13. Conclusion (6:21–24)
IV. New relationships
(Ephesians 5:21–6:24)
10. Husbands and Wives (5:21–33)
Paul has been outlining the new standards which God expects of his new society, the church, especially in terms of its unity and purity. These two qualities are indispensable to a life which is both worthy of the calling and fitting to the status of the people of God. He moves on now to the new relationships in which God’s new people inevitably find themselves, and in so doing he concentrates in the rest of his letter on two further dimensions of Christian living.
The first concerns the practical, down-to-earth relationships of the home. For the divine family ceases to be a credible concept if it is not itself subdivided into human families which display God’s love. What is the point of peace in the church if there is no peace in the home? The second dimension concerns the enemy we face and therefore the equipment we need in our unremitting spiritual warfare.
These two responsibilities (home and work on the one hand, and spiritual combat on the other) are quite different from each other. Husband and wife, parents and children, masters and servants are visible, tangible human beings, while the ‘principalities and powers’ arrayed against us are invisible, intangible demonic beings. Nevertheless, if our Christian faith is to be of any practical value, it must be able to cope with both situations. It must teach us how to behave Christianly at home and at work, and it must enable us to fight against evil in such a way that we stand and do not fall. Thus harmony in the home and stability in the fight are the two final topics which the apostle handles.
Husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants were to be found in the earliest Christian congregations. Moreover, these three pairs of relationship are basic to all human existence. Markus Barth expresses this well by suggesting that in the first we see the human person as ‘a sexual being (before Dr Freud or Dr Kinsey had put their fingers on this fact)’, in the second as ‘a temporal being (tied to the generation to which he belongs)’ and in the third as ‘a material being and part of an economic structure’, Paul thus anticipating Marx. ‘So this is man: a sexual, temporal and material being who, without exception, is enmeshed and, as it seems, hopelessly trapped in the structures of these three dimensions.’
Detailed, practical instruction on Christian family life and on Christian responsibility in what nowadays we call ‘employment’ seems to have been given by the apostles from the beginning. Examples occur in the letters of both Paul and Peter. There is an urgent need in our day for similar plain moral education. Too much so-called ‘holiness teaching’ emphasizes a personal relationship to Jesus Christ without any attempt to indicate its consequences in terms of relationships with the people we live and work with. In contrast to such holiness-in-a-vacuum, which magnifies experiences and minimizes ethics, the apostles spelled out Christian duty in the concrete situations of everyday life and work.
Luther in his Catechism seems to have been the first person to refer to these lists as Haustafeln, meaning literally ‘house tables’ but often translated ‘tables of household duties’. In recent years scholars have compared them with similar precepts both in the Jewish halakah (their corpus of law and tradition) and in Gentile literature, especially of the Stoics. That Jews, Stoics and Christians should all have been concerned about moral behaviour in the home should not surprise us. But the similarity between their Haustafeln has sometimes been exaggerated. If the apostles of Jesus were conscious of taking over any material from Jewish or Gentile sources, they thoroughly Christianized what they borrowed. There is no better example of this than Paul’s address to husbands and wives in Ephesians, which is based upon a developed doctrine of Christ and his church.
1. Authority and submission
The RSV may be right to begin the new paragraph with verse 21: Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. We have seen that the Greek verb is a present participle (‘submitting’) like ‘addressing one another’, ‘singing and making melody’ (verse 19) and ‘giving thanks’ (verse 20), and that all four participles depend on the command ‘be filled with the Spirit’ (verse 18) and describe the consequences of the Holy Spirit’s fullness. Nevertheless, a Greek participle was sometimes used as an imperative, and undoubtedly the demand for mutual submissiveness leads on to the submission asked from wives, children and slaves. Moreover, there is no verb at all in verse 22, because the call for submission in verse 21 is intended to be carried over into it. So verse 21 is in fact a transition verse, forming a bridge between two sections, which is why the NEB puts it in a paragraph by itself.
What is beyond question is that the three paragraphs which follow are given as examples of Christian submission, and that the emphasis throughout is on submission. Thus, wives are addressed before their husbands and are told to be subject to them (verse 22); children are mentioned before their parents and are told to obey them (6:1); and slaves are addressed before their masters and are told to be obedient to them (6:5).
Now the very notion of submission to authority is out of fashion today. It is totally at variance with contemporary attitudes of permissiveness and freedom. Almost nothing is calculated to arouse more angry protest than talk of ‘subjection’. Ours is an age of liberation (not least for women, children and workers), and anything savouring of oppression is deeply resented and strongly resisted. How are Christians to react to this modern mood?
Our initial reaction to these liberation movements, I do not hesitate to say (although I shall qualify it later), should be one of positive welcome. For we have to agree that women in many cultures have been exploited, being treated like servants in their own home; that children have often been suppressed and squashed, not least in Victorian England in which they were supposed to be ‘seen and not heard’; and that workers have been unjustly treated, being given inadequate wages and working conditions, and an insufficient share in responsible decision-making, not to mention the appalling injustices and barbarities of slavery and the slave trade.
We who name Christ’s name need to acknowledge with shame that we ourselves have often acquiesced in the status quo and so helped to perpetuate some forms of human oppression, instead of being in the vanguard of those seeking social change. Nothing in the paragraphs we are about to study is inconsistent with the true liberation of human beings from all humiliation, exploitation and oppression. On the contrary, to whom do women, children and workers chiefly owe their liberation? Is it not to Jesus Christ? It is Jesus Christ who treated women with courtesy and honour in an age in which they were despised. It is Jesus Christ who said ‘Let the children come to me’ in a period of history in which unwanted babies were consigned to the local rubbish dump (as they are today to the hospital incinerator), or abandoned in the forum for anybody to pick up and rear for slavery or prostitution. And it is Jesus Christ who taught the dignity of manual labour by working himself as a carpenter, washing his disciples’ feet and saying, ‘I am among you as one who serves.’
So then, we must not interpret what Paul writes to wives, children and servants in his Haustafeln about submission in a way which contradicts these fundamental attitudes of Jesus. Nor should we make Paul contradict himself, as some writers do, for to do this in biblical exegesis is a counsel of despair. No, we must set the Haustafeln squarely within the framework of the Ephesian letter, in which Paul has been describing the single new humanity which God is creating through Christ. He has been emphasizing the complete oneness in Christ of people of all cultures, especially Jew and Gentile, while in his parallel letter to the Colossians he has added slave and free man (3:11) and in an earlier letter male and female (Gal. 3:28). We may be quite sure that in his Haustafeln he does not now destroy his own thesis by erecting new barriers of sex, age and rank in God’s new society in which they have been abolished. We must give the apostle credit for a little consistency of thought and allow him to explain himself.
In the light of the teaching of Jesus and his apostles, we may confidently and repeatedly affirm at least three relevant truths: first, the dignity of womanhood, childhood and servanthood; secondly, the equality before God of all human beings, irrespective of their race, rank, class, culture, sex or age, because all are made in his image; and the even deeper unity of all Christian believers, as fellow-members of God’s family and of Christ’s body. It is only when these truths are firmly kept in the forefront of our minds that we are ready to consider the teaching of the Haustafeln.
Negatively, the submission which Paul enjoins on wives, children and servants is not another word for inferiority. Positively it is important to grasp the difference which Luther and his followers rightly make between persons on the one hand and their roles on the other. Here is one of Luther’s expositions of this theme: ‘I have often said that we must sharply distinguish between these two, the office and the person. The man who is called Hans or Martin is a man quite different from the one who is called elector or doctor or preacher. Here we have two different persons in one man. The one is that in which we are created and born, according to which we are all alike—man or woman or child, young or old. But once we are born, God adorns and dresses you up as another person. He makes you a child and me a father, one a master and another a servant, one a prince and another a citizen.’
Once we see this distinction, then those who hold an office—whether rulers, magistrates, husbands, parents or employers—have a certain God-given authority which they expect others to acknowledge. Husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants have equal dignity as God-like beings, but different God-appointed roles. As J. H. Yoder succinctly puts it, ‘Equality of worth is not identity of role’. The husband, the parent and the master have been invested with an authority to which others should submit.
Two questions immediately arise about this authority: Where does it come from? And how is it to be used?
In answer to the first question we reply that it comes from God. The God of the Bible is a God of order, and in his ordering of human life (e.g. in the state and the family) he has established certain authority or leadership roles. And since such authority, though exercised by human beings, is delegated to them by God, others are required conscientiously to submit to it. The Greek words imply this, for at the heart of hypotassomai (‘submit’) is taxis (‘order’). Submission is a humble recognition of the divine ordering of society. This is plainly taught in Paul’s Haustafeln. He tells wives to be submissive to their husbands as to the Lord (verse 22), children to obey their parents in the Lord (6:1), and slaves to be obedient to their earthly masters as to Christ (6:5). That is, behind the husband, the parent and the master they must discern the Lord himself who has given them their authority. Then, if they wish to submit to him, they will submit to them, since it is his authority which they exercise. The same is true of the mutual submission expected of all Christian people. It is out of reverence for Christ that we are to submit to one another, the Christ who both wields authority as Lord and humbled himself as servant.
We have to be very careful not to overstate this biblical teaching on authority. It does not mean that the authority of husbands, parents and masters is unlimited, or that wives, children and workers are required to give unconditional obedience. No, the submission required is to God’s authority delegated to human beings. If, therefore, they misuse their God-given authority (e.g. by commanding what God forbids or forbidding what God commands), then our duty is no longer conscientiously to submit, but conscientiously to refuse to do so. For to submit in such circumstances would be to disobey God. The principle is clear: we must submit right up to the point where obedience to human authority would involve disobedience to God. At that point ‘civil disobedience’ becomes our Christian duty. In order to submit to God, we have to refuse to submit to human beings. As Peter put it to the Sanhedrin: ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ This is the exception, however. The general rule on which the New Testament insists is humble submission to God-given authority.
To the second question about the use of divinely delegated authority, we reply that it must never be used selfishly, but always for those others for whose benefit it has been given. Perhaps the most striking feature of the Haustafeln is that in each pair of relationships reciprocal duties are laid down. It is true that wives are to submit to their husbands, children to their parents and slaves to their masters, and that this requirement of submission (hypotagē) presupposes an authority (exousia) in the husbands, parents and masters. Indeed, these two Greek words complement each other. Yet the word exousia is not used once in the passage. When Paul is describing the duties of husbands, parents and masters, in no case is it authority which he tells them to exercise. On the contrary, explicity or implicitly, he warns them against the improper use of their authority, forbids them to exploit their position, and urges them instead to remember their responsibilities and the other party’s rights. Thus, husbands are to love their wives and care for them, parents are not to provoke their children but bring them up sensitively, and masters are not to threaten their slaves, but treat them with justice.
It has seemed necessary, before coming to the actual text of the Haustafeln, to open up in a general way this topic of submission to authority. To sum up, ‘authority’ in biblical usage is not a synonym for ‘tyranny’. All those who occupy positions of authority in society are responsible both to the God who has entrusted it to them and to the person or persons for whose benefit they have been given it. In a word, the biblical concept of authority spells not tyranny but responsibility.
The first responsibilities which Paul elaborates are those of husbands and wives. The essence of his teaching is clear. Wives are to ‘submit’, and husbands are to ‘love’.
Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Saviour. 24 As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ 32 This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church; 33 however, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
2. The duty of wives (verses 22–24)
Two reasons are given, or at least implied, for the wife’s submission to her husband. The first is drawn from creation and concerns the husband’s ‘headship’ of his wife, while the second is drawn from redemption and concerns Christ’s ‘headship’ of the church.
Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife … (verses 22–23a). The husband’s headship is both stated as a fact and made the ground of his wife’s submission. But its origin is not elaborated here. For a fuller understanding of Paul’s argument we need to turn elsewhere, especially to 1 Corinthians 11:3–12 and 1 Timothy 2:11–13. In both these passages he goes back to the narrative of Genesis 2 and points out that woman was made after man, out of man and for man. He adds that man is also born from woman, so that man and woman are dependent on one another. Nevertheless, his emphasis is on the order, mode and purpose of the creation of Eve. And since it is mainly on these facts of creation that Paul bases his case for the husband’s headship, his argument has permanent and universal validity, and is not to be dismissed as culturally limited. The cultural elements of his teaching are to be found in the applications of the principle, in the requirement of ‘veiling’ certainly, and I think also in the requirement of ‘silence’. But the man’s (and especially the husband’s) ‘headship’ is not a cultural application of a principle; it is the foundation principle itself. This is not chauvinism, but creationism. The new creation in Christ frees us from the distortion of relations between the sexes caused by the fall (e.g. Gn. 3:16), but it establishes the original intention of the creation. It was to this ‘beginning’ that Jesus himself went back (e.g. Mt. 19:4–6). He confirmed the teaching of Genesis 1 and 2. So must we. What creation has established, no culture is able to destroy.
This is also why we should reject the facile argument that since slavery has been abolished, the wife’s submission should by analogy be abolished too. If this were the case, then why not complete the trio and abolish a child’s obedience as well? No, the parallels are inexact. Slavery is a dehumanizing institution, with no justification in any biblical doctrine. A husband’s headship, however, is rooted in creation.
Turning from biblical revelation to contemporary experience, Christians will agree that our human sexuality is part and parcel of our humanness. Masculinity and feminity represent a profound distinction which is psychological as well as physiological. Of course the sexes are equal before God, but this does not mean that they are identical. God himself created man male and female in his likeness. So both equally bear his image, but each also complements the other. The biblical perspective is to hold simultaneously the equality and the complementarity of the sexes. ‘Partnership’ is a good word too, so long as it is remembered that the contribution which each brings to it is not identical but distinctive. Hence a man finds himself by being a man, and a woman finds herself by being a woman. Genuine self-discovery and self-fulfilment do not come from striving to be somebody else or from imitating the opposite sex.
What then are the complementary distinctives of the two sexes? The biblical teaching is that God has given to man (and specially to the husband in the marriage relationship) a certain headship, and that his wife will find herself and her true God-given role not in rebellion against him or his headship, but in a voluntary and joyful submission.
The modern understanding of sexual differentiation tends to confirm this biblical teaching. This at least is the thesis of the American sociologist Professor Steven Goldberg in his book The Inevitability of Patriarchy. Although it is a conscious response to the feminist movement, he claims that his approach is scientific and not ideological, in that he rests his case on empirical evidence. Nor is his viewpoint to be dismissed as masculine, for the distinguished American anthropologist Dr Margaret Mead is quoted on the book’s dust cover as supporting its thesis: ‘All the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed.’
The first part of his book is an anthropological study whose conclusion he expresses as follows: ‘In every society that has ever existed one finds patriarchy (males fill the overwhelming percentage of upper hierarchical positions in political and all other heirarchies), male attainment (males attain the high-status roles, whatever these may be in any given society) and male dominance (both males and females feel that dominance in male-female encounters and relationships resides in the male, and social expectations and authority systems reflect this).’ He is at pains to point out that he is neither making any value judgments, nor measuring performance, nor pronouncing either sex ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ to the other; his purpose is simply to show that ‘patriarchy’, ‘male dominance’ and ‘male attainment’—in the technical sense in which he employs these terms—are ‘three universal realities’, since ‘in no society, anywhere or at any time, have these realities been absent’.
For the development of his second thesis Dr Goldberg moves from anthropology to physiology. He argues that the anthropological evidence for male dominance which he has marshalled has a physiological cause. The ‘three universal realities’ are the manifestation in society of a basic male drive (often called ‘aggression’, though Dr Goldberg prefers ‘dominance tendency’), which is itself ‘neuro-endocrinological’ in origin. ‘At its most basic, the hypothesis at the core of the theory presented here simply states that there are neuro-endocrinological differences between men and women that engender different male and female responses to the environment and, therefore, different male and female behaviour’. He is not denying that our genetic code interacts with our environment and upbringing, nor that there are individual exceptions to his generalization, nor that many women are frustrated because they lack opportunities to use their gifts. Instead, he is asserting that there are basic differences between masculinity and feminity, that masculinity means drive for dominance, and that ‘dominance tendency is primarily a result of hormonal development and not primarily of anatomy, gender identity or the socialization that reflects anatomy and gender identity’.
A Christian who reads Professor Goldberg’s thesis wants to state it theologically in terms of creation. God has made and makes men and women different, and one of their basic differences lies in the ‘headship’ which he has given to man. This may well have a genetic basis. If so, man’s natural ‘drive’ needs to be controlled if his ‘headship’ is to be constructive. For ‘patriarchy’ sounds paternalistic and ‘male dominance’ oppressive. Even the biblical word ‘submission’ is often expounded as if it were a synonym for ‘subjection’, ‘subordination’ and even ‘subjugation’. All these words have emotive associations. ‘Submission’ is no exception. We have to try to disinfect it of these and to penetrate into its essential biblical meaning. This we shall discover neither from its modern associations nor even from its etymology but primarily from the way it is used in its context in Ephesians 5.
There is little doubt what ‘submission’ meant in the ancient world in which disdain for women was almost universal. William Barclay sums it up: ‘The Jews had a low view of women. In the Jewish form of morning prayer there was a sentence in which a Jewish man every morning gave thanks that God had not made him “a Gentile, a slave or a woman” … In Jewish law a woman was not a person, but a thing. She had no legal rights whatsoever; she was absolutely in her husband’s possession to do with as he willed … The position was worse in the Greek world … The whole Greek way of life made companionship between man and wife next to impossible. The Greek expected his wife to run his home, to care for his legitimate children, but he found his pleasure and his companionship elsewhere … In Greece, home and family life were near to being extinct, and fidelity was completely non-existent … In Rome in Paul’s day the matter was still worse … The degeneracy of Rome was tragic … It is not too much to say that the whole atmosphere of the ancient world was adulterous … The marriage bond was on the way to complete breakdown.’ Charles Seltman confirms this. In the Roman Empire, he writes, ‘A girl was completely under her father’s, a wife completely under her husband’s, power. She was his chattel … Her life was one of legal incapacity which amounted to enslavement, while her status was described as ‘imbecilitas’, whence our word.’ True, this was not the whole picture. Markus Barth tries to redeem the balance: ‘There was also a counter-movement which promoted equal rights for females’, while ‘different periods and different geographical areas produced differing views’. As for Ephesus and its environment, ‘The cult of the Great Mother and the Artemis Temple stamped this city more than others as a bastion and bulwark of women’s rights.’ Nevertheless, the oppression of women prevailed in the ancient world, and their emancipation had scarcely begun. It is against this dark background that Paul’s teaching shines with such a bright light. Yet we still have to ask precisely what is meant by ‘headship’ and ‘submission’.
To begin with, these words do not by themselves establish stereotypes of masculine and feminine behaviour. Different cultures assign different tasks to men and women, husbands and wives. In the West, for example, it has long been conventional for the wife to do the shopping, cooking and cleaning, together with the feeding, bathing, nappy-changing and minding of babies. In many parts of Africa and Asia the women also work in the fields and carry heavy loads on their heads. Nowadays, however, and rightly, these conventions are recognized as cultural and are therefore being challenged and in some cases changed. Many couples are learning to share the household chores.
In order to understand the nature of the husband’s headship in the new society which God has inaugurated, we need to look at Jesus Christ. For Jesus Christ is the context in which Paul uses and develops the words ‘headship’ and ‘submission’. Although he grounds the fact of the husband’s headship in creation, he defines it in relation to the headship of Christ the redeemer: for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Saviour (verse 23). Now Christ’s headship of his church has already been described in 4:15–16. It is from Christ as head that the body derives its health and grows into maturity. His headship expresses care rather than control, responsibility rather than rule. This truth is endorsed by the surprising addition of the words and is himself its Saviour. The head of the body is the saviour of the body; the characteristic of his headship is not so much lordship as saviourhood.
If the husband’s headship of the wife resembles Christ’s of his church, then the wife’s submission will resemble the church’s: As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands (verse 24). There is nothing demeaning about this, for her submission is not to be an unthinking obedience to his rule but rather a grateful acceptance of his care. To quote Markus Barth again: ‘The submission to, and respect for the husband, to which the wife is specifically admonished … is by no means the submissiveness of a pussycat or a crouching dog … Paul … is thinking of a, voluntary, free, joyful and thankful partnership, as the analogy of the relationship of the church to Christ shows.’ Whenever the husband’s headship mirrors the headship of Christ, then the wife’s submission to the protection and provision of his love, far from detracting from her womanhood, will positively enrich it.
3. The duty of husbands (verses 25–33)
If the word which characterizes the wife’s duty is ‘submit’, the word characterizing the husband’s is ‘love’. We might think that nature itself would teach husbands this priority obligation, but many cultures both ancient and modern prove the contrary. Of course a certain tie of affection and desire binds every married couple together, and Paul’s Stoic contemporaries taught husbands to ‘love’. But the verb they used was the weak word phileō; it was Christian teaching which introduced strong, sacrificial ‘agapē-love’ into marriage. Paul uses two analogies to illustrate the tender care which a husband’s love for his wife should involve.
The first is that the husband must love his wife as Christ has loved his church. Already in the Old Testament the gracious covenant which God made with his people Israel was many times referred to as a marriage covenant. Jesus took over this teaching and boldly referred to himself as the Bridegroom. Paul enlarges on the image here and in 2 Corinthians 11:1–3, while in the Revelation we are permitted glimpses of the glorified church ‘prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’ and of the coming ‘marriage supper of the Lamb’.
What stands out in Paul’s development of the theme is the sacrificial steadfastness of the heavenly Bridegroom’s covenant-love for his bride. It is this which husbands are to imitate: Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her.
It will be observed that Paul uses five verbs to indicate the unfolding stages of Christ’s commitment to his bride, the church. He loved her, gave himself up for her, to sanctify her, having cleansed her, that he might present her to himself. The statement is so complete and comprehensive that some scholars think it may be a quotation from an early Christian confession, liturgy or hymn. It seems to trace Christ’s care for his church from a past to a future eternity. Certainly the words Christ loved the church, preceding as they do his self-sacrifice on her behalf, seem to look back to his eternal pre-existence in which he set his love on his people and determined to come to save them. So, having loved the church, he gave himself up for her. The reference is, of course, primarily to the cross.
But why did Jesus Christ do it? What was the purpose of his sacrifice? It was that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her. Perhaps there is a deliberate allusion to the bridal bath which took place before both Jewish and Greek weddings. The tenses of the verbs suggest that the cleansing of the church precedes her consecration or sanctification. Indeed, the cleansing seems to refer to the initial purification or cleansing from sin and guilt which we receive when we first repent and believe in Jesus. It is accomplished by the washing of water with the word, or more simply ‘by water and word’ (NEB). The ‘washing of water’ is an unambiguous reference to baptism, while the additional reference to ‘the word’ indicates that baptism is no magical or mechanical ceremony, but needs an explanatory word to define its significance, express the promises of cleansing and new life in the Spirit which it symbolizes, and arouse our faith. True, some think ‘the word’ alludes to the candidate’s confession of faith or appeal for a clear conscience, rather than to the minister’s preaching of the gospel or formula of administration. But it seems more natural to take ‘water’ and ‘word’ together as being both administered to the candidate. So when Calvin reached this verse in his expository series, he urged care ‘that we do not separate the sacraments from the Word at any time’, for ‘to have the sign without the promise added to it is but a frustratory and unprofitable thing’. Markus Barth rather delightfully argues that in the context the word of promise can be no other than ‘I love you’. He goes on: ‘The Messiah as the Bridegroom … says this decisive “word” to his Bride and thereby privately and publicly, decently and legally binds himself to her and her to him.’ It is a solemn word of covenant love.
Having cleansed his bride by water and word, the heavenly Bridegroom’s plan is to sanctify her and finally to present her to himself. The ‘sanctification’ appears to refer to the present process of making her holy in character and conduct by the power of the indwelling Spirit, while the ‘presentation’ is eschatological, and will take place when Christ returns to take her to himself. He will present her to himself in splendour (endoxon). The word may hint at the bride’s beautiful wedding dress, since it is used of clothing. But it means more than this. ‘Glory’ (doxa) is the radiance of God, the shining forth and manifestation of his otherwise hidden being. So too the church’s true nature will become apparent. On earth she is often in rags and tatters, stained and ugly, despised and persecuted. But one day she will be seen for what she is, nothing less than the bride of Christ, ‘free from spots, wrinkles or any other disfigurement’ (JBP), holy and without blemish, beautiful and glorious. It is to this constructive end that Christ has been working and is continuing to work. The bride does not make herself presentable; it is the bridegroom who labours to beautify her in order to present her to himself. His love and self-sacrifice for her, his cleansing and sanctifying of her, are all designed for her liberation and her perfection, when at last he presents her to himself in her full glory. Dr Lloyd-Jones writes: ‘Dare I put it like this? The Beauty-Specialist will have put his final touch to the church, the massaging will have been so perfect that there will not be a single wrinkle left. She will look young, and in the bloom of youth, with colour in her cheeks, with her skin perfect, without any spots or wrinkles. And she will remain like that for ever and ever.’
This, then, is Paul’s exposition of the implications of Christ’s headship. The church’s head is the church’s bridegroom. He does not crush the church. Rather he sacrificed himself to serve her, in order that she might become everything he longs for her to be, namely herself in the fullness of her glory. Just so a husband should never use his headship to crush or stifle his wife, or frustrate her from being herself. His love for her will lead him to an exactly opposite path. He will give himself for her, in order that she may develop her full potential under God and so become more completely herself.
After climbing with Paul to these sublime heights of romantic love, many readers sense an anti-climax in verse 28: Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. For in his instruction to husbands to love their wives he seems to descend from the lofty standard of Christ’s love to the rather low standard of self-love. This sense of anomaly has led some commentators to try to translate the sentence differently, but their attempts do not succeed because the next sentence stubbornly refuses to convey any meaning but the obvious one: He who loves his wife loves himself. The probable explanation for Paul’s descent to the more mundane level of self-love is that he is always a realist. We cannot fully grasp the greatness of Christ’s love; it ‘surpasses knowledge’, as he wrote earlier. Nor do husbands find it easy to apply this standard to the realities of family life. But we all know from everyday experience how we love ourselves. Hence the practical usefulness of the ‘golden rule’ Jesus enunciated that we should treat others as we would ourselves like to be treated. For we all know this instinctively. It is after all the way we treat ourselves. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it (verse 29a). That is, he feeds it and (it may mean) clothes it, or at any rate looks after it.
This exhortation to a husband to ‘nourish and cherish’ his wife as he does his own body is more than a useful guide to daily behaviour, however. It also contains an inner appropriateness, since he and his wife have in fact become ‘one flesh’. Yet God intends sexual intercourse not only to be a union of bodies, but to symbolize and express a union of personalities. It is when husband and wife become thus deeply one with each other that truly he who loves his wife loves himself.
This leads the apostle to return in his thought to Christ and so to reach the climax of his argument. So far he has used two analogies for a husband’s love of his wife, namely Christ’s loving sacrifice for his bride the church, and the husband’s loving care of his own body. Now he fuses the two. Christ’s bride and Christ’s body are the same (see verse 23), because we are members of his body (verse 30). He has incorporated us into himself, made us part of himself in a profound, indissoluble union. This leads Paul to quote Genesis 2:24: For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh (verse 31) and to declare that this mystery is a profound one (verse 32). There seems no reason to doubt that in the first instance he is referring to the mysterious and sacred depths of sexual union itself. But then he immediately goes on to its yet deeper symbolism: I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. In doing so, he not only uses the egō of his apostolic authority but actually employs the very expression egō de legō (‘but I say’) which Jesus himself used in the six antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount. It is appropriate for him to do so because a ‘mystery’ is a revealed truth, and the profound ‘mystery’ here, namely the church’s union with Christ, is closely akin to that of Jewish-Gentile unity in the body of Christ, which had been revealed to him and of which he has written in 3:1–6. He thus sees the marriage relationship as a beautiful model of the church’s union in and with Christ. When applied to Christ and his church, the ‘one flesh’ is identical with the ‘one new man’ of 2:15. Indeed, the three pictures of the church which Paul develops in Ephesians—the body, the building and the bride—all emphasize the reality of its unity on account of its union with Christ.
Verse 33 is a succinct summary of the fuller teaching which Paul has been giving to husbands and wives: Let each one of you love his wife as himself, for she and he have become one, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. It is true that ‘respects’ translates phobētai, meaning literally ‘fears’, but this verb ‘may express the emotion of fear in all its modifications and in all its degrees from simple respect through reverence up to adoration, according to its object’. The apostle began with one couplet ‘love’ and ‘submission’. He ends with another ‘love’ and ‘respect’. We have seen that the love he has in mind for the husband sacrifices and serves with a view to enabling his wife to become what God intends her to be. So the ‘submission’ and ‘respect’ he asks of the wife express her response to his love and her desire that he too will become what God intends him to be in his ‘leadership’.
4. Summary
Taking the husband first, what Paul stresses is not his authority over his wife, but his love for her. Rather, his authority is defined in terms of loving responsibility. To our minds the word ‘authority’ suggests power, dominion and even oppression. We picture the ‘authoritative’ husband as a domineering figure who makes all the decisions himself, issues commands and expects obedience, inhibits and suppresses his wife, and so prevents her from growing into a mature or fulfilled person. But this is not at all the kind of ‘headship’ which the apostle is describing, whose model is Jesus Christ. Certainly, ‘headship’ implies a degree of leadership and initiative, as when Christ came to woo and to win his bride. But more specifically it implies sacrifice, self-giving for the sake of the beloved, as when Christ gave himself for his bride. If ‘headship’ means ‘power’ in any sense, then it is power to care not to crush, power to serve not to dominate, power to facilitate self-fulfilment, not to frustrate or destroy it. And in all this the standard of the husband’s love is to be the cross of Christ, on which he surrendered himself even to death in his selfless love for his bride. Dr Lloyd-Jones has a striking way of enforcing this truth. ‘How many of us’, he asks, ‘have realized that we are always to think of the married state in terms of the doctrine of the atonement? Is that our customary way of thinking of marriage?… Where do we find what the books have to say about marriage? Under which section? Under Ethics. But it does not belong there. We must consider marriage in terms of the doctrine of the atonement.’
As for the wife’s duty in the marriage relationship, it surprises me how unpopular this passage is among many women. When it is read at a wedding and it provokes a feminine outcry, I find myself wondering how carefully it has been read and in particular whether it has been read in its total context. Let me spell out five points which will, I hope, demonstrate that it is not the blueprint for oppression which many think, but rather a charter of genuine liberty.
a. The requirement of submission is a particular example of a general Christian duty
That is, the injunction ‘wives submit’ (verse 22) is preceded by the requirement that we are to ‘submit to one another’ (verse 21). If, therefore, it is the wife’s duty as wife to submit to her husband, it is also the husband’s duty as a member of God’s new society to submit to his wife. Submissiveness is a universal Christian obligation. Throughout the Christian church, including every Christian home, submissiveness is to be mutual. For Jesus Christ himself is the paragon of humility. He emptied himself of his status and his rights, and humbled himself to serve. So in the new order which he had founded he calls all his followers to follow in his footsteps. ‘Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility towards one another.’ Should not the wife even rejoice that she has the privilege of giving a particular demonstration in her attitude to her husband of the beauty of humility which is to characterize all members of God’s new society?
This is specially so when it is seen that her self-humbling is not coerced but free. It must have been very obvious in the ancient world. The wife had no status and few rights, as we have seen. Yet the apostle addresses her as a free moral agent and calls upon her not to acquiesce in a fate she cannot escape, but to make a responsible decision before God. It is this which ‘begins the revolutionary innovation in the early Christian style of ethical thinking.’ Voluntary Christian self-submission is still very significant today. ‘Jesus Christ demonstrates rather than loses his dignity by his subordination to the Father. When a person is voluntarily amenable to another, gives way to him, and places himself at his service, he shows greater dignity and freedom than an individual who cannot bear to be a helper and partner to anyone but himself. Ephesians 5 supports anything but blind obedience or the breaking of the wife’s will. Rather, this chapter shows that in the realm of the crucified Servant-Messiah, the subjects respect an order of freedom and equality in which one person assists another—seemingly by renouncing rights possessed, actually in exercising the right to imitate the Messiah himself … A greater, wiser, and more positive description of marriage has not yet been found in Christian literature.’
b. The wife’s submission is to be given to a lover, not to an ogre
The apostle’s instruction is not ‘Wives submit, husbands boss’; it is ‘Wives submit, husbands love’. Of course there have been examples in every age and culture of cruel and tyrannical husbands, and there have been painful occasions in which in order to maintain the integrity of her conscience, a wife has been obliged to resist her husband’s authority. But Paul is describing the Christian ideal, not hideous deviations from it. This has always been obvious to commentators. Back in the sixteenth century Calvin preached. ‘Husbands … should not be cruel towards their wives, or think all things that they please to be permissible and lawful, for their authority should rather be a companionship than a kingship.’ Three times the apostle repeats his fundamental charge: husbands, love your wives (verse 25); husbands should love their wives (verse 28); let each one of you love his wife (verse 33). If then the husband’s headship is expressed in responsible love for his wife, why should she be reluctant to submit to him? And if a husband desires her to do so, he will know that it is only by loving her that he will succeed.
c. The husband is to love like Christ
Does the requirement of ‘submission’ sound hard to a wife? I think what is required of her husband is harder. This is not that he ‘love’ her with the romantic, sentimental and even aggressive passion which frequently passes for genuine love today; instead, he is to love her with the love of Christ. If the husband’s obligation to love is repeated three times, so is the requirement to model his attitude and behaviour on Christ’s. He is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church (verse 23); he is to love his wife as Christ loved the church (verse 25); and he is to nourish and cherish her as Christ does the church (verse 29). Thus his headship, his love and his care are all to resemble Christ’s. The highest pinnacle of demand is reached in verse 25 where he is exhorted to love his wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. This is the totality of self-sacrifice. He is to love her with what is sometimes termed ‘Calvary love’; no higher standard is conceivable. A Christian husband who even partially fulfils this ideal preaches the gospel without ever opening his lips, for people can see in him that quality of love which took Jesus Christ to his cross.
d. The husband’s love, like Christ’s, sacrifices in order to serve
We considered earlier the five verbs of verses 25 and 26. Christ loved’ the church and ‘gave himself’ for her, in order to ‘cleanse’ her, ‘sanctify’ her, and ultimately ‘present’ her to himself in full splendour and without any defect. In other words, his love and self-sacrifice were not an idle display, but purposive. And his purpose was not to impose an alien identity upon the church, but to free her from the spots and wrinkles which mar her beauty and to display her in her true glory. The Christian husband is to have a similar concern. His headship will never be used to suppress his wife. He longs to see her liberated from everything which spoils her true feminine identity and growing towards that ‘glory’, that perfection of fulfilled personhood which will be the final destiny of all those whom Christ redeems. To this end Christ gave himself. To this end too the husband gives himself in love.
e. The wife’s submission is but another aspect of love
We have seen that the essence of Paul’s instruction is ‘Wives submit, husbands love’, and that these words are different from one another since they recognize the headship which God has given to the husband. Yet when we try to define the two verbs, it is not easy to distinguish clearly between them. What does it mean to ‘submit’? It is to give oneself up to somebody. What does it mean to ‘love’? It is to give oneself up for somebody, as Christ ‘gave himself up’ for the church. Thus ‘submission’ and ‘love’ are two aspects of the very same thing, namely of that selfless self-giving which is the foundation of an enduring and growing marriage.
Not that such self-giving is ever easy. I fear I may have painted a picture of married life which is more romantic than realistic. The truth is that all self-sacrifice, although the way of service and the means to self-realisation, is also painful. Indeed, love and pain appear to be inseparable, especially in sinners like us, since our fallenness has not been obliterated by our re-creation through Christ. In marriage there is the pain of adjustment, as the old independent ‘I’ gives way to the new interdependent ‘we’. There is also the pain of vulnerability as closeness to one another leads to self-exposure, self-exposure to mutual knowledge, and knowledge to the risk of rejection. So husbands and wives should not expect to discover harmony without conflict; they have to work at building a relationship of love, respect and truth.
The giving of oneself to anybody is a recognition of the worth of the other self. For if I give myself up, it can only be because I value the other person so highly that I want to sacrifice myself for his or her self, in order that he may develop his selfhood, or she hers, more fully. Now to lose oneself that the other may find his or her self—that is the essence of the gospel of Christ. It is also the essence of the marriage relationship, for as the husband loves his wife and the wife submits to her husband, each is seeking to enable the other to become more fully himself and herself, within the harmonious complementarity of the sexes.
11. Parents, children, masters and servants (6:1–9)
Paul now passes in his Haustafeln from the reciprocal duties of husbands and wives to those of parents and children. As he does so, it is immediately noteworthy that he thinks of the local congregation as a ‘church family’, consisting of both sexes and of all ages. Since he addresses the children in this paragraph as well as their parents, he evidently expects whole families to come together for public worship not only to praise God but also to listen to his Word. They would hear the Old Testament Scriptures and the apostle’s letters read aloud and expounded, and when the apostolic Haustafeln were read out, they would learn their own Christian duties and those of other members of their family. That children should have been included in the instructions, and given a section of their own, is an indication of the already pervasive influence in the church of him who had said, ‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God,’ and again, ‘Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me.’ It was a radical change from the callous cruelty which prevailed in the Roman Empire, in which unwanted babies were abandoned, weak and deformed ones killed, and even healthy children were regarded by many as a partial nuisance because they inhibited sexual promiscuity and complicated easy divorce.
1. The duty of children (verses 1–3)
Children, obey your parents … Here is another example of that general submissiveness which according to 5:21 is expected of all members of God’s new society. But this time the requirement is stronger, namely obedience. For wives were not told to ‘obey’, and in my view the 1662 Prayer Book marriage service was wrong to include this verb in the bride’s vows. The concept of a husband who issues commands and of a wife who gives him obedience is simply not found in the New Testament. The nearest approximation to it is the cited example of Sarah who ‘obeyed Abraham, calling him lord’. But even in that passage the apostle Peter’s actual instruction to wives is the same as Paul’s, namely, ‘Be submissive to your husbands.’ And, as we saw in the last chapter, a wife’s submission is something quite different from obedience. It is a voluntary self-giving to a lover whose responsibility is defined in terms of constructive care; it is love’s response to love.
Children, however, are to obey their parents. Although Paul goes on to restrict parental authority and to guide it into the channel of Christian education, it is still clear that parents’ authority over their children is distinct from and stronger than the husband’s ‘headship’ over his wife. Yet Paul does not take it for granted. His teaching is always rationally argued. As with the wife’s submission, so with the child’s obedience, he builds his instruction on a carefully laid foundation. He gives three grounds for the obedience of children in a Christian home: nature, the law and the gospel.
First, nature: Children, obey your parents …, for this is right, or righteous (dikaios). Child obedience belongs to that realm which came in medieval theology to be called ‘natural justice’. It does not depend on special revelation; it is part of the natural law which God has written on all human hearts. It is not confined to Christian ethics; it is standard behaviour in every society. Pagan moralists, both Greek and Roman, taught it. Stoic philosophers saw a son’s obedience as self-evident, plainly required by reason and part of ‘the nature of things’. Much earlier, and in oriental culture, one of the greatest emphases of Confucius was on filial respect, so that still today, though centuries later, Chinese, Korean and Japanese customs continue to reflect his influence. Indeed, virtually all civilizations have regarded the recognition of parental authority as indispensable to a stable society. We experience no sense of surprise, therefore, when Paul includes ‘disobedient to parents’ as a mark both of a decadent society which God has given up to its own godlessness and of ‘the last days’ which began with the coming of Christ.
If the obedience of children is part of the natural law which God has written on human hearts, it belongs also to the revealed law which God gave on stone tablets to Moses. So Paul goes on: Honour your father and mother (this is the first commandment with a promise), that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth (verses 2, 3). In his quotation Paul freely conflates the Greek text of Exodus 20:12 (‘Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long …’) and Deuteronomy 5:16 (‘that it may go well with you’). Since this is the fifth of the ten commandments and appears at first sight to concern our duty to our neighbour, many Christians have divided the decalogue into two uneven halves, the first four commandments specifying our duty to God and the remaining six our duty to our neighbour. But the Jews regularly taught that each of the law’s two tablets contains five commandments. The significance of this arrangement is that it brings the honouring of our parents into our duty to God. And this is surely right. For at least during our childhood they represent God to us and mediate to us both his authority and his love. We are to ‘honour’ them, that is, acknowledge their God-given authority, and so give them not only our obedience, but our love and respect as well. It is because parental authority is divinely delegated authority that respectful obedience to parents was invested with such great importance in the life of God’s covenant people. Moses was commanded to say to Israel: ‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father … I am the Lord your God.’ Reverence for parents was thus made an integral part of reverence for God as their God and of their special relationship to him as his people. Hence the extremely severe penalty (death, in fact) which was to be inflicted on anyone who cursed his parents and on the ‘stubborn and rebellious son’ who refused to obey them, defied their warning discipline and proved to be incorrigible.
The apostle Paul, however, prefers to enforce God’s commandment with a promise than with a threat. He reminds his readers that the command to honour parents is the first commandment with a promise, and he goes on to quote the promise of prosperity and long life. This deceptively simple statement contains several problems. Some commentators beg to disagree with Paul, claiming that the fifth commandment is not, in fact, the first to have a promise attached to it, since the second commandment also has one, promising ‘steadfast love to thousands’ who love and obey God. A sufficient answer to this objection is that these last words ‘are a declaration of God’s character rather than a promise’. Others express the opinion that in this case it is not the first but the only commandment with a promise, for no other commandment has one. To this F. F. Bruce aptly responds that Paul is thinking ‘not only of the decalogue but of the whole body of Pentateuchal legislation which is introduced by the decalogue’. This does not satisfy everybody, however. So some interpret ‘first’ as a reference to rank not order (as when the scribe asked ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’), and suggest that it means ‘a commandment of foremost significance, with a promise attached’ or ‘the first in importance among those relating to our social duties’ or that ‘this, for children, is a primary commandment, accompanied with a promise’.
The promise concerned was material prosperity (that it may be well with you) and long life (that you may live long). During the time of the theocracy, when Israel was both a nation and a church over which God ruled, his covenant blessings were closely tied to the promised land, and to safety, health and good harvests in it. But now times have changed, and God’s dealings with his people have also changed. This seems to be implied by Paul’s deliberate alteration of the promise from the original ‘in the land which the Lord your God gives you’ to on the earth. The promised land fades from view. God’s covenant people are now an international community, and his blessings are largely spiritual in Christ. At the same time, alongside his blessing ‘in the heavenly places’ (1:3), there is here a promised blessing ‘on earth’. Probably we should interpret this in general rather than individual terms. Then what is promised is not so much long life to each child who obeys his parents, as social stability to any community in which children honour their parents. Certainly a healthy society is inconceivable without a strong family life.
Two practical questions arise from the requirement that children obey their parents. Is the command unconditional? And to whom is it addressed?
Many Christian young people, who are anxious to conform their lives to the teaching of Scripture, are perplexed by the requirement of obedience. Are they to obey absolutely everything their parents tell them to do? What if they have themselves come to know Christ, while so far as they know their parents remain unconverted? If their parents forbid them to follow Christ or to join the Christian community, are they obliged to obey? In reply to such questions, which are often asked in great pain and anxiety, I think I need first to say that during a young person’s minority (and I have more to say about this later) obedience to parents should be the norm, and disobedience the rare exception.
For example, supposing you are a young person who, having been brought up in a non-Christian home, have recently come to Christ and now desire to be baptized, but your parents are forbidding it. Personally, I would not advise you to go ahead in defiance of your parents’ expressed wishes. Even baptism, though Jesus commanded it, can wait until you are older and the law of your country gives you a measure of independence. If, on the other hand, your parents were to forbid you to worship and follow Christ in your heart, this you could not obey. It must have been just such a situation as this that Jesus had in mind when he warned of family conflict in which parents and children would be opposed to one another and our enemies would belong to our own household. In such circumstances, however painful or perilous, our loyalty to Christ must come first. If we love even our parents more than him, he said, we are not worthy of him. Not, of course, that we should ever seek family conflict or be guilty of fomenting it. On the contrary, all the followers of Jesus are called to be peacemakers and, so far as it depends on us, to live peacably with everybody. Yet sometimes tension and strife simply cannot be avoided.
It is quite true that in the parallel passage in Colossians children are told to obey parents ‘in everything’. But this is balanced in Ephesians by the command to obey them in the Lord (6:1). The latter instruction surely modifies the former. Children are not to obey their parents in absolutely everything without exception, but in everything which is compatible with their primary loyalty, namely to their Lord Jesus Christ.
This brings us to the second practical question: who are these ‘children’ who are to obey their parents? And when do they cease to be such? Is Paul addressing himself only to infants, and to young boys and girls? Or does he include all young people who are still unmarried and living at home, even though now they may be grown up and may long since have left their childhood and their teens behind? No single answer can be given to this question; for different answers would need to be given in different cultures. In most western countries the age at which young people attain their majority has in recent years been lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. At that age now they are no longer minors, they are given the vote, and they are free to marry without parental consent. At the opposite extreme, in the empire of Paul’s day, ‘the power of the Roman father extended over the child’s whole life, so long as the father lived. A Roman son never came of age.’ In some third world countries today, especially in Asia, a similar custom prevails. All one can say in relation to such situations is that either law or custom in every society recognizes at least a measure of independence for young people, either when manhood or womanhood is reached, or when they attain a certain age, or when they leave home or marry. Christians should not defy the accepted convention of their own culture in this matter. So long as they are regarded in their culture as children or minors, they should continue to obey their parents.
One other important point. Even after we have attained our majority, are regarded in our culture as being no longer under the authority of our parents, and are therefore no longer under obligation to ‘obey’ them, we still must continue to ‘honour’ them. Our parents occupy a unique position in our lives. If we honour them as we should, we will never neglect or forget them. Many third world cultures, even non-Christian ones, care for elderly parents far more conscientiously and thoughtfully than most of us do, who live in the so-called Christian West. Although in some circumstances it may be unavoidable and in others even desirable, it is a sad reflection on the selfish western tradition of the nuclear family that instead of looking after our elderly relatives ourselves, we consign them to an old people’s home. Thus to isolate, and even symbolically to reject, one’s own parents can seldom be reconciled with the command to honour them.
So far we have been following Paul as he grounds the child’s obedience to his parents on both nature and Scripture, on natural law and revealed law. That is, he urges it first because it is right and secondly because it is written. His third argument introduces the gospel and the new day which dawned with Jesus Christ. This is implied in the injunction that children should obey their parents in the Lord, namely, in the Lord Jesus. Already we have seen that these words modify the parallel command in Colossians to obey parents ‘in everything’. But this does not exhaust their meaning. They bring child-obedience into the realm of specifically Christian duty, and lay upon children the responsibility to obey their parents because of their own personal relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is he who as Creator first established order in family and society, and in the new society which he is now building he does not overthrow it. There is an essential continuity between the old order and the new, between the original creation and the new creation in Christ. Families have not been abolished. Men and women still marry and have children. ‘In the Lord’ there are still husbands and wives, parents and children. What has changed relates to the ravages of the fall. For the family life which God created at the beginning and pronounced to be ‘good’ was spoiled by human rebellion and selfishness. Relationships fell apart. Society was fractured. Love was twisted into lust, and authority into oppression. But now in the Lord, by his reconciling work, God’s new society has begun, continuous with the old in the fact of family life but discontinuous in its quality. For now all our relationships are transformed precisely because they are in the Lord. They are purged of ruinous self-centredness, and suffused instead with Christ’s love and peace. Even obedience to parents is changed. It is no longer a grudging acquiescence in parental authority. Christian children learn to obey with gladness, ‘for this pleases the Lord’. They remember the loving submission which Jesus himself gave as a boy to his parents. Now this same Jesus is their Lord and Saviour, and the creator of the new order, so they are anxious to do what pleases him.
2. The duty of parents (verse 4)
The instruction to children to obey their parents presupposes, as we have seen, the fact of parental authority. Yet when Paul outlines how parents should behave towards their children, it is not the exercise, but the restraint, of their authority which he urges upon them.
The picture he paints of fathers as self-controlled, gentle, patient educators of their children is in stark contrast to the norm of his own day. ‘At the head of the Roman family … was the pater familias, who exercised a sovereign authority over all members of the family … The autocratic character of the patria potestas manifested itself not only in the father’s right to punish, but also in his iuo vitae necisque (killing the newborn; exposure of children) … The pater familias has a full right of disposal over his children, as over slaves and things …’ William Barclay adds: ‘A Roman father had absolute power over his family. He could sell them as slaves, he could make them work in his fields even in chains, he could take the law into his own hands, for the law was in his own hands, and punish as he liked, he could even inflict the death penalty on his child.’
Completely different was the Christian father, especially if he remembered what Paul had written earlier, namely that his fatherhood was derived from the ‘one God and Father of us all’ (3:14–15; 4:6). The overarching theme of Ephesians is that through Christ’s reconciling work there is now one multinational, multicultural family of God. So human fathers are to care for their families as God the Father cares for his. And incidentally mothers are surely included too. Although the word in verse 4 is, in fact, ‘fathers’ (pateres), yet it could be used for ‘fathers and mothers’, much as ‘brothers’ (adelphoi) meant ‘brothers and sisters’. Certainly it is parents, both father and mother, who are referred to in verses 1–3, so that it is entirely legitimate for GNB to put ‘parents’ in verse 4.
Negatively, they are told: Do not provoke your children to anger (verse 4), or ‘do not exasperate your children’ (NIV) or ‘goad your children to resentment’ (NEB). Paul recognizes how delicate a child’s personality is. Some authors have speculated that in his own childhood he was comparatively deprived of love, and that in this instruction to parents there is a flashback to some early childhood reminiscence. We do not know. What we do know is that parents can easily misuse their authority either by making irritating or unreasonable demands which make no allowances for the inexperience and immaturity of children, or by harshness and cruelty at one extreme or by favouritism and over-indulgence at the other, or by humiliating or suppressing them, or by those two vindictive weapons sarcasm and ridicule. These are some of the parental attitudes which provoke resentment and anger in children. How many ‘angry young men’, hostile to society at large, have learned their hostility as children in an unsympathetic home? There is a place for discipline, as Paul goes on to say, but it must never be arbitrary (for children have a built-in sense of justice) or unkind. Otherwise, they will ‘become discouraged’. Conversely, almost nothing causes a child’s personality to blossom and gifts to develop like the positive encouragement of loving, understanding parents. Indeed, just as a husband’s love for his wife is expressed in helping her develop her full potential, so parents’ love for their children is expressed in helping them develop theirs.
Behind this curbing of parental authority there lies the clear recognition that, although children are to obey their parents in the Lord, yet they have a life and personality of their own. They are little people in their own right. As such they are to be respected, and on no account to be exploited, manipulated or crushed. ‘The dominant father of the Victorian novels’, writes Sir Frederick Catherwood, ‘who used his own authority for his own ends is no more entitled to claim Christian authority than the rebellious son. One is abusing authority, the other is flouting it. Both are wrong.’
It is not only in the novels of Victorian England that oppressive parenthood is to be seen, however. Another example comes from more recent times in the United States. Edna Ferber’s novel Giant tells the story of the Texan, Jordan Benedict. Owner of a two and a half million acre cattle ranch, he is furious because his infant son Jordy, aged three, does not take to horses. When set on one in full cowboy regalia, he cries to be taken down. His father is disgusted. ‘I rode before I could walk’, he says. ‘All right’, responds his wife Leslie, ‘that was very cute, but that was you. This is another person. Maybe he doesn’t like horses …’ ‘He’s a Benedict,’ his father retorts, ‘and I’m going to make a horseman out of him if I have to tie him to do it’. ‘You’ve been playing God so long you think you run the world’. ‘I run the part of it that’s mine’. ‘He’s not yours. He’s yours and mine. And not even ours. He’s himself …’
Every child must be allowed to be himself. Wise parents recognize that not all the non-conforming responses of childhood deserve to be styled ‘rebellion’. On the contrary, it is by experiment that children discover both the limits of their liberty and the quality of their parents’ love. Moreover, in order to grow up, they have to develop their independence, not because they are resistant to their parents’ authority but because they need to exercise their own.
Paul does not rest content with his negative instruction to parents not to provoke their children to anger. He complements it with this positive exhortation: Bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. The verb (ektrephō) means literally to ‘nourish’ or ‘feed’ and was used in 5:29 of the nourishment we give to our own bodies. But it is also used of the upbringing of children. Calvin’s translation is, ‘Let them be fondly cherished …, deal gently with them,’ and William Hendriksen’s, ‘Rear them tenderly.’ Here is an understanding, centuries before modern psychology emphasized the vital importance of the earliest years of life, that children are fragile creatures needing the tenderness and security of love.
The implications of this insistence on the parental upbringing of children are many. One is that Christian parents should jealously guard their responsibility, delegating some of it indeed to both church and school, but never entirely surrendering it. It is their own God-given task; nobody can adequately or completely replace them. Another implication is that parents need to take time and trouble with their children. Failure to do so causes many problems later. As Dr Lloyd-Jones pertinently observes, ‘If parents but gave as much thought to the rearing of their children as they do to the rearing of animals and flowers, the situation would be very different.’
How then should parents rear their children? Answer: in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. The second word (nouthesia), whether translated ‘instruction’ or ‘warning’, seems to refer primarily to verbal education, while the first word (paideia) means training by discipline, even by punishment. ‘Paideia (discipline) is training with the accent on the correction of the young.’ It is the word used in Hebrews 12 both of earthly fathers and also of our heavenly Father who ‘disciplines us for our good’.
On the need for discipline and punishment the Old Testament was clear. ‘He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.’ Again, ‘Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.’ Of course our Victorian ancestors used these verses from Proverbs to justify their excessively stern discipline. In our generation, on the other hand, we have witnessed an over-reaction leading to excessively laissez-faire permissiveness. To the one extreme we need to say: ‘The opposite of wrong discipline is not the absence of discipline, but right discipline, true discipline.’ To the other extreme we need to say: ‘The opposite of no discipline at all is not cruelty, it is balanced discipline, it is controlled discipline.’ Above all, parents must be clear about their motives. It is always dangerous for them to discipline their children when they are annoyed, when their pride has been injured, or when they have lost their temper. Let me quote Dr Lloyd-Jones again, for his exposition of these verses is full of practical wisdom: ‘When you are disciplining a child, you should have first controlled yourself … What right have you to say to your child that he needs discipline when you obviously need it yourself? Self-control, the control of temper, is an essential prerequisite in the control of others.’
So far we have been thinking principally of the disciplining of children. But the Christian upbringing of children is mental as well as moral. It includes instruction too. One popular contemporary fashion is to urge parents to be totally ‘non-directive’ and to leave their children to find their own way. Paul is of a different mind. Certainly some parents are too directive, too domineering, and thereby inhibit their children from learning to make their own decisions and so grow into maturity. We have to distinguish between true and false education. False education is indoctrination, in which parents and teachers impose their mind and will on the child. True education, on the other hand, is stimulation, in which parents and teachers act as a catalyst, and encourage the child to make his own responses. This they cannot do if they leave the child to flounder; they have to teach Christian values of truth and goodness, defend them, and recommend their acceptance, but at the same time abstain from any pressure, still more coercion.
The discipline and instruction in which parents are to bring up their children, Paul writes, are ‘the Lord’s’. This has been taken by some to mean simply that the kind of instruction and discipline intended ‘belong to a Christian upbringing’ (NEB), and that Paul is specifying Christian as opposed to secular education. But I think it means more than this, namely that behind the parents who teach and discipline their children there stands the Lord himself. It is he who is the chief teacher and administrator of discipline. Certainly the overriding concern of Christian parents is not just that their children will submit to their authority, but that through this they will come to know and obey the Lord. There is always much rejoicing and thanksgiving whenever the teaching and discipline of a Christian home leads, not artificially but naturally, to a child’s acceptance of the teaching and discipline of the Lord Jesus himself.
3. The duty of slaves (verses 5–8)
Slavery seems to have been universal in the ancient world. A high percentage of the population were slaves. ‘It has been computed that in the Roman Empire there were 60,000,000 slaves.’ They constituted the work force, and included not only domestic servants and manual labourers but educated people as well, like doctors, teachers and administrators. Slaves could be inherited or purchased, or acquired in settlement of a bad debt, and prisoners of war commonly became slaves. Nobody queried or challenged the arrangement. ‘The institution of slavery was a fact of Mediterranean economic life so completely accepted as a part of the labour structure of the time that one cannot correctly speak of the slave “problem” in antiquity. This unquestioning acceptance of the slave system explains why Plato in his plan of the good life as depicted in The Republic did not need to mention the slave class. It was simply there.’
To those of us who live in countries in which slavery has been abolished by law for one and a half centuries, it is hard to conceive how the ownership of one human being by another can have been countenanced in this way. It is even harder to understand how slaves can have been regarded more as things than as persons. For all his intellect and culture Aristotle could not contemplate any friendship between slave and slave-owner, for, he said ‘A slave is a living tool, just as a tool is an inanimate slave’, although he could at least concede that ‘a slave is a kind of possession with a soul’.
This dehumanization of slaves in the public mind was mirrored in early Roman legislation. ‘Legally they were only chattels without rights, whom their master could treat virtually as he pleased.’ ‘The Roman state left the problem of the discipline of slaves to their owners … The pater familias had complete control over all slaves owned in his familia, the power of punishment by whipping and by confinement in the ergastulum, and the right of execution of the death penalty.’ Consequently, accounts of terrible atrocities have survived, especially from the pre-Christian era. Slaves were sometimes whipped, mutilated and imprisoned in chains, their teeth were knocked out, their eyes gouged out, they were even thrown to the wild beasts or crucified, and all this sometimes for the most trivial offences. The fact that some slaves ran away (risking, if caught, branding, flogging and even summary execution), while others committed suicide, is sufficient evidence that cruelty towards them was widespread.
At the same time, it would be a grave mistake to suppose that this kind of barbaric treatment was either habitual or universal, or that it continued unabated into the first century AD. Although the law at first prescribed no penalties for slave owners who illtreated their slaves, yet more often than not they were restrained by other factors, either by their own sense of responsibility, or by public opinion, or by self-interest. As for public opinion, Paul’s Stoic contemporary Seneca was teaching the brotherhood of man and urging kindness to slaves. As for self-interest, masters knew that their slaves represented a high capital investment. It was, therefore, to their own advantage to take good care of their slaves, just as they did their farm animals and their furniture.
It is immediately remarkable that in his Haustafeln Paul should address himself to slaves at all. The simple fact that he does so indicates that they were accepted members of the Christian community and that he regards them as responsible people to whom, as much as to their masters, he sends a moral appeal. If children are to obey their parents, slaves are to obey their earthly masters (verse 5), and for the very same reason, namely that behind them they must learn to discern the figure of their master … in heaven (verse 9), namely the Lord Christ. In each of the four verses addressed to slaves Jesus Christ is mentioned. They are to be obedient as to Christ (verse 5), to behave as servants (literally, ‘slaves’) of Christ (verse 6), to render service as to the Lord rather than men (verse 7), knowing that they will receive good from the Lord (verse 8). The Christ-centredness of this instruction is very striking. The slave’s perspective has changed. His horizons have broadened. He has been liberated from the slavery of ‘men-pleasing’ into the freedom of serving Christ. His mundane tasks have been absorbed into a higher preoccupation, namely the will of God (verse 6) and the good pleasure of Christ.
Exactly the same principle can be applied by contemporary Christians to their work and employment. Our great need is the clear-sightedness to see Jesus Christ and to set him before us. It is possible for the housewife to cook a meal as if Jesus Christ were going to eat it, or to spring-clean the house as if Jesus Christ were to be the honoured guest. It is possible for teachers to educate children, for doctors to treat patients and nurses to care for them, for solicitors to help clients, shop assistants to serve customers, accountants to audit books and secretaries to type letters as if in each case they were serving Jesus Christ. Can the same be said in relation to the masses of industrial workers with tedious routine machine-minding to do, and to miners who have to work underground? Surely yes. The presence of Christ in the mine or factory is certainly no excuse for bad conditions. On the contrary, it should be a spur to improving them. At the same time, their situation is not nearly as bad as slavery in the Roman Empire, so that if the work of Christian slaves could be transformed by doing it as to the Lord, the same must be true of Christian miners, factory workers, dustmen, road sweepers and public lavatory attendants.
Once Christian slaves were clear in their minds that their primary responsibility was to serve the Lord Christ, their service to their earthly masters would become exemplary. First, they would be respectful, obeying them with fear and trembling (verse 5), which implies not a cringing servility before a human master but rather a reverent acknowledgement of the Lord Jesus whose authority the master represents. This is plain not only from the usual contexts of the expression ‘fear and trembling’ but also from the fact that in the equivalent Colossians passage it is replaced by ‘fearing the Lord’. Next, they would obey in singleness of heart (5), with integrity or wholeheartedness, without hypocrisy or ulterior motives. Thirdly, they would be conscientious, not offering eye-service as men-pleasers, working only when the boss is watching in order to curry favour with him, but as servants of Christ, who is in any case watching all the time and is never deceived by shoddy work. Fourthly, their service would become willing and ‘cheerful’ (NEB) instead of reluctant or grudging. Because they would consciously be doing the will of God, they would do it from the heart (verse 6) and with a good will (verse 7). As we might say, their heart and soul would be in it. And all this because they know that their Lord is also their judge, and that no good work, whoever does it (slave or free), is ever left unrewarded by him (verse 8).
4. The duty of masters (verse 9)
Although the duties of Christian slaves are spelled out in some detail, Christian slave-owners are given only three principles, all of which however have far-reaching implications against the background of the middle of the first century AD. First, do the same to them. That is, if you hope to receive respect, show it; if you hope to receive service, give it. It is an application of the golden rule. However masters hope their slaves will behave towards them, they must behave towards their slaves in the same way. Paul admits no privileged superiority in the masters, as if they could themselves dispense with the very courtesies they expect to be shown.
Secondly, forbear threatening. As parents are not to provoke their children, so masters are not to threaten their slaves. That is, they are not to misuse their position of authority by issuing threats of punishment. Punishment was accepted in the Empire as the only way to keep slaves under control, and Christianity does not deny that in some circumstances punishment is legitimate, even necessary. But threats are a weapon which the powerful wield over the powerless. And a relationship based on threats is not a human relationship at all. So Paul forbade it.
Thirdly, the reason for these requirements is their knowing that Jesus Christ is master of both slave and slave-owner, and that there is no partiality with him. Slave-owners were used to being flattered and fawned upon, but they should not expect (for they will not receive) such discriminatory favouritism from the Lord Christ. Thus all three principles were designed to lessen the cultural and social gap between slave and slave-owner. Instead of regarding his relationship with his slaves as that of proprietor to chattels, or of superior to inferiors, he was to develop a relationship in which he gave them the same treatment as he hoped to receive, renounced the unfair weapon of threats, and recalled that he and they both shared the same heavenly master and impartial judge.
5. The abolition of slavery
The new relationship which Jesus Christ made possible between slave and slave-owner was something new and beautiful. Understandably, however, it has seemed to many critics an inadequate Christian response to an unmitigated evil. Did the gospel offer no more radical solution to slavery than an adjustment of personal relationships? Even if Paul held back from inciting slaves to rise up against their owners and seize their freedom (as some hotheads wish he had), why did he not at least command slave-owners to emancipate their slaves? Why are the New Testament writers so feeble and mealy-mouthed, instead of condemning slavery outright for the horribly inhuman thing it was?
In whatever way we Christians seek to defend ourselves and our faith against such criticisms, it must never be by condoning slavery. For if the New Testament does not explicity condemn slavery, it does not condone it either. Although there have been varying degrees of degradation in slavery at different times and places, and although Afro-American slavery was worse than Roman, Roman than Greek and Greek than Hebrew, yet the Christian conscience must condemn slavery in every form. Its evil lies neither in the servitude it involves (for Jesus voluntarily made himself a slave of others, and so did his apostle Paul), nor even in the element of compulsion, but rather in the ownership by one human being of others which degrades them into subhuman goods to be used, exploited and traded, and in the cruelty which often accompanied this. This being so, we again ask why the New Testament did not call for its abolition.
The first answer is the pragmatic one, namely that Christians were at first an insignificant group in the Empire. Their religion was itself still unlawful, and they were politically powerless. Besides, slavery was at that time an indispensable part of the fabric of Roman society. In most cities there were many times more slaves than free people. It would therefore have been impossible to abolish slavery at a single stroke without the complete disintegration of society. Even if Christians had liberated their slaves, they would have condemned most of them to unemployment and penury. As G. B. Caird has put it, ‘Ancient society was economically as dependent on slavery as modern society is on machinery, and anyone proposing its abolition could only be regarded as a seditious fanatic.’ It had to be tolerated a while longer (although, to be sure, that ‘while longer’ lasted much, much too long) as a symptom of what Christians called ‘this present evil age’.
There is a second reason why we do not find in the New Testament stronger expressions of indignation at the system. ‘The lack in antiquity of any deep abhorrence of slavery as a social and economic evil may be explained in part’, writes W. L. Westermann, by this fact that ‘the change of legal status out of slavery into liberty by way of manumission was … constant and easy …’ ‘The apostles’ attitude is best explained by the unique way in which the Romans of the first century AD treated their slaves, and released them in great numbers.’ According to the results of Tenney Frank’s research, between 81 and 49 BC 500,000 Roman slaves were freed. So ‘The Roman slave, far from living in perpetual servitude, could look forward to a day of opportunity. It became the common practice of the Romans to free their slaves and then establish them in a trade or profession. Many times the former slave became wealthier than his patron.’ This evidence helps to explain both Paul’s advice to Corinthian slaves, if they could gain their freedom, to seize the opportunity to do so, and his strong hint to Philemon that he should release Onesimus.
A third point in alleviation of the New Testament’s position is that by that time the legal status of slaves was beginning to be eased and showed signs of further improvement to come. ‘Sweeping humanitarian changes had been introduced into the Roman world by the first century AD, which led to radically improved treatment of slaves.’ Steadily they were granted many of the legal rights enjoyed by free people, including the right to marry and have a family, and the right to own property. ‘In AD 20 a decree of the Senate specified that slave criminals were to be tried in the same way as free men.’ Several emperors introduced liberalizing measures. ‘Claudius c. AD 50 enacted that sick slaves who were deserted by their masters should be free if they recovered. Under Vespasian c. 75 a female slave could under certain circumstances obtain her freedom if prostituted by her master. Domitian c. 90 forbade the mutilation of slaves. Hadrian early in the second century refused to countenance the sale of slaves for immoral or gladiatorial purposes, and may have forbidden the execution of slaves by their masters.’
So more humane legislation was already being introduced in the Empire at the time when the gospel arrived to accelerate and extend the process. Nevertheless we Christians cannot escape a sense of shame that slavery and the slave trade were tolerated for so long, especially later in the European colonies. Both should have been abolished centuries before they were. And the best Christian minds recognized this. Calvin, for example, in the middle of the sixteenth century attributed slavery to original sin. He deduced it to be ‘a thing totally against all the order of nature’ that human beings ‘fashioned after the image of God’ should ever be ‘put to such reproach’.
While we cannot defend the indolence or cowardice of two further Christian centuries which saw this social evil but failed to eradicate it, we can at the same time rejoice that the gospel immediately began even in the first century to undermine the institution; it lit a fuse which at long last led to the explosion which destroyed it. This brings us back to Paul’s Ephesian letter and to the transformed slave-master relationship which he described. Three aspects of it may be mentioned.
The first is equality. Of course nobody could imagine that in culture or in law, masters and slaves were equal. Quite patently they were not, since the one owned the other. Nevertheless, they were equal before God, because they had the same Lord and judge, who showed no partiality between them (verse 9). Roman law was still in certain respects discriminatory; heavenly justice was not. Paul reminded both slaves and masters of this fact. For this was the theological foundation on which he built his doctrine of equality. Slaves were to give their earthly masters good service with a good will, as if to their heavenly Master, knowing that he would honour and reward them. Masters were not to threaten but to respect their slaves, knowing that they had the same Master in heaven. Thus, it was their shared knowledge of the lordship and the judgment of Jesus Christ which made them equal. If they remembered that Jesus was their common Lord now and would one day be their common judge, their whole attitude to one another would change.
The second quality of their relationship was to be justice. What is implicit here in the general instruction to masters to do the same to them (verse 9) is made explicit in Colossians 4:1: ‘Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.’ This injunction will have sounded extremely strange in the ears of those who first heard it. For although, as we have seen, Roman law was becoming gradually more humane, slaves were still popularly regarded as the property of their masters, who had absolute power over them. And of course where there are thought to be no rights, there can be no justice. So justice for slaves was a revolutionary new concept. Essentially it was the gospel which insisted that slaves had rights. This is made plain by the reciprocal nature of the slave-master relationship. For if slaves had duties to their masters, masters had duties to their slaves. Then the master’s duties became the slave’s rights, just as the slave’s duties were the master’s rights.
In labour relations today the same basic principle holds good of justice based on reciprocal rights. Employers and employees alike have duties—the employee to give good work and the employer to pay a just wage. Then each person’s duty becomes the other person’s right. If it is the employee’s duty to give good work, it is the employer’s right to expect it. If it is the employer’s duty to pay a fair wage, it is the employee’s right to expect it. The major human problem in management-labour disputes is that each side concentrates on securing its own rights, and on inducing the other side to do its duty. Paul, however, reverses the emphasis. He urges each side to concentrate on its responsibilities, not on its rights. Certainly if in modern industrial disputes the concern were for each side to fulfil its own duty and secure the other side’s rights, labour relations would immediately be sweetened.
The third and highest aspect of the transformed slave-master relationship is brotherhood. It appears with conspicuous clarity in Paul’s letter to Philemon, in which he urges him to receive back his fugitive but now converted slave Onesimus, and to welcome him ‘no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother’. The words would have sounded incredible to all but Christian ears. Seneca taught the universal brotherhood of mankind but I cannot find that he applied his doctrine to slaves. ‘Comrades’, he called them, and even ‘friends’, but not ‘brothers’. The concept of the brotherhood was Paul’s innovation and is one of the major themes of Ephesians. For God’s new society is the Father’s household or family, all of whose members are related to one another in Christ as brothers and sisters. Even in the first letter he wrote he could affirm with confidence that all who are in Christ are the sons and daughters of God, and that ‘there is neither … slave nor free, … for you are all one in Christ Jesus’. He then repeated this sentiment in the letter which parallels Ephesians: ‘Here there cannot be … slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.’ A message which thus united master and slave as brothers ipso facto issued its radical challenge to an institution which separated them as proprietor and property. Thereafter it was only a matter of time. ‘Slavery would be abolished from within’.
12. Principalities and powers (6:10–20)
We have had occasion several times in our study of this letter to marvel at the breadth of Paul’s horizons. He began by unfolding God’s purpose, conceived in a past eternity before the foundation of the world, to create a single new human race through the death and resurrection of Christ and ultimately to unite the whole church and the whole creation under Christ’s headship. He has emphasized that a distinctive shape has been given to this divine plan by the inclusion in God’s new society, on an entirely equal footing, of Jews and Gentiles. The old days of division and discrimination have gone. A brand new oneness has emerged, in which through union with Christ Jews and Gentiles are equal members of the same body and equal sharers in the same promise. So now the one Father has one family, the one Messiah-Saviour one people, and the one Spirit one body. These sure facts of what God has done through Christ and by the Spirit form the basis on which Paul went on to issue his eloquent appeal. His readers must live a life that is ‘worthy’ of their calling and ‘fitting’ to their status as God’s new and reconciled society. They must demonstrate their unity in the Christian fellowship, while at the same time rejoicing in the diversity of their gifts and so of their ministries. They must put away all the uncleanness of their pre-conversion behaviour and live a life of ‘true righteousness and holiness’. And they must learn to submit to one another in every kind of domestic relationship and so promote harmony in their homes. Unity, diversity, purity and harmony—these the apostle has stressed as major characteristics of the new life and the new society in Christ. It has seemed a beautiful ideal, an obviously desirable goal, and not so difficult to attain.
But now Paul brings us down to earth, and to realities harsher than dreams. He reminds us of the opposition. Beneath surface appearances an unseen spiritual battle is raging. He introduces us to the devil (already mentioned in 2:2 and 4:27) and to certain ‘principalities and powers’ at his command. He supplies us with no biography of the devil, and no account of the origin of the forces of darkness. He assumes their existence as common ground between himself and his readers. In any case, his purpose is not to satisfy our curiosity, but to warn us of their hostility and teach us how to overcome them. Is God’s plan to create a new society? Then they will do their utmost to destroy it. Has God through Jesus Christ broken down the walls dividing human beings of different races and cultures from each other? Then the devil through his emissaries will strive to rebuild them. Does God intend his reconciled and redeemed people to live together in harmony and purity? Then the powers of hell will scatter among them the seeds of discord and sin. It is with these powers that we are told to wage war, or—to be more precise—to ‘wrestle’ (verse 12, AV). This metaphor is not necessarily incompatible with that of the armed soldier which Paul goes on to develop, as if he ‘changed the scenery from that of the battlefield to that of the gymnasium’. He is simply wanting to emphasize the reality of our engagement with the powers of evil, and the grim necessity of hand-to-hand combat.
The abrupt transition from the ‘peaceful homes and healthful days’ of the previous paragraphs to the hideous malice of devilish plots in this section causes us a painful shock, but an essential one. We all wish we could spend our lives in undisturbed tranquillity, among our loved-ones at home and in the fellowship of God’s people. But the way of the escapist has been effectively blocked. Christians have to face the prospect of conflict with God’s enemy and theirs. We need to accept the implications of this concluding passage of Paul’s letter. ‘It is a stirring call to battle … Do you not hear the bugle, and the trumpet?… We are being roused, we are being stimulated, we are being set upon our feet; we are told to be men. The whole tone is martial, it is manly, it is strong’. Moreover, there will be no cessation of hostilities, not even a temporary truce or cease-fire, until the end of life or of history when the peace of heaven is attained. It seems probable that Paul implies this by his Finally … For the better manuscripts have an expression which should be translated not ‘finally’, introducing the conclusion, but ‘henceforward’ meaning ‘for the remaining time’. If this is correct, then the apostle is indicating that the whole of the interim period between the Lord’s two comings is to be characterized by conflict. The peace which God has made through Christ’s cross is to be experienced only in the midst of a relentless struggle against evil. And for this the strength of the Lord and the armour of God are indispensable.
1. The enemy we face (verses 10–12)
A thorough knowledge of the enemy and a healthy respect for his prowess are a necessary preliminary. to victory in war. Similarly, if we underestimate our spiritual enemy, we shall see no need for God’s armour, we shall go out to the battle unarmed, with no weapons but our own puny strength, and we shall be quickly and ignominiously defeated.
So in between his summons to seek the Lord’s strength and put on God’s armour on the one hand (verses 10–11) and his itemizing of our weapons on the other (verses 13–20) Paul gives us a full and frightening description of the forces arrayed against us (verse 12). For we are not contending against flesh and blood, he writes, but against the principalities, against the powers. In other words, our struggle is not with human beings but with cosmic intelligences; our enemies are not human but demonic. Paul’s Asian readers were quite familiar with this fact. They doubtless remembered—or would have heard about—the incident of the Jewish exorcists in Ephesus who were rash enough to try to dismiss an evil spirit in the name of Jesus without themselves knowing the Jesus whose name they used. Instead of succeeding in their attempt, they were overpowered by the demoniac and fled in panic, naked and battered. This kind of happening may have been common. For Paul’s Ephesian converts had previously dabbled in the occult and then made a public bonfire of their valuable books of magic. Such a direct challenge to the forces of evil will not have gone unheeded.
The forces arrayed against us have three main characteristics. First, they are powerful. Whether ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ refer to different ranks of evil spirits in the hierarchy of hell we do not know, but both titles draw attention to the power and authority they wield. They are also called the world rulers of this present darkness. The word kosmokratores was used in astrology of the planets which were thought to control the fate of mankind, in the Orphic Hymns of Zeus, in rabbinical writings of Nebuchadnezzar and other pagan monarchs, and in various ancient inscriptions of the Roman emperor. All these usages exemplify the notion of a worldwide’ rule. When applied to the powers of evil they are reminiscent of the devil’s claim to be able to give Jesus ‘all the kingdoms of the world’, of the title ‘the ruler of this world’ which Jesus gave him, and of John’s statement that ‘the whole world is in the power of the evil one’. These texts do not deny our Lord’s decisive conquest of the principalities and powers, but indicate that as usurpers they have not conceded defeat or been destroyed. So they continue to exercise considerable power.
Secondly, they are wicked. Power itself is neutral; it can be well used or misused. But our spiritual enemies use their power destructively rather than constructively, for evil not for good. They are the worldwide rulers of this present darkness. They hate the light, and shrink from it. Darkness is their natural habitat, the darkness of falsehood and sin. They are also described as the spiritual hosts of wickedness, which operate in the heavenly places, that is, in the sphere of invisible reality. They are ‘spiritual agents from the very headquarters of evil’ (JBP). So then ‘darkness’ and ‘wickedness’ characterize their actions, and ‘the appearance of Christ on earth was the signal for an unprecedented outburst of activity on the part of the realm of darkness controlled by these world-rulers’. If we hope to overcome them, we shall need to bear in mind that they have no moral principles, no code of honour, no higher feelings. They recognize no Geneva Convention to restrict or partially civilize the weapons of their warfare. They are utterly unscrupulous, and ruthless in the pursuit of their malicious designs.
Thirdly, they are cunning. Paul writes here of the wiles of the devil (verse 11), having declared in a previous letter ‘we are not ignorant of his designs’ or (NIV) ‘schemes’. G. B. Caird finds the English word wiles ‘slightly disparaging’, as if Paul ‘did not take the devil seriously’, and ‘hardly in keeping with the sustained military metaphor’. Instead, he suggests that ‘ “strategems” would give the required combination of tactical shrewdness and ingenious deception’. It is because the devil seldom attacks openly, preferring darkness to light, that when he transforms himself into ‘an angel of light’ we are caught unsuspecting. He is a dangerous wolf, but enters Christ’s flock in the disguise of a sheep. Sometimes he roars like a lion, but more often is as subtle as a serpent. We must not imagine, therefore, that open persecution and open temptation to sin are his only or even his commonest weapons; he prefers to seduce us into compromise and deceive us into error. Significantly this same word ‘wiles’ is used in 4:14 of false teachers and their crafty tricks. ‘As in Bunyan’s Holy War’, writes E. K. Simpson, the devil develops ‘a twofold infernal policy’. That is, ‘the tactics of intimidation and insinuation alternate in Satan’s plan of campaign. He plays both the bully and the beguiler. Force and fraud form his chief offensive against the camp of the saints, practised by turns.’
The ‘wiles of the devil’ take many forms, but he is at his wiliest when he succeeds in persuading people that he does not exist. To deny his reality is to expose ourselves the more to his subtlety. Dr Lloyd-Jones expresses his conviction on this matter in the following terms: ‘I am certain that one of the main causes of the ill state of the Church today is the fact that the devil is being forgotten. All is attributed to us; we have all become so psychological in our attitude and thinking. We are ignorant of this great objective fact, the being, the existence of the devil, the adversary, the accuser, and his “fiery darts”.’
In Paul’s characterization of them, then, the powers of darkness are powerful, wicked and cunning. How can we expect to stand against the assaults of such enemies? It is impossible. We are far too weak and too ingenuous. Yet many—if not most—of our failures and defeats are due to our foolish self-confidence when we either disbelieve or forget how formidable our spiritual enemies are.
Only the power of God can defend and deliver us from the might, the evil and the craft of the devil. True, the principalities and powers are strong, but the power of God is stronger. It is his power which raised Jesus Christ from the dead and enthroned him in the heavenly places, and which has raised us from the death of sin and enthroned us with Christ. True, it is in those same heavenly places, in that same unseen world, that the principalities and powers are working (verse 12). But they were defeated at the cross and are now under Christ’s feet and ours. So the invisible world in which they attack us and we defend ourselves is the very world in which Christ reigns over them and we reign with him. When Paul urges us to draw upon the power, might and strength of the Lord Jesus (verse 10), he uses exactly the same trio of words which he has used in 1:19 (dynamis, kratos and ischus) in relation to God’s work of raising Jesus from the dead.
Two exhortations stand side by side. The first is general: Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might (verse 10). The second is more specific: Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil (verse 11). Both commands are conspicuous examples of the balanced teaching of Scripture. Some Christians are so self-confident that they think they can manage by themselves without the Lord’s strength and armour. Others are so self-distrustful that they imagine they have nothing to contribute to their victory in spiritual warfare. Both are mistaken. Paul expresses the proper combination of divine ennabling and human co-operation. The power is indeed the Lord’s, and without the strength of his might we shall falter and fall, but still we need to be strong in him and in it, or more accurately to ‘be strengthened’. For the verb is a passive present which could almost be rendered ‘Strengthen yourselves in the Lord’ or (NEB) ‘Find your strength in the Lord’. It is the same construction as in 2 Timothy 2:1 where Paul exhorts Timothy to ‘take strength from the grace of God which is ours in Christ Jesus’ (NEB). Similarly, the armour is God’s, and without it we shall be fatally unprotected and exposed, but still we need to take it up and put it on. Indeed we should do so piece by piece, as the apostle goes on to explain in verses 13 to 17.
2. The principalities and powers
I have thus far assumed that by ‘principalities and powers’ Paul was alluding to personal, demonic intelligences. There is an increasingly fashionable theory among recent and contemporary theologians, however, that he was alluding rather to structures of thought (tradition, convention, law, authority, even religion), especially as embodied in the state and its institutions. Although a number of German theologians were debating this possibility in the 1930s, in the English-speaking world it has been a post-war discussion. So popular has it become that I think it is necessary first to trace its development and then to subject it to a critique.
In 1952 Gordon Rupp’s book Principalities and Powers appeared, sub-titled ‘Studies in the Christian conflict in history’. Writing in the aftermath of World War 2 he contrasted modern man’s ‘failure of nerve’ with the early Christians’ ‘exultant confidence’ and ‘stubborn truculence’ in the face of evil, and attributed the latter to their certainty about the victory of Jesus over the principalities and powers. By this expression, borrowed from late Jewish apocalyptic thought, Paul meant ‘supernatural cosmic forces, a vast hierarchy of angelic and demonic beings who inhabited the stars and … were the arbiters of human destiny’, enslaving men ‘beneath a cosmic totalitarianism’. But Dr Rupp went on to apply the concept to ‘the little people’ who in every era have ‘felt themselves to be no more than the playthings of great historical forces’, now in the middle ages, now in the industrial revolution, and now in the twentieth century in which they feel the victims of ‘great economic and sociological pressures’. He concluded: ‘Down the centuries the principalities and powers have assumed many disguises. Terrifying and deadly they are, sometimes sprawling across the earth in some gigantic despotism, at times narrowed down to one single impulse in the mind of one individual man. But the fight is on. For believers fighting there is the certainty of struggle to the end. But there is also the assurance of victory.’ Dr Rupp writes rather as a historian than a theologian. Without any exegetical argument he simply transfers the expression ‘principalities and powers’ to economic, social and political forces.
The following year the Dutch original of Hendrik Berkhof’s monograph Christ and the Powers was published, following a lecture delivered in Germany in 1950. Its English translation by John Howard Yoder appeared in America in 1962. Professor Berkhof’s thesis is that, although Paul borrowed the vocabulary of the powers from Jewish apocalyptic, his understanding of them was different: ‘In comparison to the apocalypticists a certain “demythologizing” has taken place in Paul’s thought. In short, the apocalypses think primarily of the principalities and powers as heavenly angels; Paul sees them as structures of earthly existence.’ He concedes that Paul may have ‘conceived of the Powers as personal beings’, yet ‘this aspect is so secondary that it makes little difference whether he did or not’. So he expresses his conclusion that ‘we must set aside the thought that Paul’s “Powers” are angels’. He identifies them with the stoicheia tou kosmou (‘elemental spirits of the universe’) of Galatians 4:3, 9, and Colossians 2:8 and 20, translates the expression ‘world powers’ and suggests that these are seen in human traditions and religious and ethical rules.
Dr Berkhof goes on to elaborate his understanding of Paul’s teaching on the Powers in relation to the creation, the fall, the redemption, and the role of the church. The Powers (tradition, morality, justice and order) were created by God, but have become tyrannical and objects of worship. So they both preserve and corrupt society. ‘The state, politics, class, social struggle, national interest, public opinion, accepted morality, the ideas of decency, humanity, democracy’—all these unify men, while separating them from the true God. Yet Christ has overcome them, for by his cross and resurrection they have been ‘unmasked as false gods’, and ‘the power of illusion’ has been struck from their hands. In consequence, Christians ‘see through the deception of the Powers’ and question their legitimacy, while others emboldened by the church refuse to let themselves be enslaved or intimidated. Thus the Powers are ‘christianized’ (i.e. limited to the modest, instrumental role God intended) or ‘neutralized’. More particularly, ‘the Holy Spirit “shrinks” the Powers before the eye of faith’, so that the discerning believer sees them in their true, creaturely proportions (whether nationalism, the state, money, convention or militarism) and avoids deifying the world. More positively, the church both announces to the Powers by the quality and unity of her life ‘that their unbroken dominion has come to an end’ and wages a defensive war against them in order ‘to hold … their seduction and their enslavement at a distance’. This announcement is Dr Berkhof’s explanation of Ephesians 3:10 and the defensive war of 6:10–17.
A third presentation of this view of the Powers was given in 1954 by G. B. Caird in a series of lectures in Canada which were published in 1950 as Principalities and Powers, A Study in Pauline Theology. It is a more careful biblical study than either of the two previously summarized books, although I cannot personally approach with any high degree of confidence a work which can refer to Paul’s ‘faulty logic and equally faulty exegesis’, not to mention ‘the insufficiency of Paul’s spurious arguments’. Affirming in his Introduction that ‘the idea of sinister world powers and their subjugation by Christ is built into the very fabric of Paul’s thought’, Dr Caird goes on to isolate three principal ‘powers’. The first is ‘pagan religion and pagan power’, including the state, and he interprets Ephesians 3:10 as teaching that these have already begun to be redeemed through Christian social action. The second power is the law which is good in itself because it is God’s, yet when it is ‘exalted into an independent system of religion, it becomes demonic’. The third power concerns those recalcitrant elements in nature which resist God’s rule, including wild animals, diseases, storms and the whole creation’s bondage to corruption. So ‘Paul’s view of man’s dilemma’ is as follows: ‘He lives under divinely appointed authorities—the powers of the state, the powers of legal religion, the powers of nature—which through sin have become demonic agencies. To expect that evil will be defeated by any of these powers, by the action of the state, by the self-discipline of the conscience, or by the processes of nature, is to ask that Satan cast out Satan. The powers can be robbed of their tyrannical influence and brought into their proper subjection to God only in the Cross’.
In his commentary on Ephesians published twenty years after Principalities and Powers, Dr Caird seems more willing to concede that Paul was referring to ‘spiritual beings who preside over all the forms and structures of power operative in the corporate life of men’. Indeed, ‘The real enemies are the spiritual forces that stand behind all institutions of government, and control the lives of men and nations.’
The only other author I will mention by name is Dr Markus Barth, whose The Broken Wall (A Study of the Epistle to the Ephesians) was published in 1959 and whose monumental two volumes in the Anchor Bible followed in 1974. In the former book he identifies the principalities and powers ‘by reference to four features of Paul’s thinking and terminology’, namely the state (political, judicial, ecclesiastical authorities), death, moral and ritual law, and economic structures including slavery. ‘We conclude that by principalities and powers Paul means the world of axioms and principles of politics and religion, of economics and society, of morals and biology, of history and culture’, and therefore ‘it is of the essence of the Gospel to include utterances concerning political, social, economic, cultural and psychological situations, dogmas and problems’.
In his later two-volume work, however, I get the distinct impression that Dr Barth is willing to allow Paul a continuing ‘mythological’ or ‘superstitious’ (as he thinks it) belief in supernatural powers. He seems to be seeking some kind of uneasy compromise between the two interpretations. Thus, ‘Paul denotes the angelic or demonic beings that reside in the heavens’, although there is a ‘direct association of these heavenly principalities and powers with structures and institutions of life on earth’. Again, ‘the “principalities and powers” are at the same time intangible spiritual entities and concrete historical, social or psychic structures or institutions’.
My first reaction to this attempted reconstruction, of which I have given four examples, is to admire its ingenuity. The scholars concerned have used great skill in their determination to make Paul’s obscure references to heavenly powers speak relevantly to our own earthly situations. Hence the attraction of this theory, which a number of authors of evangelical persuasion have also begun to adopt. But hence also its suspicious character. For some are sharing with us with great candour the two embarrassments which led them to embrace it. First, they say, the traditional interpretation reflected an archaic world-view, with angels and demons, not far removed from spooks and poltergeists. Secondly, they could find in the New Testament no allusion to social structures, which have become a significant modern preoccupation. Then suddenly a new theory is proposed which solves both problems simultaneously. We lose the demons and gain the structures, for the principalities and powers are structures in disguise!
It would be wrong, however, to reject the new theory because we may suspect the presuppositions which have led people to propound or accept it. What is needed on both sides is more serious exegetical work, for the new theory is ‘not proven’ and has failed, I would judge, to convince a majority of exegetes. All I can attempt here is an introductory critique. It is true that the vocabulary of ‘principalities and powers’ (archai and exousiai) is sometimes used in the New Testament of political authorities. For example, the Jewish priests sought some means to hand Jesus over ‘to the authority and jurisdiction (archē and exousia) of the governor’. In that verse the words are singular. Also Jesus warned his followers that they would be brought before ‘the rulers and the authorities’, while Paul told his readers to be ‘submissive to rulers and authorities’ or ‘to the governing authorities’, in all of which verses the words exousiai and archai or archontes occur together and in the plural. Moreover, in each case the context makes it unambiguously clear that human authorities are in view.
In the other contexts, however, in which the same words are normally translated ‘principalities and powers’, it is by no means clear that the reference is to political structures or judicial authorities. On the contrary, the a priori assumption of generations of interpreters has been that they refer to supernatural beings. That they were given the same names and titles as human rulers need not surprise us, since they ‘were thought of as having a political organization’ and are ‘rulers and functionaries of the spirit world’. I confess to finding the reconstructions of the new theorists not only ingenious, but artificial to the point of being contrived.
Take the three main references to the principalities and powers in Ephesians. The natural interpretation of 1:20–21 is not that God has exalted Jesus far above all earthly rulers and institutions, thus making him ‘King of kings and Lord of lords’ (though he is that, and this thought may be included), since the realm in which he has been supremely exalted is specifically said to be ‘in the heavenlies’ at God’s right hand. Next, it is to me extremely farfetched to suggest that in 3:10 Paul is really saying that it is to power structures on earth that God’s manifold wisdom is made known through the church. For those who interpret it in this way, the allusion to ‘the heavenly places’ is again an awkward addition. And thirdly, the Christian’s spiritual warfare is specifically stated to be ‘not with flesh and blood but with principalities and powers’, which has till recent days been universally understood as meaning ‘not with human but with demonic forces’. The allusions to ‘the world rulers of this present darkness’ and ‘the spiritual hosts of wickedness’, together with the armour and weapons needed to withstand them, fit supernatural powers much more naturally, especially in a context which twice mentions the devil (verses 11 and 16), while again there is the awkward addition of ‘in the heavenly places’. In fact, I have not come across a new theorist who takes into adequate account the fact that all three references to the principalities and powers in Ephesians also contain a reference to the heavenly places, that is, the unseen world of spiritual reality. It is a stubborn fact, as if Paul were deliberately explaining who the principalities and powers are, and where they operate. Indeed, the six stages in the developing drama of the principalities and powers—their original creation, their subsequent fall, their decisive conquest by Christ, their learning through the church, their continued hostility and their final destruction—all seem to apply more naturally to supernatural beings than to structures, institutions and traditions.
Turning now from exegetical to theological considerations, nobody can deny that the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels believed in both demons and angels. It was not inevitable that he should have done so, because the Sadducees did not. But exorcism was an integral part of his ministry of compassion and one of the chief signs of the kingdom. It is also recorded that he spoke without inhibition about angels. So if Jesus Christ our Lord believed in them and spoke of them, it ill becomes us to be too embarrassed to do so. His apostles took this belief over from Jesus. Quite apart from the references to principalities and powers, there are numerous other allusions to angels by Paul, Peter and the author of Hebrews. Now commentators are free, if their theology permits them, to disagree with Jesus and his apostles, to dismiss their beliefs about supernatural intelligences as ‘mythological’ or ‘superstitious’, and to attempt to ‘demythologize’ their teaching. But this is a different exercise from the attempt to argue that our Lord and his apostles were not teaching what for centuries it has appeared to virtually all commentators they were teaching. Very strong exegetical reasons, and not just the appeal of the relevant, would be necessary to overthrow such an almost universal tradition of biblical understanding.
Finally, in reaffirming that the principalities and powers are personal supernatural agencies, I am not at all denying that they can use structures, traditions, institutions, etc. for good or ill; I am only wishing to avoid the confusion which comes from identifying them. That social, political, judicial and economic structures can become demonic is evident to anybody who has considered that the state, which in Romans 13 is the minister of God, in Revelation 13 has become an ally of the devil. Similarly, the moral law which God gave for human good led to human bondage and was exploited by ‘the elemental spirits of the universe’. Every good gift of God can be perverted to evil use. But if we identify ‘the powers’ with human structures of one kind and another, serious consequences follow. First, we lack an adequate explanation why structures so regularly, but not always, become tyrannical. Secondly, we unjustifiably restrict our understanding of the malevolent activity of the devil, whereas he is too versatile to be limited to the structural. Thirdly, we become too negative towards society and its structures. For the Powers are evil, dethroned and to be fought. So if the Powers are structures, this becomes our attitude to structures. We find it hard to believe or say anything good about them, so corrupt do they appear. Advocates of the new theory warn us against deifying structures; I want to warn them against demonizing them. Both are extremes to avoid. By all means let the church as God’s new society question the standards and values of contemporary society, challenge them, and demonstrate a viable alternative. But if God blesses her witness, some structures may become changed for the good; then what will happen to the new theology of the Powers?
3. The armour of God (verses 13–20)
The purpose of investing ourselves with the divine armour is that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil (verse 11), that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore … This fourfold emphasis on the need to ‘stand’ or ‘withstand’ shows that the apostle’s concern is for Christian stability. Wobbly Christians who have no firm foothold in Christ are an easy prey for the devil. And Christians who shake like reeds and rushes cannot resist the wind when the principalities and powers begin to blow. Paul wants to see Christians so strong and stable that they remain firm even against the devil’s wiles (verse 11) and even in the evil day, that is, in a time of special pressure. For such stability, both of character and in crisis, the armour of God is essential.
The expression the whole armour of God translates the Greek word panoplia, which is ‘the full armour of a heavy-armed soldier’ (AG), although ‘the divineness rather than the completeness of the outfit is emphasized’. The point is that this equipment is ‘forged and furnished’ by God. In the Old Testament it is God himself, the Lord of Hosts, who is depicted as a warrior fighting to vindicate his people: e.g. ‘He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation upon his head.’ Still today the armour and weapons are his, but now he shares them with us. We have to put on the armour, take up the weapons and go to war with the powers of evil.
Paul details the six main pieces of a soldier’s equipment—the belt, the breastplate, the boots, the shield, the helmet and the sword, and uses them as pictures of the truth, righteousness, good news of peace, faith, salvation and word of God which equip us in our fight against the powers. Paul was very familiar with Roman soldiers. He met many in his travels, and as he dictated Ephesians he was chained to one by the wrist. He refers to his chain in verse 20. And although it would be unlikely that such a bodyguard would wear the full armour of an infantryman on the battlefield, yet the sight of him close by may well have kindled his imagination.
In 1655 the Puritan minister William Gurnall, ‘pastor of the church of Christ at Lavenham in Suffolk’ (as he styled himself), published his treatise The Christian in Complete Armour. Its elaborate sub-title, for which one needs to draw a deep breath, is: The saints’ war against the Devil, wherein a discovery is made of that grand enemy of God and his people, in his policies, power, seat of his empire, wickedness, and chief design he hath against the saints; a magazine opened, from whence the Christian is furnished with spiritual arms for the battle, helped on with his armour, and taught the use of his weapon; together with the happy issue of the whole war. In his Dedication of the book to his parishioners he modestly refers to himself as their ‘poor’ and ‘unworthy’ minister and to his treatise as but a ‘mite’ and a ‘little present’ to them. Yet in my eighth edition of 1821 it runs to three volumes, 261 chapters and 1,472 pages, although it is an exposition of only eleven verses.
Let me give you a taste of Gurnall’s spirituality. Regarding God’s armour he writes: ‘In heaven we shall appear not in armour but in robes of glory; but here they (sc. the pieces of armour specified) are to be worn night and day; we must walk, work and sleep in them, or else we are not true soldiers of Christ.’ In this armour we are to stand and watch, and never relax our vigilance, for ‘the saint’s sleeping time is Satan’s tempting time; every fly dares venture to creep on a sleeping lion’. He goes on to instance Samson (whose hair was cut by Delilah while he slept), King Saul (whose spear David stole while he was asleep), Noah (who was in some way abused by his son while he was in a drunken sleep) and Eutychus (who slept while Paul preached).
Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones in our own day has written a very fine and full exposition of the same eleven verses in two volumes entitled The Christian Warfare and The Christian Soldier, totalling 736 pages. His twenty-one chapters in the former volume on ‘the wiles of the devil’, which describe some of the devil’s subtlest assaults upon the people of God (in the three realms of the mind, of experience and of practice or conduct) and how we need to be on our guard, are full of wise counsel from an experienced pastor.
The first piece of equipment which Paul mentions is the girdle of truth: having girded your loins with truth (verse 14). Usually made of leather, the soldier’s belt belonged rather to his underwear than his armour. Yet it was essential. It gathered his tunic together and also held his sword. It ensured that he was unimpeded when marching. As he buckled it on, it gave him a sense of hidden strength and confidence. Belts and braces still do. To ‘tighten one’s belt’ can mean not only to accept a time of austerity during a food shortage but also to prepare oneself for action, which the ancients would have called ‘girding up their loins’.
Now the Christian soldier’s belt is ‘truth’. Many commentators, especially in the early centuries, understood this to mean ‘the truth’, the revelation of God in Christ and in Scripture. For certainly it is only the truth which can dispel the devil’s lies and set us free, and Paul has in this letter several times referred to the importance and the power of the truth. Other commentators, however, especially because the definite article is absent in the Greek sentence, prefer to understand Paul to be referring to ‘truth’ in the sense of ‘sincerity’ or (NEB) ‘integrity’. For certainly God requires ‘truth in the inward being’, and the Christian must at all costs be honest and truthful. To be deceitful, to lapse into hypocrisy, to resort to intrigue and scheming, this is to play the devil’s game, and we shall not be able to beat him at his own game. What he abominates is transparent truth. He loves darkness; light causes him to flee. For spiritual as for mental health honesty about oneself is indispensable.
Perhaps we do not need to choose between these alternatives. The judicious Gurnall writes: ‘Some by truth mean a truth of doctrine; others will have it truth of heart, sincerity; they I think best that comprise both … one will not do without the other.’
The second item of the Christian’s equipment is the breastplate of righteousness (verse 14). Some expositors have maintained that in God’s armour, although there is a breastplate, no protection is provided for the back. They then go on to argue that we must face our enemy with courage and not run away from him, exposing our unguarded back. John Bunyan made this point in Pilgrim’s Progress. When Christian reached the Valley of Humiliation, ‘he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him’, whose name was Apollyon. ‘Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back or to stand his ground. But he considered again that he had no armour for his back, and therefore thought, that to turn the back to him might give him greater advantage with ease to pierce him with his darts. Therefore he resolved to venture, and stand his ground.’ It is a good point of spiritual counsel, but remains a doubtful example of biblical exegesis, for the soldier’s breastplate often covered his back as well as his front, and was his major piece of armour protecting all his most vital organs.
In a previous letter Paul has written of ‘the breastplate of faith and love’, but here as in Isaiah 59:17 the breastplate consists of ‘righteousness’. Now ‘righteousness’ (dikaiosynē) in Paul’s letters more often than not means ‘justification’, that is, God’s gracious initiative in putting sinners right with himself through Christ. Is this then the Christian’s breastplate? Certainly no spiritual protection is greater than a righteous relationship with God. To have been justified by his grace through simple faith in Christ crucified, to be clothed with a righteousness which is not one’s own but Christ’s, to stand before God not condemned but accepted—this is an essential defence against an accusing conscience and against the slanderous attacks of the evil one, whose Hebrew name (‘Satan’) means ‘adversary’ and whose Greek title (diabolos, ‘devil’) means ‘slanderer’. ‘There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus … Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies; who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.’ This is the Christian assurance of ‘righteousness’, that is, of a right relationship with God through Christ; it is a strong breastplate to protect us against Satanic accusations.
On the other hand, the apostle wrote in 2 Corinthians 6:7 of ‘the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left’, apparently meaning moral righteousness, and has used the word in the same sense in Ephesians 4:24 and 5:9. So the Christian’s breastplate may be righteousness of character and conduct. For just as to cultivate ‘truth’ is the way to overthrow the devil’s deceits, so to cultivate ‘righteousness’ is the way to resist his temptations.
Alternatively, as with, the two possible meanings of ‘truth’, so with the two possible meanings of ‘righteousness’, it may well be right to combine them, since according to Paul’s gospel the one would invariably lead to the other. As G. G. Findlay put it, ‘The completeness of pardon for past offence and the integrity of character that belong to the justified life, are woven together into an impenetrable mail.’
The gospel boots come next in the list. According to Markus Barth, there is agreement among the commentators that Paul ‘has in mind the caliga (“half-boot”) of the Roman legionary which was made of leather, left the toes free, had heavy studded soles, and was tied to the ankles and shins with more or less ornamental straps’. These ‘equipped him for long marches and for a solid stance … While they did not impede his mobility, they prevented his foot from sliding.’
Now the Christian soldier’s boots are the equipment of the gospel of peace (verse 15). ‘Equipment’ translates hetoimasia, which means ‘readiness’, ‘preparation’ or ‘firmness’. The uncertainty is whether the genitive which follows is subjective or objective. If the former, the reference is to a certain firmness or steadfastness which the gospel gives to those who believe it, like the firmness which strong boots give to those who wear them. NEB takes it this way and translates: ‘Let the shoes on your feet be the gospel of peace, to give you a firm footing.’ And certainly if we have received the good news, and are enjoying the peace with God and with one another which it brings, we have the firmest possible foothold from which to fight evil.
But the genitive may be objective, in which case the Christian soldier’s shoes are his ‘readiness to announce the Good News of peace’ (GNB). There can be no doubt that we should always be ready to bear witness to Jesus Christ as God’s peacemaker (2:14–15) and also—as Paul writes in a parallel passage in Colossians—to give gracious though ‘salty’ answers to the questions which ‘outsiders’ put to us. Such tip-toe readiness has a very stabilizing influence on our own lives, as well as introducing others to the liberating gospel. For myself I veer slightly towards this explanation, partly because of the Colossians parallel and partly because of the faint echoes of 2:17 (‘He came and preached peace’) and of Isaiah 52:7 (‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace’). As Johannes Blauw has written, ‘Missionary work is like a pair of sandals that have been given to the Church in order that it shall set out on the road and keep on going to make known the mystery of the gospel.’
In either case the devil fears and hates the gospel, because it is God’s power to rescue people from his tyranny, both us who have received it and those with whom we share it. So we need to keep our gospel boots strapped on.
Our fourth piece of equipment is the shield of faith (verse 16) which we are to take up not so much ‘above all’ (AV), as if it were the most important of all weapons, but rather besides all these, as an indispensable addition. The word Paul uses denotes not the small round shield which left most of the body unprotected, but the long oblong one, measuring 1.2 metres by 0.75, which covered the whole person. Its Latin name was scutum. It ‘consisted … of two layers of wood glued together and covered first with linen and then with hide: it was bound with iron above and below.’ It was specially designed to put out the dangerous incendiary missiles then in use, specially arrows dipped in pitch which were then lit and fired.
What, then, are all the flaming darts of the evil one, and with what shield can Christians protect themselves? The devil’s darts no doubt include his mischievous accusations which inflame our conscience with what (if we are sheltering in Christ) can only be called false guilt. Other darts are unsought thoughts of doubt and disobedience, rebellion, lust, malice or fear. But there is a shield with which we can quench or extinguish all such fire-tipped darts. It is the shield of faith. God himself ‘is a shield to those who take refuge in him’, and it is by faith that we flee to him for refuge. For faith lays hold of the promises of God in times of doubt and depression, and faith lays hold of the power of God in times of temptation. Apollyon taunted Christian with the threat, ‘Here will I spill thy soul.’ ‘And with that,’ Bunyan continues, ‘he threw a flaming dart at his breast; but Christian had a shield in his hand, with which be caught it, and so prevented the danger of that.’
The Roman soldier’s helmet, which is the next piece of armour on the list, was usually made of a tough metal like bronze or iron. ‘An inside lining of felt or sponge made the weight bearable. Nothing short of an axe or hammer could pierce a heavy helmet, and in some cases a hinged vizor added frontal protection.’ Helmets were decorative as well as protective, and some had magnificent plumes or crests.
According to an earlier statement of Paul’s, the Christian soldier’s helmet is ‘the hope of salvation’, that is, our assurance of future and final salvation. Here in Ephesians it is just the helmet of salvation (verse 17) which we are to take and wear. But whether our head piece is that measure of salvation which we have already received (forgiveness, deliverance from Satan’s bondage, and adoption into God’s family) or the confident expectation of full salvation on the last day (including resurrection glory and Christ-likeness in heaven), there is no doubt that God’s saving power is our only defence against the enemy of our souls. Charles Hodge wrote: ‘that which adorns and protects the Christian, which enables him to hold up his head with confidence and joy, is the fact that he is saved’ and, we might add, that he knows his salvation will be perfected in the end.
The sixth and last weapon to be specified is the sword (verse 17). Of all the six pieces of armour or weaponry listed, the sword is the only one which can clearly be used for attack as well as defence. Moreover, the kind of attack envisaged will involve a close personal encounter, for the word used is machaira, the short sword. It is the sword of the Spirit, which is then immediately identified as the word of God, although in the Revelation it is seen issuing from the mouth of Christ. This may well include the words of defence and testimony which Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would put into his followers’ lips when they were dragged before magistrates. But the expression ‘the word of God’ has a much broader reference than that, namely to Scripture, God’s written word, whose origin is repeatedly attributed to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Still today it is his sword, for he still uses it to cut through people’s defences, to prick their consciences and to stab them spiritually awake. Yet he also puts his sword into our hands, so that we may use it both in resisting temptation (as Jesus did, quoting Scripture to counter the devil in the Judean wilderness) and in evangelism. Every Christian evangelist, whether a preacher or a personal witness, knows that God’s word has cutting power, being ‘sharper than any two-edged sword’. We must never therefore be ashamed to use it, or to acknowledge our confidence that the Bible is the sword of the Spirit. As E. K. Simpson wrote, this phrase sets forth ‘the trenchant power of Scripture … But a mutilated Bible is what Moody dubbed it, “a broken sword” ’.
Here, then, are the six pieces which together make up the whole armour of God: the girdle of truth and the breastplate of righteousness, the gospel boots and the faith shield, salvation’s helmet and the Spirit’s sword. They constitute God’s armour, as we have seen, for he supplies it. Yet it is our responsibility to take it up, to put it on and to use it confidently against the powers of evil. Moreover, we must be sure to avail ourselves of every item of equipment provided and not omit any. ‘Our enemies are on every side, and so must our armour be, on the right hand and on the left.
Finally, Paul adds prayer (verses 18–20), not (probably) because he thinks of prayer as another though unnamed weapon, but because it is to pervade all our spiritual warfare. Equipping ourselves with God’s armour is not a mechanical operation; it is itself an expression of our dependence on God, in other words of prayer. Moreover, it is prayer in the Spirit, prompted and guided by him, just as God’s word is ‘the sword of the Spirit’ which he himself employs. Thus Scripture and prayer belong together as the two chief weapons which the Spirit puts into our hands.
Prevailing Christian prayer is wonderfully comprehensive. It has four universals, indicated by the fourfold use of the word ‘all’. We are to pray at all times (both regularly and constantly), with all prayer and supplication (for it takes many and varied forms), with all perseverance (because we need like good soldiers to keep alert, and neither give up nor fall asleep), making supplication for all the saints (since the unity of God’s new society, which has been the preoccupation of this whole letter, must be reflected in our prayers). Most Christians pray sometimes, with some prayers and some degree of perseverance, for some of God’s people. But to replace ‘some’ by ‘all’ in each of these expressions would be to introduce us to a new dimension of prayer. It was when Christian ‘perceived the mouth of hell … hard by the wayside’ in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and saw flame and smoke and heard hideous noises, that ‘he was forced to put up his sword, and betake himself to another weapon, called All-prayer: so he cried in my hearing, “O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul.” ’
Perhaps most important is the command to stay awake and therefore alert (verse 18). It goes back to the teaching of Jesus himself. He emphasized the need for watchfulness in view of the unexpectedness both of his return and of the onset of temptation. He seems to have kept repeating the same warning: ‘I say to you, Watch!’ The apostles echoed and extended his admonition. ‘Be watchful!’ was their general summons to Christian vigilance, partly because the devil is always on the prowl like a hungry lion, and false teachers like fierce wolves, and partly lest the Lord’s return should take us unawares, but especially because of our tendency to sleep when we should be praying. ‘Watch and pray’, Jesus urged. It was failure to obey this order which led the apostles into their disastrous disloyalty; similar failure leads to similar disloyalty today. It is by prayer that we wait on the Lord and renew our strength. Without prayer we are much too feeble and flabby to stand against the might of the forces of evil.
Pray also for me, Paul begged (verse 19). He was wise enough to know his own need of strength if he was to stand against the enemy, and humble enough to ask his friends to pray with him and for him. The strength he needed was not just for his personal confrontation with the devil, however, but for his evangelistic ministry by which he sought to rescue people from the devil’s dominion. This had been a part of his original commission when the risen Lord Jesus had told him to turn people ‘from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God’. Hence the spiritual conflict of which he was aware. Moreover he had not left the battlefield now that he was under house arrest and unable to continue his missionary expeditions. No, there were those soldiers to whom one by one, each for a shift of several hours on end, he was chained, and there were his constant visitors. He could still witness to them, and he did so. There must have been other individuals beside the fugitive slave Onesimus whom he led to faith in Christ. Luke tells of Jewish leaders who came to him at his lodging ‘in great numbers’, and who heard him expound ‘from morning till evening’ about the kingdom and about Jesus. ‘Some were convinced,’ Luke added. Thus Paul’s evangelistic labours went on. For ‘two whole years’ he ‘welcomed all who came to him’, he proclaimed ‘the kingdom of God and … the Lord Jesus Christ’, and he did it ‘quite openly and unhindered’.
It is those last words which we need specially to notice. For ‘quite openly’ translates the Greek phrase ‘with all parrēsia’. The word originally denoted the democratic freedom of speech enjoyed by Greek citizens. It then came to mean ‘outspokenness, frankness, plainness of speech, that conceals nothing and passes over nothing’, together with ‘courage, confidence, boldness, fearlessness, especially in the presence of persons of high rank’ (AG). And this is precisely what Paul asks the Ephesians to pray that he may be given. Freedom is what he longs for—not freedom from confinement, but freedom to preach the gospel. So he uses the word parrēsia twice (first as a noun, then as a verb) in the expressions opening my mouth boldly (verse 19) in preaching the gospel, and that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak (verse 20). The good news he announces he still calls the mystery, because it has become known only by revelation, and centres on the union of Jews and Gentiles in Christ; and the two major qualities he wants to characterize his preaching of it are ‘utterance’ (verse 19) and ‘boldness’ (verses 19–20).
The first of these two words seems to refer to the clarity of his communication, and the second to his courage. He is anxious to obscure nothing by muddled speech and to hide nothing by cowardly compromise. Clarity and courage remain two of the most crucial characteristics of authentic Christian preaching. For they relate to the content of the message preached and to the style of its presentation. Some preachers have the gift of lucid teaching, but their sermons lack solid content; their substance has become diluted by fear. Others are bold as lions. They fear nobody, and omit nothing. But what they say is confused and confusing. Clarity without courage is like sunshine in the desert: plenty of light but nothing worth looking at. Courage without clarity is like a beautiful landscape at night time: plenty to see, but no light by which to enjoy it. What is needed in the pulpits of the world today is a combination of clarity and courage, or of ‘utterance’ and ‘boldness’. Paul asked the Ephesians to pray that these might be given to him, for he recognized them as gifts of God. We should join them in prayer for the pastors and preachers of the contemporary church.
It was for the gospel that he had become an ambassador in chains (verse 20). Earlier in the letter he has designated himself both ‘a prisoner … on behalf of you Gentiles’ and ‘a prisoner for the Lord’ (3:1; 4:1). Thus he gives the gospel, the Lord and the Gentiles as three reasons for his imprisonment. Yet these three are one. For the good news he preached was of the Gentiles’ inclusion in the new society, and it had been entrusted to him by the Lord. So by communicating it in its fullness he was being simultaneously faithful to the gospel itself, to the Lord who had revealed it to him and to the Gentiles who received its blessings. His faithfulness to these three had cost him his freedom. So he was a prisoner for all three. Perhaps now he was sometimes tempted to compromise in order to secure his release. For ‘imprisonment brings its own special temptation to bow to the fear of man’. But if so, he was given grace to resist. ‘Paul thinks of himself as the ambassador of Jesus Christ, duly accredited to represent his Lord at the imperial court of Rome’. How could he be ashamed of his King or afraid to speak in his name? On the contrary, he was proud to be Christ’s ambassador, even if he was experiencing the anomaly of being an ‘ambassador in chains’. It is possible even that he deliberately plays on this paradox. Markus Barth writes: ‘The term “chain” (alusis) signifies among other things the (golden) adornment(s) worn around the neck and wrists by rich ladies or high ranking men. On festive occasions ambassadors wear such chains in order to reveal the riches, power and dignity of the government they represent. Because Paul serves Christ crucified, he considers the painful iron prison chains as most appropriate insignia for the representation of his Lord.’ What concerns Paul most, however, is not that his wrist may be unchained, but that his mouth may be opened in testimony; not that he may be set free, but that the gospel may be spread freely and without hindrance. It is for this, then, that he prays and asks the Ephesians to pray too. Against such prayer the principalities and powers are helpless.
13. Conclusion (6:21–24)
Paul has reached the end of his letter, which he has been dictating. Perhaps at this point he takes the pen from his scribe and writes an authenticating sentence or two in his own handwriting. He certainly did this at the conclusion of his letters to the Galatians, the Thessalonians, the Corinthians and the Colossians.
To whom, then, has he been dictating? Probably to Tychicus, whom he now mentions affectionately by name. Tychicus was a native of Asia. Luke not only describes him as an ‘Asian’, but also brackets him with Trophimus, whom he later calls an ‘Ephesian’. So Tychicus may have come from Ephesus too. Paul certainly sent him there during his second imprisonment in Rome, and reading between the lines of the Ephesian and Colossian letters Paul seems to assume that his readers know him already.
What is clear, whether or not Tychicus was Paul’s scribe, is that Paul entrusts the letter to him to deliver, together with the Colossian Letter. For the apostle evidently has complete confidence in his younger colleague. Beloved brother, he calls him, and also faithful minister in the Lord (verse 21). He will rely on him not only to deliver the letters safely, but also to supplement their message with some personal news. He is sending him, he says, that you also may know how I am and what I am doing; he will tell you everything (verse 21). Indeed, I have sent him to you for this very purpose, that you may know how we are (verse 22). Thus three times Paul reiterates his intention that Tychicus will bring his readers up to date with news of him. This no doubt explains the unusual absence at the end of the letter of personal messages and greetings. Tychicus will convey them by word of mouth.
Then there is another reason for the visit of Tychicus to Ephesus and its neighbouring cities. He will deliver the letter, he will tell the church members how Paul is, and in addition Paul is sending him that he may encourage your hearts, (verse 22). It is touching to see the apostle’s desire to forge stronger personal links between himself and these Asian Christians. His exposition of God’s new society is no mere theological theory; for he and they are members of it themselves. So they must deepen their fellowship with one another—by praying for one another (he has recorded two of his prayers for them, in chapters 1 and 3, before requesting their prayers for him in verses 19 and 20), by his letter to them, and through Tychicus who would both bring them information about Paul and seek to encourage them. Prayer, correspondence and visits are still three major means by which Christians and churches can enrich one another and so contribute to the building up of the body of Christ.
It was the custom in the ancient world for correspondents to end their letters with a wish—usually a secular wish, even if the gods were invoked—for the reader’s health or happiness. Paul sees no reason to abandon the convention in principle. But as he has Christianized the opening greeting, so now he Christianizes the final wish. Indeed, what he writes is half wish, half prayer. For the blessings he desires for his readers will come from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. What blessings are these?
Paul’s first prayer-wish is this: Peace to the brethren, and love with faith (verse 23). Peace has been a characteristic word of this letter. In the doctrinal section at the beginning he has explained how Jesus Christ ‘is our peace’ since he has broken down the dividing wall and created a single new humanity, ‘so making peace’, and how he then ‘came and preached peace’. Consequently, in the ethical section which follows Paul has begged them both to ‘maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ and to ‘forbear one another in love’ (4:2–3), indeed to ‘walk in love as Christ loved us’ (5:2). Peace and love belong together, for peace is reconciliation and love is its source and outflow. Paul paints a beautiful picture of the church fellowship and the Christian home pervaded with love and peace, even though no peace treaty can ever be negotiated with the principalities and powers of evil. When he adds to ‘love’ the words ‘with faith’, he is probably thinking of faith as a characteristic they already have, rather than as another he wants them to be given. For ‘faith they had; Paul’s prayer was that love might be connected with it’.
Paul’s second prayer-wish is this: Grace be with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with love undying. By this expression he characterizes his Christian readers in terms of their love for Christ. The letter’s final words in the Greek sentence mean simply ‘in incorruption’ (en aphtharsiā). Most commentators understand them as a qualification of people’s love for Christ and so as a restriction on the grace of God. In this case, the prayer is that God’s grace may accompany those who love Christ with love undying or ‘with unfailing love’ (NEB). Other commentators have not felt such a limitation to be congruous with Paul’s conclusion. They therefore suggest attaching the phrase rather to God’s grace than to Christians’ love. In this case, the prayer is that all who love our Lord Jesus Christ may experience God’s grace ‘in immortality’ or ‘for ever’. If this is correct, then ‘the epistle which opened with a bold glance into the eternal past closes with the outlook of an immortal hope’.
Of the four words ‘peace’, ‘love’, ‘faith’, and ‘grace’ which are included in the apostle’s final greeting, the two which stand out as particularly appropriate are ‘grace’ and ‘peace’. The apostle began his letter by wishing his readers ‘grace … and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’ (1:2); he now ends it with a similar reference to grace and peace. No two words could summarize the message of the letter more succinctly. For ‘peace’ in the sense of reconciliation with God and one another is the great achievement of Jesus Christ, and ‘grace’ is the reason why and the means by which he did it. Moreover, both are indispensable to all members of God’s new society. Hence Paul’s wishing of peace to ‘the brethren’ (verse 23), who belong to each other as brothers and sisters in the family of God, and of grace to ‘all’ those who love Christ, without discrimination, whatever their race, rank, age or sex. It is a wish, a prayer, that the members of God’s new society may live in harmony as brothers and sisters in his family, at peace and in love with him and with each other, together with a recognition that only by his grace can this dream come true.
I venture, then, as we conclude our study of this letter to the Ephesians, to make Paul’s words my own and address them to you my readers: ‘Peace be to the brothers and sisters’ and ‘grace be with you all’.