The Letter to the Ephesians

167 Pages·1996·0.84 MB·English

by  Adrienne Von Speyr

The Letter to the Ephesians
ADRIENNE VON SPEYR
The Letter to
the Ephesians
Translated
by Adrian Walker
IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO
Title of the German original:
Der Epheserbrief
Second revised edition
© 1983 Johannes-Verlag, Einsiedeln
Cover by Roxanne Mei Lum
© 1996 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-0-89870-570-6 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-515-6 (E)
Library of Congress catalogue number 95-79947
Printed in the United States of America
Dedicated in friendship to
Mother Dominique-Francois
and
Mother Marie-Dominique
Sisters of Bethany
CONTENTS
Preface
Prelude
The Plan of Salvation in God (1:3-22)
The Homecoming of the Gentiles (2:1-21)
The Position of Paul in the Work of Salvation (3:1-21)
The Church (4:1-16)
The Life of Christians (4:17-5:20)
The Duties of the States in Life (5:21-6:9)
The Armor of God (6:10-6:24)
Notes
PREFACE
The present meditations on the Letter to the Ephesians belong with the author’s
other volumes of New Testament meditations by reason of their distinctive
features. In the first place, her method of expressing the theological meaning of
an enunciation is not merely to state the universal Christian truth but also to
characterize the particular angle of vision from which the sacred writer sees it.
The Johannine writings, upon which Adrienne von Speyr commented in their
entirety, reflect quite consciously this disciple’s mode of seeing; the same is true
of the expositions of Peter and James—whomever we have to thank for the
redaction of these writings attributed to the two apostles. Correspondingly, her
commentaries on a few Pauline epistles—the First Letter to the Corinthians and
the three prison letters—bear the imprint of Paul’s way of conceiving the content
and life of faith, and the self-conscious role of the apostle in the economy of
salvation accordingly stands out in bold relief. These differences, which the
attentive reader cannot fail to notice, stem, not from any psychological interest,
but from a purely theological, more precisely, a “missional” concern: the
“charisms” of the first great heralds of the New Testament message were
diverse, in order that the contents of this message might be illustrated from
various perspectives and thus be perceived in their inner fullness, indeed,
inexhaustibility.
The second distinctive trait of the author’s scriptural commentaries
complements the first yet is somehow perpendicular to it: it is a distinguishing
mark of all her writings that brings into prominence her own personal style of
theological thinking. In the strictest objectivity, which concentrates exclusively
on the word immediately under consideration and meditates on it without
glancing either to the right or to the left, she aims to retrace the way through the
content of this word back to the sources of revelation. Everything relating to
anthropology points to some aspect of Christology, and everything touching
Christology refers back to the Trinity as to its ultimate presupposition and
explanation. The originality of Adrienne von Speyr is this unremitting,
absolutely unswerving regress to the triune God, who not only occupies the
central position in the whole of scriptural revelation but is its one and only
viewpoint (objectum formate) and, at bottom, its all-commanding content
(objectum materiale), the theme that must be heard for its own sake and that
must echo through every other motif as through so many variations. And the
authenticity not only of theological understanding but also of Christian life, of
God-centered ethics, requires this reduction.
The insights that the author, by profession a physician without specialized
training in theology, dictated to the undersigned are drawn solely from her
contemplative meditation on the scriptural texts, and it is impossible to
distinguish here how much her expressions owe to inspiration from above and
how much they depend on her own prayerful reflection. The editor has altered
nothing of what she herself said; he is responsible for the arrangement of the
biblical text, for titles and headings, and for small grammatical corrections that
were necessary on account of hasty dictation. For the second edition, a few
minor stylistic improvements have been made and the title of the volume has
been brought into conformity with the author’s other commentaries.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
PRELUDE
1:1. Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints who are
such and to the faithful in Christ Jesus.
The Apostle begins with the address. And the first name to be mentioned is his
own, because in everything he has to say he pursues from the very outset a
definite course: his own. He will not cease saying in his own name everything he
is about to say. Whatever he is going to announce in the name of the Lord, in the
name of the Father, in the name of the Church, in the name of believers, will be
marked by his personality. He is perfectly conscious of this; even the truth that is
communicated in an unbroken way, as it were, from the triune God to man will
unmistakably have his personal stamp when he explains it and in so doing makes
use of himself in order to produce some effect in men. This will have a twofold
quality: first, insofar as he is this unique Paul, next, insofar as he is an apostle by
the will of God. He is never going to forget two things: that he is called and that
he was called while still the sort of person he formerly was, that his vocation was
equivalent to a conversion, to a complete change in the direction of his life.
Consequently, he considers himself entitled, in fact, obliged, to pass on his own
conception of Christian matters. He is the first among the apostles of Jesus
Christ who speaks as a personality. Not only as inspired by God and endowed
with authority like Peter, or in an almost superpersonal mission of love without
fixed lines of demarcation like John, but in the full force and awareness of his
uniqueness. The work he performs always remains his own work, within the
commission God has conferred upon him. And after having said that he is Paul,
he immediately says that he is an apostle. But his being an apostle is like a
function of his being Paul. He is Paul, the convert, who day by day receives the
gift of conversion afresh in his apostolate. Everything he does is always at the
same time an act of keeping his conversion alive. He never distances himself
from the moment when God turned him around. He grows, of course, and his
insight and experience grow as well, but he remains in a freshness of faith that
preserves the freshness and fragrance of new conversion. He lives in a sort of
perennial conversion, as one who is always just now becoming an apostle.