Faithful in Christ Jesus

Introducing Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians

Scripture: Ephesians 1:1–2

Scripture for this session: Ephesians 1:1–2 (and an overview of the whole letter)

From Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!

(Ephesians 1:1–2)

Why Start Here?

Most studies of Ephesians begin with its great doxology in chapter one, or with chapter two’s locus classicus on grace through faith, or perhaps with the famous armor of God passage at the close. All of these are right to be drawn forward. They are among the most theologically rich passages in the New Testament, and confessional Lutherans have rightly returned to them again and again. But this study will not begin there. It will begin with the address itself: the two short verses that open the letter and name its writer, its recipients, and the source of grace and peace they share.

There is a reason for this. A letter cannot be read well until its writer, its readers, and its situation are in view. If we open Paul’s letter and dive straight into the eulogy of chapter one, we will treat his words as if they had fallen from the sky into a vacuum. They did not. They were written by a particular man, in a particular place, to particular Christians, in a particular moment. We meet them rightly only when we meet them as they are given.

So we will spend this first session getting our bearings. We will look at where Paul was when he wrote this letter, and what kind of imprisonment he was enduring. We will take a brief look at the questions modern scholarship has raised about whether Paul really wrote it, and how this study will handle those questions. We will look at the city of Ephesus itself, and at the church Paul had planted there years before. We will sketch the shape of the letter as a whole: the great theological half of chapters one through three, the practical half of chapters four through six, and the threads that hold the two halves together. And only then will we sit with the address itself and let Paul greet us as he greeted the Ephesians.

This is slow work, and on purpose. The letter rewards patience. The pace we set in this opening session will be the pace of the volume.

A Letter from Prison

Paul writes this letter from prison. He says so himself, three times in the letter: at 3:1, at 4:1, and at 6:20. He calls himself a prisoner of Christ Jesus, a prisoner for the Lord, an ambassador in chains. The chains are real. They are not metaphors. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, who had once written to the Romans of his hope to come to them and beyond them to Spain, is now sitting in rented quarters in a city, chained to a Roman soldier, awaiting trial.

The most likely setting is Rome itself, around AD 60 to 62. Luke ends the book of Acts with Paul under house arrest in Rome, receiving all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus boldly and without hindrance, for two full years (Acts 28:30–31). This was his first Roman imprisonment, the one in which he had appealed to Caesar and was awaiting his hearing. He was not in a dungeon. Prisoners in Paul’s position, a Roman citizen awaiting a hearing on charges like his, were not necessarily locked away in cells. They could be placed under guard in rented quarters, allowed visitors, allowed to write, and allowed to receive financial support. They could speak. They could think. They could pray. What they could not do was move freely. The soldier was always there, in shifts, and Paul could speak of wearing a chain (Acts 28:16, 20).

This is the setting from which Ephesians most likely comes. It is the same setting as Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon, the four letters that have long been called the captivity letters or prison letters of Paul. They form a tight cluster. They share themes. They mention the same companions. All four speak directly of Paul’s chains or imprisonment, and Philippians returns to his chains again and again in its opening chapter. Whatever else we say about Ephesians, we say this first: it is one of four letters Paul wrote from a place where he could not move freely, to Christians who could.

A small honesty is owed here. Some scholars have argued that one or more of the captivity letters might have been written from a different imprisonment, perhaps an earlier one in Ephesus that Paul never describes in detail, or perhaps from his imprisonment in Caesarea before he was sent to Rome. The arguments are not without weight, and a careful reader will want to know that the question exists. But the traditional view that Ephesians was written from the Roman imprisonment around AD 60–62 remains the most natural reading and is the position this study will assume. The point for the lay reader is not to settle the academic debate but to keep the prison setting in view. Whatever city the chains were in, the chains were in the picture. Paul does not pretend otherwise. The study will not pretend otherwise either.

A Note on Authorship

Some modern scholars have questioned whether Paul himself wrote Ephesians. The arguments turn on the letter’s vocabulary (words appear here that do not appear in Paul’s other letters, and some characteristic Pauline words are missing or used differently) and on its style, which runs to long sentences and elevated, almost liturgical, phrasing. The letter is also unusually impersonal for Paul: it greets no individuals by name, includes no specific local situations, and reads like a general circular rather than a letter to a particular church. From these features, some have concluded that Ephesians was written after Paul’s death by a follower writing in his name.

The arguments deserve a respectful answer rather than a dismissive one. They have been answered, and answered well, across the long history of the Church’s reading of this letter.

The vocabulary differences are real but not decisive. A man writing from prison, with ample time to think and pray, and with a different and more sweeping subject than the troubleshooting of a particular congregation’s problems, would naturally write differently. Ephesians is not 1 Corinthians, nor should it sound like 1 Corinthians. The thoughts of a man in chains, given to meditate on the cosmic scope of God’s purpose in Christ, will not match the rapid-fire pastoral problem-solving of an earlier letter to a troubled church. Different occasion, different vocabulary.

The style differences are likewise real. Paul’s sentences in Ephesians are some of the longest in the New Testament. The eulogy of 1:3–14 is a single sentence in Greek. The prayer of 3:14–19 is another. A doxological refrain praising God’s glory rings through chapter one like a litany. This is liturgical Greek, the Greek of doxology. But Paul is fully capable of liturgical Greek when the subject calls for it. The Christ-hymn of Philippians 2 is the same kind of writing. So is Romans 8. So is Romans 11. When Paul lifts his eyes to the cosmic and the eternal, his prose lifts with them.

The impersonal character of the letter has its own answer. There is good evidence, to which we will return in a moment, that Ephesians was originally a circular letter, intended to be read in several churches in the province of Asia, with Ephesus the most prominent of them. A letter intended for multiple congregations would naturally lack the personal greetings of a letter intended for one.

The early Church received Ephesians as Paul’s letter without dispute. Its place in the canon of Pauline letters has never been seriously contested in the Church’s worship and confession. The traditional ascription stands, and this study will receive Ephesians as what it claims to be at its first verse: an apostolic letter from Paul, written by the will of God.

A Word About “in Ephesus”

There is one more question to mention before we move on, because the careful reader will have noticed it in the opening verse and will deserve an honest word about it. The phrase in Ephesus in 1:1 is missing in some of the earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts of the letter. The address in those manuscripts has no city name at all, simply a generic greeting to the saints, with no destination filled in. Most modern English Bibles, including the NET, retain in Ephesus because the manuscript evidence overall favors it and because the early Church overwhelmingly knew the letter as Ephesians. But the textual situation is unusual.

The most plausible explanation, held by many readers across the centuries, is that this letter was originally a circular, a letter Paul wrote to be carried from church to church in the province of Asia, with Ephesus as one of its primary destinations. Some manuscripts may preserve the original blank, with the city name to be filled in or read aloud as the letter was passed along. Others, including the dominant manuscript tradition, preserve the version that arrived in Ephesus and was kept there. Both are the letter Paul wrote. The Holy Spirit who inspired it has preserved it for us in both forms.

For the purposes of this study, we will read the letter as the letter to the Ephesians, because that is how the Church has known it and how our Bibles present it. But the circular character of the letter is worth keeping in mind. It explains the impersonal tone. It explains why Paul writes about Gentiles and Jews in such broad terms rather than naming specific factions. And it widens the original audience: this is not just a letter for one congregation but a letter for a region, and through the providence of God it has become a letter for the whole Church. We are reading mail that was always intended for more than one set of eyes.

The City and Its Saints

Ephesus was one of the great cities of the Roman world. It sat on the western coast of what is now Turkey, with a harbor that made it a major port and a trading crossroads between Europe and Asia. Its population in Paul’s day is often estimated at two hundred thousand or more, though estimates vary widely. It was the leading city of the Roman province of Asia and one of the largest cities in the empire. It was wealthy. It was cosmopolitan. It was deeply religious in the pagan sense: its great Temple of Artemis was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the city’s economy and identity were bound up with the worship of the goddess. Magic, occult practices, mystery religions, philosophical schools, and the imperial cult all had a foothold there. If a Christian congregation was going to be planted in any soil that should have made it impossible, it was going to be planted in Ephesus.

Paul came to Ephesus on his third missionary journey and stayed about three years, longer than Acts records him staying in any other single city. The story is told in Acts 19. It is one of Luke’s richest narratives. The miracles were extraordinary. The conflict with the magicians was such that the practitioners of magic publicly burned their scrolls, fifty thousand silver coins’ worth, a small fortune. The conflict with the silversmiths who made shrines of Artemis was such that a riot broke out in the great theater of the city. Paul left Ephesus in the wake of that riot, but the church he had planted remained. Timothy would later serve there. The apostle John, by long tradition, would spend his last years there. The first of the seven letters in the book of Revelation is addressed to the church in Ephesus.

Years had passed between Paul’s mission in the city and the writing of this letter. The first Christians in Ephesus had been won out of paganism, magic, the imperial cult, and Diaspora Judaism. Many of them were Gentiles. Some of them were Jews. They lived in a city where the worship of Christ stood in open opposition to the religious and economic life of nearly everyone around them. They worked. They raised families. They gathered for worship. They knew what it cost to be a Christian in a city like that. And it is to them, and to the Christians of similar standing in the surrounding cities of Asia, that Paul now writes from Rome.

The Shape of the Letter

Before we turn to the address itself, it will help to have a brief map of the whole letter. Ephesians falls into two halves of three chapters each, and the dividing line is sharp.

Chapters one through three are doctrine. Paul lifts the reader’s eyes to what God has done in Christ: election before the foundation of the world, redemption by Christ’s blood, the sealing work of the Spirit, the resurrection power that raised Christ from the dead and enthroned Him over every other power, and the eternal mystery of God’s purpose to head up all things in heaven and on earth in Christ. Two great prayers frame this section. The first, in 1:15–23, prays that the Ephesians may know the hope of their calling and the power of God toward those who believe. The second, in 3:14–21, prays that they may be strengthened in the inner person and may know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. Between the two prayers stands the Lutheran heart of the letter: chapter two’s announcement that the saints were spiritually dead apart from God, and that God in His great mercy raised them with Christ, saved by grace, through faith, as a pure gift, never as a reward for works. Around the same chapter stands the announcement that the wall dividing Jew and Gentile has been destroyed, and that the two have been made one new humanity in Christ.

Chapters four through six turn from doctrine to walk. (Paul’s verb is peripateō, “walk,” which the NET renders “live.”) Paul exhorts the saints to live worthily of the calling with which they have been called. He treats the unity of the body and the diversity of its gifts. He calls them to lay aside the old man and put on the new. He addresses their daily life (speech, work, anger, love, marriage, parenting, household ordering, and the powers behind all of it) and calls them to stand fast in the full armor of God against the spiritual forces that contest the gospel’s advance.

The two halves are not two letters welded together. They are one letter with one logic. The first half tells the saints what God has done in Christ. The second half tells them what it looks like to live as those who are in Christ. The order matters. Paul does not start with what to do. He starts with who they are and what has been done for them. The walk follows the doctrine, not the other way around. This is the order of all sound Lutheran teaching, and it is the order Paul himself sets in this letter.

Running through both halves is a single phrase: in Christ. Together with its variants (in Him, in the Lord, in Christ Jesus, and in the Beloved at 1:6, which the NET renders “in his dearly loved Son”), it appears with extraordinary density in this letter. The saints have every spiritual blessing in Christ (1:3). They were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world (1:4). They have redemption in Him through His blood (1:7). They were marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit in Him (1:13). They have been raised with Christ and seated with Him in the heavenly realms (2:5–6). Gentile believers are fellow heirs through the gospel in Christ Jesus (3:6). They are remade in the likeness of God (4:24). Marriage itself reflects Christ and the Church (5:32). The whole letter pulses with this small phrase. To be a Christian, in Paul’s vocabulary, is to be in Christ. The volume’s title is taken from this phrase because the letter itself takes its bearings from it.

With all of that in view, we are ready to read the address.

Paul, an Apostle of Christ Jesus

The letter opens as Paul’s letters typically do, with the writer naming himself.

He gives his Roman name: not Saul, the Hebrew name by which he was first known in Jerusalem, but Paul, the name by which he was known among the Gentiles. He calls himself an apostle. The word means one sent: a messenger, an emissary, an authorized representative. In the New Testament the word carries a specific weight: an apostle is one whom the risen Christ Himself has commissioned. Paul claims this commission. He has not been appointed by a synod or elected by a congregation. He has been called directly by Christ on the road to Damascus, and that calling is not something he can revoke or that any human authority can ratify or undo.

But notice the phrase that follows. Paul names the source of his apostleship: the will of God. He does not call himself an apostle by his own choosing. He does not call himself an apostle on his own merit. He is an apostle because God willed him to be one. The same emphasis will run through the letter. Whatever the saints have been given, they have been given because God willed it: chose it, predestined it, purposed it before the foundation of the world. Paul’s apostleship is the small first instance of the great theme. The man who will write of God’s eternal purpose in chapter one introduces himself as the small particular fruit of that purpose in verse one.

There is something else worth noticing here. Paul does not introduce himself as a prisoner. He will get to that in chapter three. But in his opening line he does not lead with his chains. He leads with his calling. The reader who knows Paul’s situation will not miss what is happening: a man under guard in Rome, writing to free Christians in Ephesus, identifies himself first not by the iron he wears but by the will of God that placed an apostle’s commission upon his life. The chains will come into view soon enough. They are not what defines him. The will of God is what defines him. That is the first quiet theological note of the letter.

To the Saints Who Are Faithful in Christ Jesus

Paul addresses his readers as the saints. The word in Greek is hagioi, those set apart, those made holy, those belonging to God. In contemporary English the word saint has a narrower meaning: a holy person, a hero of the faith, a figure on a stained-glass window. In Paul’s vocabulary the word is broader and more ordinary. The saints are simply the ones God has set apart for Himself in Christ. Every baptized believer is a saint. Paul addresses the congregation according to its Christian confession: those gathered by the gospel are called saints, set apart by God in Christ, however ordinary their daily life. This is the Church’s charitable and theological way of speaking, not a claim that every outward member of a visible congregation is necessarily a true believer. Hypocrites may share the outward fellowship, as the Augsburg Confession, Article VIII, acknowledges, while the true Church is the communion of those who believe. The Reformation will recover this usage, confessing the Church as the assembly of saints gathered around the gospel and the Sacraments (the Augsburg Confession, Article VII), but Paul has already given it to us in the address of his letter.

But these saints are not only set apart; they are also faithful. The Greek word pistoi can mean either believing or trustworthy, and Paul very likely means both. They believe in Christ. They trust Him. They have been faithful; they have continued in the faith they were given. This is what binds them together as a congregation: not their geography, not their ethnicity, not their social standing, not their wealth, but their shared trust in Jesus Christ. They are saints because of what God has done. They are faithful because of how the Spirit has held them in what God has done.

And the location of all of it (saints, faithful, set apart, trusting) is in Christ Jesus. The phrase appears here at the head of the letter and will not let go until the closing benediction. Whatever they are, they are in Him. They have no standing apart from Him. They have no holiness apart from Him. They have no faith apart from Him. They are who they are because they are in Him. This is the Lutheran doctrine of justification in compact form, given to us by Paul as the very first description he offers of his readers. They have a standing before God, and the standing is not their own; it is Christ’s, given to them, and they live in it.

Grace to You and Peace

Paul’s standard greeting fuses two greetings into one. Grace (charis in Greek) echoes the standard Greek greeting chairein, “rejoicing” or “well wishes.” Peace (eirēnē, the word the Greek Old Testament used to render the Hebrew shalom) is the standard Jewish greeting. Paul takes both and pours new content into them. He greets his readers with grace, the unmerited favor of God in Christ. And he greets them with peace: not the absence of conflict, but the wholeness and well-being of those reconciled to God.

The order matters. Grace comes first. Peace follows from it. There is no peace with God except by the grace of God. There is no shalom for the sinner except by the favor of God in Christ. The Lutheran tradition has confessed this order in countless places (the Augsburg Confession on justification, the Apology on Article IV at length, the Small Catechism on the Lord’s Prayer and the Sacrament), and it is given to us here in two short words at the head of a letter.

The grace and peace come from somewhere. They come from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. The two are named together as a single source. Paul does not say grace from God, then add peace from Christ as a second item. He names them as one. The grace and peace flow from a single fountain, the Father and the Son together, and the Spirit, though not named in the greeting, is presupposed throughout the letter as the agent by whom grace and peace reach the saints. The saints in Ephesus are the recipients of a triune blessing.

This is the address. Two short verses. And already we have been told that the writer is an apostle by God’s will, that the readers are saints made faithful in Christ, and that what passes between them is grace and peace from the Father and the Son. The whole letter is contained in the address in seed form. Everything that follows will unfold what is already given here.

We have set our bearings. Beginning next session, the letter itself opens before us.

For Discussion

1. The Preface and this opening session have insisted that Ephesians is a letter from a man in chains. How does it change your reading of the letter to keep Paul’s imprisonment in view from the start? What difference does it make that Paul is not free as he writes about freedom in Christ?

2. Paul calls his readers saints. If a saint in his vocabulary is simply every baptized believer set apart by God in Christ, what changes when you call the people in your own congregation by that name? When you call yourself by that name?

3. Paul says his apostleship rests on the will of God. What does it mean that his calling rests on God’s will rather than on his own choice or qualification? Where does the same logic appear in your own life of faith: in your baptism, in your vocation, in your standing before God?

4. The phrase in Christ appears again and again across this letter. In your own words, what does it mean to be in Christ? What is the alternative? What changes for the person who has been brought from one to the other?

5. Paul greets his readers with grace and peace as a paired blessing. Why does grace come first? What happens to peace if it is sought without grace? Where do you find this same order in the Small Catechism’s teaching on the gospel and the sacraments?

6. We have spent this whole session getting our bearings (historical context, audience, structure, the address itself) without yet entering the great doxology of chapter one. Was the slowness worth it? What do you expect to see more clearly when we read 1:3–14 together next session because we have sat with the address first?

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, You set apart for Yourself a people in Christ Jesus from before the foundation of the world. You called Your apostle Paul to declare Your will to the Gentiles, and through his pen You have written for us a letter that the Church has read across the centuries. Open our ears now to hear it. Hold our patience as we read slowly. Steady us in the faith we have received. And bring us, with Paul and with the saints in Ephesus, into the fullness of what it means to be Your own, faithful in Christ Jesus. Grace and peace to us, from You our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Looking Ahead

Next session we will turn to the great eulogy of Ephesians 1:3–14, one of the longest sentences in the New Testament (a single sentence in Greek), and one of the densest concentrations of the phrase in Christ anywhere in Paul. Here Paul lifts the reader’s eyes to the eternal purpose of God in Christ, the election of the saints before the foundation of the world, the redemption that comes through Christ’s blood, and the seal of the Holy Spirit with which believers are marked as God’s own. This is the title-anchor passage of the volume, and it deserves slow reading. The Lutheran tradition has confessed God’s election as the assurance of the saints, never as a doctrine of fear and never as a teaching of double predestination, and we will read this passage with the Formula of Concord, Article XI, as a faithful guide.

Before next session, read Ephesians 1:3–14 at least twice. Read it once for sense; read it a second time slowly, looking for every appearance of in Christ, in him, or in his dearly loved Son. Notice what is said to be given to the saints in Christ. Notice the rhythm of the passage and the doxological refrain that closes each of its three movements. Bring those observations with you to next session. They will repay your attention.