How many of you recognize the name Abraham Maslow? For those who don’t, he was an American psychologist of the last century who was one of the founders of the discipline of humanistic psychology. If you know his name, though, the first thing that comes to your mind probably isn’t “humanistic psychology,” it’s this:
As we move into the letter of Paul which we know as the letter to the Ephesians, we should begin by saying it probably wasn’t a letter to the Ephesians—not specifically. For one thing, from the oldest manuscripts we have, there’s good reason to think the words “in Ephesus” in 1:1 aren’t original to the text. For another, Paul founded the church in Ephesus and then spent three years there, his longest documented stay with any one church. He’s imprisoned in Rome following his arrest in Jerusalem; consider that on his way to Jerusalem for that fateful visit, he had the ship sail past Ephesus to Miletus and then sent a message to the elders of the Ephesian church to meet him there. He couldn’t just sail past them without saying goodbye, but he knew if he stopped there, it would take him weeks to tear himself away again. Yet with all that affection and all those strong relationships, there are no personal comments in the letter and no references to specific situations in the Ephesian church.
I believe, as many have for centuries, that this was actually a circular letter which was sent to all the churches in the Roman province of Asia, which occupied the western part of the Anatolian Peninsula, what we now know as Turkey. It seems to have been inspired by the issues Paul was addressing in his letter to the church in Colossae, with which Ephesians shares a great deal of material, and one of the earliest lists of New Testament books references it as the letter coming from Laodicea which Paul mentions in Colossians 4:16. The subject and concern of this letter is the unity of the church as the body of Christ; Paul takes his language from 1 Corinthians, where he tried to help the Corinthian believers understand their unity in Christ, and broadens it out to apply it to the whole church in every place and culture and language. As the great New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce summarized it, Colossians lays out “the role of Christ as Lord over the cosmos”; this is how Paul counters the false teachers in Colossae. Ephesians takes it a step further, asking what this means for our understanding of the church as the body of Christ.