Week 49 Ephesians 4-6
Since finishing both halves of Ephesians – chapters 1-3 and 4-6 – I’ve been testing whether there was any way that the two cohered. Whether they could be seen as a unified & whole piece of writing.
My quick reflex answer is “no”. To me the opening chapters consistently looked like a lot of Religious Theoreticals. But the last half of the letter were more rubber-meets-the-road Religious Rules & Advice. The first half demanded a lot of mental focus and thinking power. The second not so much. The second was simpler. More straight-ahead. More understandable. And mostly doing-things.
On the surface they look different. Like one side of a two-sided coin. I think one argument for calling Ephesians unified & coherent is because there’s lots of things that are just like that. They look one way on one side but different on the other. For instance gaming is fun and entertaining and absorbing and straightforward. But someone (a smart someone) did a lot of hard work writing the program.
Another thing I need to remember is that Paul seemed to do this kind of thing a lot. I did a quick scan of Paul’s letters and I saw that he was constantly mixing theory-practice. Reading Paul’s letters I’m pretty much guaranteed to get what I think he figured was a fusion of related content: intricate thought-provokers alongside of clear-as-day actionables.
So Paul’s Ephesian letter maybe isn’t exactly unified. On the other hand I wonder if maybe in one way it is.