NOTES for Eph 4:4-6

The biblical teaching about a personal God is often contrasted with pantheism as a pagan teaching. Indeed, pantheism is characteristic of the pagan world, while pagans rarely speak of a personal God. Still, one cannot say that they do not speak of Him at all. But a pagan's personal spiritual experience often truly has a pantheistic character. This is no surprise: for full communion with God, revelation is necessary; to know God as a Person, He must reveal Himself to the seeker. Pantheism is another matter: God's presence in the world is a reality, and this reality is accessible to every seeker.

It is no accident, therefore, that the path of spiritual searching often led many first of all to pantheism, which strengthened their paganism: from pantheism it is easy to move to the deification of the cosmos. The possibility of such deification was one of the reasons why the authors of all the biblical books without exception treated pantheism with great caution. Still, pantheism found a place on biblical pages: there is a certain truth in it, though not the whole truth.

If God's presence in the world is a reality, then pantheism has a right to exist, without claiming, of course, to be the final truth. And in the context of the New Testament revelation, the revelation of the Kingdom, it receives a new dimension. Indeed, pantheism is possible insofar as God's breath, God's presence, permeates the universe, and has done so from the very beginning, from the moment when, according to the Poem of Creation, "the Spirit of God spread His wings over the water."

And this very presence makes possible the transfiguration of creation, the qualitative change of its nature that will free the world from the power of the evil that entered it at the fall. But for such transfiguration to become possible, the fullness of the Kingdom had to enter the world from within, through a human being, more precisely, through the God-Man.

And now that this has happened, pantheism acquires a new quality. Before, it reminded us of God's presence in creation; now it reminds us of creation's presence in God. Not in the depth of God's person, where there is and can be nothing created, but in the process of God's existence, of which His Kingdom is part. God immersed in the life of the world, in its very depth, and the world included in God's life insofar as that life is open to it: this is the Kingdom. And God's own life is "over all, through all, and in all."

The Apostle Paul says that each of us “was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.” What, then, is this measure? The measure of Christ’s gift? The measure of His gift is His life, given for us! His gift is He Himself. Thus the measure of the gift is boundless. In other words, the grace given to each of us is also boundless. To each one. We love to avoid responsibility by saying that we have no special gifts and are modest people... Yet the Lord has already given everyone everything—grace without measure! And for each of us this gift is not only a present but also a responsibility.

When Paul speaks about the unity of the church community, he clearly has in mind more than organizational or doctrinal unity. For him, the unity of the church community is first of all evidence of the normal and full spiritual life of the Christians who belong to it. The apostle understands perfectly that unity is not an end in itself and not even a means for solving particular tasks facing the church. The unity of the community is the natural consequence of normal relationships among Christians as inhabitants of the Kingdom. If God is truly not only "over all," but also "in all" and "through all" (v. 6), then the unity of "all" is implied by itself; there can simply be no other relationships among people who live in the Kingdom and breathe one breath with God.

But for a person who has not yet been transformed completely, it is easy to lose the Kingdom by making concessions to his own sinfulness. That is why Paul urges the Ephesian Christians to preserve unity (vv. 1-6). On his lips this appeal sounds like a call not to forget the Kingdom and spiritual life. Paul judges church ministries from the point of view of how much they bring those who serve closer to the fullness of life in the Kingdom. For him, the very concept of grace is inseparable from service; it is given to a Christian for service, and it is given as an inseparable part of the relationship that binds him to the Risen One (vv. 7-10). For Paul, service is also inseparable from the spiritual life of the one who serves. If the Church were an ordinary religious organization, everything would be simpler: future ministers would simply be trained the way people in our still untransformed world are trained for any work requiring special knowledge and skills, and after their training they would be sent to their ministries like young specialists going to work after completing their studies.

But in the Kingdom everything is different. Here it is impossible to learn anything or prepare for anything without being rooted in the life of the Kingdom and without transforming one's own nature, so one has to learn service in the process of serving. The life of the Kingdom is so whole that it cannot be separated from service in the narrow, concrete sense of the word, and no one is ready for it, above all because one can learn to live in the Kingdom only by entering it. The ministries of the Kingdom can be learned only by living in it. Life in the Kingdom itself becomes service, and service becomes part of the life of the Kingdom. It is no accident that Paul considers the main meaning of all church ministries to be the building up of the body of Christ, and the main task of those who serve to be the attainment of that fullness of spiritual life which, in familiar language, can be called adulthood, when a person becomes so mature in every respect that any task can already be entrusted to him, as it is entrusted to an adult and responsible person (vv. 11-16). The Church is a community of inhabitants of the Kingdom, and only the Kingdom can be the means, goal, and meaning of any church ministry.

The apostle Paul does not merely ask—he implores. He implores all of us to walk worthily of the name of Christ's disciples. And what does it mean to walk worthily of the Christian name? For Paul it means “maintaining the unity of the Spirit.” We keep thinking that what matters most is some extraordinary virtue (which, admittedly, we do not possess either, but never mind—we will strive for it). Yet everything turns out to be so simple... and almost impossible. Preserve unity. Is this possible in today's world, where not only different Christian denominations are divided, but often even the admirers of different priests within a single parish? And what will this unity consist in? It is perfectly clear that none of us, nor even all of us together, can reunite the divided Churches. Paul has probably already given the answer: unity lies in humility, meekness, and patience, in bearing with one another in love. In other words, it lies in accepting the other person with love despite the fact that he is different.