# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1906_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6 Proceedings of the twenty-first convention

I.

Toward the end of his life the Apostle Paul wrote one of his most important letters, the one to the Ephesians. Beside the two other letters that stand in the foreground, Romans and Galatians, the Epistle to the Ephesians has its own quite particular character. Whereas in Galatians Paul emphatically stresses the doctrine of justification against the Judaizers, and in Romans gives, so to speak, a precipitate of his whole teaching activity in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, in writing Ephesians at the end of his career he is governed by a different thought, that of the unity of the Church, of the unity in the Spirit. There the doctrinal element is the main thing, here the exhortation. But in grounding the exhortation on the unity in the Spirit, he paints in the first three chapters a magnificent picture of the blessing of God in concise, rich, sublime words. He begins his letter with a hymn of praise for the blessings that God has poured out upon His Church, chap. 1:3–14. Then he shows further how God the Holy Spirit has made this blessing their own possession of the Ephesians, who were Gentile Christians. If one now sums up all these blessings, one recognizes the Apostle's point of view: The unity of the Church is the great blessing that God has given to His Church. When he then passes over in the fourth chapter to the exhortations, the chief exhortation reads: "Be diligent to keep the unity in the Spirit through the bond of peace!"

Here the question arises first: What does unity in the Spirit mean? In the Greek text it reads: unity of the Spirit. Luther has not translated incorrectly; his translation is rather at the same time a thorough exegesis of the expression. We say: "The expression does not mean the unity of the Spirit as the third person in the Godhead, in the sense (a) that He alone is the One who rules in the Church, or (b) that He creates the unity of the Church, but rather the unity of the spirit, which is the new life created in us by the Holy Spirit." In other words: the word Spirit here does not denote the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Godhead, but the new life created by the Holy Spirit.

In the Holy Scriptures the word pneuma has a threefold meaning. First, it denotes simply the soul-life of man, apart from the working of the Holy Spirit. Then the expression denotes the third person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit. Thirdly, Paul in particular often sets pneuma in opposition to sarx and means by it the spirit that lives in the Christian, in opposition to his flesh, which is in conflict with the flesh. Which meaning holds in our passage? The first meaning, purely psychological, as soul-activity of man, does not come into consideration here. In the Christian Church, after the time of Ambrose and Chrysostom,