The Whole Armor of God

 

The Whole Armor of God

January 23, 2022

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

There is simply no denying it. There are passages in the Bible that are just offensive and contradict the Bible’s broader messages. John Dominic Crossan characterizes the way the Bible both speaks divine wisdom and worldly sin by saying that first the authors get what God’s truth is but then fall back into advocating the worldly ways of the cultures in which they lived. At best the Bible takes two steps forward toward God’s truth, then takes one step back toward the world. At times it’s more like the Bible takes one step forward and two steps back. Sometimes the Bible speaks God’s truth of justice and peace achieved through nonviolent resistance to evil, but it also has God telling King Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites and getting angry with him when he doesn’t quite do it. It has God freeing the people from bondage in Egypt, then it has that same God kill thousands of God’s people in retribution for some offense. It has God as the One seated on the throne and Jesus as the Lamb that has been slaughtered kill off a good third of the people on earth, then it gives a beautiful, beatific vision of a world reconciled with God where God wipes away the tears from the people’s eyes. It’s enough to give you whiplash you get tossed back and forth so much.

Then there is at least one rather odd passage that proclaims divine values in very worldly terms. It’s at Ephesians 6:10-24. Verse 6:11 tells the people to “Put on the whole armor of God.” Armor is of course a piece of military equipment in the ancient world in and for which Ephesians was written. Today the author may have said put on the Kevlar vest of God to convey the same idea. The author of Ephesians (who claims to be Paul but almost certainly isn’t) isn’t done with the military imagery with that statement. He’s jut getting started. He tells his audience to put on a belt, shoes, and a breastplate (a piece of armor). Then they are to take a shield and a helmet. Finally the text tells the people to take a sword, a weapon for killing and maiming. The text here is giving us an image of an ancient soldier preparing for battle.

The military, both in the ancient world and ours, is of course a very worldly thing. While they may at times do other things, militaries ultimately exist for only one purpose, to inflict death and destruction on people identified as the enemy. The world often makes heroes of people who have been particularly good at inflicting death and destruction on other people. Militaries directly contradict Jesus’ teaching of nonviolent resistance to evil. Ephesians’ imagery of military gear is purely worldly and not at all divine.

Yet there is more in this passage from Ephesians than worldly military imagery. The text connects each piece of military battle gear with much more divine concepts. They are:

 

·        The belt we are to put on is “truth.”

·        The breastplate is “righteousness.”

·        The shoes are to make us “ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.

·        The shield is “faith.”

·        The helmet is “salvation.”

·        The sword is of “the Spirit.”

 

We see that our author has done something a bit odd or at least interesting. He has used military imagery to introduce spiritual values.  It is particularly striking that he included in the midst of his imagery of war “the gospel of peace.”

So what are to make of this odd combination of military metaphors and spiritual virtues? To answer that question let’s go back to John Dominic Crossan. Recall that Crossan tells us that one of the principal dynamics in the Bible is that it will express some divine truth, then fall back to embracing the ways of the world that are anything but divine. Clearly in the passage from Ephesians we are considering here we have contrasting images. We have physical equipment of war and spiritual values of peace. How do we know which image is worldly and which is divine?

It is easiest, I think, to start to discern which images are which by asking which of the images most come from the ways the world works. When we do, it seems obvious that the military images are worldly and the spiritual values are not. The nations and empires of the world conduct warfare. They did in the world of Ephesians, and they still do in our world. They always have. I hope they will stop warring one day, but I fear that they never will. Ephesians was written in the first century CE somewhere in the Roman Empire. The author surely knew the way Rome operated. The first century CE is part of what the Romans called the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, an extended period of at least relative peace throughout the empire. Rome did not create that peace through kindness and justice. It created it by militarily crushing anything and anyone who they thought threatened the peace. The Roman Empire grew to the extent that it did through liberal application of military might. Our author surely intended his military metaphors to represent the military ways of the world in which he lived.

Which leaves us with the other things he mentions as divine. Whatever the author’s intention was, those other virtues he mentions are certainly more divine than any military imagery could ever be, the old hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” to the contrary notwithstanding. The virtues in these verses are indeed quite the opposite of the ways of the world. The first one mentioned is “truth.” Today we live in a nation in which one of our major political parties subsists almost entirely on lies. Rare has been a worldly power that always told the truth. The next virtue we come to is “righteousness.” The term righteousness  can mean various things in the Bible. I always think of it meaning “being in right relationship with God.” Is the world in right relationship with God? Well, in a sense it is, but that’s only because God forgives the myriad ways the world would not otherwise be right with God. The next virtue is being prepared “to proclaim the gospel of peace.” I’m going skip that one for now and return to it shortly. Then we come to “faith.” Surely the text means faith in God. In our world a great many people say they believe in God, but true faith in the sense of trusting God with our lives and our souls is actually quite rare. Then there’s “salvation.” The world always gets salvation wrong. It mostly relies on itself not on God to save it. Yet true, existential salvation comes and can come only from God. The last virtue  the text mentions is “the Spirit, which is the word of God.” Our call is always to listen for the Holy Spirit present in our world and in our lives, which is something the world mostly doesn’t do. All of the virtues Ephesians mentions here are gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Then there the bit about the “gospel of peace” that I skipped above. Our author put the gospel of peace in the middle of his list of divine virtues. I would have put it either at the beginning of those verses or at the end, for everything else the author mentions here constitutes an element that makes for that peace. The gospel of peace means peace in God’s world and peace in our souls. It doesn’t mean the Pax Romana. It means real peace, true peace, existential peace. It means peace achieved through nonviolent justice for the world and the peace of true faith for our souls. If Ephesians’ image of “the whole armor of God” has any positive meaning it surely  means all that leads to true peace. Real peace is the greatest blessing we humans can have. It is the greatest blessing that God wants for every one of us. It isn’t God who keeps us from such peace, it is the world with its ways of materialism, deceit, oppression, injustice, and violence. So let’s take Ephesians’ military imagery here not as a call to war but as a call to the opposite of war. Let’s take it as a call to peace, to real, deep, lasting peace, the peace that we can only find in God. May it be so.