A long-standing and well-known issue dividing American Protestantism throughout the 20th and even into the 21st century is the relation (or lack thereof) of evangelism (understood as the verbal announcement of Jesus’ death and resurrection for human salvation) and social justice (action directed to ameliorating human need and systemic injustice). The continuum of views ranged from acceptance of one and rejection/ignoring of the other at either end of the spectrum, to asymmetrical relations weighted to the one of the other but acknowledging the legitimacy/necessity of the other, to a separate but equal relation between the two at the center. We might picture it like this:
EVANGELISM------------EVANGELISM-----------EVANGELISM------------SOCIAL JUSTICE-----------SOCIAL JUSTICE
social justice SOCIAL JUSTICE evangelism
This division is unbiblical and deeply troublesome for the integrity of the church’s life and witness. The Bible offers a holistic picture of Christian life and witness that never separates or privileges one over the other. In fact, Ephesians 2 is perhaps the clearest and most integrative of all the passages that deal with these two issues.
Unfortunately, the book of Ephesians was a stepchild among the epistles attributed to Paul in the twentieth century. Only the Catholics paid it substantial attention and then primarily because of its high view of the church. Higher criticism not only denied Ephesians was or could be from Paul, but reflecting the individualistic character of western culture, further denigrated the letter by dubbing it “early catholic” because of its emphasis on the corporate church. Conservative scholars fought for Pauline authorship but still failed to hear much of Ephesians because of its tendency to read the New Testament through the lens of the 16th century struggles between Roman Catholics and the nascent Protestants. The long shadow of those dynamics enabled Protestants to hear Eph.2:1-10 as an affirmation of the Reformation battle cry “justification by faith” but the individualism noted above along with a rather pervasive anti-institutionalism effectively muted the central role of the church in the letter. This started to change a bit in the late 20th century as “church” emerged as a central category in theology which helped lead to a revaluation of Ephesians in biblical studies. In our century, Ephesians (whether or not from Paul’s hand) has finally come into light and into its own. Some even suggest that Ephesians and not Romans is the letter containing the master template of the life of the church in the world (a suggestion I would myself support).
So, we can now read Ephesians in the holistic and integrative way Paul (as the canonical name of its author) intended. And when we read Ephesians 2 in this fashion, we find a way of relating evangelism and social justice as two sides of the one great act of God for human and cosmic salvation. I want to attempt such a reading in the rest of this essay.
Timothy Gombis[1] has advanced studies in Ephesians by detecting the presence of a “divine warfare pattern” as a key structural feature of the letter. The elements of this pattern,[2] drawn from the Old Testament, are:
Kingship; Description of Conflict and Victory; Celebration; Victory Shout; Temple-Building; Blessing
Psalm 24 offers a good example:[3]
Kingship (v.1); Description of Conflict and Victory (v.2); Victory Shout (vv.7-10); Assertion of Kingship (vv.7-10); Activity in the Temple (vv.7-10); Celebration (vv.3-6)
We see this pattern in Ephesians 1:20-2:22:
Assertion of Christ’s Cosmic lordship (1:20-23); Description of victory over alienation of humanity to God (2:1-10); Description of victory over humanity alienated from each other (2:11-18); the Church as the New Temple; celebrating Christ’s victory[4] (2:19-22).
It’s the second element, “Description of victory,” I want to focus on here. Paul has carefully correlated these two descriptions in matching terms. Each begins with a description of the “old state” in which his readers (both Gentile and Jew) were in (2:1-3/2:11-12), followed by an announcement of God’s decisive act of salvation (2:4-7/2:13-18)[5], and concluding with a declaration of the new state they are in now (2:8-10/2:19-22).
In each section it is the event of the cross and the resurrection that effects God’s decisive act of salvation. In the first section God through Christ has overcome the alienation between humanity and himself (the vertical dimension, if you will). In the second section, through this same Christ God has defeated the forces of division and dehumanization (the horizontal dimension). If one overlays the horizontal dimension on the vertical dimension an empty cross is formed, which symbol aptly sums up God’s one victory through Jesus’ death and resurrection in its double aspect. This is the way I propose we read Eph.2: as a twofold description of the one act of God’s decisive salvation.
On this reading of Eph.2 salvation encompasses both dimensions; each is integral to it and inextricably bound up with the other. Witness in word and deed to either dimension is witness to God’s saving work in Christ, which makes it evangelism. Experience of God’s grace is at one and the same time reconciliation with God and with other human beings in the church. The former entails decisive changes in our personal lives; the latter in our social, political, and economic lives. Repentance toward God means turning toward others to forgive and be forgiven, to share and be shared with, to do justice to them and have them do the same for you. To live into the reality of this “one new humanity” (2:14) is to overcome all that divides us from each other in any and every sphere of life. As we tell the story of what God has done for humanity in Christ we at the same time are inviting others to come and see what God has done for humanity in Christ in this new community.
This brief overview of Eph.2 is decisive, I think, for overcoming a divide that never should have been. We ought never have been asked to choose between sharing the good news of the gospel with others or living the good news in the social, economic, and political realities of life. The renaissance for Paul’s letter to the Ephesians gives us the opportunity and impetus to relearn the fullness of God’s gospel. God has saved us by grace through faith and bound us together with each other in one new humanity. Declaring the faith and living the faith each bear witness to God’s good news. Every word of invitation to accept the new life God has for us and every act of justice, mercy, compassion, and reconciliation offered to one another is evangelical, that is, having the character of the gospel. Both belong together, one does not have priority over the other and neither has its fullness as gospel without the other. In terms of our original diagram, Eph.2 moves us to the middle of that continuum where Evangelism (word) and Social Justice (deed) are, so to speak, the right and left hands of God’s new humanity, the church, where we find the lives God intended for us (2:10) and live together as God’s new temple, the place where God meets the
world in healing embrace (2:21,22)!
What God has put together, let us not keep putting asunder!
[1] Timothy G. Gombis, The Drama of Ephesians: Participating in the Triumph of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010).
[2] Gombis, The Drama of Ephesians, 28.
[3] The elements do not have to strictly follow the order of the ideal pattern.
[4] Gombis, Drama of Ephesians, 87-88.
[5] Note the corresponding “but” and “but now” in 2:4 and 2:14.
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