Preface
I have considered Ephesians my favorite book and the most important letter in the New Testament for at least thirty years now. I taught it numerous times in various contexts, learning more, I am sure, about this marvelous letter than those I taught. Their observations and questions have been invaluable to me and I am grateful for them.
Ephesians has come out of the shadows, so to speak, in recent years. As we have discovered the centrality of the church in God’s plan for redeeming his world, and the critical importance of a community of faith as the context for Christian growth and maturity, Ephesians has emerged as one of the most significant documents in the New Testament for the contemporary church.
Along with this is the recent rediscovery of God’s intent to redeem and restore this battered and broken globe of ours as his eternal habitation with his people. This “cosmic” view of God’s purposes understands salvation as far more and far larger than simply an individual receiving forgiveness for their sins and having their eternal life with God assured. The latter has generally been thought of in our country as a “spiritual,” that is, immaterial, kind of angelic existence with God in “heaven.” We have learned anew, however, that God intends to redeem what he has created, not junk it. He will reclaim both his creatures and his creation and refashion both for life with him on this renewed globe, his new creation. Ephesians, in fact, expounds this cosmic picture of God and his purposes and this too accounts for its rise to prominence in both the academy and the church.
A final factor that shapes my reading of Ephesians is my perception of the kind of people God calls his people to be throughout the Bible and to our very own day. In my judgment, God has always desired his people to be a “subversive” presence in the world, always contesting the status quo in the interests of God’s kingdom. Humanity’s fall into sin and rebellion constitutes the original “revolution” against God. Since that moment God has been calling, forming, and shaping a people to be his “counter-revolutionary” force to win back his wayward creatures and begin to set up kingdom outposts which both demonstrate the kind of life God intends for humanity and extends and implements that life through the world on all levels of life. The letter to the Ephesians is directed not to the particular problems of local congregations but to, as I call it, the “making of a subversive, counter-revolutionary church.
This letter, then, requires us to evaluate and rethink our life as a church in the culture in which we live. The overwhelming verdict in our time is that the form of the church as we have known it is no longer adequate, if it ever was, to living as “subversive counter-revolutionary” people of God in this country. The need to rethink our life as God’s people is a clear as it is confusing. Many ideas and models have been proposed. However, I suggest, we have in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians precisely the resource we need for evaluating and rethinking how to be and do church in faithful and fruitful ways for our time and place. Here is yet another reason to take it up in earnest.
My reading of Ephesians as “The Making of a Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Church” is my own though it is, of course, built on the research and writing of many scholars and grows out of the soil of my own twenty-five years in various forms of ministry, primarily in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). None of these scholars or those I ministered to are, of course, responsible for the reading of Ephesians I adopt here. They have made this book better than it would have been without them. All misreading or errors are my own responsibility.
I hope and pray the good folks in our churches of all traditions will find my approach to Ephesians innovative and challenging. Both mainline and evangelical churches are in bad shape in North America. Their ability to attract unchurched or formerly churched people and bear winsome witness to the world has atrophied considerably over the last four decades. And the culture in which they exist is going through its own wrenching reorientation. The time seems ripe, then, for a fresh look at what it means to be and do church in our time and place. Such reflection best begins with Holy Scripture and no book in Holy Scripture pushes the kind of reflection needed as does Ephesians. That is my thesis and the book that follows is my justification for that claim.
I have used the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted. Where possible I have cited sources available on the internet for readers’ ease in following up on anything about which they desire to read more. Thus, this Easter season 2011, I commend this book and those who read it to the risen Lord who sends and equips his church to be “the light of the world”! Amen.
©Lee Wyatt, 2011
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