The "New" Armor of God

The Making of God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary People

Postscript

          Years ago one scholar proposed that Ephesians was written by a follower of Paul to be the head of the collection of his letters as “a great rhapsody on the worth of the Christian salvation.”[1]  That particular theory has not stood up well to examination.  However, its recognition of the grandness of Ephesians and its appropriateness to serve as an overview of Paul’s missional theology of the God who sent his Son into a rebellious and distorted world to reclaim, restore, and deliver it to its intended goal is now being reclaimed.  As such, Ephesians has a claim on being a master template through which we read the rest of Paul’s letters which deal with various aspects and circumstances in the life of this missional people.  I have tried to interpret Ephesians as a missional overview of what God is doing in our world and what we as his missional people are to do in this book. 

Those whom the Son gathers to serve as his missional people I have called God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement.  We participate in and implement Christ’s victory across the globe in the power of the Spirit serving as a sign (pointing to the “mystery: of God’s great and gracious plan to gather all things up in Christ), a sacrament (a community in which others can experience the new creational life of God), and a steward (a group whose life and resources are given to furthering this great plan of God). 

We are a people born of divine warfare.  Our birth as God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement is a result of Christ’s victory in God’s divine warfare against sin, evil, and rebellious spiritual powers.  Our life as God’s people continues God’s warfare as through us he continues to reclaim and restore his creation to its created design.   

Here’s how Timothy Gombis summarizes our life as God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement:

“According to Ephesians, the church performs the cosmically significant role of divine warfare through mundane embodiments of God’s life on earth.  Cosmic conflict does not involve defiant chest thumping the face of the defeated powers.  On the contrary, we are called to purposeful, humble, cruciform faithfulness as we perform Jesus for the good of the world . . . the church embodies the divine warrior by undergoing constant community transformation through renewed imaginations and practices.  When the church participates in this transformative process, it harnesses and radiates God’s resurrection power, which has a transformative effect on outsiders.  This is how the people of God transform their surrounding cultures. This is in direct contrast to the church’s long tradition of aggressive coercion and harsh denunciation.  Such strategies are surrenders in divine warfare, since they are capitulations to worldly community dynamics. The church must also be a community of wisdom and discernment.  And finally, the church must be a culture of justice.  When the people of God cultivate these patterns of life, the church performs the role of divine warrior in the world.”[2]

It’s worth reemphasizing here at the end what I did at the beginning about the language of warfare Paul uses.  Neufeld Yoder offers wise words to take with us from this study of Ephesians.

“The interpretation of Ephesians offered in this commentary sees militarism, indeed enmity itself (cf.2:16), as one of the powers to be resisted and overcome. Warfare language then becomes fitting and highly ironic.  The persistence of organized, culturally nurtured enmity, oppression, and alienation is so strong in our world that it becomes necessary to conceive of the struggle against these as battles against these powers.  This battle requires all of the divine empowerment and armor that God places at the church’s disposal.  Our critical and essential task is to maintain the irony in such warfare, however, and too remain deeply conscious that this is always a battle for blood and flesh and never against blood and flesh.  The history of the church tells us that this is just as difficult as it is urgent.[3]

We are in a battle.  A battle that is real, though not prosecuted with military weaponry against physical enemies.  Integral to our identity as God’s people in Christ is this awareness that God has “drafted” us into active service in his subversive counter-revolutionary movement.  He has equipped us for such service and expects us to engage this struggle with all the dedication and determination of a member of the armed forces.  We wade into battle bearing weapons fit for the “violence of love”[4] with which we nonviolently resist, bear witness to, and suffer under the “death throes” of the powers that are defeated but not yet banished, as well as stand in solidarity with all other human beings who suffer their depredations. To fail to grasp this as our basic identity and vocation is to fail in a most profound way to grasp what God is doing in and with our world and to experience the full humanity for which he created us. 

But were we really created by God is to this (non-violent) “fighting force”?  Well, no and yes.  No, in that such was not the way of life Adam and Eve experienced in the Garden of Eden prior to their fall into sin (Gen.1 and 2).  They lived in harmony with God, themselves, each other, and the creation.  Human rebellion dismantled all this, however, across the board.  Thus God’s call to his people from Abraham and Sarah onwards is a call to live again this life in harmony with him, ourselves, each other, and the creation, but now in a world where such a life is blocked and resisted at every turn.  In short, it is now a battle to live God’s way as God people.  So yes, we now struggle to live God’s way by the grace and power of Jesus Christ as part of God’s plan to subvert and set right all that sin has displaced and broken – as part of a counter-revolutionary force acting to set the world on track again to fulfill its created purposes. It’s the same life lived in two radically different contexts (so to speak).

However, we struggle on in full assurance of hope, not as those who fear the outcome of the battle.  Karl Barth puts it memorably.

“The war is at an end – even though here and there troops are still shooting, because they have not heard anything yet about the capitulation. The game is won, even though the player can still play a few further moves. Actually he is already mated. The clock has run down, even though the pendulum still swings a few times this way and that. It is in this interim space that we are living: the old is past, behold it has all become new. The Easter message tells us that our enemies, sin, the curse and death, are beaten. Ultimately they can no longer start mischief. They still behave as though the game were not decided, the battle not fought; we must still reckon with them, but fundamentally we must cease to fear them anymore. If you have heard the Easter message, you can no longer run around with a tragic face and lead the humourless existence of a man who has no hope. One thing still holds, and only this one things is really serious, that Jesus is the Victor. A seriousness that would look back past this, like Lot’s wife, is not Christian seriousness. It may be burning behind – and truly it is burning – but we have to look, not at it, but at the other fact, that we are invited and summoned to take seriously the victory of God’s glory in this man Jesus and to be joyful in Him. Then we may live in thankfulness and not in fear.”[5] 

This “Christian seriousness” of which Barth speaks comes from soaking in the “mystery” of God’s great and gracious plan centered on and worked out by Jesus Christ and, in particular the “memory” of “the victory of God’s glory in this man Jesus.”  Here, and nowhere else, we find impetus and motive to sustain our subversive counter-revolutionary activity without falling into the grim, humorless, impatient despair that causes us to lash out ahead of and apart from God seeking his ends by any means necessary.

It’s appropriate at this point to look beyond Paul and ask how his vision in Ephesians comports with that of the rest of the New Testament.  In an appendix in his recent book, The Politics of Yahweh:  John Howard Yoder, the Old Testament, and the People of God, John Nugent helpfully draws together a profile of what he calls “Distinguishing Marks of a Kingdom-Reflecting Church.”[6]  He documents twenty-five such marks and it is easy to see how most if not all of them are identical or congruent with Paul’s vision of God’s people here in Ephesians.

1.    Places God’s Kingdom above all else (Matt.6:33; 13:44-46; Mark 9:47-48; Luke 12:30-31; 18:28-30)

 2.    Shows equality on multiple levels:  gender, race, age, heritage, social/economic status, and religious status (1 Cor 12:12-13; 2 Cor 5:16-17; Gal 3:26-29; Eph 2:11-22; Col 3:9-11)

 3.    Unifies through diversity (John 17:20-24; 1 Cor.1:10; 12:12-27; Eph 4:1-6, 14-16)

4.    Lives by love:  fellow believers (John 13:34-35; 1 Pet 1;22; 2:17; 4:8), enemies (Matt 5:43-48), and outcasts (Matt 25:31-46)

5.    Accepts persecution and suffering (Acts 14:22; Rom 5:3-5; Jas 1:2-4; 1 Pet 3:13-14; 4:12-16)

6.    Forgives and reconciles at all levels (Matt 6:14-15; 18:15-35; John 20:20-23; 2 Cor 5:18-19)

7.    Confounds those not in tune with God’s Spirit (Mark 4:11-20; 1 Cor 1:18-25; 2:6-16)

8.    Follows the Spirit’s leading (John 16:13-15; Rom 8:13-14; 1 Cor.2:10-16; Gal 5:25)

9.    Embodies cross-shaped wisdom (Mark 8:34-35; 1 Cor 1:17-2:16; Jas 3:13-18)

10. Exhibits sincere, diligent, fruit-bearing faith (Matt 5:20; 13:18-23; 21:33-44; Luke 9:62)

11. Values children and childlikeness (Matt 18:1-5; 19:13-14; Mark 10:13-16; Luke 18:15-17)

12. Assimilates the poor more easily than the wealthy (Matt19:23-24; Luke 6:20-21; Jas 2:5)

13. Welcomes the undeserving and unexpected (Matt 20:1-16; 21:28-32; 22:2-14)

14. Flees from and repents of immorality (1 Cor 5:1-5; 6:18-20; 2 Cor 6:14-18; Gal 5:16-21; Eph 5:5; 1 Pet 2:9-12; 4:1-3)

15. Grows in ways understood only by God (Mark 4:26-29; Luke 17:20-21; Col 2:18-19)

16. Cultivates Christ-like spirituality (Rom 8:9-17; Gal 5:22-26)

17. Expresses concern for marginalized of society (Matt 25:31-46; Luke 4:18-21; Jas 1:27)

18. Assumes a humble servant posture (Matt 5:3; 18:1-4; 20:20-28; Mark 9:33-35; John 13:1-17)

19. Attracts frauds as well as genuine converts (Matt 13:24-30; 47-50; 1 Cor 11:19)

20. Esteems small, unimpressive beginnings (Matt 13:31-32; 1 Cor 1:26-31)

21. Infiltrates the world (Luke 13:21)

22. Seeks peace even when it hurts (Matt 5:38-48; Rom 12:17-21; 1 Cor 6:7; 1 Pet 2:18-25; 3:9-17; Rev 2:9-10; 7:9-17)

23. Makes Christ-like disciples (John 13:12-17; Rom 8:28-30; 1 Cor 11:1; 2 Cor 3:18; 1 Pet 2:21-25; 1 John 4:17)

24. Hopes in bodily resurrection (1 Cor 15;12-23); eternal life (Gal 6:7-10); restoration of earth (Rom 8:18-25; Rev 21); judgment on powers and personalities counter to God’s kingdom (1 Cor 15:24-28; Col 2:15)

25. Accesses God’s power through prayer (Matt 21:18-22; Luke 11:9-13; Jas 5:13-20)

Paul’s great vision of God’s “eternal purpose” and the church’s place in it in Ephesians is arising to a new prominence just at a time when the church in North America lacks any profound sense of either.  We badly need a way to recover the dynamic power of the gospel that re-shapes our grasp of who, what, and why we are God’s church. 

We view ourselves as an institution that maintains itself; we need to grab hold of the reality that are a missional people sent into the world for God’s sake. This is who we are. We think the church is a facility in and through which God’s work happens;  we are in truth a movement.  This is what we are.  We think we exist to provide ministries and services to God’s people; we are in truth, however, a martial people recruited, equipped, and deployed in and through the world to engage the struggle with the principalities and powers that have not yet accepted their defeat and continue to trouble God’s world and its creatures.  That is why we are.

It is Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that opens all this up to us at just the right time.  The church can again lay ahold of its identity as God’s missional people, that subversive counter-revolutionary movement dynamized by a white-hot faith, a commitment to God’s cause, contagious relationships, an ability to mobilize rapidly, and generate adaptive responses to the new challenges in front of us, and effectively and faithfully engage the powers of evil in the armor of God and the victory of Jesus Christ. May it please God that this be so for us!  Amen.

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[1] E. J. Goodspeed, Introduction to the New Testament, 226 at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/goodspeed/ch14.html

[2] Gombis,,,156.

[3] Neufeld Yoder, Ephesians, 313.

[4] Romero, The Violence of Love.

[5] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, p. 123.

[6]John C. Nugent, The Politics of Yahweh:  John Howard Yoder, the Old Testament, and the People of God, Eugene, OR:  Cascade Books, 2011) 221-222.

Ch.17: Conclusion: 6:21-24

          Paul names Tychicus as his authorized and trusted ambassador (v.21).  He will bring these churches not only this letter but also news of what Paul, and those with him (“we” in v.22) are doing.  This implies that Paul and his cohort are doing God’s work even though, or perhaps because, he is imprisoned.  Tychicus’ news will reinforce Paul’s earlier reflections that his current situation in no way hinders his apostolic work or the progress of God’s kingdom. 

          This news of Paul’s activity will “encourage” the Ephesians’ hearts (v.22).  Specifically, it will incline them to take seriously all of what Paul has said and take up their calling to be God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement.

          In v.23 and 24 Paul sums up his letter in a benedictory sentence.  Paul blesses

“the whole community” (focus of the letter),

with “peace,” a key term in Ephesians for God’s ultimate end as well as the way to that end, the new creation and that by and for which his subversive counter-revolutionary movement strives,

along with “faith and love” (the great gifts that draw and keep God and his people in relationship),

all of which come from “God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Grace,” the name for God’s power which has won the decisive victories, God’s “skins on the wall,”

to those irrevocably and unconditionally committed to Jesus Christ with a “love” evoked by God’s grace.

           

And that, friends, is about as good a two sentence summary of Ephesians as we are likely to get.  And it is a wonderful way to end this magnificent letter!