NT Text: Ephesians 4:5-6
OT Source(s):
Source: Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Eerdmans, 2008); G.K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology (Baker, 2011)
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Longitudinal Theme
Anchor Text: Deut 6:4-5 — The Shema
Significance: Paul's sevenfold "one" — "one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all" — is built on the Shema's εἷς and deploys it as the ground of the church's unity. As in 1 Corinthians 8:6, the Shema's single confession is distributed: "one Lord" (κύριος, the LXX divine name) names Jesus, and "one God and Father of all" names the Father, both bearing the Shema's predicate one. Here the purpose is ecclesial rather than polemical: because God is one, His people must be one — the unity of the church is the visible downstream of the unity of God. The clustering of seven unities around the one God and one Lord shows the Shema doing ecclesiological work, its monotheism translated into a charter for the one body, one Spirit, one hope. This is the textual root of the pattern the Shema-network surfaces: the confession of God's oneness generates the demand for the church's oneness (cf. Acts 4:32, "one heart and one soul"). The telos: the church's unity is not organizational convenience but worship — a people gathered into the one God's life through the one Lord, so that division in the body is a failure to treasure the One who is Himself undivided, and reconciliation among believers is the Shema lived as glad communion.