Dec. 1, 1921
[3 Εὐλογητὸς ὁ θεὸς καὶ πατὴρ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, ὁ εὐλογήσας ἡμᾶς ἐν πάσῃ εὐλογίᾳ πνευματικῇ ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις ἐν Χριστῷ, 4 καθὼς ἐξελέξατο ἡμᾶς ἐν αὐτῷ πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου, εἶναι ἡμᾶς ἁγίους καὶ ἀμώμους κατενώπιον αὐτοῦ, ἐν ἀγάπῃ 5 προορίσας ἡμᾶς εἰς υἱοθεσίαν διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰς αὐτόν, κατὰ τὴν εὐδοκίαν τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ, 6 εἰς ἔπαινον δόξης τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ ἧς ἐχαρίτωσεν ἡμᾶς ἐν τῷ ἠγαπημένῳ, 7 ἐν ᾧ ἔχομεν τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν διὰ τοῦ αἵματος αὐτοῦ, τὴν ἄφεσιν τῶν παραπτωμάτων, κατὰ τὸ πλοῦτος τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ, 8 ἧς ἐπερίσσευσεν εἰς ἡμᾶς ἐν πάσῃ σοφίᾳ καὶ φρονήσει 9 γνωρίσας ἡμῖν τὸ μυστήριον τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ, κατὰ τὴν εὐδοκίαν αὐτοῦ, ἣν προέθετο ἐν αῦτῷ 10 εἰς οἰκονομίαν τοῦ πληρώματος τῶν καιρῶν· ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ, τὰ ἐπὶ τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς· ἐν αὐτῷ, 11 ἐν ᾧ καὶ ἐκληρώθημεν προορισθέντες κατὰ πρόθεσιν τοῦ τὰ πάντα ἐνεργοῦντος κατὰ τὴν βουλὴν τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ, 12 εἰς τὸ εἶναι ἡμᾶς εἰς ἔπαινον δόξης αὐτοῦ τοὺς προηλπικότας ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ· 13 ἐν ᾧ καὶ ὑμεῖς, ἀκούσαντες τὸν λόγον τῆς ἀληθείας, τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς σωτηρίας ὑμῶν, ἐν ᾧ καὶ πιστεύσαντες ἐσφραγίσθητε τῷ πνεύματι τῆς ἐπαγγελίας τῷ ἁγίῳ, 14 ὅς ἐστιν ἀρραβὼν τῆς κληρονομίας ἡμῶν εἰς ἀπολύτρωσιν τῆς περιποιήσεως, εἰς ἔπαινον τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ.]
3 Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing, in heaven, in Christ:
4 In him, he chose us before the creation of the world to be spotless and blameless before him. 5 In love he determined us through Jesus Christ his Son, according to his good pleasure, to exist 6 for the praise of the glory of his grace, which he lavished upon us in the beloved.
7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace, 8 which he has generously given us in perfect wisdom and insight: 9 to make known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure 10 (to accomplish in the fullness of time according to his intention) to gather together everything in Christ, the heavenly and the earthly in him.
11 In him we have also become heirs, having been determined (according to the intention of him who accomplishes everything according to the purpose of his will) 12 to the praise of his glory to be the first to hope in Christ.
13 In him, you also, having heard the word of truth, the message of your salvation and believing in him, were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, 14 the downpayment of our inheritance, until it becomes our own possession, to the praise of his glory.
We begin with an overview of the passage. It is a doxology, in which the apostle invites his hearers to praise God along with him, since the praise of God is his subject, and they must adopt the posture of praise in order to grasp it. There is an untranslatable wordplay in verse 3 that trades on the word “blessed,” which describes the human act of praise that is required for the readers to understand the writer of the letter: “Blessed be him who has blessed us.” This act of praise is described as an echo of what God has done first—both chronologically and in order of importance in the eternal scheme of things—a human echo that follows necessarily and immediately upon the divine action.
Accordingly, all of the ideas in verses 4–14 move between the two poles of the divine action, described as ἐυδοκία, the beneplacitum of God, on the one hand, and ἔπαινος, the glorificatio of God by the human creature, on the other. The central term εὐλογεῖν, benedictio, which occurs throughout verse 3, has a twofold meaning: as the creature recognizes God to be the one who blesses him, he responds by blessing, praising, and glorifying God. As Bengel correctly points out, “Aliter deus benedicit nobis, aliter nos benedicimus illi.”63 An infinite qualitative distinction separates the action of the creator from that of the creature. However, this infinite distinction is precisely what unites the creature and the creator. God can bless man only as his creature; man can bless God only as his creator. The recognition of this infinite distinction is precisely what makes the blessing and the praise both meet and right. Recognition of God’s divinity establishes the divine Otherness, the “aliter”; and precisely by being established, it is sublated.64
It is no accident that Calvin, who understood this relation between God’s blessing and human praise better than anyone before or since, seems to have particularly loved verse 3, which sets the tone for the entire epistle.65 We are created by God, from whom we come, and for God, toward whom we are moving. We are standing on the ground of the beneplacitum Dei; we are moving toward the goal of the gloria Dei. The knowledge of God is the presupposition, and the knowledge of God is the goal of all human being, having, and doing, including our present speaking and hearing of divine things! This is what Paul wishes to shout to his readers in this doxology. By pointing to both the presupposition and the goal, he means to jolt them out of their constant forgetfulness, to save them from the quicksand of trivialities, to deliver them from both false subjectivity and equally false objectivity by confronting them with the fundamental questions of human existence and the answer that is already given by God. Paul will not allow them to remain as mere spectators and contemplatives; rather, he summons them into the sphere of the subject—to a vocation, a movement, an upheaval, a sublation of time and everything temporal by eternity, in which we come to our senses and walk before God. And all of this takes place in Christ.
The phrase “in Christ” is the actual key to our passage: it appears at the end of verse 3, again in the phrase ἐν αὐτῷ in verse 4, and in the threefold ἐν ᾧ in verses 7, 11, and 13. We should not only recognize this key but also use it vigorously to unlock the meaning of the passage. Accordingly, we use this central motif to arrange the passage in the sequence suggested by Dibelius:66 verses 4–6, Jesus Christ: our election; verses 7–10, Jesus Christ: our liberation; verses 11–12, Jesus Christ: our hope; verses 13–14, Jesus Christ: our sealing with the Spirit. Furthermore, the passage becomes more intelligible if we translate each phrase or sentence that begins with ἐν ᾧ as a separate unit (“In him, he has chosen us [v. 4] . . . In him, we have liberation [v. 7] . . . In him, we are heirs [v. 11] . . . In him you also . . . have been sealed [v. 13]”). This is the only possible way to understand the passage in German. Luther’s translation, which preserves all the relative clauses, makes it impossible to grasp the passage as a whole, whether reading it or hearing it read. I strongly recommend accommodating your listeners by using Dibelius’s outline in your sermons and Bible studies.
We must remember, of course, that this separation of syntactical units for linguistic clarity runs the risk of obscuring a distinctive feature of the text: the huge span of ideas, expressed in what is for us such a torturing concatenation of clauses, pointing in so many different directions. The early church could express such a span of ideas in a single sentence or thesis as a whole—as a single, rounded truth—because it was regarded as completely integrated and elastic.67 We must understand the text the same way, not as a collection of dogmatic loci but as a single kerygma, hearing all the parts simultaneously and each individual part in relation to the others; otherwise, the separation of syntactical units will result in a toning down and a distortion of the contents. In any case, whether we read the original Greek text, Luther’s translation, or Dibelius’s, let us be sure that we are repeatedly reoriented to the subject by the constantly appearing ἐν ᾧ and the equivalent ἐν Χριστῷ. What is expressed here is not a general, universal truth and therefore cannot be expressed directly—either rationally or irrationally, speculatively or experientially through the vagaries of the “pious consciousness.” Rather, it is expressed existentially, indirectly from God and by God, not as individual words in themselves but with every single word in relation to the Word, which is not exhausted by any individual word.
Because that is the meaning of the phrase ἐν Χριστῷ, it constitutes the formal key to the section. We are placed before God, claimed by God, born from God, and determined for God. God himself has blessed us, and for this reason we should praise him. Ἐν Χριστῷ the veil that hides the human creature’s true situation, preventing him from seeing that he belongs to God, is torn. Ἐν Χριστῷ means Immanuel! God with us! [Matt. 1:23]. Ἐν Χριστῷ God draws near in his self-revelation, while remaining distant, strange, and incomprehensible: the Deus absconditus. In Christ is thus the proximity of God, which always means eternity and never merely the temporal extension of what is palpable, comprehensible, or perceptible. Precisely because the proximity of God is ultimate reality, it can only be believed—and the belief itself is the wonder of its revelation. In Christ are thus election, liberation, hope, and the sealing of the Spirit, says Paul. And he does not mean a series of discrete truths—even holy truths—from which one chooses to affirm some, doubt others, and ignore still others, but rather the truth, the holiness, which can only be understood temporally in all its variability, in the various concepts of human language, and certainly in the various elements of knowledge and experience. But it can be truly grasped and apprehended as one, despite its apparent diversity, but as such as truly one, in its totality, in the necessity and solidarity of all its various relations. We are ἐν Χριστῷ; therefore, God has blessed us so that we should praise him. Therein he is the creator and we the creature.
Note well that ἐν Χριστῷ is the presupposition and goal of our human being, having, and doing—the beneplacitum Dei on the one hand and the glorificatio Dei on the other—in their original relation, not the human creature’s existence or anything he might produce or achieve. Paul would never have described his conversion at Damascus as the cause of his being ἐν Χριστῷ. He was not ἐν Χριστῷ because he experienced Damascus; rather, he experienced Damascus because he was ἐν Χριστῷ. If in an attempt to understand Paul, we reverse the order to conform to our own notions of cause and effect, we will sever the nerve of the passage and forfeit the only possible way of understanding the words that sound from the initial κατὰ τὴν εὐδοκίαν τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ and soar to the climactic εἰς ἔπαινον τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ. As those who we never were, are, or shall be, we are ἐν Χριστῷ; and it is precisely this unprecedented reality—that in Christ we are a new creation—that is incomparable and incommensurable with everything that constitutes our temporal existence. It is this reality that compels his praise to God and about which he intends to remind his readers, as the ἅγιοι καὶ πιστοί, as those who are neither ignorant nor indifferent. Let us turn to the detailed exposition.*
Concerning εὐλογητός,† it should be noted that for Paul and for the Bible, Old Testament and New, the praise of God is not peripheral, superficial, merely external, or mere lip service. It certainly can become superficial and will do so when the object of our praise is no longer God but our own best thoughts, ideas, and wishes; the zenith of human accomplishments; or anything else in the universe, from the least to the greatest. Such putative praise of God is really fundamentally about us. It is merely one ordinary activity among others, and easily can be replaced by other concerns. The praise of God to which Paul refers is not a matter of course; it tolerates no rivals. Such praise is directed to God, the Father of Jesus Christ, who reveals himself in his hiddenness and is the creator of all things. It is an act of knowledge, of repentance, of transformed thinking. Something new is opened up in the human creature when he is able to εὐλογεῖν. He has found light where human eyes can only detect darkness. He has made the most important discovery of all. He has found God, and he has found God. He not only can but must εὐλογεῖν. “For I can do no other. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” [1 Cor. 9:16].68 In this context, how could the inward and the outward aspects of praise be separated? How could the praise of God consist of words alone? Words are inadequate, but so is action. We can only cover our faces (“crever les yeux,” Calvin)69 and give God the glory.
Dec. 8, 1921
Ὁ θεὸς καὶ πατήρ. Καί in this instance (as in Eph. 1:13, καὶ πιστεύσαντες; and Rom. 16:1, καὶ διάκονον) emphasizes πατήρ as that which further clarifies the identity of this θεός. God is praised as this God—and as such also as ὁ θεός. This God emerges from the ranks of all other gods, real or imagined, as the only one to whom honor is due, as in Athens, the unknown God emerged from the ranks of the known gods [Acts 17:23].70 For Paul, not even monotheism is a self-evident, dogmatic truism; rather, it must be continually rediscovered and reestablished. Here, if we are attentive, we discover the vigor behind Paul’s ideas: even with the foundations of his “system,” he always begins at the beginning and not, like most religious thinkers, with anything assumed or conceded.71 Nothing is conceded: that God is the Father of Jesus Christ and that the Father of Jesus Christ is God is as staggering today as it was on day one and must be repeatedly acknowledged and expressed on the basis of continual revelation, not as something known beforehand. What exactly this means for Paul becomes clear in the following clause, which elaborates upon the description of God as Father.
Ὁ εὐλογήσας ἡμᾶς . . . First, we should note the relationship of this εὐλογήσας to the earlier εὐλογητός. As I pointed out earlier, the εὐλογεῖν to which Paul invites his readers is essentially the moment of astonishment. It could just as easily be called joyful discovery as terror. Apart from ἔκστασις, apart from the ecstasy of man face-to-face with the reality of God, there can be no εὐλογεῖν, at least not the kind of praise that is evoked by God. Εὐλογεῖν is the act of man, in which God draws near, but as the unknown God, whose goodness is new every morning [Lam. 3:23]. Εὐλογεῖν is the unmediated act of knowing God that nevertheless emerges originally and wonderfully from not knowing him, an act that in and of itself is nothing other than a qualified, prolonged [?] not knowing of God, a docta ignoranta,72 an awe-inspired adoration of God in his divinity, that is, in his unfathomable majesty. Therefore when God reveals himself in Christ, he reveals himself in absolute mystery, in contrast to all that is known or simply given. He is revelatus as absconditus.
This interpretation of the εὐλογητός seems unavoidable, given its relationship to the εὐλογήσας that is spoken by God and to everything else that is said in verses 4–14. The creature’s eternal election, redemption, appointment to hope, and anointing by the Holy Spirit constitute the divine act that Paul refers to as εὐλογεῖν. Human εὐλογεῖν means the act by which the creature becomes objective before God and stands in the place where God draws near. Think about what this means! Clearly it is a profound ecstasy, more profound than any ecstasy that we can account for psychologically, an act in which a person radically transcends what is humanly possible. Could the creature be objective before God at one moment just as much as the next? Could the creature make the radically new beginning at any given moment? Couldn’t the εὐλογεῖν at any moment signify the unprecedented transformation, the act that brings light out of darkness, a sublation of time? No, says Paul: the origin, spontaneity, and essence of the human εὐλογεῖν lie neither in the creature nor in creaturely time. Rather, God appears first with his εὐλογεῖν. Human εὐλογεῖν is a response to his call. His freedom is the sphere in which the creature acquires the freedom for such an act. This incomparable human possibility emerges from all possible human achievements just as radically as God himself emerges from the ranks of other gods. This explains the necessity for the human creature’s praise of God and the vigor with which the creature is claimed for the glory of God. Praise, the divine possibility for man, which is beyond description and beyond all human boundaries, nevertheless becomes an actual reality for the creature. The divine possibility is a necessity. It manifests itself as an absolute act, tout court.
Note that the divine act of blessing in which this human act is grounded is described as speech. God blesses. He speaks a word of promise and a word of grace. That is all. No gratia infusa.73 No direct communication of life. No direct relationship between God’s will and what occurs in the world, within man, or among human affairs. Not a creative act but, as in Genesis, the creative word. He speaks, and it comes to be; he commands, and it stands firm [Ps. 33:9]. The word alone does it. In the word as word, every conceivable act is included. As divine word, God’s εὐλογεῖν becomes the ground of and occasion for the human creature’s εὐλογεῖν. If the divine possibility for man does not appear as word—with the utter strangeness and distinctiveness of the word, which cannot be understood directly—it does not appear at all. If is it not believed as word, it will not be believed at all. If it is not the possibility, which can only be believed, it is not the divine possibility for man. As God’s possibility for the creature, it can only be believed. The New Testament λόγος is not simply the supreme form of humanly mediated reality or any kind of material hypostasis; rather, it refers to the relation in which God confronts man directly. Λογίζεσθαι and here εὐλογεῖν [denote]74 not to any kind of a priori relation but to the divinely created relation between God and man. Εὐλογεῖν therefore refers to the divine act as an undifferentiated, unexpected, free act of absolute revelation. As such, the divine word calls the human creature out of himself and into the world of the Father of Jesus Christ, into the world of freedom.
The threefold use of the preposition ἐν points us in the same direction. Following Hofmann, I think it simplest and best to form three parallel sentences, each beginning with ἐν rather than forming three subordinate clauses. Unlike the majority of commentators, I see nothing in the text that requires a syntactical relationship between only the first two ἐν-clauses; and it seems to me that the meaning of the passage emerges most clearly if instead we separate each ἐν-clause with a comma and imagine all three as a circle, proceeding from the central εὐλογήσας. Before considering the nature of that blessing, we must describe the manner in which God blesses the creature. God blesses (1) with every blessing of the Spirit, (2) in heaven, (3) in Christ. If this gives the impression of saying the same thing three times, then we are on the right track: the blessing proceeds from the center of the same circle three times, albeit in three distinctive ways.
Ἐν πάσῃ εὐλογίᾳ πνευματικῇ. The play on words with εὐλογεῖν appears once again. “God blesses us with blessings—and for this we are blessed!” Unless we assume that Paul wrote in a deliberately stylized fashion simply to sound poetic, then it should be obvious that the Pauline message is intentionally and thoroughly dialectical and must be understood dialectically. Do not be led astray by the current voices clamoring for simplicity,75 particularly by those who without any basis contrast the dialectical Paul with the allegedly simple Jesus.76 The goal of dialectical communication is simplicity, that is, the truth, that is, God. But God must be believed as God, and God can only be believed. Therefore, all authentic communication about him is necessarily dialectical, that is, broken, indirect, pointing beyond itself.77 We are not so simple that we can receive a simple communication about simplicity. Our alleged simplicity is ever-increasing complexity and confusion. We can be open to the divine simplicity only if we are profoundly unsettled in our human simplicity. Therefore, do not think that dialectic is a special feature of Paul that can be dismissed with the catchword “Paulinism.” Dialectical theology is behind the best of Luther’s early sermons and table talk. Most importantly, Jesus’s speech is supremely dialectical. I would go so far as to say that Jesus’s speech is even more dialectical than Paul’s, precisely because his words, which at first sound so simple and direct, are actually so suggestive and laden with meaning. Whenever we speak about God, what is meant differs from what is said; and the more truly we speak about God, the greater is the difference between what we mean and what we say. And that is precisely why dialectical communication is so infinitely instructive and infinitely vexing for the interpreter. Whoever prefers to avoid it should know that he prefers not to hear about God. Whoever intends to hear about God, in whom we can only believe—whoever would hear afresh that God is the one in whom one can only believe—will certainly not avoid dialectical communication because he understands that it is the only adequate form of communication.
“God blesses us with blessings.” The blessing of the divine word is itself a word, only a word, only a promise, only a pledge, whose fulfillment we do not see. If we saw the fulfillment, the promise would not be God’s promise. If in giving his gift, God ceased to be a mystery, then the gift would not be God’s gift. No, we will never plumb the depths of God’s blessing. It will always elude our grasp. It is never at our beck and call. The New Testament plerophory78 does not mean that we have advanced beyond Abraham, as if somehow we had more than the word or are required to do more than to believe. Rather it means that in Christ, the blessing of Abraham is recognized as the blessing under which all persons in all generations stand [cf. Rom. 4:9–12, 16–18; Gal. 3:6–9, 14]. It means that in Christ, the word of God is recognized as the divine and therefore the universal possibility for all persons in all times and for all peoples. It means that in Christ faith is freed from the common perception that it is merely one among other historical religions instead of the presupposition from which we all come and which we need only realize in order to enter into the generation that is blessed on account of Abraham. But blessing remains blessing. Word remains word. Faith remains faith.79 Even in light of the New Testament fullness, man remains man, and the world remains the world, just as the advent of the fullness of time in Christ affords no direct insight into its fullness for those who live in time—no direct insight into the coming of the new heaven and the new earth. “My grace is sufficient for you”! [cf. 2 Cor. 12:9].80
To want more in this case is to want less. It is a heathen plerophory that promises more than the blessing of God, that promises the presence of God in the form of visible, direct immediacy, which is the domain of gods and idols. Here, where the point is how God has blessed us, let us take care not to hanker after what is not properly ours and thereby forfeit what we do have and are allowed to have.81 God blesses us with blessings. Any train that attempts to ignore this Halt! signal is derailed, as church history testifies a thousand times over. But, it is “with the blessings of the Spirit” that God blesses us. And with that, the unheard of is indeed declared: God’s unmediated presence for us, for you and for me, God in his inapproachability, inaccessibility, and hiddenness. God, who cannot be known, surrounds, besieges, storms, and reorders the domain of my knowing. At the limits of my intellectual powers, of my strength of character and disposition, stands the power of God, who is both the final question and the final answer. My existence borders God’s existence, verging not upon a separate existence but upon the inverse of my own nonbeing, the ultimate Aufhebung and grounding of my own existence.82 My personality is found as it is lost and lost as it is found in the ultimate reality of God’s personality.83 God speaks. What does my speaking or my silence amount to? God acts. What is the source of my own action or nonaction? God is in the right. What difference does it make if I am in the right or not? God lives. What is the significance of my own life and death? Knowing this does not obliterate, neutralize, or obviate anything that is mine, positive or negative; but the relativity of all that is mine is clearly revealed, or to be precise, related to its origin, measured according to the standard by which all things are decided, large and small, life and death, good and evil. What I am, I am in relation to God.
What is intrinsically mine may stand under grace or law, but this is a secondary question that must be decided on a case-by-case basis; and [it must be said]84 that in every case both grace and law are relevant. Let us establish this as fundamental: God gives us the Spirit, we are related to him, without whom we are nothing and with whom we are everything that he is himself. God gives us the Spirit. Then how could our relationship with God at any moment be based on anything that is already given, or on the object of either rational knowledge or irrational feeling? No, this point in us, the Spirit of God, is not accessible by either rational or irrational paths. The Spirit is not accessible at all; he is the absolute Other. Our greatest spiritual capacity, including the supremely religious achievements of our spirit in the world, stands diametrically opposed to him. He is God’s creative act among us, not one act among others—certainly not an act that we can imagine by recourse85 to anything visible, material, or temporal—but rather God’s creative act as God’s word, God’s λόγος, God’s own Spirit, meaning, and ground. So, with a word of blessing that proceeds from the Spirit, God blesses us. It has been so from the beginning: God’s word alone stands. Word, not act (despite what Goethe says).86 The act only in the word, the word as act, which should be a sufficient guarantee that in his Spirit God blesses us with his supremely real presence.
The boundlessness of this εὐλογία, or state of blessedness, is what Paul emphasizes when he says that God blesses us with every blessing of the Spirit. Haupt’s translation of εὐλογία πνευματική as “blessing from the religious realm” conveys almost the opposite meaning. When speaking of the Spirit, we can no longer maintain such distinctions between discrete domains; and it is precisely when the Spirit is absent that such distinctions are made and the Spirit is confined to the “religious realm.” What do concepts like “religious” and “realm” mean when we are speaking about the human relationship to God? Only to the extent that the relationship is absent does such a delimitation have meaning; and where the relationship does exist, this delimitation is removed. The Spirit is the attack on all human being, having, and doing, including both the predicament and the promise of all things human. Take away the Spirit—that is, the relationship in which our predicament and promise are grounded in God—and the negative consequences tend to be just as bitter in the scientific, artistic, and political realms as in the “religious realm.” In the New Testament, therefore, the correlate of the Spirit is the resurrection of the body (Rom. 8:11), by which the totality of our existence and essence are determined by our relationship with God. Because the divine word of blessing with which we are blessed is a πνευματικὴ εὐλογία, it is necessarily πᾶσα. By contrast, a merely religious εὐλογία is not worthy of the designation πνευματική and is certainly not the word of blessing that encompasses the full extent of human extremity.
Ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις. The phrase—it means the same as the noun τὰ ἐπουράνια in normal Pauline usage—occurs in the New Testament only in Ephesians (cf. 1:20; 2:6; 3:10; 6:12); and in each case, the meaning is locative.87 Christ is seated at God’s right hand in heaven (1:20) and we with him (2:6). Through the existence of the ἐκκλησία, the wisdom of God is revealed to the powers and principalities who are in heaven (3:10), as are the πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας with which we must contend (6:12). In light of these parallels, we must reject the suggestion of Beck and others to translate it “God has blessed us with heavenly possessions.” Rather, as already shown regarding the paradoxical εὐλογία, Paul again emphasizes that this is God’s blessing, which can only be given to us. Calvin’s interpretation points us in the right direction: “Voluit indicare praestantiam gratiae quae per Christum nobis confertur.”88 In the most spacious of all rooms, as Hofmann says rather well,89 the decisive word is spoken, and the decision turns out to be favorable for us. Every good and perfect gift comes from above, as James puts it [James 1:17]. Clearly Paul thinks about this “above” as a battlefield: on one side is Christ the field marshal, standing at the king’s right hand [cf. 1:20–22], and we with him; on the other side are the principalities and powers [cf. 6:12], which are alienated from God and opposed to him, in their utter disarray, exercising their limited influence. Here, as in chapter 6, Paul says that the origin of our current predicament is the same as that of the divine blessing, namely, the promise of victory. We should not be put off by the figurative quality of Paul’s words, which provides grounds for neither metaphysical speculation nor rationalistic rejection of the ideas behind them. Throughout the passage, Paul is thinking from a human point of view. The riddle confronting us here, like the fact that we can recognize God only in his word, is that we see God and our relationship with him in light of the “not yet,” the victory that is not yet complete. But even from this darkness, ἐπουράνια heralds the last word, εὐλογία, the promise—that nothing can separate us from the love of God [cf. Rom. 8:39].
And all this, finally and emphatically: ἐν Χριστῷ.90
Καθώς (v. 4)‡ functions like a colon that introduces the words that follow. Strictly speaking, it is part of the syntactical unit that comprises verses 4–6, but I would in fact relate it to the entire section (vv. 4–14). God has blessed us in Christ with every blessing of the Spirit in heaven: καθώς, that is, he has chosen us in him; we have redemption in him; we are heirs in him; we are those who wait for the salvation that is to come; and all of this you share with us. As I said in the previous lecture, I would outline the entire passage as follows: There is the blessing of God, from which we come, namely, ἐκλογή (vv. 4–6). There is the blessing of God in which we stand, namely, ἀπολύτρωσις, the forgiveness of sins (vv. 7–10). And there is the blessing of God for which we are headed, namely, the future κληρονομία for which we hope, developed in two different formulations (vv. 11–12 and vv. 13–14). Note well that this succession of three or four trains of thought does not constitute three different truths. Nor does their relationship consist in the fact that they constitute a plan, method, or history. Rather, a single truth is expressed here in three distinct forms, and the distinct meaning of each individual form can be understood only by noting how each relates to their common origin. What relates this succession of thought forms is that each in turn depicts what cannot be depicted: the single act of God, his εὐλογεῖν ἐν πάσῃ εὐλογίᾳ πνευματικῇ, ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις, ἐν Χριστῷ. In view of the single act of God, we can (with Calvin) emphasize the blessing of God from which we come, and therefore the God who predestines. We can (with Luther and many others) place the emphasis on the blessing of God in which we stand, on the forgiveness of sins. Or, finally, we can place the emphasis (with Blumhardt, for example) on the blessing of God to which we are headed so that we emphasize eschatology.
The decisive thing with each of these distinctive emphases is that we know what we are doing and why, namely, that with the perceptible, temporal truth with which we speak, we actually mean the one, imperceptible, eternal act of God. Part of the greatness of the theology of the Reformers is that precisely because they grasped the truth so one-sidedly, they express this ultimate relationship to the origin so clearly and precisely. Let us not abandon this one-sidedness too quickly. To become as universal as Paul, we must first become one-sided! The possibility of formulating and depicting each of the various forms of the truth with equal seriousness, as equally significant and important—the possibility of being, say, Calvin, Luther, and Blumhardt simultaneously—is either an intellectual feat of the first order or a more or less mindless, unoriginal compendium. Whether the endeavor of dogmatics—which as you know is the attempt to form an ordered relation of the various truth forms—turns out to be an intellectual feat of the first order or a mindless, unoriginal compendium must, of course, be assessed on a case-by-case basis. In any case, we should be aware as dogmaticians—and it is well known that secretly everyone is a dogmatician—that it is no small matter to form an ordered relation of all truths and thereby to speak truly and earnestly. The best way to avoid a mindless compendium is to begin with an intellectual act of the second order, that is, to start with one of the possible truth forms, not with the intention of remaining there (neither Calvin nor Luther nor Blumhardt did that, to mention them again) but rather from a single starting point to propose a survey of all the possible viewpoints by showing how each individual viewpoint is related to the origin.
In our section, Paul speaks on the basis of such a panoramic view. He speaks from the limits that we can attain only with great difficulty. If we want to understand him, we must anticipate a vantage point that presumably not a single one of us here has attained. Our actual viewpoint of the divine blessing in Christ will include only a small sector of the circle described here. However, let us read Paul so that through such anticipation we can at least be sure that our small sector is truly part of the circle. We should try to understand as one reality what Paul presents successively as election, reconciliation, hope. Paul indicates that he understands everything to be truly one both formally, by enclosing all three within the phrase ἐν ᾧ or ἐν Χριστῷ, and materially, by what he says about each individual part.
Ἐξελέξατο. Ἐκλέγεσθαι means to pick out, select, or choose. To understand what Paul means here, we should be wary about jumping to the conclusion, as Calvin does, that this election is necessarily a double election, that the election to be ἅγιος and ἄμωμος, which is described here, necessitates a corresponding election to condemnation.91 We should be just as wary of the more or less forced attempts of many recent exegetes to avoid this obvious implication by contending, as do Hofmann92 and Ritschl,93 that the object of election is actually the church of Christ; or, with Beck,94 all of humanity rather than individuals; or by minimizing the seriousness of this implication by saying, as does Philipp Matthäus Hahn (Erbauungsstunden über den Brief an die Epheser, 1878),95 that election merely indicates the order in which God reveals himself, first to one person, then to another; or, with Haupt, that “the κλῆσις is only the projection of an event occurring in time.”96
The weakness of all of these interpretations, including Calvin’s to a large extent, is that they stem from anthropological concerns. Can there be, may there be, must there be individuals chosen for condemnation in addition to those chosen for blessedness? That is the question behind these interpretations. Yes, says Calvin. He once preached on double predestination from this text for literally almost an entire day: a long sermon in the morning followed by an even longer one in the afternoon,97 claiming that this teaching has “utilité si grande, qu’il vaudroit mieux que nous ne fussions pas nais, que dèstre ignorants de ce que S. Paul nous declare ici,” and even further that, “qu’il vaudroit mieux que tout le monde fust abysmé, que de se taire de ceste doctrine.”98 Undoubtedly, Calvin’s yes is closer to Paul’s meaning than the other exegetes’ variously qualified no. When forced to answer the anthropological question, Paul also responded with an unqualified yes, though I do not intend to introduce Romans 9 here.99 But the actual significance of predestination—and in this regard even Calvin occasionally departs from Paul—is not to be found in this anthropological question, not for Paul and finally not even for Calvin. For Paul, the statement God chooses! is primarily a statement about God—indeed, about God’s relationship with the human creature and, more precisely, about God’s relationship with the human creature. When in the presence of Christ Paul attempted to answer the question Who am I? Where do I as one blessed by God come from?, he answered, I have been chosen by God! This statement includes the possibility that I am not chosen or that I am chosen for unbelief and condemnation because I might not be recognized in the presence of Jesus Christ. Therefore the possibility and even the reality of double predestination cannot be disputed. To this extent, Calvin is right.
But with Paul a lot depends on the objectivity with which he expresses this ἐκλέγεσθαι of God; because of this objectivity, he is not compelled to point out or describe every situation in which both sides of predestination are either possible or impossible. He is concerned about the double predestination of the human creature in God, not about the double predestination of the human creature. His outstretched finger points above, not below.100 By contrast, in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination—at least as Calvin expressed it dogmatically and homiletically—psychological concerns already cast their shadow, and this feature is evident in Calvin’s imitators following the Reformation and in subsequent periods. Because the “utilité de cette doctrine,”101 as Calvin develops in detail, is that this doctrine alone truly humbles the creature and brings assurance of salvation, the interpretation of ἐκλέγεσθαι undergirding the doctrine necessarily reveals the electing God in his unfathomable freedom, sovereignty, and majesty. He chooses, he only, he himself, and he alone. He is recognized as our origin because he humbles us, sending us back to the dust,102 and exalts us in the community of his glory. This is how he reveals himself in Christ, as utterly remote, as the King of kings and Lord of lords [cf. Rev. 17:14; 19:16], the origin of our origins. Because that is the fundamental meaning of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and what constantly shines through. Despite the psychological elements, Calvin and his doctrine tower above all those recent theological lightweights who have forgotten the meaning of “soli Deo gloria.” And precisely the mature insight that that is the basic meaning of his doctrine could have spared Calvin himself many forced and artificial explanations. The claim that the double predestination of the human creature tout court effectively humbles and assures him might prove to be forced and artificial; and to the extent that more recent theology is interested fundamentally only in the religious situation of man in and of himself, it is more correct than Calvin. It needs to understand, however, that Calvin’s position is wrong precisely at the point that it is eroded by embracing the assumptions of more recent theology. We must first understand Paul, bypassing Calvin, in order to understand Paul by way of Calvin; but we will understand neither by approaching the question in a way that seems commonplace or plausible to us.
Everything else in verses 4–6 is merely a description and explanation of this ἐξελέξατο. It should be obvious that in this section, Paul is describing one segment of a circle.
Ἐν αὐτῷ, in Christ, God has chosen us, Paul says. Who is this αὐτός, this Christ, in the relationship? Clearly, he is God’s grasp upon the individual whom God summons: not humanity in general but a particular person according to God’s choice, not this or that person on account of one human quality or another but a particular person according to God’s choice, not this or that human circle or any group that is distinguished qua group but, once again, God’s choice upon these particular people in all of their individuality and uniqueness.103 Christ is not a generic term for humanity, church, people group, or corporation but is the Individual, Unique One—in his individuality and uniqueness before God, however—the historical one who is eternal, the Son of Man who is the Son of God. In him we recognize God as our God, who turns to us in complete freedom because in him God himself is given and recognized. Ἐν αὐτῷ does diminish the wonder of election; no bridge is built from eternity to time, from God to the human creature. Eternity remains eternity, and God remains God; what occurs and is revealed in Christ is that man, who lives in time, also lives in God, who by nature lives and remains in eternity. God turns to the human creature as the God who elects in absolute freedom, but in this way he truly turns to the creature. “Si in Christo sumus electi, ergo extra nos” (Calvin), but “sumus electi.”104 Everything depends on continually recognizing the enormous tension that exists in this ἐν αὐτῷ. Are we chosen? Yes, we are chosen by God, whom we do not choose and have never chosen; we are chosen as these particular people in this time in this world, and only in this way.
Πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου. These words safeguard Paul’s understanding of election from any possible confusion with fate, nature, or history. No relationship in time, in the world, in history—not even a historical connection with Jesus—assures this relation as securely as does election in Christ, however assured we may be in all of these other relations. We should recognize, however, that there is a relation beyond all relations, an ultimate synthesis. That is what meets us in Jesus Christ. Our ἐκλογή, the Yes that God speaks to us, is rooted in this synthesis. He is beyond time, beyond the world, beyond all causality, though not as the prima causa of the first of a series. Paul’s doctrine of predestination is more sharply formulated than both Augustine’s and the Reformers’. It is not a question of being chosen as the member of a group; rather, God chooses as the One and Only. As the eternal One, he chooses the human creature, who lives in time. In this decisive moment of God’s freedom, emphasized here by ἐκλέγεσθαι, God is distinguished from all random events, gods, and idols. We should not confuse any contingency in the κόσμος with this contingency, because this is the contingency that exists through what is noncontingent. Its grounding πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου must be sought yesterday, today, tomorrow, and ever again. God is alive, not an impersonal, immovable principle. His election is not a form of natural law but the law of freedom. That is what is conveyed here.
Jan. 12, 1922
We resume with the infinitive phrase in verse 4, εἶναι ἡμᾶς ἁγίους καὶ ἀμώμους κατενώπιον αὐτοῦ. The divine ἐκλέγεσθαι is directed toward a particular dimension of human existence: being holy and blameless before him, for this he has chosen us. Our existence before him as the elect, summarized in the expression εἰς υἱοθεσίαν in verse 5, is the proximate temporal purpose willed by God and achieved in Christ, which anticipates the accomplishment of his final, eternal purpose, expressed in the phrase εἰς ἔπαινον δόξης τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ (v. 6). It is thus a complete circle that Paul envisions: from the mystery of God’s own counsel and will, his purpose proceeds to us known, perceptible, utterly finite human creatures and beyond us, before returning to the mystery itself, that we, his children, are to be holy and blameless before him so that the glory of grace may be praised. The human creature is the arena of action of the Unique One,105 who is his own purpose and goal. We are only the arena; nevertheless, we are the arena. That is what is promised to us here.
As I said last time, the interpretation of ἁγίους καὶ ἀμώμους is disputed. J. T. Beck argues, with characteristic liveliness, that the phrase refers to the “ethical character” that is established for “humanity chosen in Christ through the determination to election in Christ before the world was created.”106 I cannot go with Beck here, nor do the majority of commentators, because of the context from verse 3 on, in which εἶναι ἁγίους καὶ ἀμώμους is parallel to εἰς υἱοθεσίαν as well as to the corresponding passage in Colossians (Col. 1:22). This context provides clear evidence for the view that “verse 4 speaks of God’s conduct with the human creature, not of the human creature’s conduct with God” (Haupt).107 However, I think that von Soden is cavalier to say, in sharp contrast to Beck, that what is described here is “only the religious relation.”108 Expressions such as εἶναι ἡμᾶς ἁγίους καὶ ἀμώμους are intended to be taken empirically, and in this respect Beck’s intention is undoubtedly correct. Presumably Paul would find unintelligible such meticulous distinctions between the religious and the ethical realms. For him, the reality of God is a single sphere.
Therefore, it is beyond dispute that God’s intention for us, which is described here, is an unprecedented attack on man, upon the entirety of man, an attack whose effects are certainly not limited to what we normally refer to as the ethical realm. Remember what we said about ἅγιος in the first lecture. A person who is chosen by God and therefore God’s holy one, a prophet or apostle, for example, is shaken down the line and thrown off track in much more than his religious relation.109 It is utterly impossible that what the hidden God accomplishes in the person will not also have the greatest visible consequences in that person’s life. It is utterly impossible for faith not to be accompanied by good works, as Luther says. The seismic tremor that shakes the human creature’s trust in the things of the world and the moral appeal to the human creature to “Become what you are!” at the heart of this infinitive clause are unmistakable; but what is even clearer is the phrase κατενώπιον αὐτοῦ, holy and blameless in God’s presence. In his presence, everything human is shaken and wounded, including all good works, even the greatest prophetic or apostolic holiness. They are called into question as human work, which can be quantified and qualified. When we have done everything that is required of us, we can only say that we are useless servants! [Luke 17:10]. Ἅγιοι καὶ ἄμωμοι, or δίκαιοι, the term that Paul uses regularly in his earlier letters [cf. Rom. 2:13; 5:19; also Rom. 1:17; 3:26; Gal. 3:11], refer to the world of sin understood through the reality that God forgives us because of what we have become and is pleased with us as we are, that is, those whose existence is determined by the judgment of God. That is the happy Christian proclamation. Who could hear it and walk away undisturbed or remain the same? Conversely, who could hear it and mistake the little disturbance and transformation that it effects in him for the imputed, forensic, alien righteousness that is ascribed to us in Christ? “Gloria Dei summus est finis, cui nostra sanctificatio est subordinata” (Calvin).110 This “summus finis”111 is applicable from beginning to end: from beginning, by making impossible the assurance that is based on “only [a] religious relation,” to end, by making equally impossible the existence of an ethical habitus. Man qua man is always impossible. Human possibility is found only in the faith and obedience in which man recognizes himself in light of that which is overcome. What is possible is God alone, who intercedes for man in Christ.112
The participial phrase in verse 5, ἐν ἀγάπῃ προορίσας ἡμᾶς εἰς υἱοθεσίαν διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰς αὐτόν, is a second iteration of the same idea. I agree with most recent exegetes that ἐν ἀγάπῃ modifies the phrase that follows it, but with a qualification. I do not think we can rule out the possibility that the phrase refers to the human creature’s love for God as the correlate of divine election, as in Romans 8:28. The evidence for this reading is that the parallel phrase in verse 8, ἐν πάσῃ σοφίᾳ καὶ φρονήσει, cannot modify the phrase that follows. On this reading of Ephesians, human love for God would be associated with εἶναι ἁγίους καὶ ἀμώμους, in contrast to these objective, “juristic” human characteristics,113 and would refer to the unprecedented human act by which the divine act is affirmed and grasped, just as love for God is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, according to Romans 5:5, as I understand it.114 However, the evidence against this interpretation is that such a syntactical relation between ἐν ἀγάπῃ and ἁγίους καὶ ἀμώμους is unattested. Above all, it does not fit the context of the passage as a whole, in which human action plays no sustained role, because the emphasis is on the praise of the divine εὐλογία.
We will therefore interpret ἀγάπη as God’s love for us and read the phrase as follows: In love, God determined that we should be his children through Jesus Christ. The sovereign freedom and lordly power of God, who conducts himself toward us solely as the electing God, whose act of electing must be understood as an entirely absolute action from beginning to end, is revealed in Jesus Christ as love. The Deus absconditus is revealed as our Father. There is no cause to shudder as before a despot, because his despotism is the despotism of love. In love he determines what happens to us according to the good pleasure of his will, as it says later. Προορίζειν is synonymous with ἐκλέγεσθαι, just as the Latin praedestinatio is synonymous with electio. Both are pictures, indeed anthropomorphic pictures, of the sovereignty by which God has created a relation with us: προορίζειν emphasizes the divine will in itself, ἐκλέγεσθαι his absolute freedom. Προγινώσκειν, which appears in Romans 8:29, emphasizes the knowledge of God that anticipates all actual events115 and in this way guards the divine sovereignty from being mistaken for necessity, fate, or natural causes.
So it is certain that God has determined in love that we are εἰς υἱοθεσίαν εἰς αὐτόν. In Haupt’s commentary, you find the exceedingly awkward translation, “being made into a child.”116 But it actually strikes exactly the right emphasis. We do not become God’s children either by process or procreation.117 When we become children of God, there is a new creation, a new birth. But we must become his children. The good news of our kinship with God is not a direct communication. It is never based on experience; its confirmation is never based on an unmediated, innately spiritual connection between a person and God. The relation presupposes an infinite abyss between the creator and the created. Ὑιοθεσία is a strange, new event, completely distinct from everything in our familiar way of life. It means that the estranged from God become children of God by adoption.118 Ὑιοθεσία is creation out of nothing. Becoming God’s children occurs by divine appointment, according to divine will, through an event that takes place διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. There is one begotten Son of God. He stands facing us, the image of our own existence through divinely appointed sonship—not κατὰ σάρκα, not ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυείδ, but κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν (Rom. 1:3–4), and ἐν δυνάμει, by God’s appointment119—a sonship unlike any human sonship and that only God can give and that God does give to those whom he wills and determines to become his children. Dibelius says that kinship with Christ is “experienced.”120 We can say that, as long as we add: “experience” that we do not experience except as promise. How could the experience of the Son of God, that is, of the risen one, the experience of the new man who is begotten by God for us, be anything except promise, since all of these experiences surpass even our greatest experience? The promise of our υἱοθεσία includes the promise of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection of the dead, and the fulfillment of everything that God wills and determines concerning us. That, Paul says, is what is given to us in Jesus Christ. Through Jesus Christ we encounter the God who intercedes for us and therefore makes faith and obedience possible.
But, understand clearly, Paul adds immediately, this possibility is God’s possibility; and he establishes this claim by describing the promise given to us as God’s promise. God wills and determines that we should become his children κατὰ τὴν εὐδοκίαν τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ. Εὐδοκία, the good pleasure of his will,121 is not merely a second, weaker description of ἐν ἀγάπῃ. It means being loved and esteemed freely by God. “Gratuito non mercenario amore Deus nos complectitur” (Calvin); and “Dominus nos adoptando, non respicit quales simus, nec conciliatur nobis ulla personae nostrae dignitate: sed una illi causa est beneplacitum aeternum, quo nos praedestinavit” (Calvin).122 God loves us for his own sake. God himself constitutes the possibility that we become his children. God himself gives us this promise. In God himself and only in him is its fulfillment and reality to be found. Regarding this point, Calvin says: “Hic verus fons est unde haurienda est divinae misericordiae cognitio.”123 He and his kin do not shake their heads, baffled and horrified at the possibility that everything—everything—could hang on the single thread of God’s will, or—we might as well go ahead and speak the horrible word out loud—the arbitrary act,124 namely, God’s free election. For them, this knowledge alone affords knowledge of God’s saving mercy because it is founded on unshakable certainty, whereas they found in any allegedly reciprocal relation between God and man the element of uncertainty, which was unbearable for their faith.
Conversely, all domesticated piety, which regards living with God to be more important than living with God, finds this insight to be objectionable and relegates it to the background as much as possible. What becomes of us if, even for a second, we are separated from the beneplacitum of God? What becomes of our certainty if we lack the kind of certainty that God himself gives? How can we live with God when we can only believe in God? Any rapprochement between Pauline-Reformation piety and this domesticated-bourgeois piety is out of the question. Anyone who contends that the former is valid merely as a corrective and counterweight, and who wishes to raise the banner for a more practical form of piety, will find plenty of justification in history to do so. It is even more certain that Pauline logic is supported by the subject,125 whereas the luxuriant vines of Pelagianism and Semipelagianism, otherwise known as church history, live fundamentally from their resources. One person considers the honor of God to be preeminent and waits for the salvation of man with the sole concern that God may receive the honor; another is concerned above all for man’s salvation and asks about the honor of God only for the sake of this goal. These two people will always talk past each other, and no formula of concord between them is possible. Here, κατὰ τὴν εὐδοκίαν τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ is essential. Here, the recognition of what is beyond us is essential. Here, election is essential. It is a case of Either-Or!
And now finally: Where does the journey lead? What are God’s intentions in Christ? For what purpose does he determine that we should be his children through him? Answer: εἰς ἔπαινον δόξης τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ ἧς ἐχαρίτωσεν ἡμᾶς ἐν τῷ ἠγαπημένῳ. With that phrase, the first circle that Paul describes here is complete. It brings to mind the famous formula in Romans 11:36: ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ δι’ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν τὰ πάντα. God’s purpose resides in himself. It is to glorify himself that he goes his wonderful way with us. Therefore, at each moment he necessarily has the last word and fills [?] the room [?]. For that reason, we never arrive at a point of stasis with regard to knowing, possessing, and enjoying what God has in mind for us. For the same reason, the divine reality that we encounter in Christ is merely [?] the crisis of everything human. Open your eyes and look. Open your ears and listen. The crisis is where our salvation is found. See and hear the good news of grace that is announced there. Because if God himself is the goal, then grace is his goal. Grace is his essence and is revealed to us only in Christ, when we come to the place where we seek God himself and him alone. Then he speaks with us. Then he gives himself to us. Then he is our God, our Father. Is this true? we ask. Can a person be led to the place where he seeks only God himself and him alone? What distinguishes the tidings of despair from the tidings of grace? What gives man the right to say, “If I have only you, I ask for nothing in heaven or earth” [Ps. 73:25]? How does God’s freedom become our freedom and his goal, which is himself? How does it become our salvation? Paul answers: by the grace with which God has graced us in the Beloved. The election of our existence as the elect exists in Christ. The determination of God concerning us is love. The beneplacitum of God is his good pleasure to us. Here the mystery is revealed. Why? Because precisely here God comes as word on the cross of Christ but becomes word as God in his resurrection.
Jan. 19, 1922
Verses 7–14 describe the blessings with which God has blessed us—now from the vantage point of the present. The discussion moves from the distant past—πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου, when God elected us to be his children, in love, according to the good pleasure of his will to praise the glory of his grace—to seemingly more familiar territory. With the expression ἔχομεν (v. 7), our feet touch the familiar ground of human being, having, and doing, where we can catch our breath for a moment. We should be careful not to exaggerate the advantages of this vantage point. Even a superficial view of these verses reveals that they are speaking not about a different subject matter but rather about the same subject matter, only differently. Differently because the only method for speaking properly about this subject matter—if we can speak about a method at all—is to find ever new ways to speak about it. Therefore to speak properly about this subject matter is to recognize that all of our attempts to see and to speak about it are provisional so that our attention is drawn to—I am tempted to say “forced upon”—the object being considered and the content of what is written.
Paul deploys this method admirably. In verses 4–6 he speaks about the past, but what does the past mean if it refers to that which is eternally ordained for us in Jesus Christ? Clearly this past could just as easily be the present or the future. And now in verses 7–10 he speaks in fact about the present, but what does the present mean if it refers to the possession of our redemption, described here specifically as the knowledge of the mystery of God’s will? Is it not clear that this present could just as easily be the past or the future? Our familiar human being, having, and doing are called into question from beyond just as bracingly in this second iteration, even though it is introduced by the apparently straightforward ἔχομεν. If we are prepared to hear what is truly being said here, then we cannot relax in this apparently more familiar territory; rather, the ἔχομεν points us back to the time frame of the past, which we just considered, or to yet a third temporal framework, that of the future, as Paul clearly does in verses 11–14, where he says the same thing once more by means of this third framework. By this juxtaposition, Paul makes it clear that his concern is not the past, present, and future as such, the καιροί (v. 10), which he regards as merely temporal frameworks, but the πλήρωμα τῶν καιρῶν, the end of time, eternity, which we can never speak about except by means of the temporal forms of the καιροί—yet paradoxically by continually altering and suspending these temporal dimensions. Our attention is diverted from the human observer and riveted upon that which is observed only when we recognize that we cannot speak about it unambiguously. The fact that we recognize the limitations of our discourse guarantees that we are speaking properly. Paul speaks about the ἔσχατον, speaks eschatologically, whether describing something that begins πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου or not, whether he is describing what we have or the inheritance for which we hope. How strange all of this sounds to us! The very strangeness of what Paul is saying accounts for its unambiguous clarity. The very fact that it eludes our grasp is evidence that God is being spoken about.
We “have” τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν διὰ τοῦ αἵματος αὐτοῦ, τὴν ἄφεσιν τῶν παραπτωμάτων, κατὰ τὸ πλοῦτος τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ.
Ἀπολύτρωσις means the purchase of freedom. Human creatures are in prison; they have become slaves. They are set free from this slavery through a payment made on their behalf. What kind of slavery is this, and what kind of payment? Paul does not go into detail here. We learn only this much from the additional appositional clause: the slavery of humans is related to their sins; their sins have either landed them in prison or constitute the prisons themselves. Their manumission is essentially the forgiveness of their sins; they are no longer bound but released, just as a prisoner’s chains are removed when he is granted freedom.
Paul regards man’s state as a contradiction of the sonship for which he is eternally ordained. He is under a spell. He is living under tyranny. His own actions, his παραπτώματα, his trespasses, are the explanation for this state; and it amounts to the same thing if we say that the actions themselves constitute the bondage, the chains which hold him. This tyranny is absolute: rebellion or escape are both out of the question. Anything that the creature can do will simply perpetuate his own παραπτώματα, forge additional chains, deepen his bondage, and prolong his servitude. We are the guards of our own prisons; how could we possibly set ourselves free? For that, an ἄφεσις is needed. The command Halt! directed to us and our actions must come from beyond us. God must stand opposite the creature in order to say to him, I am your Lord! [cf. Exod. 20:2ff.; Deut. 5:6ff.], in order to set him free from himself. Man must face up to this claim on his existence so that he is compelled, awestruck, and totally absorbed by it. That is the forgiveness of sins. The good news of the forgiveness of sins means: we have received a new Lord! Whether we call the old lord “sin,” peccatum originale, about which later church doctrine spoke so profoundly, or the “I” whom we know through our own experience, or the devil, what matters is that the Lord has become our Lord—absolutely. He has brought to an end the former tyranny. God is now our Lord. And he is our Lord in an absolutely different way than the sin that dominates us, because he is God. Slavery to sin is a breach of our freedom. We belong to the one who redeems us and claims what is justifiably—by a twofold right—his right as our creator and as our redeemer.
Suffice it to say that the forgiveness of sins is nothing less than God’s rule. Forgiveness is by no means the only way to conceive of the rule of God, and it would be wrong to emphasize this motif alone to the exclusion of others. Forgiveness is not a matter of merely excusing a person; the one who is forgiven is also made obedient. The rule of God does not refer only to the dynamics of God’s action; God’s acquittal effects a corresponding dynamic in the creature, whose action is completely dissolved, reconstituted, and established on a new foundation. The word βασιλεία designates God’s word as act. The terms ἄφεσις and ἀπολύτρωσις indicate God’s act as nothing other than his word.
In addition to the appositional phrase τὴν ἄφεσιν . . . , Paul further clarifies ἀπολύτρωσις by saying [that it is] τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν διὰ τοῦ αἵματος αὐτοῦ. The identity of the ἀυτός is clear from the conclusion of verse 6: he is the ἠγαπημένος, the one through whom God has graced us. By his blood we have the purchase of our freedom, our release from sin. When the New Testament refers to the blood of Christ, it means the suffering that Jesus endured in his passion, where the acquittal of man is announced by God, albeit in obscurity and hiddenness. The Halt! confronting our action and the total claim of our new Lord, who is actually our original Lord, is proclaimed. Διὰ τοῦ αἵματος αὐτοῦ or ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι (Rom. 3:25), Jesus is the ἱλαστήριον . . . , the Kapporeth of the Old Testament ark of the covenant, the place where on the Day of Atonement peace between God and his people was proclaimed by the sprinkling of blood [cf. Exod. 25:16–17; Lev. 16:14]; consequently, Jesus is the place of propitiation, where our lot turns, where we exchange masters, and where our sins are forgiven.126
The truth of this pronouncement—that God intends to be our God and Father through Jesus—is actualized only when God himself announces it, continually, that is, in our present situation, through the Spirit. How could we understand the meaning of the blood of Jesus, of his suffering and action in the passion, apart from the resurrection, which reveals their meaning? The resurrection in turn is revealed to us only through the cross and blood of Jesus. And so the cross simultaneously reveals what is seen and veils what is unseen. The ἀπολύτρωσις, the ἄφεσις, occurs here as God’s mystery and act: here because it is precisely here, where all light is extinguished and the darkness of Golgotha enfolds even God’s Son, that God alone can be seen to speak, act, and reveal himself. Let us be clear about what we mean when we say with Paul: ἔχομεν τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν. We are saying that we have what only God has, what we [can] have only in God, who unites time and eternity. In other words, we have what we must receive continuously from God in each present moment.
I am familiar with the attempts of so-called Biblical Realism, which is not content with redemption on these terms but attempts to advance beyond the Reformation doctrine of justification to what it claims is a more robust and living fellowship with God. In fact, this approach is simply a form of naturalism. I confess that in the past, I was influenced by J. T. Beck’s ideas. I abandoned this approach, however, because I became convinced that its gains in concreteness and vividness come at the expense of actual content. I judge any religious concept by the degree to which it makes me truly attentive to God himself, by the degree to which it witnesses to the reality that cannot be grasped by any religious concept. That quality clearly seems to diminish the more we assume that the parable coincides with the subject matter, and this is clearly the tendency of Biblical Realism.
An excellent example is Beck’s interpretation of this very passage, especially the phrase διὰ τοῦ αἵματος αὐτοῦ. He speaks about the “sanctified and sanctifying life force of Christ’s soul,”127 which has been transformed into his nature and particularly into his blood. By this account, blood is no longer a material substance but the animating element of Jesus’s body. By virtue of this purifying, sanctifying dynamic,128 the blood of Jesus Christ now has purifying and sanctifying effects in the bodily-spiritual spheres, whose concrete substance is the blood itself. Through his Spirit, the sanctifying effects of his blood extend to all who are purified with him. Granted, that is certainly realism; but if I had to give it a name, I would call it not “biblical” but “mystical-theosophical realism.” And I reject such approaches because, like all mysticism and theosophy, they attempt to avoid the offense of the cross and the necessity of faith. The word of God does not become more real by being refashioned into human reality. We should be content with its own reality rather than trying to make it conform to ours through such attempts. Let us be content with that ἔχομεν, which takes our breath away, because that is how God breathes his breath into us [cf. Gen. 2:7; Ps. 104:30].
The third phrase, κατὰ τὸ πλοῦτος τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ, clearly points us in this direction. It defines ἔχομεν the same way that the phrase ἧς ἐπερίσσευσεν defines our human being and having. We have liberation, the forgiveness of sins. But how do we have it? To avoid any misunderstanding, God alone must receive the honor: we have it “in accordance with the riches of his grace.” God’s grace is so much richer than we can conceive or imagine that his light illuminates our darkness: in that place where we can detect only the triumph of sin, where even the Son of God is accounted as sinful and allows himself to be so reckoned, precisely there, God’s grace and truth triumph by his blood. His grace is that great, his truth that deep. No human parable is adequate for this reality. This reality signals the parable that is the end of all parables. Although we understand parables, we sigh and cry out with the disciples between Good Friday and Easter about the unreality that faces us in this parable, which is the parable of death. Even for Jesus, this was necessarily the final parable. Whoever is not afraid of this parable but sees the reality of God in light of it has ἀπολύτρωσις and ἄφεσις. And whoever does not fear but believes in light of it has grace and sees the Resurrected One. It goes without saying that this grace is not restricted to Easter morning. His grace, God’s grace, is always present. Certainty is always found in God, and it is always found in God. How can we complain that the foundation of Christian ἔχομεν is grace alone when God himself makes it the basis of our certainty? I think that we would do better to part with our supposed attempts at clarity and be content with God’s clarity.
Concerning this grace of God that is turned to us by Jesus’s blood, the text adds: ἧς ἐπερίσσευσεν εἰς ἡμᾶς ἐν πάσῃ σοφίᾳ καὶ φρονήσει. This phrase forms the transition to γνωρίσας ἡμῖν, which in turn introduces the second sentence in which Paul describes what we have. The phrase beginning with γνωρίσας is the exact parallel to the sentence that begins with προορίσας in verses 5–6. This strongly suggests that γνωρίσας in verse 9 goes with ἐν πάσῃ σοφίᾳ καὶ φρονήσει, designating the wisdom and insight of God,129 just as γνωρίσας is connected to ἐν ἀγάπῃ in the earlier sentence. So argues Beck.130 In fact, the context does not provide evidence for this connection: it is not the wisdom and insight that effects God’s revelation but his revelation itself that is praised and for which we are to be thankful. Σοφία and φρόνησις actualize our deliverance. Σοφία means insight into the last things, into God’s ultimate purpose—the knowledge of God, in other words. Φρόνησις refers to the ultimate insight into penultimate realities, things visible, and quotidian affairs. Such knowledge, which is lavished upon us as from an overflowing vessel, constitutes our deliverance and the riches of God’s grace. Only knowledge? Is this the alleged intellectualism of Ephesians and of Paul? Only correct thinking? Only an idea? It is not much, but then what else could we have? A feeling? Volition? Σοφία and φρόνησις identify the crisis in which we stand. Therefore, the adjective “only” is completely out of place here. God’s idea constitutes our relation to God’s reality. Knowledge of forgiveness is forgiveness.
Jan. 25, 1922
The overall parallelism between verses 4–6 and verses 7–10, and more specifically between προορίσας ἡμᾶς and γνωρίσας ἡμῖν, suggests that the latter phrase introduces a second description of the ideas expressed in the first set of verses. The relationship between the two clauses is governed by the relative clause in verse 8, ἧς ἐπερίσσευσεν. Inasmuch as we receive ἀπολύτρωσις and ἄφεσις, the abundance of God’s grace is lavished upon us. How? As perfect wisdom and insight: we know how things stand with both eternal and penultimate matters. That knowledge constitutes our present ἔχομεν, our εὐλογία πνευματική in the present. Paul says that ἔχειν τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν, τὴν ἄφεσιν is synonymous with the receiving of γνῶσις, the knowledge of the will of God. We have deliverance and forgiveness because God is present with us in the one who γνωρίσας τὸ μυστήριον τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ.
As I said at the conclusion of the previous lecture, it is completely unjustified to accuse Paul of intellectualism or to reject the obvious meaning of this passage because of an anti-intellectual bias. Γνῶσις, knowledge of the will of God—or to express it objectively, γνωρίζειν, God’s revelation of his eternal will—cannot be dismissed or qualified by the adjective “only” when referring to the Pauline gnosis. The Pauline concept of γνῶσις is every bit as dynamic and robust as the Lutheran concept of faith; it is as all-encompassing and grounded just as absolutely in the reality of God. Γνῶσις in this later Pauline letter has the pride of place occupied by πίστις in the major letters. Presumably Paul made this change because he needed to intensify what he had expressed with the word πίστις; that is, he needed to express more emphatically the object of faith, or rather, the origin of the relationship that he describes. Evidently, the term πίστις lost the ring of objectivity with Paul’s later congregations that it had for the apostle. Despite his preference for the former term—and here he exemplifies the undogmatic dogmatician—he substituted the latter, which was bound to remind them that God is the Α and the Ω of faith [cf. Rev. 1:8]. When one speaks about the knowledge of God, the emphasis is on God confronting us as the wholly Other. By contrast, πίστις implies that God confronts us while remaining in relation to us; this relational dimension—that we are his and he is ours—is not excluded but rather included if we say that God reveals himself and that we recognize him. Granted, when we describe man’s relationship with God as γνῶσις, we enter a danger zone where “intellectualism” lurks at the door, as demonstrated by developments in the second century. But every human activity, particularly theological activity, is a matter of escaping one danger after the next. No single term assures unmistakable clarity. Everything in its own time [cf. Eccles. 3:1], πίστις and γνῶσις. For the sake of the subject matter, freedom, and comprehensiveness, we should be prepared to sacrifice or adapt our terms—even our favorite terms—if they contribute to misunderstanding. A theologian must be able to speak occasionally as a thoroughgoing gnostic. So much for the γνῶσις ἡμῖν, which rather surprisingly is a synonym for ἔχομεν τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν.
The subject matter of this revelation is τὸ μυστήριον τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ. Mystery according to Paul is not only God’s hiddenness in general. For Paul, there is mystery whenever God’s purpose and ways are veiled, as if a curtain obscures the temporal, concrete reality of all things human. There is mystery whenever God is silent and we hear something else instead of God. This other, the reality of the world,131 initially effects an absolute occlusion. Because of it, we cannot perceive the will of God. Whoever desires to know God’s purpose directly on the basis of what is observable and concrete, whoever is offended by this mystery, will only be undone by it. Because our vision is occluded, an act of revelation is necessary. Every veil must be rent; all human reality must be upended. God must speak, and God must speak, if we are to understand his will. This is what Paul means when he refers to marriage as a mystery in Ephesians 5:32; or to the mystery of lawlessness that delays the dawn of Jesus Christ in 2 Thessalonians 2:7; or to the mystery of the coexistence of the living and the dead in 1 Corinthians 15:51 when speaking of the resurrection; or to the hardening and rejection of Israel in Romans 11:25. In our passage, it is the θέλημα of God that is veiled in mystery. God, however, has revealed the mystery and disclosed his will.
What exactly is this μυστήριον, before which God is initially silent and whose temporal reality initially hides his purpose from us? To answer this question, we must anticipate the main clause in verse 10: it is the paradoxical fact of the historicity of Christ, the eruption of eternity into time, the singularity of the divine inevitability.132 The riddle before which Paul stands is the present moment, the now, the today, which he believes is coexistent with the name of Jesus. Is this name merely one name among many others? Is this moment merely one contingent event133 in an endless series of moments? Could this present stand majestically above both the past and the future rather than being a fleeting in-between moment that immediately vanishes? Could the will of God exist as a unity in the scattered temporal existence of man? Could there be a present moment in which we are able to know this will, this unity, actually present to us personally and compellingly?
The meaning of our existence depends on the πλήρωμα τῶν καιρῶν, the fulfillment of time, the eternal dimension of time, which confronts us here and now. But even the will of God is enshrouded in mystery for us. Direct knowledge of his will is impossible, even unimaginable for us. Direct knowledge is by definition finite and temporal knowledge, even when it concerns Jesus. Even his “today” is marked by contingency. Even his temporal existence in and of itself is unqualified.134 Here too we face the aforementioned question about the will of God and of the unity of all things. How could it be otherwise? How do we come to Jesus the Christ? How and why is it possible to encounter the eternal here? And how and why here exactly? The μυστήριον and silence of God also apply to the historicity, contemporaneity, and uniqueness of the historical moment. Anyone who is not frightened by God’s silence in the present or can never be frightened by it will not recognize it when God breaks the silence and speaks, when temporal reality becomes the theater for the decisive, divine word in its eternal mystery. Γνωρίσας ἡμῖν. Jesus is the Christ. The πλήρωμα τῶν καιρῶν, the eternal present, appears in the unobservable midpoint between past and present. The will of God meets us. The disiecta membra135 of this world-reality do have a unity. This is so because of God’s reality, God’s act, God’s revelation. The moment that so qualifies it is God’s truth, God’s act, God’s revelation and not the moment in and of itself. It is not the threshold between just any past and any future. It completely separates the past from the future: the past is all time from the very beginning to the remotest future; the future is eternity. In him, a single moment reveals what the many fluctuating moments point to but are not in themselves.
Think about Selma Lagerlöf’s legend about Christ in which two pillars, which have stood side by side since primeval times, move apart, allowing the twelve-year-old Jesus to enter.136 So it is when the will of God meets us. There, between yesterday and today, dawns an incomparable today. There, time is split. There, world-reality is not destroyed but turned upside down. There, God reveals his mystery. This-world reality—that is, anything temporal, historic, or contingent—remains God’s mystery, which he must reveal so that we understand it as the mystery of God. And he does reveal it. The liberation of man (ἀπολύτρωσις) and the forgiveness of sins constitute the revelation of his mystery. The phrases “through his blood” and “according to the riches of his grace” make it clear that the ἔχειν of verse 7 designates the unique having, which we have in God alone, and amounts to our not having. Who really has the resurrection? Who really has grace? Who could possibly boast that he has God in the fullness of his reality? That is the point. Anything less than resurrection, less than grace, less than God’s reality, does not qualify as ἀπολύτρωσις and as ἄφεσις τῶν παραπτωμάτων. That is the meaning of this ἔχειν, according to verse 9. God has revealed his reality to us. That says it all—neither too much nor too little. We know God—as the unknown God. To think of God is to confront the mystery of God—the revealed mystery. The one interprets and clarifies the other and would not be true without the other. The Christian gnostic who is concerned with the reality of God as the forgiveness of sin is a Socratic in the strictest sense: he knows that he knows nothing. But precisely in his lack of knowledge, in his humilitas before God, which Calvin knew and spoke about so often, he is the one who truly knows and has overcome ἀγνωσία τοῦ θεοῦ (1 Cor. 15:34).
I am indebted to Haupt for my reading of verses 9–10; his commentary is the most reliable guide to the difficulties in this passage. Accordingly, I place a dash after αὐτοῦ: the will of God consists in bringing together all things in Christ according to his good pleasure. And I place a parenthesis around the phrase that begins with ἣν and ends in καιρῶν: God’s good pleasure refers to the οἰκονομία, the creation and orchestration of the πλήρωμα τῶν καιρῶν.§
Let us consider first the central motif: ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ. The accomplishment of this ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι according to his sovereign purpose and his beneplacitum is the will of God, which is hidden from us and known exclusively through revelation. Inasmuch as God reveals his will to us, we receive liberation and forgiveness. Furthermore, he reveals his will to us by the blood of Christ, according to the riches of his grace, as we learn from verse 7. To understand this ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι as the will of God is to have the understanding that surpasses all understanding. The term ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι refers to a thought process;137 that is, the actual reality and occurrence of the will of God lies beyond the conception itself. Understanding the will of God does not mean direct knowledge of its fulfillment. We see God’s plan, God’s course. We have reason to hope. We know that there is something to believe in. However, faith and hope are just as necessary after understanding God’s will as before. The paradox of the human situation is continually present and must be continually overcome. We know the will of God, the truth of which is revealed beyond the paradox, only when we wait upon the Lord as his servants, only when we are content to know our Lord’s thoughts, even if they are only thoughts. Ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι means to gather together and integrate diverse elements. To use a mathematical expression, it is to reduce a series of numbers to their common denominator. That unity is God’s conception and will. The assumption is that this conception has not yet become a reality. The world, τὰ πάντα, is fragmented into a multitude of particulars. Its essence is disintegration, fragmentation, dissolution, isolation, and complete contradiction between competing entities, all claiming to be ultimately true. As on earth, in the known, observable world, so it is in the heavenly realm, which is hidden from us. We cannot think God’s thoughts without remembering the antithesis between the creator and creation, without recalling the dissolution of all finite things. Any unity that can conceive or create remains merely finite, temporal, and relative, pointing beyond itself to an antithesis. Ultimately, any human ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι is an illusion. The idea of unity—the unity of this world with the next, God with humanity, eternity with time—is God’s conception and therefore humanly inconceivable. He and he alone can create such a unity. He and he alone is the Lord over life and death [cf. Rom. 14:9]. He is this unity, and this unity is his will. In him it is already at hand. In Christ we can and should know this unity. And precisely this knowledge is our liberation, the forgiveness of sins. Here, there appears a reality beyond our imprisonment, a real beyond.
Ἣν προέθετο ἐν αὐτῷ εἰς οἰκονομίαν τοῦ πληρώματος τῶν καιρῶν. This phrase provides a parallel explanation. The present emptiness described in this phrase corresponds to the fragmentation in the previous phrase. Fulfillment refers to the aforementioned summing up and gathering together. In Christ all time is fulfilled. God’s present contains the fulfillment of all time. To achieve this fullness, to manage the household, so to speak, is God’s purpose. Now we who live in time are able to see in the light of eternity.
Feb. 2, 1922
I have an additional observation about verse 10. The phrase τὰ ἐπὶ τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς is in apposition to τὰ πάντα. Therefore, the phrases ἐπὶ τοῖς οὐρανοῖς and ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς refer to the place or location where the objects, creatures, or essences designated by τὰ πάντα are found. The synthesis, the ἀνακεφαλαιοῦν, identified as the will of God in verses 9–10, spans both heaven and earth. So the text is not describing the reconciliation of the heavenly spheres with the terrestrial spheres below or peace between heaven and earth, between angels and humanity; rather, it describes the reconciliation of everything—including the conflicting world orders, the heavenly and the terrestrial realms, all that is in them—with God and by the will of God, who is the source of their unity. Because of the deliverance, the fullness of time that God wills—in the previous lecture I pointed out how Paul regards everything that exists as a series of concentric circles—definitely extends to the metaphysical landscape, whose existence Paul clearly acknowledged. Whatever else we might say about heaven and its inhabitants, about angels and spirits, the reconciliation is not between οὐρανοί, as the ultimate reality, and earth; rather, it is the reconciliation of the will of God with both heaven and earth, the physical and the metaphysical.
Our passage is saying that the most diametrically opposed antitheses that we can imagine all stand as numerators in relation to God, their single common denominator. There is no suggestion here of physical-cosmic deliverance. Anything that we consider “otherworldly” is really no more than an extension or an enhancement of this world, a replication of its contents, all of which are sorely in need of the divine ἀνακεφαλαίωσις. “Quae enim proportio creaturae ad creatorem, nisi intercedat mediator?”138 asks Calvin in reference to the angelic world. Any deliverance whose consummation is this humanly conceived beyond—whether we go to this heaven or this heaven comes to earth—would be no deliverance at all. The actual beyond is God alone.¶ What the text describes is the actual beyond: the will of God, which is the unity of heavenly and terrestrial things, of what we call “this world” and of what we call “beyond.”
This beyond, which surpasses both worldly and otherworldly spheres, is emphasized once more at the end of the verse by ἐν αὐτῷ. The phrase is part of the preceding clause and should not be joined to the clause that follows (contra Nestle).139 If they were so joined, they would form an anacoluthon or an unexpected repetition of the ἐν ᾧ, which is possible given the awkward style of this passage. However, the parallelism that we have observed between verses 4–6 and verses 7–10 brings to mind the ἐν τῷ ἠγαπημένῳ at the end of verse 6; correspondingly, ἐν αὐτῷ is the conclusion of the phrases that immediately precede it. Here, ἐν αὐτῷ refers to Christ the same way that ἐν τῷ ἠγαπημένῳ does in verse 6 (in contrast to the ἐν αὐτῷ in verse 11).140 That is the will of God: to join together all things in Christ, both the heavenly and the terrestrial things in him. The reference to Christ is a device that Paul uses to focus the attention and to demonstrate how heaven and earth, immanence and transcendence, are encompassed by the will of God. Conversely, he maintains that this radical ἀνακεφαλαίωσις, this drastic relativization of heaven and earth, takes place through Christ. Now it is clear why he can equate [this ἀνακεφαλαίωσις] with both the forgiveness of sins and the fulfillment of time: he regards all three as equally valid instantiations of the divine act of revelation, which calls everything into question and redeems all that is questionable. Precisely where Christ dwells among these unimaginable regions according to Paul is impossible to say on the basis of this passage. In any case, whenever we have a hard time understanding Paul, we should note that all the difficulties of his message can be reduced to one point. He presents us with a riddle—not many but one. And he insists on posing exactly the same riddle again and again. The riddle and its answer are one and the same.
We now consider the third circle of the prologue, verses 11–14, which describes the εὐλογία πνευματική of verse 3 from the perspective of the future, now under the rubric of hope. This is undoubtedly Paul’s intention, given the prominence of προηλπικότας in the first half of the paragraph and ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ ἐσφραγίσθητε τῷ πνεύματι τῆς ἐπαγγελίας in the second. Notice the dialectical subtlety with which Paul accomplishes his aim. Given what he says in verse 7, we must ask: What exactly is this future, if it is God’s future and the future that we already have, albeit only as future?141 Couldn’t this future just as easily be called “past” or “present”? And in fact, as the concepts of υἱοθεσία and χάρις, which describe relationships in the present, stood at the midpoint of verses 4–6; and as the eschatological terms “forgiveness of sins,” “the fulfillment of time,” and ἀνακεφαλαίωσις stood at the midpoint of verses 7–10; so now at the midpoint of verses 11–14 stand, paradoxically, not a future being and having but rather the aorists ἐκληρώθημεν and ἐσφραγίσθητε because of the theme of election in verse 11. Understandably, many interpreters completely overlook the transition that occurs between verses 10 and 11 and regard the ensuing verses as simply a continuation of the theme of Christian salvation in the present. The transition is evident, however, if we note the material meaning of those aorists and what they say about the nature of the Christian’s existence. In contrast to verses 7–10, which describe Christians as those who are ordained to wait, this section describes them as those who are ordained to hope.142 We must pay attention to these intratextual connections in order to do justice to the content of the prologue, even though they do not qualify as “commentary” in the usual sense.
The paragraph begins with the aorist passive ἐκληρώθημεν, emphasized by καί. There are three possible ways to translate κληροῦσθαι: “were redeemed” (Hofmann),143 “have received an inheritance or property” (Beck);144 or “to share in the inheritance” (Meyer and the more recent commentators).145 Because verse 14 refers explicitly to κληρονομία ἡμῶν, I prefer the third option, but either of the other two are valid translations. Because we are in him, in Christ, we have reason to hope for an inheritance. The blessing that has been promised to us in Christ is the hope that, though we live in this world, we are headed for the world to come. We look forward to all the benefits that come from there, and from there we expect every possible good. Notice how ἔχομεν in verse 7 takes on new meaning viewed from this angle. Clearly, Christians possess something; they possess hope. Is that all? Yes, that is all. There is nothing else in addition to that. But then, what could we have or hope for that is greater than living hope in an inheritance that includes everything?
As those who hope and wait, Paul adds parenthetically, we are προορισθέντες κατὰ πρόθεσιν τοῦ τὰ πάντα ἐνεργοῦντος κατὰ τὴν βουλὴν τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ. There are two threats to the believer’s hold upon hope: (1) We can mistake our own human hopes for the one great hope in the blessing of the redemptive future of God. We all have these hopes—it is inevitable. But through the demonic element that accompanies these human hopes, the all-consuming eschatological expectation can be lost. (2) Christian hope is unseen [cf. Rom. 8:24–25]. We are not given an indubitable pledge of its fulfillment, the type of pledge that would make faith superfluous—even for a moment. The very Spirit who is the pledge of our inheritance, according to verse 14, is the Spirit of promise. The prototype of the Christian who lives in hope will always be Abraham, who believes παρ᾽ ἐλπίδα ἐπ᾽ ἐλπίδι (Rom. 4:18).
How can we maintain our grasp upon hope in the face of these threats? Paul addresses the twofold threat of human arrogance and human faintheartedness by reminding us of our election, by the constant reminder that our existence in Christ is from God alone. Even our grasp upon hope is not up to us. Our claim on our eternal inheritance is not subject to the ebb and flow of the demonic element of our passions. Hope’s all-consuming eschatological expectation is assured independently of our fluctuating passions, which are “Sky high exulting / To death burdened down.”146 As an heir of the world to come, the Christian is sui juris, or rather divini juris.147 His fellowship with God comes with unassailable certainty because he has it like he has nothing else. It is real certainty precisely because it depends on God and not on himself. He is προορισθείς, ordained and chosen for election by God, a priori from eternity.
Paul expresses this thought in two parallel phrases with κατά. The believer is ordained and chosen for election, first, according to the purpose of the one who ἐνεργεῖ τὰ πάντα and has power over all things. This is the assurance in the face of human faintheartedness: there is no reason to lament the fact that we must believe without seeing, because the invisible God in whom we believe is the creator of all things visible. And, second, according to God’s will, for the accomplishing of his purpose—which is the meaning of βουλή. This is the safeguard against human arrogance. It is God, and not we ourselves, who has made us his people and the sheep of his pasture [cf. Ps. 100:3]. We should never fall into the trap of thinking that our hope is or ever will be our hope. Our hope is founded on a foundation that is far more substantial than anything we can create for ourselves because it comes from God.
What is the significance of such an assured Christian hope? Answer: we are κληρονόμοι εἰς τὸ εἶναι ἡμᾶς εἰς ἔπαινον δόξης αὐτοῦ τοὺς προηλπικότας ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ. The construction εἰς τὸ εἶναι harkens back to verse 4. Once again, Paul answers the question about the state of the person to whom God devotes himself and about God’s designs for such a person: here, as the God who makes promises—in the previous passage, as the God who elects. And each answer clarifies the other: to hope in Christ is to be ἅγιοι καὶ ἄμωμοι before God; and to be holy and blameless before God is to hope in Christ. This is God’s purpose for us in this world. This is his absolute claim on us: that we praise his glory, which is possible in our creaturely existence if we dare to hope in his word of promise. To hope is to intentionally align oneself with God, with all the risk that such partisanship involves. It is a declaration of war against the reality of this world.148 You could call it the willingness to see the world completely unromantically and without any illusions.
The person who risks thinking the thought of eternity is precisely the person who can see time for what it is. He never mistakes time for eternity; and because he recognizes the difference, he has the courage to wait for eternity in time. Restrained yet completely free, taut yet nimble, the Christian praises the glory of God. All the demands of religion and ethics are included for him in the one simple requirement that he continually hope and wait. He is content to maintain a healthy skepticism. He doesn’t get worked up about what he does not have yet because it is already there. And anything that is already present cannot be identified with Christ. Hope that is seen is not hope [Rom. 8:24]. The Christian remains content,** even childlike, in the very act of waiting. He has the promise by virtue of waiting for it. Beck expresses it nicely: “Waiting on Christ’s glorious future distinguishes true believers from all who seek glory in this age, even if they are seeking the glory of Christendom.”149 Notice especially the last part!
Bengel,150 Meyer,151 von Soden,152 Dibelius,153 and others regard προηλπικότας as a reference to the Jewish Christians, among whom Paul numbers himself by using the pronoun ἡμᾶς, subsequently distinguishing himself from gentile Christians by using the phrase ἐν ᾧ καὶ ὑμεῖς. There is superficial support for this position, including the change of the personal pronoun from ἡμᾶς to ὑμεῖς, the difficulty of coming up with an alternate meaning of προηλπικότες given the καὶ before ὑμεῖς (notwithstanding my alternate proposal, which follows), and the fact that the Jewish-Christian conflict figures prominently in Paul’s other letters.
Nevertheless, I shall propose an alternative explanation for the reference to Jewish Christians. The change from ἡμᾶς to ὑμεῖς at the beginning of verse 13 more likely signals a rhetorical shift from general statements to direct address. The presence of καί in and of itself is inconclusive because ἐκληρώθημεν in verse 11 is also introduced with καί. In both instances and subsequently, καί before πιστεύσαντες has the effect of emphasizing the words that follow rather than signaling a contrast with what immediately precedes it. Moreover, as Beck points out, Paul normally uses the prefix προ- not to distinguish between various groups of people but to distinguish between God and man. In any event, we cannot overemphasize the difference between the Pauline προ- and any temporal beforehand. The beforehand of God is clearly nontemporal or beyond time—think, for example, about προγινώσκειν or προορίζειν—it is an antecedent that cannot be casually equated with any human antecedent. The προ- before ἠλπικότες is actually redundant, as Haupt correctly observes, here as in Romans 1:2, where Paul refers to the gospel as προεπαγγειλόμενον. In our passage, it clearly refers to the Christian’s hope, which is grounded in God himself and therefore precedes and exceeds all hope, hope that is by its very nature assured, a priori. It is related to the προορισθέντες in the preceding verse and placed in the foreground by means of the all-important phrase ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ. Finally, the passage seems to me to be far too neutral to describe a conflict as sharp as the Jewish-Christian conflict and seems out of character with the overall style of the prologue.
So the phrase ἐν ᾧ καὶ ὑμεῖς in verse 13 does not, as I said, refer to gentile Christians as a distinct audience. If we have correctly interpreted the meaning of προηλπικότες, then it is clear that the “we” in verses 11–12 refers to the same subject as the “we” in the preceding paragraphs. Conversely, nothing is said about the “you” in ἐν ᾧ καὶ ὑμεῖς of verses 13–14 that does not apply equally to the “we” in verses 11–12. Therefore, I regard ἐν ᾧ καὶ ὑμεῖς as a rhetorical device. Paul concludes the prologue with an ad hominem argument, without excluding himself from his audience as a recipient of the spiritual blessing. After all, he is writing a letter, not a treatise. He is not speaking about Christians in general; he is addressing these particular Christians. And this is how he addresses them: You are those whom God appointed as κληρονόμοι so that you might dare to hope and therefore to live for his honor! You ἐσφραγίσθητε τῷ πνεύματι τῆς ἐπαγγελίας τῷ ἁγιῳ. And here, the train of thought moves from the participial phrases with ἀκούσαντες and πιστεύσαντες to the finite verb. The ἐσφραγίσθητε here is related to ἐκληρώθημεν in verse 11 in the same way that προορίσας in verse 5 is related to ἐξελέξατο in verse 4 and that γνωρίσας in verse 9 is related to ἔχομεν in verse 7.
In other words, this is a second description of the same reality, using different terms and images: Christians are those who wait for future glory. “Sealing” brings to mind a contract, which is legally valid by virtue of the seal that the contracting party places on the document. By virtue of the seal, the person vouches that he will honor the contract; so that seal serves as a guarantee in the person’s absence, as effectively as if he were actually present. Christians have received such a seal from God—inasmuch as they are σφραγισθέντες, they have received the seal. The seal is the Holy Spirit of promise. It seems to me completely out of context to interpret this passage as a fulfillment of the Johannine promise of the Paraclete, that is, to suggest that they have the Spirit who was promised to them beforehand. No, the Spirit here is the Spirit of promise, as the word in the same verse is the word of truth. The word is the truth itself, and the Spirit is the promise itself. Whoever has the promise truly has it and the Holy Spirit with it. The fact that the children of God wait for their inheritance, truly wait, is in itself the proof, guarantee, and surety that they do not wait in vain. God can vouch for his own promise, and the fact that God is with us as the pledge of his promise and personally witnesses to his own trustworthiness constitutes our sealing with the Holy Spirit. To have the Holy Spirit is to be content in God. Paul addresses the Christians in Ephesians on that basis: as those who are content in God and thereby feel that they are blessed by God. They are content with God’s own trustworthiness [or veracity]. Perhaps this explains the real meaning of the phrase ἐν ᾧ καὶ ὑμεῖς: it is an appeal to the subjective in the reader, which in this case coincides with the objective.
The Spirit, previously identified by the phrase τῆς ἐπαγγελίας, is now described more precisely by the addition of the relative clause in verse 14: ὅ ἐστιν ἀρραβὼν τῆς κληρονομίας ἡμῶν εἰς ἀπολύτρωσιν τῆς περιποιήσεως. The word ἀρραβών, deposit or pledge, like ἀπαρχή elsewhere, implies that the possession of the Holy Spirit is not something to be enjoyed in and of itself. Rather, it is the guarantee of the eschatological future, the enjoyment of the kingdom of God. Hope is our endowment as Christians because we have our κληρονομία in hope. But in hope we actually have it—until we are admitted to the event described as ἀπολύτρωσιν τῆς περιποιήσεως, that is, until we come into our inheritance and gain access to what is ours. It is legitimate to equate this event with what is described in other Pauline passages as Christ’s second coming in glory [cf. 1 Cor. 15:23–28; Phil. 3:20–21; 1 Thess. 1:10; 4:16]. It is the end, the outer limits of time, and the object of hope.
Feb. 9, 1922
We still need to consider the participial phrase in verse 13, ἀκούσαντες τὸν λόγον τῆς ἀληθείας, τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς σωτηρίας ὑμῶν, and the phrase ἐν ὧ καὶ πιστεύσαντες, which accompanies and complements it. Both depend on the verb ἐσφραγίσθητε. God vouches for himself. God’s promise is as certain as if it were already fulfilled because he is the one who makes the promise. This is so by virtue of the Holy Spirit. The future is already present for those who are sealed with the Spirit, which is why Paul can speak about the future in terms of the present, as he does here. Their hope is not some private matter to be kept hidden; nor is it comparable to other hopes for the future, which are only relatively certain because they are subjective, conditional, and of relative importance. No, hope is secure, more secure and reliable than anything I might decide to do right now or what is about to happen in the next thirty seconds. It is not subject to anything contingent or relative, and it is certainly not a matter of religious enthusiasm. It is as likely to be expressed in the most prosaic of thoughts as it is in the most ecstatic utterances. It is always a factor and cannot for one moment be marginalized like so much of what passes for eschatology these days. No, ἔσχατον, properly understood, refers not only to the last things but also to the first and most important thing in each moment. This future shatters our concept of the future; or to be more precise, it reveals the limitations of our two-dimensional concept of the future. If you believe in the return of Christ, you necessarily acknowledge the futurum aeternum, which is the rehabilitation and renovation of all time, God’s multidimensional present.
Paul addresses the Ephesian Christians as σφραγισθέντες. He applies the expression ad hominem—that is, he directs it to their subjectivity—by virtue of the phrase ἐν ᾧ καὶ ὑμεῖς. He thereby indicates the precise point where the objective εὐλογία πνευματική (v. 3) becomes subjective.154 One can appeal to man’s eternal hope. It is his great potential for relationship and communion, in whatever form or fashion. Is Paul wrong to assume that there is such a point in his listeners, that is, where the objective—their relation to God—coincides with their subjectivity? This perennial concern is addressed in the two participial phrases in verse 13. The point in us to which Paul refers is unassailable. It lies beyond the realm of matters that we either doubt or believe, accept or reject. Humanity and everything human is questionable. What is not in question is the relation of humanity and everything human to God. The more we recognize humanity’s uncertainty, the more we recognize the certainty of man’s relation to God. Indeed, the reason human existence in and of itself is dubious is precisely because humanity is originally related to God. Everything that is contingent and temporal is relative. What is not relative is the actual relation to the Absolute. The more clearly we recognize this relation for what it is, the more clearly we understand155 the relativity of all things. And Paul addresses his readers here exactly on this basis: they really have this insight. They have heard the word of truth, the announcement of salvation. And more than that, they have believed (again, one should pay attention to the familiar καί). They have believed in him, in Christ. In Christ, the eternal hope of humanity has actually become the presupposition of humanity. Each moment in which we redirect our attention to him, we remember and are assured: we have heard; we have believed; we have understood; we have found the unassailable, immovable point. In him, the nongiven is given; God is revealed.156 In him, the Spirit broods upon humanity, and God turns toward humanity in grace. In him, both the relativity of all things and their relation to the absolute are one. In him, one can hear what no ear has heard [cf. 1 Cor. 2:9] and can believe what is infinitely beyond belief. In him, God personally vouches to fulfill within the scope of human existence every promise he has made.
The λόγος τῆς ἀληθείας and the εὐαγγέλιον τῆς σωτηρίας refer to the advent of God’s promise within human existence and our recognition of these promises. Both concepts must be understood analogically. It diminishes their significance to translate them thus: the word that “includes” or “brings” the truth, the gospel that “announces” salvation. No, the word is the truth (John 17:17), and the message of salvation is the δύναμις θεοῦ εἰς σωτηρίαν (Rom. 1:16). In both cases, the meaning of the genitive coincides with the meaning of the noun it modifies.157 The message about salvation is so closely related to salvation itself that to hear and believe the word spoken in Christ is to hear and believe the truth directly. To be sure, the paradox remains: the truth about salvation comes in the form of hope, as sealing by the Spirit of promise. But it has been given to us. In Christ, a real connection between humans and the truth is established and remains; there is a real expectation of salvation—real in the sense that we already participate in the salvation that we anticipate.
Note the close, explicit connection between ἀλήθεια and σωτηρία. Salvation comes only from the truth. Whatever is not true—for example, millennial fervor that contradicts straightforward logic—cannot help us or save us either. And conversely, truth, real truth, is salvation. Whatever does not help us in the deepest sense, whatever fails to fundamentally transform the human condition, whatever remains in the realm of ideas alone, is also untrue. Questions about truth cannot be divorced from rational thought and concrete experience; ethics cannot be divorced from logic. The Holy Spirit is the promise of both: truth and salvation. This perspective calls into question our tidy distinctions between philosophy and theology. If it has merit, then a convergence of perspectives on the part of the two disciplines is the very least we should expect.
Εἰς ἔπαινον τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ reappears at the end of verse 14 (cf. v. 6 and v. 12). It is governed not by the preceding phrase but by the finite verb ἐσφραγίσθητε, which, as Haupt correctly notes, is the crux of the sentence and the point to which the entire passage moves. Paul tells his readers that they are what they are—namely, blessed abundantly with the εὐλογία πνευματική—so that they may praise the glory of God. They have been charged with a great matter—indeed, the greatest matter. They are witnesses, heralds, deputies. The more fully they appropriate this blessing for themselves, the more fully the complete sweep of the blessing is revealed. Its truth comes from God and is found in God. Listen to what Calvin observes about this phrase, εἰς ἔπαινον τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ, which appears repeatedly in our passage:
Quod autem toties commemorationem gloriae Dei repetit, non debet videri supervacuum. Nam de re infinita nihil potest dici immodice. Praesertim valet hoc in commendanda Dei misericordia, cuius sensum quisquis vere pius erit nunquam poterit verbis aequare. Itaque tam narrandis eius encomiis promptas esse pias omnes linguas, quam aures libenter audiendis apertas esse convenit. Hoc enim argumentum est, in quo si totam suam facundiam explicent tam angeli quam homines, magnitudini tamen longe cedent.158
(This frequent repetition and recollection of God’s glory is by no means redundant because it is impossible to say too much about such an infinite matter. Especially in regard to God’s mercy, no truly pious person would dream of exhausting its meaning with his own words. Precisely for this reason, pious lips must be just as eager to announce his praise as pious ears are willing to hear it. Therefore both men and angels remain debtors before this theme, even if they exhaust their wealth.)159
With that, we conclude our examination of the prologue. As we have seen, it is much more than an introduction. Bengel [called] it a “compendium evangelicum.”160 In any event, it is certainly a compendium of the Christian message in Ephesus and, most of all, a compendium of the fundamental Pauline framework. In one brief succession of sentences, it offers a glimpse into the unprecedented revolution that must have occurred in the hearts and minds of this group of people in the first century and the impression it must have made upon them—upon both Paul and his readers, whom he considered capable of understanding such ideas!161 It is impossible on the basis of historical analysis to perceive the essentially imperceptible event that occurred here, or anywhere for that matter, because the subject matter—like the essence of any such revolution, any such impression—eludes historical analysis, as can be shown by any number of parallel examples. However, I hope that I have convinced you that it is possible to enter sympathetically with Paul and not only to see along with Paul but to think along with him at that point where the subject matter, the incommensurable, Jesus Christ, speaks and becomes his own interpreter.162 Since the passage affords such extraordinary possibilities for such a reading, I am surprised that it has not been more prominent in historic and systematic accounts of Christianity, and I hope that you are not disappointed that we have devoted the majority of the course to it.
*Barth comments here: “Gerade bei V. 4 deutlich, daß das Gesagte nicht aus der Luft gegriffen” (“It is clear from v. 4 that what has been said is not out of thin air”).
†In the margins, Barth remarks: “Nur Lob? Lob ist gerade genug!” (“Only praise? Praise is just enough!”).
‡The following comments in the margin appear to be Barth’s notes for an announcement prior to the lecture: “Complaint: too slow; text: not simple, not insignificant, not first controversy. Understand: to understand something from the word, no control how far to understand or not to understand.” The following is an attempt to reconstruct Barth’s announcement based on the notes: “Announcement: In response to the complaints that we are moving too slowly, I would point out that the text we are considering is not easy to interpret, not insignificant, and not merely a matter of controversy. Our goal is to understand the text. We have no control over how far we go or do not go when it is a matter of understanding something from the word.” By this point in the course, Barth had delivered five lectures, roughly one half of the semester, and covered only three verses. We have evidence from the announcement prior to the third lecture, on November 24, that he realized that he would not be able to cover the entire epistle. This announcement suggests that he did not know how much of the letter he would cover until the end of the course (see below for his comments about the necessity of summarizing chapters 2–6 in a final lecture). In the Calvin lectures, he faced a similar challenge. At some point in the semester, he realized that he would not be able to cover the material that he had announced and would need to alter his approach. See Barth, Theology of John Calvin, xvi–xvii.
§The editor of the German edition comments, “Keine logisch-sachliche Abfürung, sondern Parallelen”—literally, “Not logical-material removal, but parallel.”
¶At this point in the margin of the manuscript, Barth penciled in a diagram with these words: “God! and earth, heaven, this world, the world beyond, physics, metaphysics.”
**The editor of the German edition adds “zu,” which Barth omitted.