Commentary on Ephesians 1:11-23

Every Pauline letter opens with either a thanksgiving prayer or a blessing, with the blessing recounting God’s deeds and the thanksgiving addressing the recipients’ situation. Ephesians has both. The blessing, a Jewish berakah, recounts in one elaborate sentence God’s adoption of the nations into the covenant because of Christ (Ephesians 1:3–14). The thanksgiving prayer, in another long sentence, draws out implications of that divine election for the church (1:15–23). In so doing, Ephesians constructs a grand narrative that transposes Jewish covenantal promise and fulfillment into the creation of a cosmic church.

The nations are adopted as children of the covenant “for the sake of praise of the glory of [God’s] grace” (1:4–6). We are chosen “in order that we live [literally, “be”] for the praise of [God’s] glory” (1:12). We have been purchased as God’s “possession” (peripoiēsis 1:14; New Revised Standard Version “God’s own people”), “for the purpose of praising [God’s] glory” (1:14). God’s election of the nations has a singular purpose from the start: It begins and ends with praise. 

The decisive event that pivots world history to the church is the cosmic Christ, the holy Wisdom in whom all things are summed up (1:10). Three “in Christ” (literally, “in whom”) propositions elaborate the Christ-event in three logical, if not chronological, movements (1:11–14). In him we “who have previously set our hope in Christ” have been “chosen” for praise of God’s glory (1:11–12). 

The passive verb eklērōthēmen does not mean “we have obtained an inheritance” (New Revised Standard Version) but “we were chosen or appointed”—that is, by divine election—to be included in the covenant when we had no rights to it. The verb echoes “adoption” of 1:5, which, according to Roman law, entitled an outsider to the same family privileges and obligations as a natural-born heir. The Pseudo-Philonic sermon De Iona attributes the chief sin of the nations to their failure to express gratitude to God for having created and sustained the world. 

To be elected for praising God’s glory (1:12) is therefore nothing short of the supreme act of reconciling wayward gentiles so they can finally acknowledge the true and living God as creator of heaven and earth.

An interplay between active and passive verbs can be observed in the next two “in Christ” clauses. Passive verbs in the indicative foreground divine actions, while active participles describe human responses. “In Christ you who heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation” and “in Christ you who had faith have been stamped with the holy spirit of promise” (1:13). Both allude to the moment of the gentiles’ coming to faith when, recalling Galatians 3:14, the Spirit was imparted to believers as fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise.

The author adds a thanksgiving prayer that, in Pauline fashion, also announces the major motifs of the epistle/sermon (1:15–23). After a general greeting (1:15–16), the author prays that God might grant readers a “spirit of wisdom and revelation” (1:17). In Isaiah 11:2, a “spirit of wisdom and understanding [synesis]” is given to God’s chosen one. In Ephesians, the same Spirit is given to the church, but is depicted as dynamic, revelatory, and, most crucially, developing. The Spirit is given for the purpose of knowing God, which is an ongoing process. That means to know “what is the hope of [God’s] calling, what are the riches of the glory of [God’s] inheritance, and what is the surpassing greatness of [God’s] power for us” (1:18–19). 

The difference between the Messiah and believers is only a matter of degree. With “eyes of the heart enlightened,” referring again to the nations’ conversion, believers are not only gifted with an incipient knowledge of God but are also given the responsibility of growing into Christlike maturity, a theme Ephesians explores in depth in the ensuing chapters (see especially 4:13). This developmental arc empowers the author of Ephesians to attribute many of Christ’s qualities found in Colossians to the church, thereby erecting an ecclesiology on a christological foundation.

The Christology of Ephesians begins in typical Pauline fashion with the resurrection, but incorporates also the cosmic Christ of Colossians. God raised Christ (1:20) and elevated him above “every ruler, authority, power, dominance, and every name that is named” and “subjected all things under his feet” (1:21–22). Ephesians goes beyond both Paul and Colossians, however. 

While Paul calls the congregation the body, which is to be equated with Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12), and Colossians focuses on Christ’s preeminence by making him the head of the church (Colossians 1:18), Ephesians suggests that the church must carry out the christological mandate as Christ’s body. God “has given to the church a head above all things” (1:22b), thus granting the church the same authority first given to the cosmic Christ in whom all things are summed up (1:10). As a result, the church is now “the plērōma of him who fills all in all” (1:23). 

Plērōma (literally, “fullness”) was the Hellenistic term for divinity. That is how the term is used in Colossians 1:19 and 2:9. Ephesians continues this usage in 3:19 but now extends divinity to the church. The only exception is that the classic tension between the already and the not-yet, mentioned in passing in 1:21b, is now transformed into an exhortation to grow from present immaturity to the full stature of Christ (4:13).

The space within which the church grows into maturity is “in the heavenlies” (New Revised Standard Version “in the heavenly places”), a phrase unique to Ephesians. “In the heavenlies” is used synonymously with “at the right hand [of God],” where Christ now sits (1:20), but it also refers to the theater of operations we share with Christ: “[God] raised us up with him and seated us with him in Christ Jesus in the heavenlies” (2:6; see also 1:3). The heavenlies are where Christ and the church struggle with powers and principalities. Inasmuch as Christ engages supernatural beings and their counterparts in human society, we likewise take part in the same struggle (3:10; 6:12).