Standing Under the Scriptures
September 6, 2009

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday are:

Isaiah 52.3-10: The prophet conveys Israel’s prospective return from exile in terms of the opening of the eyes of the blind and the unstopping of the ears of the deaf.

Mark 7.31-37: Jesus correspondingly opens the ears of a deaf man and removes the impediment to his speech.

Our Ephesians passage last Sunday is well known (“put on the whole armor of God”). Our reading in Mark, concerning the true cause of defilement, was notable too. But the end of the class we had not worked out the relation between the two, however. But perhaps in this further consideration we can come closer.

Let us begin with the elements of the Ephesians passage (6.10-20). The armor of God is itemized as the equipment of a heavily armed soldier: belt, breastplate, boots, shield, helmet, sword. And symbolism is assigned respectively to each of them: truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, the word of God. This armor enables us to be “strong in the Lord.” And we need his strength if we are to stand against not “flesh and blood” but “the wiles of the devil… the rulers, the authorities… the cosmic powers of this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.. the flaming darts of the evil one.” The final verses exhort to prayer: for the “saints” in general and for Paul in particular, that he may proclaim the gospel boldly.

We recognized the inspiring quality of the passage. But we saw also some of the questions that it raises. One of these is that of authorship. Biblical critics have supposed that it was written not by Paul himself but a later author, or authors, following in his tradition. On stylistic grounds, particular in the original Greek, there is some basis for this supposition. Still the thought in it is recognizably Pauline, so a later authorship would not detract from its validity.

Another question concerns its use of military imagery. Jesus renounced force. The pre-Constantinian church, despite the massive persecution that it was subjected to by the Roman state during three centuries adhered strictly to non-violence. Why then this couching of the message in military terms? To be sure, they are only symbolic. Any doubt on this score is resolved by the above equation of a soldier’s footwear with the gospel of peace (cf. Isaiah 52.7: “How beautiful are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace…”). Still might there be some limited endorsement of warfare here? The point is of interest to me because, as I reported at the time, in Oxford last October I attended the debate between Richard Hays, the Duke Divinity School’s New Testament scholar, and Nigel Biggar, Oxford’s Regius Professor of ethics, morals, and the like, on the topic “Was Jesus a Pacifist?” Hays seemed to win hands down (both of them are friends of mine). But this particular point never came up.

Another question, even more serious, is the nature of the “rulers, authorities, the cosmic powers of this present darkness… “against whom we are to stand. The wiles of the devil, also cited, we can probably figure out, but these present a puzzle. As I noted in the class, a solution of it was offered by Walter Wink’s Naming the Powers. As I recall from reading it some years ago, it picks up from the oppressiveness of political and social systems in Latin America and, while acknowledging their human component, sees them as having a penumbra, as it were, of spiritual forces. In the world of ancient Rome one could see not only large-scale and brutal slavery but the havoc wrought by political ambition and economic greed. Then, of course the worship of pagan deities was officially sanctioned. Our own time probably seems more innocient. But the pursuit of position and material acquisitiveness are scarcely absent from it. And they can be seen as having a life and power of their own. They are the more threatening, to the culture and to the church itself, in that we tend to accept them as part of the environment.

So we too are in need of putting on the whole armor, the panoply, of God. This raises a question that we did not manage to consider in the class, namely what does this putting on amount to. How, for example, do I don the helmet of salvation? .My best answer is that it is not something that I can do simply by deciding to. Instead, as brought to mind by this passage, the gift of faith has already been bestowed this armor on me. And insofar as I am conscious of it, I will not be dismayed by the flaming darts of the devil or even by the worldly powers that are arrayed against me. Nor will I succumb to their temptations. And so I will indeed stand.

But, as reflected in the concluding verses of the passage, the battle is not over. For they exhort to prayer, for the saints and particularly for Paul, as still in the midst of it. Nor is the armor our God to be employed merely defensively. Instead Paul asks that it be given to him to declare the gospel boldly, “as I ought to speak.” .Here is a recognition that without carrying the struggle to the opposition, it will not be won. In this is a particular lesson of us. Our stone walls here at All Saints’ afford us protection, even if not on a par with the armor of God. At the same time, if we do not venture outside but operate only within them, the eventual outcome can only be our defeat.

There remains the challenge of relating our Ephesians passage to our Mark passage (7.1-23). In it, prompted by the question of the Pharisees as to why his disciples ate with unwashed, i.e. ritually impure, hands, Jesus asserts that it is not what goes into the stomach but what comes out of the heart that defiles a person. He lists a number of vices as so coming out and defiling: evil thoughts, fornication, theft, etc. And he goes on to rebuke his critics for adhering to traditions and rituals that are essentially of human devising in place of following the commandments of God.

Here Jesus seemed to be putting the responsibility on the individual for his actions without regard to external influences, whereas in the Ephesians passage societal and institutional forces, and the powers that stood behind them, seemed to be the concern. And we did not know quite how to reconcile the two. I was not much help, for I took imminence of the 10 o’clock service as an occasion to leave the class before it quite concluded. Still the discrepancy may be more apparent than real. Here Jesus was not necessarily discounting external factors. His focus was on the falsity of regarding ritual observance as the essential thing, to the detriment of following the commandments of God. And from the food going into the stomach that he spoke of, we need not extrapolate to external factors in general. It remains that external factors may strongly influence, if they do not finally determine, what comes out of our hearts. But, in that God has made his armor available to us, we are not thereby excused from responsibility.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted

P.S. I brought to the class a small book entitled A Pocket Guide to Christian Belief. It was given to me by its author, Dr. Benno van den Toren, the tutor in doctrine at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, when I saw him there on my way back from the Congo. I showed it because I found that in the most straightforward language, and in only about 200 pages, it covers much the same ground as do the 14 volumes of Karl Bath’s Church Dogmatics, donated by the class to the All Saints’ library (not that the Church Dogmatics is rendered surplus thereby). A class member recommended that cite I it in the class notice. It is available from Amazon.