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 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]