The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians. George G. Findlay
missionary and the masterly debater. Those critics who recognize the genuine apostle only in the four previous epistles and reject whatever does not conform strictly to their type, do not perceive how much is needed to make up a man like the apostle Paul. Without the inwardness, the brooding faculty, the power of abstract and metaphysical thinking displayed in the epistles of this group, he could never have wrought out the system of doctrine contained in those earlier writings, nor grasped the principles which he there applies with such vigour and effect. That so many serious and able scholars doubt, or even deny, St. Paul’s authorship of this epistle on internal grounds and because of the contrast to which we have referred, is one of those phenomena which in future histories of religious thought will be quoted as the curiosities of a hypercritical age.[2]
Let us observe some of the Pauline qualities that are stamped upon the face of this document. There is, in the first place, the apostle’s intellectual note, what has been well called his passion for the absolute. St. Paul’s was one of those minds, so discomposing to superficial and merely practical thinkers, which cannot be content with half-way conclusions. For every principle he seeks its ultimate basis; every line of thought he pushes to its furthest limits. His gospel, if he is to rest in it, must supply a principle of unity that will bind together all the elements of his mental world.
Hence, in contesting the Jewish claim to religious superiority on the ground of circumcision and the Abrahamic covenant, St. Paul developed in the epistle to the Galatians a religious philosophy of history; he arrived at a view of the function of the law in the education of mankind which disposed not only of the question at issue, but of all such questions. He established for ever the principle of salvation by faith and of spiritual sonship to God. What that former argument effects for the history of revelation, is done here for the gospel in its relations to society and universal life. The principle of Christ’s headship is carried to its largest results. The centre of the Church becomes the centre of the universe. God’s plan of the ages is disclosed, ranging through eternity and embracing every form of being, and “gathering into one all things in the Christ.” In Galatians and Romans the thought of salvation by Christ breaks through Jewish limits and spreads itself over the field of history; in Colossians and Ephesians the idea of life in Christ overleaps the barriers of time and human existence, and brings “things in heaven and things in earth and things beneath the earth” under its sway.
The second, historical note of original Paulinism we recognize in the writer’s attitude towards Judaism. We should be prepared to stake the genuineness of the epistle on this consideration alone. The position and point of view of the Jewish apostle to the Gentiles are unique in history. It is difficult to conceive how any one but Paul himself, at any other juncture, could have represented the relation of Jew and Gentile to each other as it is put before us here. The writer is a Jew, a man nourished on the hope of Israel (i. 12), who had looked at his fellow-men across “the middle wall of partition” (ii. 14). In his view, the covenant and the Christ belong, in the first instance and as by birthright, to the men of Israel. They are “the near,” who live hard by the city and house of God. The blessedness of the Gentile readers consists in the revelation that they are “fellow-heirs and of the same body and joint-partakers with us of the promise in Christ Jesus” (iii. 6). What is this but to say, as the apostle had done before, that the branches “of the naturally wild olive tree” were “against nature grafted into the good olive tree” and allowed to “partake of its root and fatness,” along with “the natural branches,” the children of the stock of Abraham who claimed it for “their own”; that “the men of faith are sons of Abraham” and “Abraham’s blessing has come on the Gentiles through faith”?[3]
For our author this revelation has lost none of its novelty and surprise. He is in the midst of the excitement it has produced, and is himself its chief agent and mouthpiece (iii. 1–9). This disclosure of God’s secret plans for the world overwhelms him by its magnitude, by the splendour with which it invests the Divine character, and the sense of his personal unworthiness to be entrusted with it. We utterly disbelieve that any later Christian writer could or would have personated the apostle and mimicked his tone and sentiments in regard to his vocation, in the way that the “critical” hypothesis assumes. The criterion of Erasmus is decisive: Nemo potest Paulinum pectus effingere.
St. Paul’s doctrine of the cross is admittedly his specific theological note. In the shameful sacrificial death of Jesus Christ he saw the instrument of man’s release from the curse of the broken law;[4] and through this knowledge the cross which was the “scandal” of Saul the Pharisee, had become Paul’s glory and its proclamation the business of his life. It is this doctrine, in its original strength and fulness, which lies behind such sentences as those of chapter i. 7, ii. 13, and v. 2: “We have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses—brought nigh in the blood of Christ—an offering and sacrifice to God for an odour of sweet smell.”
Another mark of the apostle’s hand, his specific spiritual note, we find in the mysticism that pervades the epistle and forms, in fact, its substance. “I live no longer: Christ lives in me.” “He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.”[5] In these sentences of the earlier letters we discover the spring of St. Paul’s theology, lying in his own experience—the sense of personal union through the Spirit with Christ Jesus. This was the deepest fact of Paul’s consciousness. Here it meets us at every turn. More than twenty times the phrase “in Christ” or its equivalents recur, applied to Christian acts or states. It is enough to refer to chapter iii. 17, “that the Christ may make His dwelling in your hearts through faith,” to show how profoundly this mysterious relationship is realized in this letter. No other New Testament writer conceived the idea in Paul’s way, nor has any subsequent writer of whom we know made the like constant and original use of it. It was the habit of the apostle’s mind, the index of his innermost life. Kindred to this, and hardly less conspicuous, is his conception of “God in Christ” (2 Cor. v. 19) saving and operating upon men, who, as we read here, “chose us in Christ before the world’s foundation—forgave us in Him—made us in Him to sit together in the heavenly places—formed us in Christ Jesus for good works.”
The ethical note of the true Paulinism is the conception of the new man in Christ Jesus, whose sins were slain by His death, and who shares His risen life unto God (Rom. vi.). From this idea, as from a fountainhead, the apostle in the parallel Colossian epistle (ch. iii.) deduces the new Christian morality. The temper and disposition of the believer, his conduct in all social duties and practical affairs are the expression of a “life hid 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