Walter Wink – Forging Ploughshares

Salvation as Defeat of the Powers

The depiction of the armor of God in Ephesians (6:10-19) is often taken as a colorful illustration, which makes for great sermonizing, but is not usually considered as central to the gospel. Defeat of the powers and personal engagement in this defeat, to say nothing of the notion that Christ came to defeat evil, are often displaced by theories of the atonement focused on deliverance from the wrath of God, and limited to a legal remedy of imputed righteousness, none of which allows for primary focus on personal engagement with and defeat of evil. In this understanding, the gospel is thought to pertain to more effervescent and transcendent categories rather than depicting how it weaponizes those who bear it and wear it with a capacity to engage and defeat evil. Thus, what the early church and Paul considered the very heart of salvation is dismissed as a fun allegory, more suited to children’s choruses than serious theologizing. How this came to be is largely explained by the Constantinian shift.

Constantinianism is a form of Christianity which has abandoned Christ’s strategy for what it presumes is a more effective method. As Nathan Kerr describes it:

Constantinianism most fundamentally names a certain orientation toward the political meaning of history which is rooted in a heretical eschatology based upon a misconception of the relation of Christ to history. Most importantly, Constantinianism proceeds as if what happened in the cross, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus had not profoundly altered history, and it provides for the church a way of acting politically in history which is not entirely determined by the lordship of Jesus Christ.[1]

According to John Howard Yoder, Constantinianism (true to the vision of Constantine), moves the sign of the cross from Golgotha to the battlefield, and conquering under this sign no longer entails taking up the cross as an instrument of self-giving sacrifice but it reinforces sacrificing one’s enemies in violence and warfare.[2] As Jordan Wood describes, Yoder “is not merely claiming that ‘Constantinianism’ tempts Christians to disobey the commands of Jesus, but that it tempts them to renounce their destiny to be like God.”[3] In Yoder’s estimate this temptation becomes reality in the undoing of the church/world distinction, such that the church disappears and the Roman State takes its place:

Before Constantine, one knew as a fact of everyday experience that there was a believing Christian community but one had to “take it on faith” that God was governing history. After Constantine, one had to believe without seeing that there was a community of believers, within the larger nominally Christian mass, but one knew for a fact that God was in control of history.[4]

Prior to Constantine the persecuted and martyred Christians marked the church state distinction, but with the Constantinian embrace of Christianity, all Romans were (mostly) Christian and the church became an indistinct part of the masses, while Rome’s rule in the name of Christ was interpreted as the arrival of the kingdom. Thus, every Roman soldier was required to be a Christian, and soldiering for Christ was sublated by literal killing and service to the State. This ideology persists in Christendom, such that Paul’s illustration is often allegorized and spiritualized away.

Four key points need to be made regarding the gospel armor in Ephesians 6 to regain the meaning and centrality of this passage:

1. If Ephesians is, as I have argued (along with the early church fathers such as Origen, and contemporary scholars such as Douglas Campbell – here) the center and summary of Paul’s gospel, then Ephesians 6 as a summary of all that Paul has said in Ephesians, encapsulates Paul’s understanding of how the gospel works to defeat evil and bring about salvation (as I demonstrate below).[5] As Joshua Greever notes, Romans 13:12–14 is a parallel text, in which Paul urges Christians to “put on the armor of light” (13:12), but then follows this up in 13:14 with “put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” “suggesting that putting on the armor of light is nothing other than putting on the Lord Jesus.”[6] In other words, by encouraging them to put on this armor Paul is urging them once again to “put on Christ” and is summarizing his gospel with the added urgency to do this and thus defeat the powers.

2. Paul’s gospel is built upon resistance to evil. The genius of Walter Wink is in recognizing (and one could point to the failure of theologians such as David Hart and John Milbank, who both eloquently describe a peaceful ontology but fail to recognize) what Wink calls the third way of the gospel. This third way is not nonresistance or violent resistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. As Wink writes, “Jesus is not telling us to submit to evil, but to refuse to oppose it on its own terms. We are not to let the opponent dictate the methods of our opposition. He is urging us to transcend both passivity and violence by finding a third way, one that is at once assertive and yet nonviolent.”[7] Christ does not promote passive resistance or violent resistance, but Christ offers the singular solution – the gospel.

3. In Ephesians 6:10-19, Paul is describing salvation. Salvation defeats evil in the form of the powers of this world and the only way these powers are defeated is through the means provided by God. Taking Ephesians as a whole and Ephesians six, in particular, as descriptive of salvation, means salvation is not deliverance from God but deliverance from the cosmic powers of evil, death, and the devil. The captivating power, the darkening power, the death dealing power, is not the power of God but the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers (the cosmocrats), the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (6:12). The cosmic struggle is not removed from the historical, political, and earthly, and so too, the Christian engages these spiritual forces through their earthly manifestations. Ideologies and institutions manifesting the various forms of individual and corporate violence and oppression (e.g., nationalism, fascism, racism, sexism, legalism) constitute the cosmos of darkness. There is no mystery as to the power of evil (this power of death and violence is the coin of the realm of the kingdoms of darkness) undone by the gospel of peace, truth, and righteousness.

That the mode of this salvation is provided by God is made clear in the armor passages Paul is echoing. The description of God’s armor in Isaiah (which Paul must be following) and God’s saving is Israel’s only hope: “And He saw that there was no man, And was astonished that there was no one to intercede;Then His own arm brought salvation to Him, And His righteousness upheld Him” (Is 59:16). God alone can accomplish this salvation and he alone has this armor.

Why can only God save? The obvious answer is in Paul’s depiction of the power of God (equated at 6:10 ff. with the armor) found (as he has explained) in Christ’s resurrection, ascension, and reign over the powers:

what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion (Eph 1:19–21).

Paul has explained the strength of the Lord and how believers appropriate this strength, thus his command to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might” (6:10) is a reiteration of the opening of the letter. It is through the gospel that God in Christ defeats death, and the powers that depend upon death. Christ is seated at the Father’s right hand in the heavenly place and this exaltation of Christ implies the disarming of all cosmic powers, and this disarming power is to be appropriated by each Christian.

4. Salvation involves a real-world defeat of the principalities and powers in the life of the believer. There is simultaneously the corporate empowerment (implying an army), but the focus in this passage is on the individual soldier. To state it most succinctly: to be saved is to be saved from the powers as outlined in the armor passage. This is inclusive of the thought (head), action (feet), and heart (breast) of the individual. The armor weaponizes the individual against the “fiery darts of the evil one” by creating a new plan of action (feet shod with the gospel of peace), a new world of thought (the head and mind transformed by the helmet of salvation), and a new ethic and worldview (the breast plate of righteousness and the belt of truth girding up the whole outfit). Defeating the powers, though it may not be a full explanation of salvation, is synonymous or at least synchronous with salvation in that the fulness of the gospel is required (with all of its positive benefits) to counteract, as Ephesians puts it, “the flaming arrows of the evil one” (Eph. 6:16).

Paul’s picture of salvation through the defeat of the powers focuses on the perspective of the individual soldier. This soldier has the resources of his Lord seated at the right hand of God, but he only sees the battle in the limited perspective of one directly engaged in warfare. It is only the commander on high who can survey the entire field of battle and he alone understands how this battle is to be won. One must trust that God is in control of history, as only the immediate warfare is in plain sight. The temptation is to judge this methodology ineffective and to replace the armor and weaponry of the gospel with the sword of state. The kenotic self-sacrificing power of the cross, the feet shod with the gospel of peace, the head protected by salvation, are unlikely strategies for victory by the standards of worldly power, so the soldier must have faith in his weapons and his commander or abandon the gospel. The final outcome is assured only in the eschaton.

[1] Nathan R. Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene: Cascade, 2009) 7. Quoted in Jordan Wood, Assessing the “Constantinian Shift”: A Defense of the Theological Question, Presented at “For the Good of the Many”: Constantine and the Edict of Milan on Its 1700th Anniversary St. Louis, September 20, 2013.

[2] The description is from John Howard Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics,” in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984): 145. Quoted by Wood, 7.

[3] Wood, 7.

[4] Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources,” 137. Quoted in Wood, 4.

[5] Throughout his description of the armor, Paul is appealing to his former key points (a few examples must suffice): “the strength of his might” of 6:10 is defined by resurrection and ascension at 1:19; “put on the whole armor of God” has its parallel explanation at 4:24, “put on the new self”; “the schemes of the devil” (6:11) are explained at 4:14 as “deceitful schemes” and the Ephesians are warned “give no opportunity to the devil” at 4:27; the first three pieces of armor—peace, truth and righteousness (6:13-15) are defined earlier by Christ. Truth is directly equated with Jesus (4:21), and truth and righteousness are found in the one new man created and embodied in Christ (4:24; cf. 2:15), and the original preacher and resource of the gospel of peace is Jesus (2:17); the defeat of the rulers and authorities of 6:12 has been explained at 1:21, as Christ (resurrected and ascended) is far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, inclusive at 2:2 of the authoritative ruler of the air and at 3:10 the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. For an exhaustive list Joshua M. Greever, The Armor of God, the Gospel of Christ, and Standing Firm against the ‘Powers’ (Ephesians 6:10–20); [JBTS 5.1 (2020): 72–89].

[6] Ibid, 84.

[7] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (p. 101). Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.

The Peace of Jesus’ Body Versus the Violent Semantics of the Flesh

The semantic load that can be attached to the biological body is undergoing a continual extension, in that there is seemingly no end to the arrangement of gender identity. In a Lacanian psychoanalytic frame, the complete identity with the symbolic order though, is not really a multiplicity of types but is a singular type which he would dub “masculine.” “Masculine” does not refer to gender but to an orientation to the symbolic order. One might identify with these structures as they presently exist in the society or attempt to “bend the rules” but of course the rules are bent so as to conform to them. That is, the letter is prime reality and the biological body is divided or separate from this reality. The masculine (as opposed to the feminine, in a Lacanian frame) does not question the symbolic order as prime reality.

As Paul describes this type, “the law dominates the man for whatever time he lives” (Romans 7:1 DBH translation). Paul will identify this type, according to his own experience, as ignorant of their own actions and having an incapacity to discern evil. There is a fusion between sin and the law so that Paul, at the time he was doing it, could not discern the sort of evil in which he is engaged. As he describes, in a parallel passage in Galatians, his zeal for the law and his advancement in Judaism were marked by his persecution of the church and his desire to destroy it (Ga 1:13-14). For Paul, the law was not a marker of sin and evil but was fused with sin such that he could not perceive his own evil due to his zeal for the law. As he advanced in law-keeping and in Judaism he simultaneously advanced in his participation in evil. It did not occur to Paul the Pharisee that there was a reality which exceeded the measure of the law. Clearly, Paul is not imagining that in this understanding he has rightly perceived the law; quite the opposite, as he dubs this orientation as “having confidence in the flesh.” The problem is, the flesh marked by the law, has become a principle unto itself.

In the masculine the symbolic order reigns supreme and the biological body is written over and made to conform to this semantic load. This is not really the problem of any particular group of people, but in Paul’s terms this is the universal problem. There is (in Eph. 2) the divided body which may refer to the individual (divided into mind and flesh in Eph. 2) or the division of gender, race, or social status. The divided body might be classed, as it is in Ephesians, as either circumcised or uncircumcised or elsewhere he will talk of male and female identity, but the point is that this division makes of the flesh a sign system, or a blank slate for inscribing the symbolic order of the law. Circumcised or uncircumcised is clearly the imposition of a sign system (the law), on the biological body. We know that male and female can also bear this same sort of cultural inscription in which the biological is overwritten with a meaning that is not inherently part of gender. To be female in Japan, for example, may bear a very different meaning than it bears in Korea or the United States. Female can be assigned the meanings of passivity, nurturing, or servitude, all of which bear meaning in a particular culture in conjunction with what it means to be male. So too, the idea with circumcision and uncircumcision is that it is a binary that is not simply a description of physical marks, but is a religious and ethnic division inscribed in the flesh (Jew/Gentile). Paul refers to it as a mind and flesh issue (2:3 – the very opposition which gives rise to the peculiarities of human desire).

Paul then calls this the “enmity of the flesh,” but of course inasmuch as Christ is going to destroy this enmity in his own flesh, the problem is not the flesh per se but the semantic load invested in the flesh. Paul describes this semantics of the flesh in connection to conforming to the world; a conformity in which death reigns, and which is controlled by the “prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). He also speaks of a lust of the flesh, which he seems to connect to a spirit mind duality (Eph. 2:1-3). There is an antagonism, a sacrificial economy, that in both Walter Wink’s and Rene Girard’s description, predominates in human culture and religion. We can read Christianity as either fitting into and as a support of this sacrificial economy (divine satisfaction or penal substitution, or the oppression of women, or the “domination system”) or we can read it as disrupting this economy and order.

This principle or power (as Paul also refers to the same force) may be what Wink calls the domination system or the system of redemptive violence. As Slavoj Žižek describes it, redemptive violence is inscribed deep within the human psyche. The original sacrificial relation is established within the Subject (with passage through the mirror stage) between the imaginary (the ego or “I”) and the symbolic (the superego) which establishes the alienated distance from the real of the body. The passage is from being a body to establishing a symbolic distance from the body (and having a body): “The body exists in the order of having – I am not my body, I have it” (Organs without Bodies, 121). Self-consciousness arises simultaneously with the realization and refusal of the body and its mortal contingencies (sexuality/castration) so that the Subject arises over and against the real of the body. The symbolic or the soul “has to be paid for by the death, murder even, of its empirical bearer” (The Žižek Reader, vii). Žižek, following Paul, describes the process as giving rise to two bodies. That body which one might think can be reduced to the biological dimension is refused: the “subject turns away from her biological body in disgust, unable to accept that she ‘is’ her body” (Organs without Bodies, 93). Since “the body refuses to obey the soul and starts to speak on its own, in the symptoms in which the subject’s soul cannot recognize itself” she rejects the body (Organs without Bodies, 93). But this body that is rejected cannot be equated with the biological body as the body has already been overlaid with the symbolic “forcefully distorting its normal functioning” (Organs without Bodies, 93). So, there is the biological body and this second body: “The body that is the proper object of psychoanalysis, the body as the inconsistent composite of erogenous zones, the body as the surface of the inscription of the traces of traumas and excessive enjoyments, the body through which the unconscious speaks” (Organs without Bodies, 93). It is this second body, and not the physical or biological body per se, which the Subject struggles against and which makes up unconscious experience constituting desire. The biological body with its biological interests (wellbeing, survival, reproduction) is not at the center of the human Subject but the true “interior” is this second body.

When “we penetrate the subject’s innermost sanctum, the very core of its Unconscious, what we find there is the pure surface of a fantasmatic screen” (Organs without Bodies, 93). Žižek describes the rise of this screen of the fundamental fantasy as an attempt to “outpass myself into death” (Tarrying with the Negative, 76). One hastens to assume death in the form of the letter or symbolic (“potentially my epitaph”) in order to avoid it (Tarrying with the Negative, 76). The dead are immortal in that they are no longer subject to dying, so identity through the dead letter achieves an enduring (immortal) identity.

As we see further on (in chapter 2 of Ephesians) Christ is going to resolve the various antagonisms of the flesh in his flesh, or as chapter 1 concludes through his body. The unity of the body is achieved in the incarnation (it is precisely our tendency toward a disincarnate dualism that is overcome). Paul describes a present tense resolution through Christ’s resurrection and ascension and the Christian participation in the same (Eph 2:5–6). Death is marked by the division within the body, but Christ overcomes this division, as can those “in Christ” – in and through the body of Christ.

Though he does not use the word flesh in his description of “works,” Paul is clearly talking of the flesh. Circumcised or uncircumcised, or keeping the works of the law, is a matter of maintaining the signs in the flesh of Jewish ethnicity, the most important of which is circumcision. Where we are caught up in the law, in the symbol system, of being Jew or Gentile, or taking on the identities of the flesh that depend upon division, love is incapacitated (precisely the “work” for which we were made and toward which Paul is aiming).

Giorgio Agamben and Žižek both provide a picture from Romans 7, which explains how law can potentially create an obstacle to love. In Paul’s illustration (in 7:1-3), Paul describes a masculine orientation to the law with the husband of the woman representing the law. The woman that has a husband is bound by law to the husband. The woman’s relationship to her husband is the prototypical social obligation, marriage being the foundation of the family and of society, but it is also the prototypical love relationship. The problem occurs when these two are pitted against one another; when “social life appears to me as dominated by an externally imposed Law in which I am unable to recognize myself … precisely insofar as I continue to cling to the immediacy of love that feels threatened by the rule of Law” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 117). The law can only be said to “bind” when desire is in some way curtailed by the law. Love, understood as synonymous to this sort of desire, an element deep within the self which only refers to the self, can only experience the regulation of law as an imposition on the true nature of the self. The woman whose husband is alive, but who has fallen in love with another man, experiences the law as that which opposes her love. In fact, her love (her enjoyment or jouissance – evil desire) is here synonymous with sin (The Monstrosity of Christ, 273). Her notion that she is loved by her consort is, in turn, to imagine that deep within her is “some precious treasure that can only be loved, and cannot be submitted to the rule of Law” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 117).

In Žižek’s logic of the exception (masculine sexuation), her “love” is a symptom of the prohibition and the prohibition has its force only in the exception. The exception, in Žižek’s view, could be seen as creating the rule. As in Kafka’s short story The Trial, Josef K. discovers that the elaborate system of the law which bars him from entering a certain door is actually built by himself for himself (Reader, 45). The law is a construct erected by and for those who stand outside of it. If the woman in Paul’s illustration were to love her husband and not consort with other men, and if this were the universal case, the law would “disintegrate.” The law functions in this sense like a psychoanalytic symptom: “A symptom … is an element that … must remain an exception, that is, the point of suspension of the universal principle: if the universal principle were to apply also to this point, the universal system itself would disintegrate” (The Universal Exception, 171). The woman, as the one who is subject to the law, represents an orientation of inherent transgression: “The subject is actually ‘in’ (caught in the web of) power only and precisely in so far as he does not fully identify with it but maintains a kind of distance towards it” (The Fragile Absolute, 148). The dynamic of sin is an identity caught up in a web which tightens its grip the more it is resisted. In Žižek’s description of the couplet law/sin, the law is a transcendent “foreign” force that serves to oppress what is perceived as the love relationship (The Monstrosity of Christ, 271). The law becomes an obstacle to be overcome in order for love to be possible.

Žižek’s point is that this sort of love is not agape love but rather a form of love or enjoyment (jouissance) in which the obstacle constitutes the (lost) love. The woman’s living husband is a necessary part of this sort of consorting, as he is the obstacle that makes the sexual relationship with the “other.” This construct is synonymous with sin: “‘Sin’ is the very intimate resistant core on account of which the subject experiences its relationship to the Law as one of subjection, it is that on account of which the Law has to appear to the subject as a foreign power crushing the subject” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 271). The Subject is attached to a “pathological agalma deep within itself” and it is attachment to this supposed exception or remainder that gives the law the specter of an oppressive foreign force (The Monstrosity of Christ, 271). There is a resistant core, a holdout or remainder on the part of the Subject: “The notion that there is deep inside it some precious treasure which can only be loved and cannot be submitted to the rule of Law” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 271). The deception or illusion that sin works is to construe the law as a closure of identity which by its very nature – its absoluteness – excludes love. Sin mediates the law as a power over and against love.

It is from the seeming failure of interpellation or the failure of universality to account for the exception that the totalizing symbolic takes hold. From one perspective it can be said “that the subject never fully recognizes itself in the interpolative call … and this resistance to interpellation (to the symbolic identity provided by interpellation) is the subject” (The Indivisible Remainder, 165). The woman consorting with her lover only understands herself over and against the law, while she may imagine her relationship to her lover in some way pre-exists her relationship to the law. “Is not this hysterical distance towards interpellation … the very form of ideological misrecognition? Is not this apparent failure of interpellation … the ultimate proof of its success … that is to say, of the fact that the ‘effect-of-subject’ really took place” (The Indivisible Remainder, 166)? Ideological interpellation, from the Subject’s perspective, might appear to be relieved or in some way mitigated if the Subject simply maintains a cynical distance towards the interpolating power. The woman in Paul’s illustration might say to herself, “I know the law says not to consort, but the law does not account for my true self.” “Hegel’s Beautiful Soul maintains a cynical, passive distance towards power, but this is precisely the power of interpellation doing its work” (Reader, 229–30).

We are made for good works, and this is love, a love that is not available through a misorientation to law. Paul assures us these works are not of the ethnic kind and not works that are foundational: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (2:10) – this is the foundation.

The Gentiles and Jews have a flesh problem (Eph. 2:11-13): near and far, inside and outside, excluded and included, citizens or aliens. Christ has undone the gauge of distance, and of inclusion and exclusion. He has suspended (καταργέω) the effect of the misorientation to the law. If body (sῶma) is the Subject with the qualifiers of death and sin (“the body of sin and death” according to Paul) describing the orientation to the law, to crucify the body of sin so that it is suspended or brought to nothing (καταργέω) describes the profound reorientation brought about by participation in the body of Christ.

Christ has suspended this problem of the flesh:

“For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing (καταργήσας) in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace” (Eph. 2:14-15).

We can specify what Christ has done and how he has done it. In Wink’s terms, Christ has abolished notions of redemptive violence and he has defeated the domination system. There is an undoing of the violence of the law which has been coopted by sin and domination. This law plays out in nearly every realm of psychological and social life.

Relief is brought from the domination system of the family:

I believe Jesus was so consistently disparaging because the family in dominator societies is so deeply embedded in patriarchy, and serves as the citadel of male supremacy, the chief inculcator of gender roles, and a major inhibitor of change. It is in families where most women and children are battered and abused, and where the majority of women are murdered. In a great many cultures, men are endowed with the inalienable right to beat, rape, and verbally abuse their wives. The patriarchal family is thus the foundation on which the larger units of patriarchal dominance are based.[1]

There is an undoing of Jewish purity laws and the markers of inside and outside:

Table fellowship with sinners was a central feature of Jesus’ ministry. These sinners, notes New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, had been placed, or had placed themselves, outside the holiness code of Israel as it was being interpreted by certain circles in first-century Palestine. To include such outcasts in the realm of God was to reject the views of those who valued separation from the uncleanness of the world. Jesus’ table fellowship with social outcasts was a living parable of the dawning age of forgiveness.[2]

The gender divide is defeated, as male and female are no longer a mode of securing identity:

Respectable Jewish men were not to speak to women in public; Jesus freely conversed with women. A woman was to touch no man but her spouse; Jesus was touched by women, and touched them. Once, a prostitute burst into an all-male banquet, knelt at Jesus’ outstretched feet, and began to kiss them, washing them with tears of remorse and relief, wiping them with her hair and anointing them with oil. Despite the shocked disapproval of the other men, Jesus accepted her gift and its meaning and took her side, even though she had technically rendered him unclean and had scandalized the guests (Luke 7: 36– 50).[3]

Jesus’ system, the ontology or ground of his work, is one of peace and nonviolence:

Jesus rejects violence. When his disciples request permission to call down fire from heaven on inhospitable Samaritans, Jesus rebukes them (Luke 9: 51– 56). Instead of praising the disciple who, in an attempt to save Jesus from arrest, cuts off the ear of the high priest’s slave, Jesus reacts: “No more of this!” (Luke 22: 51)— an injunction the church took literally for the next three centuries. According to Matthew, Jesus says, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matt. 26: 52).[4]

In place of a system of division, hierarchy, and domination, a system of equity prevails, beginning with a different economy:

The gospel of Jesus is founded on economic equity, because economic inequities are the basis of domination. Ranking, status, and classism are largely built on power provided by accumulated wealth. Breaking with domination means ending the economic exploitation of the many by the few. Since the powerful are not likely to abdicate their wealth, the poor must find ways to overcome the Domination Epoch from within.[5]

In short there is an ending of the domination system:

The words and deeds of Jesus reveal that he is not a minor reformer but an egalitarian prophet who repudiated the very premises of the Domination System: the right of some to lord it over others by means of power, wealth, shaming, or titles. In his beatitudes, his healings, and his table fellowship with outcasts and sinners, Jesus declared God’s special concern for the oppressed.[6]

The real world defeat of the violence of the flesh inscribed with the law is accomplished in the suspension of this violent “ontology” and economy in the unifying peace of the body of Christ – this is the work for which the body was made.

[1] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (p. 76). Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.

[2] Wink, 73-74).

[3] Wink, 69-70.

[4] Wink, 68

[5] Wink, 66.

[6] Wink, 65.

The Gospel of John Lewis Versus the Gospel of Trump and Barr

As John Lewis lay in state, steps away Attorney General William Barr defended the aggressive treatment of protestors by federal law enforcement officers. The accusation of the judiciary committee, before which Barr was defending himself, is that he and Trump are acting unconstitutionally in suppressing protests and fomenting their own violence. It is not at all clear that in the world of Barr there is room for peaceful protest (he seemed to equate protest with violence) of the kind which Lewis spent his life leveraging to expose injustice. Barr claimed the force used against peaceful protesters (he acknowledged some were peaceful but nonetheless deserving of violent suppression), using pepper spray and clubbing protestors, was warranted. The methods of the civil rights icon and the methods of the President and Attorney General are of two different worlds. The way the New Testament characterizes these two worlds is through the two logics on display in the Capital: in one world we must do evil that good may come (peace is obtained through violence), and in the other the end and the means are tied together.

Lewis taught that the means of violence and peace will bring about their own end. The means of violence fosters violence and the means of peace fosters peace. According to this understanding, the turn to violent protest and violent suppression of protest dilutes the message of peaceful protest – and this may be the goal of some. Extremists on the right or the left (or perhaps both) may have reasons to foment violence, and it may be that the Attorney General and President would prefer undiluted violence. The goal, as is evident in their method, is not peace. As Lewis maintained, there is one “immutable principle that you cannot deviate from. If you want to have a good end, your means must be good and noble. Somehow, some way, the end must be caught up in the means.”

This most obvious principle may be the least noticed and least practiced tenet of the gospel. The way of the world, the necessary logic which orders politics, nations, and individuals, is the presumption that peace can only be obtained by war, that violence can only be halted with more extreme violence, and that force must be meant with more force. This, let us do evil so as to achieve a good end, is the counter-gospel. The method of Trump and Barr is the message of the world and the message of history. In this understanding, if the enemy bombs civilians than we will drop bigger and better bombs on civilian populations. If the enemy resorts to cruel torture we will duplicate and exceed this torture. The federal agents escalating the violence on the streets are following the logic of their masters and their forebears. It is this logic that set state troopers to clubbing and bloodying Lewis on the Edmund Pettus bridge. It is this logic by which we arrive at the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the firebombing of Dresden, and the destruction of civilian populations – even by those who had only a few short years before forsworn such action.

The one thing world history should teach but the lesson it cannot get across, is the message of John Lewis: war does not end war and violence does not stop violence. What is most obvious is that violence begets violence and is most dangerous when it seems to succeed, as it becomes the lure to imitation. The way in which we have arrived at mutually assured destruction, the way which would club down the John Lewises of the world, is the way of world destruction. The truth of Lewis is the living exposure of the contradiction toward which history has been moving. Barr is part of a long history in his escalation of violence. It is this logic in which we are grounded personally and corporately by dint of being enculturated into this world. The dominant force in the world, religious and personal, is not that which animated the life of John Lewis, but the opposite: violence and evil are the way to peace and goodness.

In this world human beings are thought to be incapable of peaceful coexistence. Order must be violently imposed: men over women, masters over slaves, priests over laity, the elite over commoners, rulers over people, and the police over citizens. It is necessary to dominate (“We must dominate the streets,” according to Trump) as to do anything less is weakness. The powers of state, of religion, of logic, call for dominance and unquestioning acquiescence. To cause trouble is by definition bad trouble, as the highest virtue, the supreme religious value, is obedience to the dominance of the powers. In this world, there is no such thing as Lewis’s “good trouble.” We are trained not to resist, not to challenge, as the dominating system is thought to be God’s system. We are not to exercise dominion but we are called to serve it, die for it, sacrifice our sons and daughters for it. In serving the dominating system, after all, don’t we serve God and his earthly representatives? Where violence is the norm, in the words of Walter Wink, “The tasks of humanity are to till the soil, to produce foods for sacrifice to the gods (represented by the king and the priestly caste), to build the sacred city Babylon, and to fight and, if necessary, die in the king’s wars.”[1] Where the President is God’s chosen representative, in the characterization of Barr, there is no other legitimate or legal force. Peaceful protest against the powers is an oxymoron in this world.

This singular world of legal violence is not new, as the myth of redemptive violence constitutes the oldest form of religion and is the organizing principle, according to René Girard, of human society. For example, in the Babylonian creation myth violence is the primordial condition from which life arises. The god, Marduk, murders and dismembers Tiamat, and from her cadaver creates the world. Order arises from a primordial disorder and chaos. Evil precedes the good and the gods themselves are violent. This basic structure is shared by the myths of Syria, Phoenicia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, Ireland, India, Japan, and China. Girard maintains that the violence of the myth, whether hidden or obvious, is what generates the mythic form and it constitutes the violent organization of society. As Wink describes it, “Typically, a male war god residing in the sky— Wotan, Zeus, or Indra, for example— fights a decisive battle with a female divine being, usually depicted as a monster or dragon, residing in the sea or abyss (the feminine element).” Once the enemy is vanquished by war and murder, the victor fashions a cosmos from the monster’s corpse. In Japan (a myth with which I became acquainted partly because I lived at the base of the Mountain where the gods descended) the various gods are formed from the body parts of Izanagi while Izanami was shut up in to the place of the dead. As Wink notes, “Cosmic order requires the violent suppression of the feminine, and is mirrored in the social order by the subjection of women to men and people to ruler.”[2] Girard’s point is that myth, or the very structure of religion, is framed around the notion of redemptive violence and murder. The murder mythologized channels violence and organizes society around sacrifice and oppression. The murdered scapegoat becomes the redeeming mythological deity, making all things possible (warding off the chaos of violence and its various representations).

This tendency toward murderous myth indicates the deep psychological ties to the necessity of violence. It constitutes religion because it is already the substance in which we seem to live and move and have our being. It is the personal necessity, Paul describes, in which we experience our own ego. We are continually subject to an agonistic struggle apart from which we cannot imagine our own existence. We are set over and against ourselves, doing what we would not and incapable of doing what we would, and this reality seems to define us. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, to resolve the conflict would be to destroy personhood, as we are born and have our being in chaos and conflict. The myth and logic of redemptive violence, the world of Barr and Trump, speaks with the voice of God and cannot possibly recognize a prophet, such as Lewis. The deep grammar of deploying evil and violence to gain peace finds the message of peace incomprehensible and totally impractical.

Christianity, rightly realized, is the counter to the world constituted by violence and the logic of doing evil to gain the good. Once violence is identified as the force which would rule and destroy us, biblical redemption can be read as the counter to this all-pervasive dominating force. Beginning with an alternative creation, not by means of chaos but the good ordering the chaos, the anti-myth of Genesis can be read as a direct rebuttal and counter to Babylonian myth and all creation myths. Rather than a primordial chaos and violence, the Bible portrays a good God who creates from an original peace and goodness (he is the good and peaceful origin). God pronounces creation good and this goodness reigns prior to the existence of evil, murder, and violence. Violence is not the means to something else in Genesis but is a product of the Fall and is posed as the primary problem.

The culmination of the gospel, like the powers that presently divide this country, pits the religion, the law, the powers, of the world against the religion of Jesus. The war that is still being waged is between those who put Jesus on the cross in the name of power and religion (“to save the nation, for the greater good, our religion requires it”) and those willing to take up crosses (to counter the religion and powers of the day). It was the equivalent of the president and the attorney general, not rabble rousers, not protesters, but the religious and political powers, who put Jesus on the cross. What we can now perceive, because of Christ, is that the violence done to Jesus follows the age-old rule of redemptive violence. This violence has always been an attack on God, which would displace him with the god of violence. The peace of the gospel is the counteraction of God, in which the war on God is exposed and is being defeated, through the cross and its warriors.

It is this reality which Lewis’s principle puts into play. Paul describes the enactment of peace, truth, and righteousness, as their own weapons their own means and end. The armor of God (Eph. 6:10-20) does not consist of secondary means or material: truth, righteousness, and peace, are their own armor. The movement called “salvation” is the deployment of weapons of nonviolence which constitute the word of God. These are not simply defensive weapons but are part of the offense against the lie, the unrighteousness, the way of violence which Paul describes in Romans 3. In this world, understanding is obscured as all have given themselves over to the lie of violence. The organs of speech deal in death: throats are graves, tongues deceive, and lips spew poison, and this culminates in the shedding of blood and mutually assured destruction (Ro. 3:10-18). Paul sums up this deadly logic as the perversity of doing evil for the good (Ro. 3:8), establishing the law through sin (Ro. 7:1), and committing transgressions to gain grace (Ro. 6:1). Where the undergirding logic, the feet or the moving force of this way, is bloodshed, Paul describes the gospel of peace as its own moving force (an inherent “readiness”). Only peace can counter the contagion and logic that has gripped the world and only peace brings together means and end. It is not by evil that good shall come but the means to the good – peace, righteousness, truth – foster the end through the means.

[1] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (47). Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.

[2] Wink, 45-46.

The “Good Trouble” of John Lewis and Jesus

“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation, a mission and a mandate, to stand up, to speak up and speak out, and get in the way, get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”
John Lewis

In seeking to cause “good trouble” John Lewis (the civil rights activist and one of the last surviving members of Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle) deployed Christ-like challenges to evil. He understood that the Gospel does not teach non-resistance to evil, though this is often the interpretation given to Jesus’ words (in Matt. 5:38-41), in spite of the fact that everything about Christ is resistance to evil. What we have in the life of Lewis is the embodiment of Jesus’ mode of “nonviolent resistance” (the correct translation – and in accord with Paul’s direct command in Ephesians to resist evil). In this verse Christ provides the sort of examples Lewis would employ in his 40 odd arrests and in being nearly beaten to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

As Walter Wink notes, each of Jesus’ three examples is a specific mode of exposing the underside of an unjust law or an evil situation. In the first, “By turning the cheek, the servant makes it impossible for the master to use the backhand again: his nose is in the way.” The shame and degradation are absorbed and overcome by the unyielding servant standing firm. “The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow with the right fist; but only equals fought with fists . . . and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underling’s equality.” This is no passive acceptance but a form of defiance which renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance.[1] Or in Paul’s description, here is one standing firm and resisting evil, not through violence, but through the armor of nonviolence. Paul explains, if one takes up this full armor of God, they will be able to resist evil (Eph 6:13).

The master could do what the police did to the civil rights marchers (beat the slave), but the violence is itself a defeat (the slave is not cowed and the marchers cause is proved just). The violence done to the civil rights marchers exposed to the world the inherent racism of this legal violence. Troopers swinging clubs and throwing tear gas canisters, charged the marchers and ran them over as they broke bones and cracked skulls, Lewis’s among them. Yet, less than ten days later, and after the world witnessed the horrific lengths racists would go to, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. The Act banned the use of literacy tests and poll taxes – the goal of the protest.

The nonviolent movement for civil rights, like the nonviolent movement of Mahatma Gandhi, discovered the form of resistance inherent in going the second mile, turning the other cheek, giving both cloak and undergarment, and culminating in taking up the cross. If a creditor takes a poor man to court over an unpaid loan, he had the right to take his outer robe as collateral (Deuteronomy 24:10-13). Jesus is not suggesting people should simply confound their problem in offering the undergarment as well; rather he is suggesting that the injustice of being stripped naked exposes the inherent injustice of the situation. Here is the legal equivalent of letting the blow land and turning the other cheek. “He is telling impoverished debtors, who have nothing left but the clothes on their backs, to use the system against itself.” Exorbitant interest on loans (25 to 250 percent), and high taxation levied by Herod Antipas, was being used by the powerful to dispossess Galilean peasants of their land. Jesus counsels them to give over their undergarments as this would mean being left naked in court. Nakedness was taboo in Judaism, and shame fell primarily on the person viewing or causing the nakedness (Gen. 9: 20–27). By stripping, the debtor exposes the injustice of the situation and brings shame on the creditor.[2]

So too, the civil rights marchers who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, forced the authorities to decide between allowing the blacks to march and thus acknowledging the legitimacy of their protest; or they could violently stop it, thus exposing their own race hatred to all the world. The equivalent of turning the other cheek and allowing them to expose their helplessness or the equivalent of being stripped naked of their rights, simultaneously exposed the ugly underside of those who covered themselves with the law. Far from the usual interpretation, that Christians do not use the law to their advantage, this reading accords with Paul’s use of his Roman citizenship to extract an apology from city officials, or Christ’s exposure of the perverseness of the law on the cross. There is a way of “suspending the law” (in Paul’s description of the work of Christ) and exposing its perverse underside. There is an excess to the law that brings about sin, but this is at once a personal and corporate predicament, exposed and relieved by the love of Christ.

Lewis devoted his life to exposing the perverse underside of racist laws by deploying both Christ’s nonviolent resistance and love, with the aim of creating what he called the “Beloved Community.” This sort of challenge to evil is not for the faint of heart or cowardly. As Gandhi pointed out, it is easy enough to make a violent person nonviolent but it is impossible to teach a coward nonviolent resistance. Perhaps one of Lewis’s greatest acts though, and one that confirmed the effectiveness of his love of enemies (he cautioned against becoming hostile or bitter toward enemies) was his acceptance of repentance and granting of forgiveness to a former Klansmen.

In 1961, Lewis as part of the Freedom Riders, entered the white waiting area in the Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina, to protest segregation. Elwin Wilson was one of a group of white men who beat Lewis upon this infraction. Lewis did not fight back and declined to press charges. According to Wilson, “What happened was, after he was beat and bloody and all, the policeman came up and asked him, he said, ‘Do y’all want to take out warrants? [Press charges].'” “He said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘We’re not here to cause trouble.’ He said, ‘We’re here for people to love each other.'” Wilson would never forget the statement and he would eventually discover the man he had beaten had become a congressman and he would seek him out to ask for forgiveness. Years later, Lewis and Wilson appeared together in an interview with Oprah, and in the still of the interview Lewis has his hand gently resting on Wilson’s.

Perhaps this is an instance of Jesus example of going the second mile. Any bystander could be pressed into service, with the only limitation being one of distance. Carrying the pack or burden a second mile was an infraction of Roman military code and the offending soldier could be flogged, receive reduced rations, forced to camp outside the fortifications, or forced to stand all day before the general’s tent clutching a clod of earth. The oppressor has opened himself to punishment should the civilian file a complaint. The very possibility means that the one oppressed by the law has turned the tables, not to oppress in turn, though Lewis or the anonymous citizen could act vindictively. But in Jesus command and in Lewis’s example, love is the final arbiter. Love is not averse to turning round the oppressive momentum, but not for revenge but to create the mutual recognition of humanity (perhaps fostering uncertainty and anxiety in the oppressor) and creating the possibility for repentance.[3]

The great dignity and love of John Lewis demonstrate that nonviolent resistance works toward justice through a heart overflowing with love – up to and including love of enemy. This is a hard love and is in no way otherworldly or impractical. As Wink concludes, Jesus is not giving a nonpolitical message of spiritual transcendence. His is a worldly spirituality in which the people at the bottom of society or under the thumb of power learn to recover their humanity through nonviolent resistance.[4]

John Lewis devoted a lifetime to demonstrating and modeling the power of nonviolent resistance to defeat evil. In his own words, which indicate his legacy, “The irony is that a bridge named after a man who inflamed racial hatred (Pettus was a Confederate brigadier general and leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan) is now known worldwide as a symbol of equality and justice. It is biblical—what was meant for evil, God used for good.” Lewis’s deployment of Christ’s nonviolent resistance insured he could be so used for God’s good purposes.

[1] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be, 102. Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.

[2] Wink, 104.

[3] Wink, 108.

[4] Wink, 108.

Exposing the “Powers”: Japan, Germany, and the United or Confederate States

I have long wanted to write a fact-based novel portraying what Walter Wink calls the “powers.”[1] The “powers” refers to the spirit or personality of a country or group of people which is larger than the sum total of its parts. The peculiar “spirit” or power I have encountered in both Japan and the United States is remarkable in its capacity to shape and blind people to their history (e.g. war crimes, the enslavement of other peoples) and as a result of this blindness to continue to oppress (and, of course, I am thinking of the present moment in this country in which the blindness to racism is being made evident).

Japanese citizens resemble those in post war Germany, in counting themselves the primary victims of their military and governmental leaders during World War II. Very few admit to any sort of guilt on the part of the Emperor, their own family, or within themselves. Though Germany also experienced this victim mentality, counting themselves the ultimate and worst victims of the war and portraying a blindness to the near universal support of Hitler, the philosopher, Susan Neiman, describes how Germans, over a period of decades, have confronted their past through memorials, official acts of remembrance, and reparations.[2] Otherwise Germans might see themselves as victims, on the order of Southerners who continue to imagine the lost cause of the Confederacy was just and heroic.

Even slight acquaintance with the history of the Confederate States dispels the pervasive narrative that the Civil War was about States’ Rights. The point of secession was, according to the Confederacy’s Vice President, Alexander Stephens, to correct the United States Constitution: “The Constitution… rested upon the equality of races. This was an error. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Stephens deploys biblical language, referring to Christ, to describe slavery as the cornerstone of Southern States: “This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner’—the real ‘corner-stone’—in our new edifice.” The reason for secession and the resulting war was to establish “a new government . . . upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” The Christian language deployed lends the strongest of terms to the religious-like commitment to slavery, which stood at the heart of the Confederacy.

Perhaps we would also witness defense of Nazi statuary and Nazi memorials, rather than holocaust memorials, if it weren’t for the particular history in East and West Germany which required the deconstruction of German history. Neiman traces the efforts of clergy, the publication of memoirs of survivors, the production of films and books, and the pressure of various government officials in efforts to change the narrative of “Germans as victims.” A growing self-awareness and broad German acknowledgment of complicity in the rise of Hitler has required a decades long struggle.

This self-awareness or any acknowledgement of corporate guilt is mostly missing in Japan, a blindness which is also intimately connected to the dominance of right-wing politics and attitudes in educational institutions and in the culture as a whole. The Japanese equivalent of Nazi memorials or Confederate statues is the Yasukuni Shrine commemorating Hideki Tojo (the wartime prime minister) and 13 other war criminals (along with millions of war dead) as Japanese deities. Nearly every government, since the end of the war, has worshipped at this shrine, marking the right leaning nationalism of post-war Japan. These same governments have continued to cover up war crimes, and have resisted text book entries which include “aggression in” China (it was, government representatives insist, an “advance”) and have instead focused on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[3] While we were in Japan the Ministry of Education mandated the singing of the Kimigayo (the national anthem indicating the deity of the Emperor) before the Hinomaru (the national flag) at graduation and entrance ceremonies (which fits with right wing goals and a nationalist slant on Japanese history). State powers are at work in institutions, in corporate culture, often marked by peculiar cruelties in schools and in the workplace. The point being that personal attitudes, corporate attitudes, and the political reality of the country, are all quite interconnected and traceable in people’s daily lives.

In my would be historical fictional portrayal of my real experience of a small town, a psychoanalytic researcher is dispatched to Hartdale, Texas to diagnose how an entire community has become subject to a mysterious malign force. The specific phenomena developed in the research pertains to “research on violence and identity as a corporate and learned process.” What our intrepid researcher discovers, is that while the community imagines itself built on the redemptive act destroying the Bloody Benders (this part of the story is true – the Benders and their demise), this final act of violence, the very act related to the establishment of Hartdale, had a corporate and individual impact. The violence that “saved” Hartdale and the myths that surround this violence turns out to have slowly impacted the lives of many its citizens.

The point of this book that will never be written is that, given the right tools, I believe the story could be told of how the corporate personalities, the schools, the churches, the communities, in which we have our life can also be exposed in the ways they would destroy life. There is a hidden center, an idolatrous violence, which corruptly organizes the powers. This is most obvious among the “possessed,” those suffering PTSD, or those who commit acts of violence, as those subjected to violence and oppression bear traceable marks of their trauma. Lonnie Athens, in his doctoral studies, interviewed hundreds of violent criminals to arrive at a pattern which he calls “violentization.” He discovered that those who commit the worst forms of violence have themselves been exposed to consistent and predictable levels of violence as children. Would this not hold true for corporate personalities or to what Paul refers to as the principalities and powers, or those corporate personalities of states, towns, and smaller groups of people? They must bear a peculiar history that explains how they may have gone bad or become either good or demonic.

In Japan, religion is at stake in the worship at Yasukuni Shrine and in the peculiar religious nationalism surrounding the Hinomaru and Kimigayo. In Germany, it was clearly something on the order of a religious blindness that refused corporate acceptance of national complicity in the rise of National Socialism. In my real-fictional Hartdale it becomes possible to trace the genealogy of violence in a community founded on originary violence in individual lives. We want and perhaps require heroic ancestors, a heroic nation, or a heroic history. At the very least, we would see ourselves as victims of violence, rather than its perpetrators. Confrontation with this lie we would tell ourselves about our identity must be the essential part of what Paul describes as the exposure and witness to the principalities and powers.

The debate over Confederate statues and the Confederate flag concerns founding myths and how we order our lives and it raises the question of whether that history will be confronted and exposed or whether it will continue to support an ethos of violence and oppression.

[1] C.S. Lewis’ novel, That Hideous Strength, may be the sort of work I am thinking of but in my story the spiritual and fantastic would be replaced by more ordinary developments (which probably would not make for a very good novel).

[2] Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, See https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-confront-a-racist-national-history

[3] Through the life-long efforts of Saburo Ienaga the most widely used Japanese textbooks in the mid- and late-1990s contained references to the Nanjing Massacre, anti-Japanese resistance movements in Korea, forced suicide in Okinawa, comfort women, and Unit 731 (responsible for conducting medical experiments on prisoners of war)—all issues raised in Ienaga’s suits.