The ‘Ephesians Moment’

I want to reflect on this significance of this by reference to a significant article by the missiologist Andrew Walls called ‘The Ephesian Moment: At a Crossroads in Christian History.’ (See Andrew F. Walls, ‘The Ephesian Moment: At a Crossroads in Christian History,’ The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Orbis, 2002), pp. 72–81. Available online here.)

Walls speaks of the ‘return of the Ephesian moment’. The church in Jerusalem was Jewish. Most of its members were Jewish. It observed much of the Old Testament law. It was culturally Jewish in its practice. It met in the temple. But persecution drove it out into Gentile culture and the subsequent large scale conversion of Gentiles created a new dynamic. Peter’s experience with Cornelius in Acts 10-11 and the so-called council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 were decisive. They decided that Gentile converts did not need to become culturally Jewish. At this point there was every possibility of two Christian communities or two culture developing: a Jewish one and a Hellenistic one. This was a real possibility as the conflict at Antioch described in Galatians 2 reveals.

But Paul in Ephesians casts a very different vision for the future. ‘And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.’ (Ephesians 2:22)

Emphatically, there was to be only one Christian community. That community had become more diverse as it crossed the cultural frontier with the Hellenistic pagan world; and Christian obedience was tending to increase the diversity by developing parallel lifestyles that would penetrate and influence Jewish society on the one hand and pagan society on the other. But the very diversity was part of the church’s unity. The church must be diverse because humanity is diverse; it must be one because Christ is one. Christ is human, and open to humanity in all its diversity; the fulness of his humanity takes in all its diverse cultural forms. The Ephesian letter is not about cultural homogeneity; cultural diversity had already been built into the church by the decision not to enforce the Torah. It is a celebration of the union of irreconcilable entities, the breaking down of the wall of partition, brought about by Christ’s (Eph. 2:13-18). Believers from the different communities are different bricks being used for the construction of a single building – a temple where the One God would live (Eph. 2:19-22) …
The coming together of diverse elements from different quarters produces common convictions, a common assurance, about Christ. This in turn brings the church’s maturity, ‘the very height of Christ’s full stature’ (Eph. 4:13). The very height of Christ’s full stature is reached only by the coming together of the different cultural entities into the body of Christ. Only ‘together,’ not on our own, can we reach his full stature.
It is usual to see the great celebration of Ephesians 2 in terms of the reconciliation of two races, Jew and Gentile; and the words have in modern times spoken powerfully to situations of racial division. But in their own time these also stood for two cultures; and, in the church, they stood for two contrasting Christian lifestyles. Two lifestyles met at the institution that had once symbolized the ethnic and cultural division: the meal table.

Here is the key idea: ‘The understanding of Christ—knowing the ‘full stature’—thus arises from the coming together of the fragmented understandings that occur within the diverse culture-specific segments of humanity where he becomes known.’ In other words, we only fully understand the fulness of Christ by interacting with Christians of other cultures. It is inevitable, and perhaps even appropriate, that we express the gospel in and through our own culture. Jesus himself was Jewish. He was not an abstract ‘everyman’ figure divorced from history and culture. We are not like Muslims who will not translate the Koran from Arabic. The gospel is translated and embedded into each culture. But the danger is always that our thinking and practice reflects not only the gospel , but also our culture. We easily confuse gospel norms with cultural norms. And so maturity is found through the interaction of cultures. This is what the first Jewish Christians found as they moved out in mission into Gentile culture. This is one reason why cross-cultural mission is so important to the healthy and vigour of the church.

In another important essay Walls argues that there are in Christianity two principles:

1. The ‘Indigenising’ Principle
The gospel invites to come to God as we are with all our cultural and social conditioning. Throughout Christian history Christians have tried to indigenise – to make Christian at home in their culture, but be Christian within their culture. We make faith ‘a place to feel at home’.

2. The ‘Pilgrim’ Principle
God not only accepts as we, he also changes us into what he wants them to be. ‘Along with the indigenising principles which makes his faith a place to feel at home, the Christian inherits the pilgrim principles, which whispers to him that he has no abiding city and warns him that to be faithful to Christ will put him out of step with his society.’ No society has existed that can absorb the word of God painlessly.

These two forces exist in tension:

Just as the indigenising principles, itself rooted in the Gospel, associates Christian with the particulars of their culture and group, the pilgrim principles, in tension with the indigenising and equally of the Gospel, by associating them with things and people outside the culture and group, is in some respect a universalising factor.

‘Every Christian as dual nationality’ – he has all the relationships with which he was brought up plus the new relationships of the family of Christ.

In Ephesus different contextualised gospel were united. Soon after the Jewish church died away and every since Christianity has been largely monocultural. But now at the beginning of the 21st century we have the opportunity of an Ephesians scenarios again.

When Ephesians was written, there were only two major cultures represented in the Christian church, the Jewish (reflecting a spectrum of attitudes and accommodation to Greek thought) and the Hellenistic. They could easily have formed separate churches, but that thought does not occur to the author. Two races and two cultures historically separated by the meal table now met at table to share the knowledge of Christ.
The Ephesian moment—the social coming together of people of two cultures to experience Christ—was quite brief. Circumstances—the destruction of the Jewish state in 70 C.E., the scattering of the Jewish church, the sheer success of the mission to the Gentiles—soon made the church monocultural again; and in the eastern Mediterranean the Christian movement became as overwhelmingly Hellenistic as once it had been overwhelmingly Jewish.
But in our own day the Ephesian moment has come again, and come in a richer mode than has ever happened since the first century. Developments over several centuries, reaching a climax in the twentieth, mean that we no longer have two, but innumerable, major cultures in the church. Like the old Jerusalem Christians, Western Christians had long grown used to the idea that they were guardians of a ‘standard’ Christianity; also like them, they find themselves in the presence of new expressions of Christianity, and new Christian lifestyles that have developed or are developing under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to display Christ under the conditions of African, Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Latin American life. And most of the world’s Christians are now Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans.
There are two dangers. One lies in an instinctive desire to protect our own version of Christian faith, or even to seek to establish it as the standard, normative one. The other, and perhaps the more seductive in the present condition of Western Christianity, is the postmodern option: to decide that each of the expressions and versions in equally valid and authentic, and that we are therefore each at a liberty to enjoy our own in isolation from all the others.
Neither of these approaches is the Ephesian way. The Ephesian metaphors of the temple and of the body show each of the culture-specific segments as necessary to the body but as incomplete in itself. Only in Christ does completion, fullness, dwell. And Christ’s completion as we have seen, comes from all humanity, from the translation of the life of Jesus into the lifeways of all the world’s cultures and subcultures through history. None of us can reach Christ’s completeness on our own. We need each other’s vision to correct, enlarge, and focus our own; only together are we complete in Christ.

Walls shows how the move into Hellenistic culture both forced and enabled the church to refine its understanding of the incarnation and the Trinity and how the move into Roman culture likewise enabled the church to refine its understanding of the atonement. Such moves are risky. There is a danger of corrupting the gospel. But they can also be enriching.

It was a risky, often agonizing business, but it led the church to rich discoveries about Christ that could never have been made using only Jewish categories such as Messiah. Translation did not negate the tradition, but enhanced it … Crossing a cultural frontier led to a creative movement in theology by which we discovered Christ was the eternally begotten Son; but it did not require the old theology to be thrown away, for the eternally begotten Son was also the Messiah of Israel.

What does this mean for the future? Walls goes on:

The majority of Christians now belong to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These regions will increasingly be the places where Christian decisions and Christian choices will have to be made, where creative theology will become a necessity and where the materials for constructing that theology will be such as have not been used for that purpose before. New questions will be asked about Christ that arise from the endeavours of Christian people to express him, to think in a Christian way, and make Christian choices in settings that have been shaped by the venerable traditions of Africa and Asia. And the materials for constructing theology will be African and Asian, as surely as earlier generations used the materials of Platonism and Roman and customary law. If past experience is anything to go by, the process can only enrich the church’s understanding of Christ.

The point is that we in the West will have to listen to these voices. We must avoid, as Walls puts it, the twin dangers of protecting ‘our own version of Christian faith’ ‘as the standard, normative one’ and seeing all ‘expressions and versions [as] equally valid and authentic’ so that we ‘enjoy our own in isolation from all the others’. Mass migration from areas where the church is growing (the south) to areas where the church is declining (the West) means that this cultural diversity will increasingly be a present reality in Western churches. It also present a challenge for the church to witness to the diversity-in-unity that the gospel proclaims as a rich West endeavours to isolate and defend itself from a populous poor world.