N.T. Wright’s ‘Vision of Ephesians’ Offers Insightful Lens For The Pauline Letter
(REVIEW) At Crowley’s Ridge College in Paragould, Ark., where I teach history, we begin each class with a verse of the day to encourage students and give them a grounding, reorienting start to the morning.
Then we turn to the news of the day, the top stories shaping their world. I should not be surprised by how often the VOD illuminates the NOD.
I am also struck by how frequently, when I ask students to name their favorite Bible verses, something from Ephesians appears — 3:20, for example. Romans and Galatians tend to dominate church conversations, but if N. T. Wright has anything to say about it — and he does — Ephesians deserves equally sustained attention.
Wright, a leading Bible scholar and senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, has written “The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God.” If this volume inspires you to read more of his work, be warned: You will have 79 or so additional books to go.
The letter to the Ephesians is generally accepted as having been written by the apostle Paul, a conclusion Wright defends while giving little weight to arguments against Pauline authorship.
Importantly, Wright emphasizes that Ephesians was likely a circular letter — written not to address a single congregation’s local concerns, but to be read aloud among several house churches in and around Ephesus (in modern-day western Turkey).
These were small communities — perhaps five to 30 people each — largely poor rather than wealthy, hearing this letter read while Paul himself was imprisoned.
Wright moves through the letter section by section rather than adhering rigidly to the chapter-and-verse divisions added to our Bibles some five centuries ago. Because the original Greek lacked punctuation, determining where sentences begin and end is an act of interpretation.
Wright’s remarkable facility with the language allows these interpretive decisions to yield fresh insights and renewed perspective.
One striking example appears in Ephesians 2:10: “autou gar esmen poiēma.” Wright renders “poiēma” not merely as “workmanship,” but as “poetry.” We, the church, are God’s artwork — his sculpture, his poem. As Wright puts it, “We are to be Renaissance-people, demonstrating the birth of the new world.”
This leads to the central theme of Wright’s reading of Ephesians: The church is called to be a small working model of God’s promised new creation — a heaven-and-earth community that serves as an advance sign of what redeemed creation looks like.
The church is meant not only to announce this new creation, but to embody and enact it here and now.
What, then, does Paul call the Ephesian Christians — and us — to be? A people motivated by God’s glory as their goal; a praising people and a praying people; a peaceful and unified people; Spirit-filled, marked by self-giving love and clothed in the armor of God.
Read through this lens, “The Vision of Ephesians” offers rich insight for any teacher, student or reader of Scripture seeking to understand not only what the church believes but also what it is meant to be.
This article was originally published in The Christian Chronicle.
Shannon Beasley is the Associate Professor of History at Crowley's Ridge College, a private Christian liberal arts college in Paragould, Arkansas.