Being the Fullness of God in Christ by the Spirit: Ephesians 5:18 in Its Epistolary Setting

Abstract

The enigmatic command in Ephesians 5:18, ‘be filled by the Spirit’, is often understood in terms of the empowerment of individual believers for discipleship and ministry. Such an interpretation leads to difficulties in relating the command to the five participles which follow, and to the argument of the epistle as a whole. Reading the command as directed to the community as a corporate body, and the five participles which follow as participles of means, instead of result, solves a number of problems normally associated with this passage.