Episode 317: N.T. Wright – The Book of Ephesians

Pete: You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns. 

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.

Pete: Hey folks. Welcome back to the podcast. It’s been a while. This is such a special episode for us because today we’re kicking off Season 10, you heard that right, of The Bible for Normal People. 

Jared: Yeah. I mean, when we started this podcast. Beyonce’s “Lemonade” album had just come out. 

Pete: I don’t know what that is. 

Jared: You don’t, you can ignore this part. Uh, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were just getting divorced. The first season of Stranger Things had just come out. Pete was in his fifties. 

Pete: Yeah, I was. I remember that.

Jared: My kids were in elementary school and now one’s graduated high school and we’re over 300 episodes in.

We’re ready to rock and roll. 

Pete: Right. 

Jared: We’re not slowing down. 

Pete: I know. And, we couldn’t think of a better way to start the season than with one of the OGs of making biblical studies accessible to everyday people, N. T. Wright. Tom is a former bishop of Durham and senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University.

He’s written so many influential and prominent books, but his most recent is on the topic of our conversation today, the book of Ephesians. He’s written The Vision of Ephesians, the Task of the Church, and the Glory of God. So if you find this conversation interesting, check it out. Now one just, uh, slight comment we wanted to make here the side issue of, so people aren’t confused.

You know, a lot of you might be familiar with, uh, controversies or disagreements, academic disagreements about who wrote Ephesians, and there are various views on that. And we’re just going to use the word Paul all throughout, even though, I mean, I have some thoughts about maybe, maybe Paul didn’t write it and a lot of people would agree, others would disagree, but just, we’re just gonna say Paul.

Don’t read any more into that, just because that’s the guy who keeps coming up. It’s easier than saying, you know, the alleged author or whoever wrote it or, you know, one of Paul’s followers or something like that. It’s just not worth it. 

Jared: Right. Alright, well thanks for being with us as we enter our pre-teen years here at The Bible for Normal People.

Let’s get into the episode. 

Tom: If Paul was to come back today, what would he be most surprised by? And I would say he would be most surprised, not just by the fact that we are not united, but by the fact that we don’t care. We ought to be reading Paul, not to tell us how to get to heaven, but to tell us how important it is that we signal the coming together of heaven and earth by our unity across traditional boundary markers.

Jared: Well, welcome to the podcast Tom. It’s great to have you. 

Tom: Thank you very much. Good to be with you. 

Pete: Yeah. 

Jared: Absolutely. It’s a long time coming. It really is. 

Tom: I dunno when it was last time, but anyway, here we are. 

Jared: Yeah. 

Pete: We had to practice for 10 years. 

Jared: That’s right. We had to work our way up.

Pete: Before we had Tom on.

I think that’s, that’s, that’s what we’re telling people anyway. That’s okay. 

Jared: Good. Well, today we’re gonna talk about Ephesians, which I think people will be very excited about. It’s probably a letter people have read many, many times in their Bible, and you talk about it as this visionary text, and I think that’s a little bit unique.

So can you explain that and kind of the big picture, and then we’re gonna get into the weeds a little bit. 

Tom: Yeah. Um, the idea of Ephesians as a visionary text has often been in my mind because it kind of gives you the whole picture from start to finish. At the beginning, we’re talking about God’s purpose in creation and then God’s longer term purpose for the whole renewal of the cosmos.

Um, with Jesus and us and the Holy Spirit somewhere in the middle of all that. So it, it, it rather than plunging into, um, uh, okay, you guys have got a problem and here’s how we’re gonna fix it. It’s, let’s just stand back and see this whole picture. I think this is because Ephesians is circular, I think Paul is writing it from prison to churches in the Ephesus area.

Um, and it’s designed to be spread about. So it’s not very specific to a particular situation except, you know, the Roman Empire in the middle of the first century in general. Um, but the, the, the images are used. Which came to me when Mike Bird and I were recording, um, uh, some stuff for our book, The New Testament in its World.

And Mike asked me quite suddenly unscripted what my favorite Pauline letter was and why. And I described different Pauline letters in terms of different rooms in my house. Um, this is when we lived in, um, in Eastern Scotland. Yes, in Andrews. And I went through the different rooms and Galatians was the kitchen and Romans was the dining room, et cetera, et cetera.

But then I said, at the back of the house, there’s a room from which we can see straight across the hills, which are about 40, 45 miles away. Certain times of certain days, we can look east and see the sun rising outta the sea. Certain times of certain days we can look west and see the moon setting over the mountains. I said that’s Ephesians.

It gives you that visionary picture, and actually the American edition of this book, which you probably got in front of you accessible, they designed the cover to reflect that so that the cover is kind of an artist’s impression of me looking out over farmland close to, then over the further or forth.

And then the distant mountains, they did a nice job on that. I was very grateful for that. 

Pete: Yeah, that was sort of a rainbow effect sort of going up. Yeah. Right. Yeah. 

Tom: Different layers of color. Yeah. 

Pete: So, so the, um, I, let’s, let’s maybe dig into more to what that vision is that, um, maybe a panorama rather than thinking of Ephesians as let’s say a, a rule book of some sort.

And, and there’s, um, I mean get, if you can get into like the, the cosmic dimension, that’s what always captures me with both Ephesians and Colossians is this cosmic perspective that, that Paul takes, which, um, he may not take as much in some of his other letters, but these just maybe ’cause they’re general, like you said, you know, he’s trying to set a big picture.

So just, um, you know, help us understand that a little bit, this cosmic perspective. 

Tom: Yeah. And, and, and I would say, I think this is one of the reasons why some older critics didn’t want Ephesians to be by Paul because they didn’t like that cosmic perspective and they didn’t like the Christology that went with it.

Um, the big picture of Jesus and the church in relation to God’s plan for the whole world. So that, for me, the kind of strap line at the beginning of the letter is chapter 1, verse 10. But God’s plan from the beginning was to sum up in the Messiah all things in heaven and on earth. Now, the idea of everything in heaven on earth sounds like Genesis 1, and there’s a reason for that, that Paul is actually tracking with the Pentateuch in that opening great prayer of chapter 1 verses 3 to 14, where we’ve got God’s purpose in creation and then it’s rolled out through God’s purpose in redemption. 

And then that is rolled out through God’s purpose for his people who are to be indwelled by his spirit. And again, one of the big things that I was able to work through when I was doing the lectures that led to this book was that for years I had imagined Ephesians, that bit in particular, to be about God’s, um, predestining of some people for salvation, for going to heaven. 

I realized along with many other passages in the New Testament, this is not about going to heaven. The, when he is talking about the heavenly realms, he’s talking about where Jesus has ascended to in order to continue implementing his work on the cross.

That’s a whole different dimension. He never talks about us going to heaven. The point in chapter 1 and going on through is that God’s plan is that through the church, through the people who are called to belong to Jesus, the people who are indwelled by the Spirit, God’s character and purposes will be made known to the wider world.

The, he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, not so that we could go off somewhere else and, and sit there happily ever after, but so that we should be holy and blameless because that’s what the world needs to see. Is that God has done a new creation, a new people, and the new people are meant to model the new cosmos.

That’s why. And it was kind of fun doing the lectures. I had this little mantra, which you have picked up in the book, that the church is designed to be the small working model of new creation. And, uh, I used to get the audiences when I was doing the lectures to, to repeat that, I would say the small, they would say, working model of new creation.

Okay. Get it into your heads. So that’s the cosmic vision, which then the church is supposed to keep in mind in order to say, new creation is an extraordinary idea, but we are going to make it, uh, the more credible by following Jesus and living in the power of the spirit so that people can see that this isn’t just a crazy idea that somebody’s got, but it actually is happening on the ground.

And then that train of thought runs through 1 to 3, and then is spelt out in, in terms of the so what in 4 to 6 

Pete: Could I, could I follow up with one thing? Um, what intrigues me is the language, uh, I think it was, uh, 1:10 you cited about, um, yeah. All things in Heaven, earth being summed up in Christ.

Could you, I mean, what does that mean? Summed up? You know, and, and I, I, I’m thinking, I mean, I have this voice that doesn’t shut up in the back of my head from maybe a long time ago in Calvinism, and this would be understood in a very legal sense. I mean, he sums up the thing, satisfies the code of law, things like that.

But now, I, I see it as more, um, uh, imaginative language that tries to grab at something that, um, might not be as concrete. 

Tom: Yeah. Um, I mean, I think it’s concrete, alright. It’s just the whole Calvinist framework, um, is an imposition of a 16th century variation on certain medieval themes and the attempt to understand a first century text through those, and you know.

If you’re faced with a choice between, say, Aquinas and Calvin, I’d probably go with Calvin. But if you’re faced with a choice between both of them on the one hand and a first century text by somebody called Paul on the other, let’s go with Paul. And the, the, the Greek word there, as you know, is anakephaleosis, which means, uh, to, to head up, the kephale is the head, or the sum total.

And it’s as though God in creating heaven and earth didn’t create them in order that they be separate spheres forever. He created them so that, uh, the completeness of his design, which was for a single heaven-plus-earth creation, a bipartite hole if you like. Um, that would come to its fulfillment in, in Genesis 1 and 2, in the creation of human beings in God’s image and human beings designed there to stand at the dangerous intersection between heaven and earth and kind of be the people in whom the rule of heaven comes to earth and the praises of earth ascend back to heaven.

And then Paul is saying. That was a purpose always designed for the Messiah, uh, in later Christian language. For the second person, the Trinity, God always wanted to come himself in his second self, as some writers have called Jesus, that in order that he should be the place where heaven and earth come together and find their unity.

Later Christological language, that’s a way of saying Jesus is both human and divine, but actually the New Testament prefers to talk about heaven and earth to those abstractions of humanity and divinity. But I think that’s what’s going on. This was God’s purpose from the beginning to have a heaven-plus-earth bipartite whole with human beings in general.

And Jesus in particular at the middle of it. 

Jared: Well let, maybe let’s keep that train of thought going, because I think as we get into, you know, the first, the first half of the book is sort of this, uh, painting this picture, giving this vision. And then the second half is a little bit more of the ethics of that.

How does that play out? And so, um, particularly I was curious about this idea of, um, diversity, this, this many-colored wisdom of God, while also the idea of unity and holiness. I feel like these three points on the triangle don’t always go together really well, so how do we navigate those things?

Tom: Yeah. Uh, that’s a great point. And I think in order to understand the passage you quoted, which is chapter 3 verse 10, uh, that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers, you’ve gotta read that in the light of chapter 2 verses 11 to 22, where Paul applies the soteriology of chapter 2, verses 1 to 10 we’re sinners saved by grace through faith, et cetera.

He applies that to the Jew plus Gentile question, and the way I see that is that Jesus in summing up all things in heaven and on earth, bringing together the apparent two halves of God’s good creation, this is to be worked out on the ground in the creation of a new community, which consists of Judeans and Gentiles together.

And to anyone who says that’s unthinkable, that’s impossible. Um, the answer is that because of the Messiah’s cross and resurrection, gentile sinners who believe in Jesus are sinners no more. So you need the first half of chapter 2 to explain the second half. You Gentiles are now fellow members. You are right there with believing Judeans in this extraordinary new creation, which is a new temple God has established.

God has built a new temple in the middle of history, in the middle of the world in order to make the surrounding nations look and say, oh my goodness. We didn’t know that was gonna happen. We didn’t know that was possible. And hence, the principalities and powers, the shadowy forces that think they run the world and they carve it up in their own way are called to account.

That’s chapter 3 verse 10 is a calling to account of the principalities and powers by the fact that there is something new happening on the face of the Earth, which nobody had predicted. And it is this united community. And so how do you get a united community? Well, you need all of, I dunno, Romans 14 and 15.

You need all of Galatians, you need, um, bits of Philippians 3, et cetera in order to, to show how these two radically unalike communities, Judean and Gentile could now through faith in Israel’s Messiah, who is the world’s Lord, they can be brought into one. So the unity of the church is absolutely central for Paul.

And you know, a few years ago when I wrote my big book on Paul, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, I went round particularly America doing book launch things. Um, we don’t do that so much. We have podcasts instead. Isn’t that fun? Um, but, uh, I, I, everywhere I went in the Q-&-A, people would say, if Paul was to come back today, what would he be most surprised by?

And I would say, he would be most surprised not just by the fact that we are not united, but by the fact that we don’t care, that we haven’t heard what he was saying in letter after letter after letter about the unity of the church being the thing that then says to the wider world, the God who is the God of creation, the God of Israel has established a new thing which is gonna last and is going to remake the whole cosmos. 

So that unity thing is absolutely vital and it, it’s, it’s rooted there in chapter 2, expounded in chapter 3, and then, as you say, developed in 4, 5, and 6.

Jared: I, I think I wanna tie in the third point on that triangle, and that’s holiness, because I think for a lot of people that, I’m curious how you would define it or see it through the Pauline lens here in Ephesians. Because for a lot of people, that’s what creates that division is the holiness is we gotta get it right.

It’s that separateness to get it right and if it’s tainted with heresy or wrong thinking, and then that seems in tension with unity. 

Tom: Absolutely it is. And I’ve said many times in speaking and writing, unity is quite easy. If you don’t care about holiness, you just get together and who cares who, who does what.

Holiness is quite easy if you don’t care about unity. Each time you have a disagreement about how to behave, whatever, you just split off and start your own church Now, um, that has of course happened, uh, in enormous, worldwide extent through the different Protestant movements that have done precisely that, we don’t like what you are doing.

So we’re splitting off. Maggie and I now have a house on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. In our local town, there are four Scottish Presbyterian churches within walking distance of one. 

Pete: That’s all?

Tom: Well, yeah. It’s a very small town. 

Pete: Even so.

Tom: So it’s only about, it’s only about 1500 inhabitants.

Most people go to church, but they go to different churches. And as an outsider coming in, I can’t tell them what to do and what not to do. ‘Cause there’s serious history there. And they may have been on opposite sides in the, um, civil wars of the 1700’s, whatever. But, um, uh, the, this, you know, for, for Protestants believing in the Bible, we ought to be reading Paul, not to tell us how to get to heaven, but to tell us how important it is that we signal the coming together of heaven and earth.

By our unity across traditional boundary markers. And you know, that’s, that’s there in Galatians 2, but it’s normally ignored that. The point about the gospel is that, that if you believe in Jesus, you’re supposed to be at the same table with all the others who believe in Jesus. 

Irrespective of your ethnic, cultural, et cetera background. Having said all that, of course for Paul, holiness matters, and we see him navigating that in say, 1 Corinthians, because there are some bits where he says, you know, some people have a conscience about this and other people aren’t worried about it, so don’t judge one another and, and just figure out how to live together across those differences.

Uh, similar things in Romans 14, but there are other things where he says, um, for instance, in 1 Corinthians 5, um, word has reached me that there is this guy who is, um, in an incestuous relationship with it apparently seems to be his mother-in-law or, or something, and he doesn’t say well, some of us approve of incest and some of us don’t.

So let not the one who does judge, the one who doesn’t. No, he doesn’t say that. He says kick him out. He says there is, there’s a red line here. And, uh, because this is about God’s design for creation, which includes the, the, the one flesh unity of marriage, which must not be compromised because, and I would say that’s not just some miscellaneous odd rule that Paul has got from some or other, it’s because for Paul, and we see this in Ephesians, um, the union of husband and wife is one of the signals about Christ and the church, about God and the world about creation and new create the goodness of creation and its redemption in new creation. 

And the challenge then to husbands and wives to model that, um, speaking as somebody who’s been married for 54 years, you know, this is, this is not an easy thing.

I don’t think it was ever easy. Um. But, but so, so that holiness and unity, yes, they matter and they matter together. And together they are part of this modeling, this strange new way of being human before the watching world that is deeply suspicious. 

Pete: You know, um, yeah. Sort of mapping all onto contemporary life can sometimes be tricky.

And with the, um, the divisions that you mentioned, you know, in, in, in Ephesians, I think I’m right on this. It, it’s really, it’s, it’s the Jew and Gentile issue. Can they both sit at the same table? Right. Um, we don’t really have that problem today or do we? Right. Um, uh, how, how, I mean, it’s, it’s different today, right?

I mean, we’re, we’re at the beginnings of this Jesus movement, and, and Paul has this vision for how the Jews will flock in, and then it doesn’t seem to really happen and we live in now the 21st century. Um, how, how could that, um, Paul’s, uh, admonitions about unity and the importance of unity and holiness?

How can that be extrapolated maybe to today? Is it just people getting along in church or is it bigger kinds of issues? Is it Jews getting, I mean, Catholics and Protestants together, which was all a big rage about 30 years ago? You know, what is it? 

Tom: I’m surprised you say that Catholics and Protestants getting together was all the rage 30 years ago.

Yeah. I mean it happily, it’s still going forward. Yeah. But as you have more and more Catholics and Protestants getting together, both of them find that their wings are increasingly suspicious, all breaking away in other directions. So there’s all kinds of stuff going on there. No, for me, the big thing is that this is the coming together of human beings across cultural and particularly ethnic differences. 

And, uh, you know, if people had read Ephesians 2:11-22, or indeed Galatians 2:11-21, uh, as seriously as they were looking for how to get to heaven without going through purgatory, which was the, the basic challenge of the 16th century, then they would’ve seen that the whole point of the gospel is this one new creation.

In Galatians, it’s the single family of Abraham. Now, Paul doesn’t spell that out at all in Ephesians, but it’s, that’s all part of the same thing. And I would say looking around the world in the last 300 or 400 years, the real problem is ethnic, in that we allowed ethnic divisions to creep into the church when we all insisted on having the Bible in our own native tongue.

Now, I’m all in favor of that. William Tindell is one of my great heroes. Um, let’s have the Bible in English and not have to be mumbling in Latin, which most people don’t understand. Et cetera. However, once you’ve done that, people didn’t realize that the imperative of cross-cultural and cross-ethnic unity was being ignored, so that by the end of the 17th century you had in say, London, a Polish church and a Portuguese church and an Italian church, and a this and a that, and a whatever, as well as English churches.

Um, and nobody seems to have noticed that that was actually pulling away from itself. Paul would be absolutely horrified. It seems to me it translates directly into that question.

And when people say, as the so-called church growth movement did in the last generation, oh well, churches grow much faster if you concentrate on having people who are just like yourselves. Same sociocultural ethnic background. Paul would say that’s not the point. The church is precisely the, the community in which the Revelation 7vision comes true, namely, a, a, a community praising God from every kingdom and nation and tribe and tongue.

That’s exactly how Romans lands in chapter 15. Um, where addressing an ethnically diverse group of house churches in Rome, he said, the point is that with one heart and voice, you should be glorifying God. So we’ve got that as our major challenge, it seems to me. Some churches in America, some churches in Britain are already making great strides in this direction.

That’s very exciting to see. Many are only just nibbling at the beginning of that.

Pete: No true unity. No true, no true unity. Wave at other down the street, but that’s not unity 

Tom: Exactly. And we in Britain are not very good at that either.

But we should be learning from one another, sharing in worship and prayer together. I think that’s one of the main things Paul would be saying to us. And if we did that, then issues of behavior would bubble up pretty quickly. Um, uh, do you allow this? Do you encourage that? Um, how are we then going to navigate those questions?

But they, they, they tend not to be so prominent if you are not bothered about unity. 

Pete: Right. You know, um, something you said earlier too, I wanna make sure we get to this. Uh, you mentioned the powers and principalities. Um, every time I hear that, I, I’m not, I, I always wonder exactly what is Paul talking about.

I think I have an idea. You know, he, you have a better idea than I do, but I know people will individualize this battle and they will say, you know, I lost my car keys and I found them, but I was 10 minutes late for church and Satan’s attacking me. And so it’s a pretty lame attack if you ask me.

But still, he could have done much better than that. But, um, it’s, it’s not that, you know, it’s, it’s not, it, it’s not a personal inconvenience or struggle or trial. It’s bigger than that. So just explain the biggerness of that. 

Tom: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, I think part of the problem here is that evil in the nature of the case is not easily described, and there’s a good reason for that, theologically, that evil is parasitic on God’s good creation.

Um, that evil does not invent new evils. Evil is the corruption of God’s good creation, but because it’s a corruption, it’s hard to pin it down and say this is bad or that is bad. And if we do, we have to be careful lest we create a dualism with a, a good God and a good world over there and, and a, a, a bad Satan and, and a wicked world over there.

It’s much more subtle than that. And it was in the New Testament as well, which is why in Paul, whenever you get these lists of principalities and rulers and powers and authorities. It always comes out differently. He always says it differently and adds different bits and pieces into that list, which implies to me that he doesn’t have a fixed theory of, well, there are rulers and they look like this.

There are authorities and they look like that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Rather, these are ways of gesturing towards something that Paul, like many if not most Judeans at the time, was very much aware of. Namely that as you are trying to be the community of the creator God, so the dark powers of anti creation seeking [00:28:00] to unmake the goodness of creation will try to strike back.

And sometimes, I mean, I don’t want to say that they would never do it through somebody losing their car keys before going to church, but I agree with you that that is a fairly trivial example. And maybe it shouldn’t even be on the radar. But when we see great movements, movements of people and nations and parties, et cetera, who are bent on doing their own thing, even at the cost of killing people or impoverishing people or bombing people or whatever, then I think we’re seeing what Paul would’ve recognized, which is a, a, a dimension of evil, which is more than the sum total of all the human intentions and actions involved. 

In other words, you can add up everything that Hitler and Himmler and dah dah, dah da did in the 1930s, and it still wouldn’t amount to the sense of total darkness and evil, which was not only the Holocaust, but all sorts of things to do with the second World War, et cetera.

Right. Now we can transpose that into the present, and that’s very difficult because we’re commanded by both Jesus and Paul not to think in terms simply of human opponents. Jesus says, don’t be afraid of those who can kill the body, and then that’s all they can do. Be afraid of the one who can actually destroy your whole being in, in other dimensions, and exactly the same in Ephesians 6.

Paul says, we’re not wrestling against flesh and blood. You can’t simply identify it as, oh, there’s this politician, and we think he’s being satanic, so we have to oppose him.

No, it’s rather that there are shadowy forces, which are using people, sometimes people in public life, sometimes people just down the street who seem quite inoffensive until you realize what’s going on and, and, and that the dark powers can use them and that the real battle, Ephesians 6, is to join Jesus in his victory parade.

I’m thinking of 1 Corinthians 15: 20-28 here, and, and holding the line against the steady encroachment of the anti-creational powers, which still lurk out there. Even though in principle they’ve been defeated on the cross. So, this is a difficult area. Mike Bird and I wrote a book you may know, called Jesus and the Powers two or three years ago.

And the late Michael Heiser, of course, wrote quite a lot on it. And you, you will know about that. I don’t go with him all the way, but that’s a way of saying there’s stuff out there that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have not usually said too much about, and we have to be more aware of it and more aware of the way in which our life of prayer and holiness and unity actually is part of holding the line of gospel victory, a la death and resurrection of Jesus against the encroaching of the anti powers.

Pete: Right. You know, the, um, what, what was, uh, triggered in me as you were talking about this, I was thinking of Romans were death and sin typically in, in English Bibles. Those, those, uh, words are capitalized to, to get across the point, right. That it’s, it’s not individual sins. It’s, it’s, it’s, um, it’s, for lack of a better word, a force, right?

That is, that is behind, that, that’s the real problem. It’s not the little things that you do being mean to people. There’s something going on there, of course, what that thing is. Um, I, that’s, that’s a hard thing, I think to articulate, but it’s, it’s, it’s a very, it’s a visionary con, it’s a visionary kind of thing to say.

Tom: I, I totally agree. And, uh, it is a curiosity of Romans translations speaking as somebody who’s done a translation. Um, the, the, at what point do you give these words capital letters? Now that’s of course a question for English people because in German, all nouns have capital letters, et cetera. 

But it does bring out the force of the point.

That it looks as though Paul is trying to say something cosmic, that’s, um, Romans 5-8, particularly where you have these larger powers. Um, and it isn’t just the accumulation of one death after another after another. Though that’s symptomatic of the larger problem, which is that death itself is the last enemy, which is to be destroyed according to 1 Philippians 15.

Pete: Right? 

Tom: Um, and that then everything which leads to all points to death. Becomes part of that same problem.

I, I think, again, part of the difficulty, and I feel this from my own background, I never heard sermons on this stuff when I was growing up. Either from my kind of liberal, mainstream church where I grew up, nor from evangelical teachers when I was in my, uh, teens and twenties. We just didn’t hear, we didn’t, people didn’t preach about this and so.

I, I came into it actually through befriending or being a friend of the late great Walter Wink, who as you know, wrote a trilogy on the power 

Pete: Right. 

Tom: And Walter himself had found, uh, that he had to struggle with the powers ’cause he and June were doing work with, um, in, in South Africa with, with, uh, during the time of apartheid and in Northern Ireland during the major Catholic-Protestant struggles.

And they were realizing that these things, um, the apartheid struggle and the Catholic Protestant struggle were more than the sum total of foolishness, wickedness, bad behavior on both sides is something larger happening. And that if you try to name the name of Jesus in the middle of it, then metaphorically speaking, all the furniture starts flying around the room.

Bad things happen. Um, ’cause the powers, the powers strike back. And I think we see that in Paul’s life himself. I think it’s after Paul has had the great celebratory victory over the powers in Ephesus at the beginning of, um, of chapter 18 or halfway through chapter 18, that then there is the crisis and, uh, sorry, Acts chapter 18 and then on into 19 , that then, in 2 Corinthians, we see the results of that, that he goes through a terrible, terrible, dark time, so awful that he says he despaired of life itself. You know, when the powers strike back, they don’t fight fair. And, uh, it’s much worse than lost car keys. 

And, uh, so, so I think, I think there’s a whole dimension there, which I find it difficult to talk about, but I think, you know, as we look, people have often said, as we look back on the history of the 19th, 20th, and now 21st century, are we really saying that the only thing that could be evil is a few wicked people doing silly things? I think we really ought to open our eyes and say there are much larger, you use the word forces, precisely, forces unleashed.

Um, and I would say it’s when human beings worship, including their own ethnicity or their own identity or their own, whatever it may be, their own country, their own power group. When people worship that instead of God, we give to the principalities and powers the power, which is properly ours as human beings, which we should be using to God’s glory.

And the prince powers and powers say, thank you very much, we will now manipulate you and all those whom your lives are touching. And you just watch what we can do. And it’s very ugly and we’ve seen it again and again over the last couple of hundred years,

Jared: Maybe I can maybe pull us back to some, like, I guess what I wanna talk about is, through this conversation, and maybe I’m pulling on what we talked about earlier, this navigating the descriptive versus the prescriptive, the is versus the ought. And in some ways, the way that you’ve kind of outlined the cosmic vision in the earlier chapters that then kind of leads to this ethical way we live that out, what does it look like? 

And I feel like maybe the household codes, because it’s such a, uh, maybe a litmus test for this kind of thing, where is the room for, how do we navigate that we can maybe get on board with the descriptive part, but does the prescriptive part change culturally over time?

And how do we navigate those things that a hundred percent Paul would’ve advocated for and, and felt was true, but there were some cultural things going on. versus how do we navigate it as a church today, 

Tom: Uh, as though we don’t have cultural things going on. 

Jared: Right, exactly. Yeah. 

Tom: One of, one of the moves that I have made regularly, I think I say it in this book, um, is that as we look around today’s western world of movies and poems and plays and television shows, satire, and all the rest of it. Um, are we really in a position where we can say, we have got this male plus female, um, parent plus child, um, workers and, and masters. We’ve got that all sussed. We now know exactly how that works. Look at us. Uh, we know how to do marriage, we know how to do employment, et cetera.

So we can stand on a great pedestal and look back at Paul in the first century and say, ugh. You are such a chauvinist, or oh you are so this or so that. It’s absurd. We are absolutely as confused as people were in the Roman world. And what Paul is doing is mapping out a way of a kind of a holding pattern within the cultural world of his day.

Um, and of course in Ephesians particularly, his command to husbands, um, would be almost unthinkable in the Roman world. Husbands, um, devote yourself to your wives as the Messiah loved the church and gave himself for her. Even so, husbands should love their wives as themselves. Now, you know, people like Cicero and Seneca used to write treaties or Plutarch used to write treatises about marriage and relationships.

I don’t think any of them ever ascend to the height of this husband and wife picture in Ephesians, Ephesians 5. And if we want to say, oh, we now know better, uh, our society is so much more, more sensible about these things. Well, I think the burden of proof is on us to show that, uh, we, we have happy marriages, we know about, um, the, the, the, the value of every individual, et cetera. 

I’m not saying that Paul’s teaching at the time couldn’t be picked up and twisted and, and some men might say to the wives, um, there you are, you’ve got to read verse such and such about, um, submission. Um, and then, then the wife mightn’t have the courage to say back to the husband, ah, but your task is much harder.

No. For Paul, it’s mutual submission. And you see the whole ethical framework there. Um, you need to start it from chapter 4, verse 17 onwards. And there’s some amazing stuff there about kindness and generosity and forgiveness and, and, and, and mutual, mutual support and affirmation. And I wanna say that stuff doesn’t date that, that, that, that’s, um, hard in any culture.

Um, but it’s the sort of thing which marks out the Christian Church. And within that, then there’s of course the strong warnings against, um, stealing, against, uh, angry speech against sexual immorality, against drunkenness. Um, and again, these are not, um, oh, well that was a problem in their culture, but, but of course wouldn’t be a problem for us.

No, absolutely. I look around the world and I see those same problems out on the street here in Oxford, uh, day by day. Um, so, uh, I, I’m, I’m quite bullish about this, as you detect.I don’t wanna say oh, oh, oh no. That was just culture specific, so we can kind of drop it. The whole New Testament is culture specific.

Um, and we’ve gotta live with this extraordinary vision that there might be a different way to be human. And it might just mean being the small working model of new creation. And when people say, oh, that’s so difficult, and I’m not sure that we can do that these days. Well, it’s the same difficulty as believing in the resurrection of Jesus.

Sensible people today know perfectly well that dead people don’t rise well, sorry, but Jesus did. Um, he launched the new world and. This is what it looks like. So I, I don’t like splitting off ethics from, uh, as you said, the, the ought from the is. I mean, I know that that’s one way of analyzing this, and it goes with certain 17th and 18th century, uh, analyses of ethics, et cetera.

But I, I wanna say the whole of Ephesians is about the new world that God is creating into which God is calling the followers of Jesus. To step in nervously looking around themselves, getting it wrong, no doubt. But taking their place and finding their way forward. 

Pete: When, when I was in seminary and, you know, reading Paul and really studying Paul for the first time, I had not really ever studied this stuff.

The, the, the concept that just made me stop and say, wow, okay, I, I didn’t see this coming, is, you know, what, what they call realized eschatology. And we see that in Ephesians, right? With um, uh, if you’re in Christ, you have already been seated in, in the heavenly places with Christ. Can you just riff on that a bit?

Like, I mean, how, how, what’s a good way of understanding that, um, I’m gonna use the word mystical kind of description of the, um, the life of those who are in Christ that you are already seated in the heavenly places? Like what? 

Tom: Yeah. 

Pete: How, how do we understand that? 

Tom: I, I used to go in the wrong direction on this until comparatively recently.

I mean, I did a series of expositions on Ephesians about 25 years ago, and I look back and shudder at some of the things I said, and no doubt if I’m spared for another 25 years, I may look back at this book and shudder as well. But hopefully I’ll have gone to my rest before then. Um, but, but one of the things that I used to think was that this meant that for, from Paul’s point of view, we were somehow detached from, of course we’ve still got our feet on the ground here, but that we, we lived in a different dimension. 

Now, I think Paul would say, well, there’s a sense in which the Christian lives in a different dimension. But the point is, God’s plan was always to bring heaven and earth together. You know, in Revelation 21, it’s the new heavens and new Earth together with the new Jerusalem as the place where heaven and earth meet. And, and renewed humans as standing, as I said before, uh, the dangerous intersection between heaven and earth, but being people of both Now, but here’s the thing.

I was then very puzzled because, whereas at the beginning of the letter, you do get that if you are in the Messiah, you died with him. You’ve been raised with him. You are already seated in heavenly places with him, which by the way, is the place marked out, and it’s very clear from what Paul does there.

Marked out for humans. It’s the Psalm 8 place. What are humans that you’re mindful of? You have made them a little lower than the angels, to crown them with glory and honor putting all things in subjection under their feet. That’s not an image of somebody being divinized, and so stopping being human, that’s God’s purpose for humans in the beginning.

But then I used to think, so why then do we have to have this battle in chapter 6 if we’re already in the heavenly places? Why is, and the answer is, the battle is in the heavenly places. Or put it the other way around the heavenly places is where the battle is. And when we are in Christ and indwelled by the Spirit, we are recruited to be part of the defense force in that ongoing battle so that the, the heaven earth duality, rather than dualism, at the moment is unresolved in the way that 1 Corinthians 15 says. It’s unresolved. So there is an inaugurated eschatology. Something has already happened. Jesus has been crucified, raised and exalted. The Holy Spirit has been poured out, and now he must reign, 1 Corinthians 15, until he’s put all his enemies under his feet.

And Ephesians 6 is saying, and by the way. Now that you are in the Messiah, you are, now that you are in the heavenly places, you are signed up to play your part in that defensive. All, all, all the items of armor in Ephesians 6 except for the sword of the spirit are defensive, uh, items of armor, that they’re not offensive.

So Jesus has won the victory and we are recruited in order that by being who we’re meant to be, not least being prayerful, we will be part of holding that line against the, the backwash, uh, of, of, of evil and destruction. So, um, I, I think the idea that we are called to live in those two dimensions at the same time, is absolutely vital.

I mean, as a typical English Anglican, I love the way in the liturgy, we say therefore, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, um, you know, holy, holy, holy. And it’s not as if we’re in heaven. Part of the mystery of the Eucharist is, is that heaven and earth come together as actually some of the great reformers would’ve been happy to say as well. 

Um, we in our modern western protestant theology haven’t really worked that one out, I don’t think. But it needs to be worked out because it’s teaching us how to be heaven and earth people, because Jesus was the heaven and earth human, and because the church is to be the small working model of new creation.

Pete: I, I think we’re coming to the end of our time here, unfortunately. I just, maybe one last final question. This is easy. Um, what, what do you hope people will take away from Ephesians if, if you had, if you had to boil it down to, um, you know, a post suitable for, uh, uh, Twitter or whatever they call it now.

So, uh, yeah. How would you put that? 

Tom: Obviously, obviously the thing that I, the line that I’ve given you three or four times now would be in there somewhere, but it’s, it’s about a vision of the church as standing at the intersection of heaven and Earth in order to demonstrate to the world, to the powers of the world and to the watching human world, that there is a different way to be human, and that it’s the way of, uh, the, the Jesus way and the Holy Spirit way, and it involves them unity, holiness, et cetera.

Jared: Well, thank you so much, Tom, for taking some time out and uh, it was a great conversation. 

Tom: Thank you. 

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Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of The Bible for Normal People.

Don’t forget, you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by The Bible for Normal People team.

Tom: I know Americans like flattery. 

Pete: Well, yeah, we do. Unfortunately, especially this American.