lord Jesus Christ, who are bracketed as the single spring from which grace and peace flow forth. Thus the Lord Jesus Christ dominates Paul’s mind and fills his vision. It seems almost as if he feels compelled to bring Jesus Christ into every sentence he writes, at least at the beginning of this letter. For it is through and in Jesus Christ that God’s new society has come into being.