Ver. 20. Το this verse Eph. 1. 10, ii. 16, are partially parallel. It supplies the basis for the Son’s pre-eminence (ver. 18) in His reconciling death.—8v αὐτοῦ: through the ϑοη.--ἀαποκαταλλάξαι τὰ πάντα εἰς αὐτόν. The choice of ἀποκατ. instead of the more usual καταλλ. is for the sake of strengthening the idea, and by insisting on the completeness of the reconciliation accomplished to exclude all thought that reconciliation by angels is needed to supplement that made by Christ. The reconciliation implies pre-
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vious estrangement. It is the universal sweep of this passage that makes it at once fascinating and mysterious. Numer- ous expedients have been devised by exegetes to avoid the plain meaning of the words. The natural sense is that this reconciliation embraces the whole uni- verse, and affects both things in heaven and things on the earth, and that peace is made between them and God (or Christ). The point which creates diffi- culty is the assertion that angels were thus reconciled. Some have evaded thr by interpreting τὰ πάντα of the thing, in heaven below the angels and those on earth below man. It might be possible to parallel the latter reconciliation with Paul’s prophecy of the deliverance of animate and inanimate nature (excluding man) from the bondage of corruption (Rom. viii. 19-23). But the two are not identical, for one is and the other is not eschatological, and reconciliation is not deliverance from the bondage of corrup- tion. And this helps us little to explain what the reconciliation of all things in heaven is. Nor is any such limitation legitimate; on the contrary, it is pre- cisely in the opposite direction that any limitation would have to be made; for in its full sense reconciliation can only be of beings endowed with moral and spiri- tual nature. In vv. 16, 17 angelic powers are explicitly included in τὰ πάντα. It is plain that eis αὐτὸν excludes the view that a reconciliation of angels and men is intended. This is so even if with Chrysostom and others (including appar- ently Abbott) we make τὰ ἐπὶ τ. γῆς and τὰ ἐν τ. ovpav. depend on εἰρηνοπ. For this still leaves unexplained ἀποκ. τ. πάντα εἰς αὐτόν, Which makes the refer- ence to angels undeniable. Bengel’s note, ‘‘Certum est angelos, Dei amicos, fuisse inimicos hominum Deo infen- sorum,’’ may be perfectly true. But it is irrelevant here, for only by forcing the words can εἴρηνοπ ... οὐραν. be re- garded as other than epexegetical of the preceding clause, and in particular τ. ἐπὶ τ. γῆς and τὰ ἐν τ. οὐραν. as a resolution of τ. πάντα. Abbott’s suggestion that τὰ ἐν. τ. οὐραν. may be inhabitants of other worlds may be true, though for Paul the thought is far-fetched, but does nothing towards excluding the angels. He urges that ἐν Tots οὐρανοῖς is not necessarily equivalent to ‘tin heaven”. But not only did Jewish angelology place the angels in the heavens, but Paul did so too, and has done so only just before in this passage, defining τὰ ἐν τοῖς οὐραν. as the various orders of angels (ver. 16),
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