Ephesians - What is the Main Theme?

Dear team, I hope you've had a chance by now to listen or read something relating to Ephesians. It will really help if you've started to think about Ephesians over the summer, long before you turn up at our first SLOBS meeting. It would be a good idea then to start reading (and re-reading) this profound little letter.



Compared with Paul's other letters, however, Ephesians is harder than most to pin down in terms of a central theme. The two simple reasons for this are:

1) There is no agreement about who this letter was originally intended for. Most reliable early manuscripts don't have the words "in Ephesus" (verse 1). Furthermore, the letter lacks Paul's usual intimate warmth when writing to a church he knows well. A probable explanation is that Ephesians was a circular letter which eventually came to reside in Ephesus.

2) There is no obvious "ocassion" for the letter (i.e. a problem Paul was sorting out). Though some have ventured that the apostle was sorting out problems between Jewish and Gentile Christians, or that he was instructing new Gentile Converts, we really can't be sure. Moreover, there is no purpose statement such as we have in 1 John 5, John 20, which pinpoints the aim of Paul's argument.

These problems aside, there are a number of obvious emphases in Ephesians. I'll mention five and protide an additional comment from Carson, Morris and Moo's Introduction to the New Testament.

1) Grace - "The letter begins with a section putting a strong emphasis on the divine action in bringing salvation...This massive emphasis on the place of the divine is expanded with continuing references to grace." ['Grace' occurs twelve times in Ephesians, only less than Romans, Acts and Corinthians; books which are much longer. No wonder Mark Dever simply entitles his Ephesians overview: "Grace"]

2) Christ -"Christ's saving work is stressed in the opening....This emphasis persists throughout the letter: it is plain everywhere that who Christ is and what he does is at the heart of the Christian way."

3) Christian Growth in Knowledge - "...this letter emphasizes divine disclosure. "I pray also tha the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know...' (1:18), which is seen against the background of hte darkness of the Gentiles (4:18). The readers are 'light in the Lord' and they are to live as 'children of light' and 'find out what pleases the Lord' (5:8-10); they are to 'understand what God's will is' (5:17). No one who has grappled with the thought of this letter can doubt the importance of growing in knowledge." [See also the emphasis on 'mystery' 1:9, 3:3, 6:19]

4) Living Life in Conformity with God's Salvation - "The kind of life the Gentiles live is contrasted with the new life believers live (4:17-5:21).... This has important entailments for specific groups - wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters (5:22-6:9)

5) The Church - "The letter's emphasis on the church is unmistakable; Ephesus clearly tells us about the church universal than do other writings in the Pauline corpus."

As you read and re-read the letter this summer, I'd be interested to hear what you think the central theme/themes of Ephesians is?