St. Paul's Prayer.
St. Paul follows up this first expression of the great thoughts that fill his mind with a deep and comprehensive thanksgiving for that large measure of correspondence with the divine purpose which is reported from the Asiatic churches, and with a prayer for their full enlightenment in heart and intellect. He prays that they may rise to the true science of what their Christian calling, as fellow-inheritors with the saints of the divine blessing, really means; and to an adequate expectation of what God intends to do in them, on the analogy of what He has already done in Christ their head.
For this cause I also, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is among you, and which ye shew toward all the saints, cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers; that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to that working of the strength of his might which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and made him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and he put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.
There is very little further explanation needed for this passage. But three phrases may be noted:—
(1) St. Paul calls the Father 'the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,' as our Lord Himself calls Him 'my God' (John xx. 17) in His resurrection state. It is no doubt of Christ as man that the Father is God; but this relation of the Son as man to the Father depends upon an eternal subordination in which the Son, even as God, stands to the Father from whom He derives His divine life. The essential subordination of the Son (and Spirit) to the Father as the one fount of Godhead, is continually suggested in the New Testament; but it involves no inferiority in Godhead, or subsequence in time—'nothing before or after, nothing greater or less,' as the Quicunque vult says. And it conveys to us the moral lesson that a subordinate position is not to be resented as if it were a dishonour.
(2) The spirit of 'wisdom and revelation' vouchsafed to us is to enable us to apprehend in a measure the divine 'wisdom and prudence[[1]]' manifested in God's work of creation and redemption. The humility which is content to correspond patiently and teachably with the method of God is, as Francis Bacon was at pains to teach, of the essence of all fruitful human science.
(3) The expression 'the fulness' or 'the fulness of the Godhead[[2]]' means the sum total of the divine attributes, which, instead of being spread over different angelic mediators, as the Colossians were disposed to imagine, are, by the divine will, all concentrated and combined in the glorified Christ. And here St. Paul teaches the Ephesian Christians that all that belongs to the glorified Christ is to belong also to the Church, which is His body. It is Christ who gives to all creatures whatever various gifts of life they have. He 'filleth all in all'; that is, 'He filleth the whole universe with all variety of gifts.' But something much more than various gifts—the sum total of all He is—He pours, or intends to pour, into the Church, so that the Church as well as the Christ shall embody, and thus be identified with, the fulness of the divine attributes. At present the Church is this only ideally, or in the divine intention: the actually existing Church has still much need of growth that her members 'may be filled (as they are not at present) up to the measure of the divine fulness'; or, in other words, up to 'the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ[[3]].'
The fulness, according to St. Paul's doctrine, is to be sought first in the eternal God; then in the glorified Christ; then, through Him, in the fully developed Church; and, finally, through the Church, in a sense in the universe as a whole, when the work of redemption is done and God is at last 'all in all' throughout His creation.
It may be noticed that St. Paul, in this doctrine of 'the fulness,' is thinking rather of the divine attributes as manifested, than as they are in themselves: and of Christ, not as the eternal Son of God, but, more particularly, as incarnate and glorified. It was the 'good pleasure' of the Father to fill the exalted Christ, the first-begotten from the dead, with the fulness of divine glory and power as the reward of the humility and love which He showed when He 'emptied himself in taking the form of a servant[[4]].' This bestowal was no doubt a giving anew to Him, as man and as head of the Church, what was eternally His as Son of the Father.
There is another interpretation adopted by Chrysostom in ancient times, and by Dr. Hort among moderns, of the phrase 'the church which is his body, the fulness of him who filleth all in all.' According to them the Church is regarded as making the Christ complete. It is in this sense the 'fulfilment' of Christ, because without the Church He would be a head without its members: and then the rest of the sentence should be translated differently—'the church which is his body, the fulfilment of him who is fulfilled in all ways with all things.' But this is decidedly less agreeable to the general use of the expression 'the fulness' in the epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians[[5]].