On 22nd August the RCL readings include Ephesians 6, the ‘armour of God’. CSBV research associate Peter King reflects on the challenges this presents.

August 22 – Ephesians 6: 10 – 20. RCL Year B

I have to admit that I have problems with Paul’s call to put on the “whole armour of God”.  Even when concerned colleagues have tried to tell me that the armour Paul describes is essentially defensive, not offensive, I am uneasy with being described as a soldier for Christ.

I’m sure I am not alone in this, and it may be that it is time to acknowledge it more widely and to enable people in our congregations to be honest about their unease with the military imagery both in the Bible and in our hymns and prayers.

The problem becomes more acute as churches become increasingly aware of the importance of Justice & Peace issues, working and praying for peace, yet at the same time using very different language in their hymns and prayers and readings.   Does it make sense to work for peace and to see ourselves as peacemakers, whilst at the same time using the language of warfare ?   Maybe it does, but I am not convinced.

Another reason we might start asking questions about such language is suggested by this comment from a blog post discussing militaristic language in worship:

Taking a very high view of the formative power of worship and singing … both for the individual and for the congregation, is it acceptable to have violent imagery in songs of praise and worship ?  It strikes me as odd to protect [children] from being influenced by violent imagery at home, only for the imagery to come in church !!

Once we have become aware that Samson might be seen today as a suicide bomber, how do we feel about him as a Sunday School hero, his story presented to children alongside other heroes of the Old Testament ?

Furthermore, how many of those who are concerned about the Bible’s violence fail to notice the explicit or implicit violence in our hymns ?   Yet, as Brian McLaren observes:

The combined imagery of the songs we sing creates a kind of inner construct or lens through which we see the world. If the background music and imagery of our lives is predominantly hostile, fearful, aggressive, or dominating, if it sends us into the world primarily as warriors, then we will find ourselves encountering the world, including other people, in a certain way.

Is this the way we want to encounter the world ?  

What we sing in church matters, and even more so if it is true that we internalise and remember what we sing far more profoundly than what we say or hear.

In his 2005 article Peace and War in Hymns David Wright suggests ten reasons to stop using military language in hymns.   The ten reasons are well worth reading and reflecting on, as is the whole article.  Wright is writing in 2005 and he observes that there has been no real conversation about violent hymnody, even in the aftermath of 9/11, and over fifteen years on it seems we are still waiting to have that conversation.   Perhaps now would be a good time to start it.

Faced with these questions, coming from others if not from ourselves, what does a peacemaking church do with all the imagery in our tradition which seeks to describe us as soldiers for Christ and the Christian life as a battle ?

File:Human Peace Sign (2008).jpg
Image: creative commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_Peace_Sign_(2008).jpg

So how might we start a conversation in our congregations ?

Firstly, I would suggest we acknowledge that there is a problem with these images.  However harmless and right they may seem for some, for others they contradict our core beliefs about what it means to be followers of Christ. 

Secondly, I would suggest we look at the hymns and prayers we use week by week and ask ourselves what picture of God they are presenting, and whether that picture is one which we would wish to identify with ourselves and communicate to others.  It is very easy to take certain words and images for granted, so much so that we actually don’t consciously realise exactly what we are saying and singing week by week.

Thirdly, I would suggest that we reflect on the ways in which we are all formed by the words of our worship services: how the stories, liturgies and hymns of our tradition have formed us through the years, and how in turn they might form – or deform – others. 

Interviewed about his peacemaking rewrite of the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” a few years ago, Brian McLaren observed:

When I am in a congregation that sings songs like these — songs that consciously or subconsciously play into hostility and fear and imperial or warlike sentiments — I feel that we are flirting with dark and dangerous currents that are very unsacred.

However:


Keith Petit: The Watcher (Photo by Peter King) – attached

… if we get more and more worship teams making policy decisions to stop using dangerous warfare language and to stop avoiding the essential Christian discipleship theme of peacemaking … and then if we help congregations sing powerful songs that celebrate this and other important themes, then five, 10 and 50 years from now, a cumulative impact will build.

To return to the language of Ephesians 6.  Writing about “Violence & Ethics in Revelation” (Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 73:4, pp. 777 – 796), but in words which could equally well apply to our text here,  Susan E Hylen suggests that

what seems dangerous about the metaphor of [the] sword is how it may shape and constrain the imagination. … in employing these metaphors [the writer] invites the reader to imagine the world in a particular way.  He asks the reader to envision spiritual advancement as a battlefield – and to reason in these terms.

In most congregations I suspect there will be a diversity of views on these questions, but this is no reason to avoid the issue.   This week’s New Testament Reading offers us a way into a conversation.  So, what does a peacemaking church do with the armour of God ?

What does a peacemaking church do with the armour of God ?
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8 thoughts on “What does a peacemaking church do with the armour of God ?

  • 18th August 2021 at 3:37 pm
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    Simply stated, those of us lay people who inhabit church sanctuaries week and in and week out need much more meat, not more of the same pablum. We need to be effectively taught how to rightly understand the violence in the Old Testament as well as the judgment passages in the New Testament. We must learn how to properly interpret all this in light of Jesus Christ who we profess to be love incarnate. We need to be theologically challenged as well as encouraged to also do our own scholastic homework. At face value the biblical narrative is a violent one. It contains horrible ugliness and fiery judgment. After we get through the beginning chapters of Genesis, it seems nothing more than a story of people failing and God violently judging through actions in history. Even the solution, Christ crucified, is not beyond the scope of violent narrative. Even the beauty of Revelation 22 might arguably be overshadowed by all the violence contained in that particular book. Even if we interpret Revelation, for example, in light of Jewish apocalyptic literary genre and symbolism; even if it´s pagan Rome and the satan being judged at the end and not primarily individuals, it´s still all very violent. We simply cannot get around all this.

    A biblical scholar recently said to me that we need to start warming up to the fact that God judges and often does so violently through acts in history. This scholar, obviously, is not speaking as a representative of a peacemaking church, but I can say that his viewpoints represent a large swath of churches especially within American evangelicalism. That said, those who are dedicated to a non-violent, peacemaking hermeneutic need to stand up and state their case with sound interpretive reasoning. Only then will we be better able to understand exactly why we need to change our battle cry hymns. Only then will we be able to understand how such a violent Bible can still be embraced as something inspired by God. Only then will those of us sitting in the pews be better equipped to understand our faith more accurately, more fully. Only then will we be able to challenge others who use the violence in the biblical narrative to justify violent actions in the world.

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    • 18th August 2021 at 3:40 pm
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      Thank you Matthew, we agree, which is why I set up the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence. You might find some resources on here that help, and you might like to look at my book “God of Violence Yesterday, God of Love Today? Wrestling honestly with the Old Testament”.

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      • 18th August 2021 at 4:07 pm
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        Thanks so much Helen. I´ve written down the title. For some years now I have pretty much embraced a non-violent, peacemaking interpretive model but I must say such an embrace does not come without its share of confusion and critique. I sometimes feel like I have to do hermeneutical gymnastics in order to make non-violence fit in with the Gospel message!

        I´ve been challenged recently by a particular scholar who espouses what he calls the narrative-historical interpretive model. The model, in part, supports the use of violent judgement by God both against the church and against the pagan nations of the world as acts that take place in history. For example, he would view Constantine´s sword not as a violent aberration as such but as an historical act of judgment by God for the vindication of the suffering early church. This understanding is in stark contrast to what I have learned from peacemaking Christians like the Anabaptists for example.

        Thanks for all the work you are doing and for this blog.

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  • 18th August 2021 at 4:10 pm
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    Ha! I’ve literally just written these words in my current writing project.
    With the accession of Constantine came the end to Christian pacifism. At this point the Christian faith was first tolerated and then became the official religion, and so Christianity found itself aligned with the ruling body. It suddenly became in its interest to permit Christians to serve in the military as their service to the state. Depending on one’s viewpoint, it might be considered that the church made a Faustian bargain at this point from which it has never recovered

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    • 18th August 2021 at 4:15 pm
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      I tend to agree with your argumentation Helen. Thanks.

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  • 18th August 2021 at 4:18 pm
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    I do wonder, now, what the church would look like had Constantine never wielded his mighty sword.

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  • 21st August 2021 at 11:59 pm
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    I suspect it would be less powerful but more authentic ! Though, that being said, there are so many things that would be different without Constantine that it’s difficult to imagine what the world would be like now…

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  • 11th November 2021 at 12:18 pm
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    As a quick response, what we need here is to emphasise the NT teaching which ‘transposes’ the ideas from a single earthly nation – Israel – during a necessary time of preparation, to a fulfilment in the form of an ‘ekklesia’ of Jesus which is seen as a ‘kingdom not of this world’, as itself a ‘nation’ but a nation living in peaceable ‘diaspora’ throughout the world, a nation whose warfare is as Paul says “without physical weapons”. If we state that firmly enough it should then not be a great problem to nevertheless use the imagery of warfare while being very positive that for example our ‘sword’ is not a physical weapon but the word of God.

    I think I might agree that we should declare a bit of a moratorium on the more warlike hymns – rather too many of them belong to the period of “Christian states” and are ambivalent; or worse, for example the appalling “I vow to thee my country…”

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