Ephesians

Ephesians. Believers Church Bible Commentary. By Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld. Scottdale: Herald, 2002, 400 pp., $24.99 paper.

Because Ephesians is not typically regarded as genuinely Pauline in wider NT scholarship, it has suffered from a relative lack of attention completely out of proportion to its importance in the history of the church. The result has been a stagnant scholarship sorely in need of fresh work in order to reinvigorate discussion on this powerful letter of Paul. Yoder Neufeld's commentary is an emphatic step in this direction.

The commentary is aimed at a wide readership and is perhaps most suitable for educated pastors, though scholars working on Ephesians will want to interact with a number of the fresh interpretations he has to offer. His main conversation partners are the well-known commentaries by Andrew Lincoln, Ernest Best, Markus Earth, and Rudolf Schnackenburg, though he also engages the work of Pheme Perkins, Joachim Gnilka, and Ralph Martin. He also interacts at a number of points with Letty Russell's 1984 feminist commentary on Ephesians, along with a variety of Anabaptist and Mennonite scholars, thus effectively bringing a range of voices to bear in helping the church to avoid turning a deaf ear to potentially uncomfortable portions of Scripture. The format is useful and helpful. He first gives an outline of distinct portions of the text, which he then discusses verse by verse, before moving to relate certain themes in each passage to their wider biblical-theological context. Finally, each section closes with a consideration of the text in the life of the church, in which Yoder Neufeld reflects on how the church might faithfully respond to the teaching of Scripture. The issues he chooses to highlight and the manner in which he appropriates the text reflect his Mennonite background, and in this he provides a perspective that is a minority voice among evangelicals but one that will be heard with great profit.

An extended outline of Ephesians, schematic translation, and collection of essays close out the volume. Each of the essays is both accessible to any reader and wellinformed by contemporary scholarship, and they function like articles in a theological dictionary. They are immensely helpful and provide vital information for interpreting Ephesians, covering authorship, the apocalyptic worldview of the letter, and the identity of "the powers," among other topics.

Since he wrote his Th.D. dissertation at Harvard Divinity School on the biblical background to the imagery of the divine warrior in Ephesians 6 (later published as "Put on the Armour of God": The Divine Warrior from Isaiah to Ephesians [JSNTSup 140; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997]), he is sensitive to this imagery as it appears throughout the letter. He rightly notes that the resurrection and exaltation of Christ by God over "the powers" in 1:20-23 is stated in terms that recall the victory of God over enemies in the OT (pp. 74-75, 84-85). Regarding "the powers," he rightly claims that they are "features of a divinely ordered cosmos," though in the present age they are fallen and evil (p. 76). He prefers to regard their identity with a measure of ambiguity between personal and structural entities (p. 355), and his extended essay on the topic is an excellent summary of the discussion to this point.

Just to mention briefly his readings of a few key texts, the "new human" (2:15; 4:24) is both Christ himself as well as the new humanity that is created by Christ and in Christ. Yoder Neufeld bases this on the "in Christ" phrase which occurs throughout the letter (pp. 42-43, 119, 207), along with the emphasis in a number of places on the unity of Christ and the church. He reads the household code in 5:21-6:9 through the "twin lenses" of the commands to be filled with the Spirit in 5:18 and to be subordinate to one another in 5:21 (p. 255). He regards the submission as mutual, and his discussion amounts to a powerful call to the imitation of the sacrificial self-giving of Christ in Christian community life. The command to put on the armor of God, along with the entire context in 6:10-20 is directed to the corporate church, not merely to individual Christians. It is the church as God's people that is "to be empowered with God's own power" (pp. 290-91). An individualistic reading "limits what kind of struggle is imagined and misses the biblical allusions to God as the divine warrior" (p. 292).

As expected with any commentary, not all of Yoder Neufeld's interpretations will be convincing. He argues that the "putting off" of the old humanity and the "putting on" of the new humanity (4:22-24) are past events since the "infinitives are in the past tense" (p. 206). On this basis he claims that this passage is a "witness to the importance of baptism in Pauline churches and to the creativity with which exhortation could appeal to baptism" (p. 206). But this misstates the significance of the aorist infinitives, which do not point to past action on their own, and it overstates the importance of baptism in Ephesians, which, many scholars argue, is not in view in the letter at all. He also translates the initial command in 4:25 as "putting off the lie" and claims that this has reference to "much more than making statements that are not true" (p. 210). Rather, "the lie" refers to "the fundamental misreading of reality by those who mistake slavery for freedom, and such 'freedom' for impunity" (p. 210). While this section of the commentary is compelling in its analysis of the human condition apart from Christ, some may find this particular reading unconvincing.