Book Review: The Vision of Ephesians by N.T. Wright
N.T. Wright, The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God. Zondervan, 2005. 176 pp.
At the small, private Christian college where I teach history, we begin each class with a verse of the day (VOD)—something intended to encourage students and give them a grounding, reorienting start to the morning. Then we turn to the news of the day (NOD), the top stories shaping their world. I should not be surprised by how often the VOD illuminates the NOD, but I still am.
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It also strikes me how frequently, when I ask students to name their favorite Bible verses, something from Ephesians turns up—3:20, for example. Romans and Galatians tend to dominate church conversations, but if N. T. Wright has anything to say about it—and he does—Ephesians deserves equally sustained attention.
Wright, the former Bishop of Durham and Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University, has written The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God. If this volume inspires you to read more of his work, be warned: you will have seventy-nine or so additional books to go.
A Circular Letter
The church generally accepts that the Apostle Paul wrote the letter to the Ephesians, a conclusion Wright defends while giving little weight to arguments against Pauline authorship. Importantly, Wright emphasizes that Ephesians was likely a circular letter—written not to address a single congregation’s local concerns, but intended to be read aloud among several house churches in and around Ephesus (in modern-day western Turkey). These were small communities, perhaps five to thirty people each, largely poor rather than wealthy, who heard this letter read aloud, written by its author from prison in Rome.
An Accessible Commentary
Although Wright writes this relatively short book (about 150 pages) for a broad Christian audience, most will find it better suited to practical church use (eg. small-group Bible studies, adult education classes, and pastoral formation) than to strictly academic settings. Pastors and lay leaders will find it especially useful for shaping congregational life and for thinking more deeply about holiness, unity, and the church’s vocation. In college and seminary contexts, its non-technical nature makes it best used as an introductory or supplementary text alongside more historically and critically focused works.
Wright is not necessarily attempting to offer an authoritative commentary on Ephesians. His aim is pastoral and ecclesial: He wants the church today to witness in Paul’s letter the vision of what God is doing in the world through Christ’s cosmic victory–the reconciliation of all things, the bringing together of heaven and earth–and to show how we are to live inside that vision. Ephesians, on Wright’s reading, is not a collection of detachable doctrines, but a grand narrative that forces Christians to rethink how they understand reality itself.
A Radical Reorientation
Readers hoping this book will settle centuries-old debates over slavery or submission will likely be disappointed. Wright ploughs little new ground here. As others have done, he situates these difficult passages within the framework of ancient household codes, while stressing the radical reorientation introduced by the lordship of Christ. Even here, the gospel goes to work—reshaping relationships and redefining power (slaves and masters, wives and husbands, children and parents) under the pattern of Christ’s self-giving, self-sacrificial love.
Wright moves through the letter section by section rather than adhering rigidly to the chapter-and-verse divisions added to our Bibles some five centuries ago. Because the original Greek lacked punctuation, determining where sentences begin and end is an act of interpretation. Wright’s remarkable facility with the language allows these interpretive decisions to yield fresh insights and renewed perspective.
The Church as God’s Artwork
One striking example appears in Ephesians 2:10: autou gar esmen poiēma. Wright renders poiēma not merely as “workmanship,” but as “poetry.” We, the church, are God’s artwork—his sculpture, his poem. As Wright puts it, “We are to be Renaissance-people, demonstrating the birth of the new world.”
This leads to the central theme of Wright’s reading of Ephesians: God calls the church is to be a small working model of God’s promised new creation—a heaven-and-earth community that serves as an advance sign of what redeemed creation looks like. The church should not only announce this new creation, but also to embody and enact it here and now.
What, then, does Paul call the Ephesian Christians—and us—to be? A people motivated by God’s glory and oriented toward it as their goal; a praising people and a praying people; a peaceful and unified people; Spirit-filled, marked by self-giving love, and clothed in the armor of God.
Read through this lens, The Vision of Ephesians offers rich insight for any careful reader of Scripture seeking to understand not only what the church believes but also what God means the church to be.
Image: The Vision of Ephesians. © Zondervan.
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