In this bonus episode, Tom Wright and Michael Bird open up Ephesians as Paul’s “panoramic” letter, exploring why its vision for unity, holiness, and the renewal of all things is urgently needed in today’s church. Drawing on scholarly insight and pastoral urgency, Wright calls believers to recover Ephesians’ call for the church to embody God’s new creation - showing the world that unity is not a slogan, but a costly, lived reality.
In a bonus episode of Ask NT Wright Anything, Michael Bird and Tom Wright open the door to what Tom calls Paul’s “panoramic” letter: Ephesians. Michael reads from Ephesians 1:7-10 and highlights what he sees as the distilled essence of Paul’s thought: God’s intention to “sum up the whole cosmos in the Messiah”.
From there, Tom offers both the scholarly background to why he wanted to write on Ephesians, and a pastorally urgent reason the church needs to hear it again now. The result is not simply an overview of a biblical book, but a plea for the church to recover its calling as a unified people who embody God’s new creation in public view.
Why Ephesians, and why now?
Tom explains that when he wrote his major work on Paul, he wanted to draw on Ephesians without making it “load-bearing” in scholarly debates about authorship. But the letter kept pressing itself on him as the place where Paul’s themes come together.
He recalls a comment from Paul Meyer:
“When I finished that, I realised that the Paul I had been describing. Could have sat down the next day and written Ephesians.”
In other words, Ephesians doesn’t feel like an awkward appendix to Paul’s theology. It feels like a soaring summary.
The “room with windows on three sides”
One of the most memorable moments in the conversation comes when Tom describes the Pauline letters like rooms in a house. Galatians is the kitchen - hot, busy, argumentative. Romans is the dining room - structured, formal, a place where everything is laid out. The Corinthian correspondence is the lived-in family space, with all its relational complexity.
But Ephesians is something else entirely:
“At the back of the house, there’s a room with windows on three sides… And I said. That’s Ephesians.”
And what do those windows look out onto? The vast purpose of God.
God’s plan is not escape, it’s reunion
Tom frames Ephesians as the announcement that God’s answer to a fractured world is not to abandon creation, but to heal it from the inside out:
“Ephesians is all about God’s plan, which was not to say, oh, this world’s such a mess. I need to take you guys away from it to somewhere else. It was about God, the creator. Planning to bring heaven and earth together in the Messiah.”
That vision reaches back to Genesis (“the heavens and the earth”) and forwards into a new creation. For Tom, Ephesians isn’t mainly about individuals going somewhere after death; it’s about God remaking the world through the Messiah, and doing so in a way that can be seen.
The church is meant to be the sign of a new humanity
Tom lays out a striking “chapter 1 verse 10 / chapter 2 verse 10 / chapter 3 verse 10” sequence
- Ephesians 1:10: heaven and earth brought together in the Messiah
- Ephesians 2:10: the church as God’s “artwork”, made for good works that display the Creator’s intention
- Ephesians 3:10: the church reveals God’s wisdom to the powers not by domination, but by existence as a unified, reconciled people
At the heart of it is a point the modern church too easily forgets:
“Because the church is this, people are called to be one family of Judean and Gentile together in the Messiah.”
Unity is not a side theme. It is one of the main ways the gospel becomes visible.
Unity isn’t a slogan. It’s obedience.
Then comes the sharp edge. Tom turns to Ephesians 4 and refuses to let “unity” remain a vague aspiration:
“Chapter four is to begin with all about unity. There is one body, one spirit, one faith, one Lord, one baptism, one God, and Father of all. As I look around the worldwide church today, many people will happily say they would sign up to Unity, but they don’t want to actually do anything, which would mean that they might have to share fellowship with that other big building down the road.”
That line lands where it hurts because it exposes how easily we praise unity while practising distance.
And Tom argues that our failure here often flows from a smaller, thinner gospel story. If Christianity is reduced to “individual saved souls going up to heaven”, unity becomes optional, a nice-to-have. But if God is bringing heaven and earth together in the Messiah, then the church must live now as the preview of that future.
Unity and holiness: the hard double imperative
Ephesians won’t let us pick our favourite virtue and ignore the other. Tom names the two major imperatives in chapters 4–5: “the two great imperatives of chapters four and five are unity and holiness.” And he gives a blunt pastoral reality-check:
“Unity is easy if you don’t care about holiness…Holiness is easy if you don’t care about Unity.”
This is where so many church conflicts go wrong. Some communities protect “purity” by splitting quickly. Others keep a superficial peace by refusing to take discipleship seriously. Ephesians calls the church to both: a united people who live distinctly.
The unity of creation, the unity of the church, the unity of the home
Tom traces a pattern that runs through the whole letter:
- Heaven and earth united in the Messiah
- Jew and Gentile united in the Messiah
- husband and wife becoming one, and Paul reading Genesis 2 through the lens of “the Messiah and the church”
Whatever debates swirl today, Ephesians insists that unity is not merely organisational. It is theological. It is woven into creation, redemption, and the public witness of God’s people.
Spiritual warfare: don’t demonise humans
Finally, Tom turns to Ephesians 6 and brings it right into contemporary Christian habits, especially the temptation to treat political or theological opponents as enemies to be destroyed:
“And the battle is not against flesh and blood. This is so important at the moment when many Christians demonise their opponents and think that as long as they’re opposing that lot over there, they are fighting God’s battles.”
That sentence alone feels like a needed reset. If our fight is “against flesh and blood”, we’ve already lost the plot. Ephesians calls Christians to resist evil without turning neighbours into demons.
A call to unity that costs something
If Ephesians really is the “room with windows on three sides”, then the view is clear: God is making one new humanity in the Messiah, and the church is meant to be the living demonstration of that reality.
Tom sums it up like this:
“This wonderful vision of unity. Unity of God’s world, unity of God’s church, unity of families, all to the glory of God before the watching world.”
So here is the invitation Ephesians presses on us, especially in a fragmented and suspicious age:
- Unity is not pretending differences don’t exist; it is refusing to let them become excuses for separation, contempt, or indifference.
- Unity is not institutional tidiness; it is shared life, shared worship, shared table fellowship, shared mission.
- Unity is not achieved by lowering the bar of discipleship; it is sustained by the holiness that makes forgiveness, patience, and kindness possible.
- Unity is not sentiment; it is the church doing the difficult, deliberate work of becoming what it already is: “one body”.
And perhaps the most practical first step is the simplest and the hardest: cross the road, knock on the door, and learn to recognise fellow Christians not as rivals, threats, or strangers, but as family.
If God’s plan is to bring heaven and earth together in the Messiah, then the church should look like that plan, now.
