Paul and Ephesians

“A bishop once said plaintively: ‘Everywhere St Paul went there was a riot. Everywhere I go they serve tea.’ It’s a fair complaint – maybe riots will come back when we preach Paul – who knows?

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Those who have read some of my longer books may know that I use the category of worldview as something distinct from theology. Theology proper is, of course, discourse about God – in a Christian context, discourse about God, the Trinity, the Father, the Son, the Spirit; about the Church, the calling of God to the Church and so on. But worldview is about spectacles, not what you look at, but what you look through. You only stop to examine your worldview, like your spectacles, if suddenly things have gone fuzzy and you can’t see straight – so I analyse worldview in terms of the stories that people habitually tell, the narratives by which they live without thinking until somebody suddenly says: ‘Why do you do that?’ and the answer is: ‘Well that’s just what we do.’

Symbols have a key place in this. Today they include obvious things like mobile phones and credit cards, which indicate how we go about things and what our society is about. Now, let’s ask about symbols in Paul’s worldview because when he’s teaching young Christians, he is getting them to put on a new pair of spectacles, helping them to think about what he as a Christian takes for granted, but they don’t – not yet. As a Second Temple Jew, Paul’s worldview symbols were clear – the things that mark you out from your pagan neighbour are circumcision, the keeping of the Sabbath, the keeping of the food laws, the centrality of Torah and Temple, particularly. In your world, if you are a Jew with other Jews, you don’t often talk about those things: you take them for granted. But if somebody who is not Jewish meets you, they will perhaps say, ‘Why do you do those things?’, or perhaps go off and whisper, ‘Do you know what those Jews do? They take a day off once a week. Can’t think why they do that. And they refuse to eat pork. Is that because they think they are better than the rest of us?’ (because most people ate pork as the cheapest meat going) – and so on.

But for Paul it is quite clear that the Church is not defined in terms of the Sabbath, circumcision, food laws, the Temple in Jerusalem, or even the Torah given by God to Moses. What are the symbols of Paul’s worldview? You could say the cross – but the cross is not actually there on the street as a visible, tangible thing. I have come to the preliminary conclusion that the central symbol of Paul’s worldview is the Church itself, precisely in its unity and in its holiness. On the street, what the onlooker is supposed to see is a community that is united and a community that dances to a different drummer, that does stuff differently. Unity and holiness is what chapters 4–6 [Ephesians] are all about, but the groundwork is laid in 1–3. Pastors will know that it is easy to have either unity or holiness in the Church, but hard to get both of them at the same time! Paul insists on both with claims of apostolic authority...”

~N. T. Wright