St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition

The admission of Gentiles

But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle wall of partition, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; that he might create in himself of the twain one new man, so making peace; and might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: and he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father.

Now we can turn from the negative to the positive statement, and observe what St. Paul says of the new privileges of the once heathen converts. He pictures them under four metaphors, each describing a social state.

(1) They are citizens in the holy state, the commonwealth of the people consecrated to God – citizens with full rights, and no longer strangers or unenfranchised residents (sojourners).

(2) More intimately still, they belong to the family or household of God.

(3) They are being built all together into a sanctuary for God to dwell in – a holy structure of which the foundation stones are the apostles, and the Christian prophets who were their companions; and of which the corner-stone, determining the lines of the building and compacting it into one, is Jesus Christ, according to the word of God by Isaiah, 'Behold I lay in Zion for a foundation stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone of sure foundation.'

(4) But the metaphor of the building passes into the metaphor of the growing plant. Christ is, as St. Peter says, 'a living stone[101].' He not only determines the lines of the spiritual structure, but He pervades the whole of it as a presence and spirit, so that every other human 'stone' is also alive and growing with His life.

So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God, being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief corner stone; in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.

These are indeed metaphors expressive of glorious realities, which have no doubt become dulled in meaning through a conventional Christianity, which involves no sacrifice and therefore attains no sense of blessedness, but which a little meditation may easily restore to something of their original freshness.

(1) The idea of the chosen people all through the Old Testament is that they are as a whole consecrated to God. Priests and kings appointed by God to their several offices may indeed fulfil special functions in the national life, yet the fundamental idea is never lost that the entire nation is holy, 'a kingdom of priests.' It is because this is true that the prophets can appeal as they do to the people in general, as well as to priests and rulers, as sharing altogether the responsibility of the national life. Now the whole of this idea is transferred, only deepened and intensified, to the Christian Church. That too has its divinely-ordained ministers, its differentiation of functions in the one body, but the whole body is priestly, and all are citizens – not merely residents but citizens, that is, intelligent participators in a common corporate life consecrated to God. How truly realized this idea was in the early Christian communities, St. Paul's letters are our best witnesses. They are really – except the pastoral epistles – letters to the churches and not to the clergy. It is the whole body which is at Thessalonica and Corinth to concern itself with the exercise of moral discipline[102] – the whole body in the Galatian churches and at Colossae who are to concern themselves with the apprehension and protection of the full Christian truth. They are all to be 'perfectly initiated' in Christ Jesus, full participators in the affairs of the divine society[103]. Whatever needs to be said afterwards about the special functions of special officers, this is the first thing to be said and recognized; and it gives us a profound sense of the distance we have fallen from our ideal. The laity, it is generally understood among us, are to come to church and perhaps to communion, are to accept the ministries of religion at marriages and funerals, and are to subscribe a little money to religious objects; but they may leave it to the clergy, as a matter of course, to carry on the business of religion – that is, worship and doctrine, for discipline has been dropped out – and confine themselves to a certain amount of irresponsible criticism of the sermons of the clergy and their proceedings generally.

The catholic church

For this state of things – this very false sacerdotalism – the responsibility is generally laid at the door of 'clerical arrogance.' It is not necessary to consider how large a factor in the result clerical arrogance has really been, for certainly what alone has given the clergy the opportunity to put themselves in false isolation, and what has been an immensely more powerful factor in the general result, has been the spiritual apathy of the mass of church members, an apathy which began as soon as the Christian profession began to cost men little or nothing.

Are we to set to work to revive St. Paul's ideal of the life of a Church? If so, what we need is not more Christians, but better Christians. We want to make the moral meaning of church membership understood and its conditions appreciated. We want to make men understand that it costs something to be a Christian; that to be a Christian, that is a Churchman, is to be an intelligent participator in a corporate life consecrated to God, and to concern oneself therefore, as a matter of course, in all that touches the corporate life – its external as well as its spiritual conditions. For the houses people live in, their wages, their social and commercial relations to one another, their amusements, the education they receive, the literature they read, these, no less truly than religious forces strictly so called, affect intimately the health and well-being of any society of men. We Christians are fellow-citizens together in the commonwealth that is consecrated to God, a commonwealth of mortal men with bodies as well as souls.

(2) But St. Paul also describes the Church as the 'household of God.' When our Lord was speaking to St. Peter about the ministry which was being entrusted to the apostles, He said to him, 'Who then is the faithful and wise steward whom his Lord shall set over his household to give them their portion of food in due season[104]?' This description opens to us part of the meaning of the divine household. A household is a place where a family is provided for, where there is a regular and orderly supply of ordinary needs. And the Church is the divine household in which God has provided stewards to make regular spiritual provision for men, so that they shall feel and know themselves members of a family, understood, sympathized with, helped, encouraged, disciplined, fed. What in fact are the sacraments and sacramental rites, what are baptism, confirmation and communion, marriage and ordination, the administration of the word of God, the dealings with the penitent, the sick, the dead, but the 'portions of food in due season,' the orderly distribution of the bread of life in the family or household of God?

But there is another idea which, in St. Paul's mind, attaches itself strongly to the idea of the 'divine family.' It is that in this household we are sons and not servants – that is intelligent co-operators with God, and not merely submissive slaves. It is noticeable how often he speaks with horror of Christians allowing themselves again to be 'subject to ordinances,' or to 'the weak and beggarly rudiments,' the alphabet of that earlier education when even children are treated as slaves under mere obedience. 'Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years, I am afraid of you[105].' 'Why do ye subject yourselves to ordinances, handle not, taste not, touch not[106].' It is perfectly true to say that what St. Paul is deprecating is a return to Jewish or pagan observances. But this is not all. He demands not a change of observance only, but a change of spirit. Their attitude towards observances as such is to be different. Not that St. Paul does not insist on that readiness to obey reasonable authority which is a condition of corporate life, or would hesitate to lay stress upon corporate religious acts in the Christian body. The truth is very far from that. 'We have no such custom, neither the churches of God,' is an argument which ought to be sufficient to suppress eccentricity. To 'keep the traditions' is a mark of a good Christian[107]. 'A man that is heretical' (or rather 'factious') after the first and second admonition is to be 'refused'[108]. Government is to be a constant element in the Christian life. But the character of authority and of obedience is to be changed. The authority is to be reasonable authority, and the obedience intelligent obedience. Passive obedience to an authority which does not explain itself, whether in a spiritual director or in the Church as a whole, St. Paul would have thought of meanly as a Christian virtue. And the multiplication of authoritative observances he would have dreaded as a bondage. Our Lord was very unwilling to give His disciples, when He was on earth, much direction. And St. Paul is true to his Master's spirit. Our life should be ordered by principles, rather than directed in detail. For to rely upon direction from outside dwarfs our sense of personal responsibility, and personal relationship to the divine Spirit. A certain amount of confusion, hesitation, difference, due to men feeling their way, due to their different individualities having free scope, St. Paul would apparently have thought preferable to that sort of order which is the product of a very strong and exacting external government, and to an undue exaltation of the virtue of passive obedience.

(3) St. Paul describes the Church as a sanctuary which is gradually to be built for God to dwell in. We remember how our Lord had said of the temple at Jerusalem, 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.' 'He spake,' St. John explains, 'of the temple of his body[109].' That – His own humanity proved triumphant over death – was to be henceforth the tabernacle of God's presence among men. Where that is God is, and the true worship of the Father in spirit and in truth. But that body, raised again the third day and become 'quickening Spirit' as the body of the risen Christ, takes within its influence the whole circle of believers. The 'body of Christ,' which is God's temple, comes to mean the Church which lives in Christ's life, and worships in Christ's Spirit. This is still the Church of the fathers of the old covenant, but fundamentally reconstituted. God, as St. James perceived[110], was fulfilling His promise to 'build again the tabernacle of David which had fallen.' It was being built anew upon the apostles and their companions the prophets, the immediate ambassadors of Christ, as foundation-stones of the renewed building, who themselves have their positions determined and secured by Christ Jesus as chief corner-stone. It was a spiritual fabric combining, like a Gothic cathedral, various parts or 'several buildings,' with their distinctive characteristics, all however united in one construction, one great sanctuary of a redeemed humanity in which God dwells.

The metaphor suggests the combination of national and individual differences in real unity. It encourages us to pay due regard to the free developement of our own characters and capacities, but also to develope ourselves as parts of a greater whole, always remembering that the work of a Christian individual or a local church is in God's sight measured, not by its isolated result, but by the contribution it makes to the life of the whole body. An eccentric individuality, a schismatic developement is, even in proportion to its strength, a source of weakness to the whole. By its relation to the whole life of the Church all Christian effort must be both invigorated and restrained.

The metaphor suggests further that the social organization of the Church is an organization for worship. It is a house and a citizenship, because it is also a sanctuary. The strength of corporate Christianity is to be measured by the vitality of corporate worship. A church life in which the eucharist is not the centre, for all the vigour which it may show in learning, or preaching, or philanthropy, is after all but a maimed life.

(4) But the Church, as a visible organization of men, can be what it is – the city of God, His household and His sanctuary – only because it is pervaded by Christ's life and spirit. The 'stones of the building' are not merely placed side by side of one another, or held together by any external agency of government; they are as branches of a living tree, limbs of a living body. In this recurrent thought, which will be presented to us in another form when St. Paul comes to speak of the head and the body, is the interpretation of all his theory of the Church. It is verily and indeed the extension of the life of Christ.

How are we to receive this great and manifold ideal of what the Church means[111]? It is by meditating upon it till St. Paul's conceptions – and not any lower or narrower ones, Roman or Anglican or Nonconformist – become vivid to our minds. Then, knowing what we aim at restoring, we shall seek, in each parish and ecclesiastical centre, to concentrate almost more than to extend the Church, to give it spiritual, moral, and social reality, rather than to multiply a membership which means little. For if men can understand the meaning of the Church, as the city of God, the family of God, the sanctuary of God, in the world, there is little fear that whatever is good in humanity will fail of allegiance to her. The kings of the earth will bring their glory and honour into her, and the nations of the earth shall walk in her light.

DIVISION I. § 5. CHAPTER III

Paul the apostle of catholicity

Paul the apostle of catholicity

St. Paul has unfolded the dimensions of the revelation of God given in the catholic church. The interests of the whole of mankind and of the whole universe which it is to subserve – that is its breadth: the eternal and slowly realized intention of God of which it is the expression – that is its length: the spiritual elevation up to which it takes men – that is its height: the gulf of sin and misery from which it rescues them – that is its depth. And now he is about to press upon the Asiatic Christians the moral obligations which this great catholic brotherhood involves. He begins his exhortation and enforces it by reminding them of what he was enduring as a prisoner for Christ's sake – 'For this cause (i.e. seeing that all this is true), I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus in behalf of you, the Gentiles.' But when he has thus made a beginning, he pauses to add weight to his appeal by emphasizing a personal but very important consideration. The particular truth of the catholicity of the Church had been in quite a special sense entrusted to him, Paul, personally, as apostle of the Gentiles. He assumes that they have heard of this, his special commission, and that it was the subject of a special revelation to himself[112]. Indeed the fact must have formed part of his teaching at Ephesus and throughout Asia, for his mind was full of it; he had contended for it against strong opposition in his epistle to the Galatians[113]; he had asserted it in his speech on the occasion of his being made a prisoner at Jerusalem: and he had quite recently explained it 'in brief compass' in the letter to the Colossians which was intended to have, in part at least, the same readers as his present epistle[114]. This special revelation then and accompanying commission justifies him in particular, and more than any of the other apostles, in pressing upon his converts the doctrine which forms the special topic of this epistle.

But to think of his special office as apostle of a catholic society, is to think also of its extraordinary difficulty.

The difficulty of catholicity

When we set ourselves in our own later age to rehabilitate the sense of church membership, we feel at once the strength of the forces against us; we realize how much the feeling of blood-kinship in the family counts for, or the wider kinship of national life, or the common interests of our professions or our classes, compared to the feeble sense of fellowship which comes from a church membership which is so largely conventional. Most assuredly we feel the difficulty of what we have in hand. But we cannot feel it more intensely than St. Paul felt the difficulty involved in the very idea of a human brotherhood in which national distinctions were obliterated. After all, the degree of unity impressed by the Roman Empire upon the different nations it embraced was superficial. On the whole it left men to walk in their own ways. In particular it did not succeed in breaking down the barriers of Jewish isolation. A society in which men should be neither Jews nor Gentiles, Greeks nor barbarians, bond nor free, but all should be welded into one manhood by the pressure of a common and constraining bond of brotherhood – a society in which even the savage and brutal Scythian should have equal fellowship with Greeks and Jews[115] – represented what had never yet been accomplished, and what the most sanguine might reasonably have thought impossible. The history of the Church, though not yet much more than thirty years old, had served already to emphasize the difficulty of the undertaking. We read the record of the first Jerusalem Church with its communism of love and sympathy, and it seems the perfect realization of the Christian spirit of brotherhood. So it was, but under comparatively easy conditions. For all that community were Jews with common traditions, sympathies, habits, ways of looking at things. They could behave as brethren, in the glow of their fresh enthusiasm at finding that the long-expected kingdom of Christ was now an actual fact, and its triumph to be immediately expected, without any real bridging of the gulfs which yawn between different sorts of men. That these gulfs still remained to be bridged soon appeared. It became manifest that Gentiles, 'sinners of the Gentiles,' had to be received into Christian brotherhood upon equal terms, and without their accepting the Jewish law and customs. The Council at Jerusalem attempted a compromise by requiring of the Gentile converts certain accommodations to Jewish manners. But the compromise did not avail to overcome the difficulty. St. Paul found the centre of opposition to the equal admission of the Gentiles in that very Church of Jerusalem which had been previously foremost in the race of love. In fact, the true difficulty of the law of brotherhood only then appeared when the obligation to fuse inveterate national distinctions began to be enforced. Then indeed flesh and blood rebelled. Without going any further than this single piece of Christian experience, there is every reason why St. John should warn Christians that the old commandment, 'ye shall love one another,' is constantly, with every change of circumstance, becoming 'a new commandment,' involving new difficulties, and challenging afresh the efforts of the human will[116]. The same difficulty, only in a less acute form, is in St. Paul's mind, and makes him measure and weigh his words, when he writes to Philemon to beg him to receive his former runaway slave, 'no longer as a slave, but as a brother beloved[117].'

And we cannot but pause and ask, in view of all the moral discipline for men of various kinds which St. Paul sees to be involved in the simple obligation to belong to one Christian body[118], – what would have been his feelings if he had heard of the doctrine which cuts at the root of all this discipline by declaring that religion is only concerned with the relation of the soul to God, and that Christians may combine as they please in as many religious bodies as suits their varying tastes?

This difficulty in the very idea of a catholic brotherhood of men explains the extraordinary earnestness with which St. Paul proceeds to emphasize that indeed this, and nothing less than this, is the divine mystery (or 'secret'), which, held back from all eternity in the mind of God, was only now being disclosed through Christ's consecrated messengers, and specially through St. Paul himself, the apostle of the Gentiles. The incredible nature of the idea clogs St. Paul's language, and almost makes shipwreck of his grammar. All the depth of Christian doctrine is necessary as background to recommend and justify this otherwise entirely 'supernatural' ideal – this marvellous climax of the workings and revelations of God. The spectacle of a catholic brotherhood, with all that it promises of universal unity beyond itself, is a lesson even to the angels of what the manifold wisdom of God can conceive and accomplish.

We have got into a habit of talking about the 'brotherhood of man' as if it was an easy and obvious truth. All our experience of our English relations with races of a different colour to our own, nay, all our experience of class divisions at home, might have served to check this easy-going sort of language. If we will consent to pause and reflect on the actual difficulty of behaving or feeling as brethren should behave and feel towards men of other races and of other educations and habits than our own, we may be more inclined to believe that it is only through some fundamental eradication of selfishness and inherent narrowness that it can be made possible; only when we begin to live from some centre greater than ourselves. And that is the moral meaning of the constant doctrine of the New Testament, that only through being reconciled to God can we be reconciled to one another – only in Christ that men can permanently and satisfactorily learn to love one another, when racial and educational and personal antipathies make for separation and not for unity.

Now perhaps we are in a position to read with greater intelligence what St. Paul wrote about 'the dispensation of the divine mystery,' i.e. 'the stewardship of the divine secret,' of the brotherhood of all men in Christ or the catholicity of the Church, which had been committed to him by the 'revelation' which followed his conversion to Christ[119].

The doctrine of the brotherhood of men is in fact as much a peculiarly Christian doctrine as that of divine sonship, and both alike are, in the New Testament language, represented as realized only within the community of the baptized. The facts of New Testament language compel us to say and to recognize this[120]. But we are bound to recognize also that they are truths which, when they are heard, are welcomed by the natural conscience everywhere. For as all men are 'God's offspring[121],' by the very fact of their creation as men, so they are fitted to receive the privilege of sonship: and as they are 'made of one[122],' so they are fitted to realize the privilege of brotherhood. It is but to say the same thing in other words, if we insist that Christians are the elect body, to realize and express among men an idea of human nature which is the only true idea, and which, overlaid and forgotten as it may have been, has never ceased to stir in man's heart and conscience everywhere. The elect are elected for no other purpose than to make manifest what all men are capable of becoming, and, if they will obey God, are destined to become.

For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus in behalf of you Gentiles, – if so be that ye have heard of the dispensation of that grace of God which was given me to you-ward; how that by revelation was made known unto me the mystery, as I wrote afore in few words, whereby, when ye read, ye can perceive my understanding in the mystery of Christ; which in other generations was not made known unto the sons of men, as it hath now been revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit; to wit, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs, and fellow-members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel, whereof I was made a minister, according to the gift of that grace of God which was given me according to the working of his power. Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; and to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which from all ages hath been hid in God who created all things; to the intent that now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness and access in confidence through our faith in him. Wherefore I ask that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which are your glory.