The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians. Findlay George Gillanders
with Christ in God.” It is the identical “new man” of Romans and Colossians who presents himself as our ideal here, raised with Christ from the dead and “sitting with Him in the heavenly places.” The newness of life in which he walks, receives its impulse and direction from this exalted fellowship.
The characteristics of St Paul’s teaching which we have described – his logical thoroughness and finality, his peculiar historical, theological, spiritual, and ethical standpoint and manner of thought – are combined in the conception which is the specific note of this epistle, viz., its idea of the Church as the body of Christ, – or in other words, of the new humanity created in Him. This forms the centre of the circle of thought in which the writer’s mind moves;6 it is the meeting-point of the various lines of thought that we have already traced. The doctrine of personal salvation wrought out in the great evangelical epistles terminates in that of social and collective salvation. A new and precious title is conferred on Christ: He is “Saviour of the body” (v. 23), i. e., of the corporate Christian community. “The Son of God who loved me and gave up Himself for me” becomes “the Christ” who “loved the Church and gave up Himself for her.”7 “The new man” is no longer the individual, a mere transformed ego; he is the type and beginning of a new mankind. A perfect society of men, all sons of God in Christ, is being constituted around the cross, in which the old antagonisms are reconciled, the ideal of creation is restored, and a body is provided to contain the fulness of Christ, a holy temple which God inhabits in the Spirit. Of this edifice, with the cross for its centre and Christ Jesus for its corner-stone, Jew and Gentile form the material – “the Jew first,” lying nearest to the site.8
The apostle Paul necessarily conceived the reconstruction of humanity under the form of a reconciliation of Israel and the Gentiles. The Catholicism we have here is Paul’s Catholicism of Gentile engrafting– not Clement’s, of churchly order and uniformity; nor Ignatius’, of monepiscopal rule. It is profoundly characteristic of this apostle, that in “the law” which had been to his own experience the barrier and ground of quarrel between the soul and God, “the strength of sin,” he should come to see likewise the barrier between men and men, and the strength of the sinful enmity which distracted the Churches of his foundation (ii. 14–16).
The representation of the Church contained in this epistle is, therefore, by no means new in its elements. Such texts as 1 Corinthians iii. 16, 17 (“Ye are God’s temple,” etc.) and xii. 12–27 (concerning the one body and many members) bring us near to its actual expression. But the figures of the body and temple in these passages, had they stood alone, might be read as mere passing illustrations of the nature of Christian fellowship. Now they become proper designations of the Church, and receive their full significance. While in 1 Corinthians, moreover, these phrases do not look beyond the particular community addressed, in Ephesians they embrace the entire Christian society. This epistle signalizes a great step forwards in the development of the apostle’s theology – perhaps we might say, the last step. The Pastoral epistles serve to put the final apostolic seal upon the theological edifice that is now complete. Their care is with the guarding and furnishing of the “great house”9 which our epistle is engaged in building.
The idea of the Church is not, however, independently developed. Ephesians and Colossians are companion letters, – the complement and explanation of each other. Both “speak with regard to Christ and the Church”; both reveal the Divine “glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus.”10 The emphasis of Ephesians falls on the former, of Colossians on the latter of these objects. The doctrine of the Person of Christ and that of the nature of the Church proceed with equal step. The two epistles form one process of thought.
Criticism has attempted to derive first one and then the other of the two from its fellow, – thus, in effect, stultifying itself. Finally Dr. Holtzmann, in his Kritik der Epheser-und Kolosserbriefe,11 undertook to show that each epistle was in turn dependent on the other. There is, Holtzmann says, a Pauline nucleus hidden in Colossians, which he has himself extracted. By its aid some ecclesiastic of genius in the second century composed the Ephesian epistle. He then returned to the brief Colossian writing of St Paul, and worked it up, with his own Ephesian composition lying before him, into our existing epistle to the Colossians. This complicated and too ingenious hypothesis has not satisfied any one except its author, and need not detain us here. But Holtzmann has at any rate made good, against his predecessors on the negative side, the unity of origin of the two canonical epistles, the fact that they proceed from one mint and coinage. They are twin epistles, the offspring of a single birth in the apostle’s mind. Much of their subject-matter, especially in the ethical section, is common to both. The glory of the Christ and the greatness of the Church are truths inseparable in the nature of things, wedded to each other. To the confession, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” His response ever is, “I will build my Church.”12 The same correspondence exists between these two epistles in the dialectic movement of the apostle’s thought.
At the same time, there is a considerable difference between the two writings in point of style. M. Renan, who accepts Colossians from Paul’s hand, and who admits that “among all the epistles bearing the name of Paul the epistle to the Ephesians is perhaps that which has been most anciently cited as a composition of the apostle of the Gentiles,” yet speaks of this epistle as a “verbose amplification” of the other, “a commonplace letter, diffuse and pointless, loaded with useless words and repetitions, entangled and overgrown with irrelevancies, full of pleonasms and obscurities.”13
In this instance, Renan’s literary sense has deserted him. While Colossians is quick in movement, terse and pointed, in some places so sparing of words as to be almost hopelessly obscure,14 Ephesians from beginning to end is measured and deliberate, exuberant in language, and obscure, where it is so, not from the brevity, but from the length and involution of its periods. It is occupied with a few great ideas, which the author strives to set forth in all their amplitude and significance. Colossians is a letter of discussion; Ephesians of reflection. The whole difference of style lies in this. In the reflective passages of Colossians, as indeed in the earlier epistles,15 we find the stateliness of movement and rhythmical fulness of expression which in this epistle are sustained throughout. Both epistles are marked by those unfinished sentences and anacolutha, the grammatical inconsequence associated with close continuity of thought, which is a main characteristic of St Paul’s style.16 The epistle to the Colossians is like a mountain stream forcing its way through some rugged defile; that to the Ephesians is the smooth lake below, in which its chafed waters restfully expand. These sister epistles represent the moods of conflict and repose which alternated in St Paul’s mobile nature.
In general, the writings of this group, belonging to the time of the apostle’s imprisonment and advancing age,17 display less passion and energy, but a more tranquil spirit than those of the Jewish controversy. They are prison letters, the fruit of a time when the author’s mind had been much thrown in upon itself. They have been well styled “the afternoon epistles,” being marked by the subdued and reflective temper natural to this period of life. Ephesians is, in truth, the typical representative of the third group of Paul’s epistles, as Galatians is of the second. There is abundant reason to be satisfied that this letter came, as it purports to do, from Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through God’s will.
But that it was addressed to “the saints which are in Ephesus” is more difficult to believe. The apostle has “heard of the faith which prevails amongst” his readers; he presumes that they “have heard of the Christ, and were taught in Him according as truth is in Jesus.”18
See ch. i. 9–13, ii. 11–22, iii. 5–11, iv. 1–16, v. 23–32.
Gal ii. 20; Eph. v. 25.
Rom. i. 16; Eph. ii. 17–20.
1 Tim. iii. 15, 16; 2 Tim. ii. 20, 21.
Eph. iii. 21, v. 32.
Von Soden, the latest interpreter of this school and Holtzmann’s collaborateur in the new
Matt. xvi. 15–18; John xvii. 10:
See his
See Col. ii. 15, 18, 20–23.
See the Winer-Moulton
Eph. iii. 1; Phil. i. 13; Philem. 9.
Ch. i. 15, iv. 20, 21.