In order to wage war upon, or live in a state of threatened war with, another society, there is an essential ideological condition: The "enemy" must take on the identity of evil. The social processes by which this happens are what we may call the institutionalization of enmity. In no case is the socializing role of the state seen more clearly than in the way in which economic, social, political, and religious or moral institutions are mobilized to promote a world view of antagonism. When protracted over generations, the perceptions of enmity shape not only foreign and even domestic affairs but the entire national character of a people.
The primary fact of world history in the 1980s was the deadlock of institutionalized hostilities called euphemistically the "Cold War." It attained the status of "cultural orthodoxy." To challenge it was viewed with all the suspicion and rancor of heresy.
We must, as Karl Barth did, see the Cold War as a very ancient human enmity-construct, a "bipolar" world view in which all socio-political plurality is reduced to a single mythological dualism. In antiquity it was "Greek and barbarian, Roman and pagan"; under Hitler it was "Aryan and Semite"; and during the Cold War it was "free and Communist."
The Bible has a term for social processes which absolutize human interests—idolatry. But the churches have not taught us to view these processes in this way. Instead, we Christians have invested this enmity with the sacred mantle of "realism." In so doing, however, we have cut out the very heart of our gospel.
Atonement as Peacemaking
It is ironic that the epistle to the Ephesians, which more than any other piece of New Testament literature speaks straightforwardly about "war" and "peace," is rarely mentioned in the debates on these issues. Too long exposited as an ethereal tract concerned solely with the individual believer's mystical union with Christ, Ephesians in fact challenges the community of faith to disengage itself from all social institutionalizations of enmity. Perhaps even more troubling to modern Americans, the book of Ephesians identifies the meaning of the atonement as the "unilateral disarmament" of the church.
The author of Ephesians takes on the task of summarizing the social meaning of the teachings of the apostle Paul, offering a treatise on the struggle within salvation history to realize God's great plan of reconciliation. The epistle focuses upon the eschatological conflict between Christ's inauguration of peace and the powers' perpetuation of enmity. At the heart of this struggle stands the church, the "called out" community, which has inherited the messianic vocation of peacemaking.
The opening chapter of Ephesians establishes its theme as the design of God for the re-establishment of peace in the universe:
God has made known to us the mystery of God's will—according to God's favor, which is set forth for the administration of the fullness of time—to reunify all things in Christ (1:9-10).
The fact that this "vision whose time has come" is repeatedly stressed as a "mystery" throughout the epistle (see 3:3-6,9; 6:19) testifies to realism: Genuine social peace is alien to life as we know it. The fact that it is a mystery revealed testifies to hope—and our responsibility to be part of this new "administration," the heritage of those who believe (1:12,18).
The precondition for this new order is the conversion, likened to resurrection, of a new people (2:1-6; note that the author always uses the plural pronoun, addressing a community, not just individuals). This people has been called together in grace for the purpose of putting the vision into practice (2:7-10). Conversely, "unbelief" is referred to as that "way of life" which follows the course of the world and the powers.
Peace Between Jew and Gentile
All commentators agree that Ephesians 2:11-22 is the theological core of the epistle. Here again the author's realism tests God's vision upon the fact of human enmities, indeed upon a "worst case" example: Jew and Gentile. It has been argued that this conflict was considered in the ancient world to be the prototype of all human hostility. Certainly no enmity in the Hellenistic world was more comprehensive than this one, which had cultural, economic, and political aspects. We know from Galatians 1:6-9 that Paul's whole project of evangelism threatened to founder more than once on this social institution of enmity.
After reminding his audience of this enmity which they themselves had historically experienced (2:11-12), the author begins to attack its ideological foundations. In a carefully constructed commentary upon Isaiah 57:19 ("I offer peace to all, both near and far; I will heal my people."), Ephesians 2:14-17 then asserts that in Christ Jesus peace has been declared and enmity abolished:
For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the enmity, the law with its commands and ordinances, in order that the two be created in himself into one new humanity, so making peace, reconciling both in one body to God through the cross, thereby killing the enmity.
The result is that the gospel has become the message of peace (2:17; 6:15) and a "third force" has entered history: the reconciled community of the church (2:18-22).
It is unarguable that this doctrine of the atonement unambiguously makes reconciliation with our social enemies a precondition to reconciliation with God. Markus Barth comments:
If Christ "is peace," then he is by nature a social, even a political event, which marks the overcoming and ending of barriers however deeply founded and highly constructed....When this peace is deprived of its social, national or economic dimensions...then Jesus Christ is being flatly denied.
This passage calls us to renounce all aspects of national identity—even things fundamental to it, as was the case with the "law and commandments" for the Jew— that perpetuate ideologies of enmity. This we must do because Christ's cross represents a unilateral declaration of peace by which we must abide if we are to belong to him.
If the first half of this epistle announces the "cease-fire" inaugurated by God in Christ, the second half addresses the problems arising from the fact that there is no sudden historical end to hostility in the world. For the atonement leaves us with a dilemma: How do we respond to the persistent presence of enmity and evil in a world that lives in defiance of Christ's work? While it may be illegitimate to reduce this dilemma to the simplistic "What about the Russians?" so often found upon the lips of Western Christians [during the Cold War], the problem of resisting oppression in its many forms very much remains.
In an abrupt and bold transition, the author transfers the vocation of "administrating" God's grace from Christ (1:10) to the apostle Paul (3:2). The "mystery" of reconciliation (3:6) is being made known to the apostle by the Spirit (3:4-5), to the church by the apostle (3:7-9), and finally—in an astounding claim—to the powers by the church (3:10). Here then is the inescapable political vocation of the church: to witness against the ideologies of enmity perpetuated by the potentates of the world. Paul knows the cost of such political evangelism—he speaks from the empire's prison (3:1,13).
THE NEXT SECTION exhorts the church to maintain peace and equity in its internal social life (4:1-6:9). The new community must resist attempts by the "children of disobedience" to seduce it away from its ground of unity (5:6), and it must continually discern good and evil (5:7-10). Its offensive stance before the "works of darkness" is two-fold: Not only must it non-cooperate with evil, it must pursue a prophetic unmasking of injustice (5:11).
This text speaks with stinging relevance to the historical moment [of the 1980s]. Despite ecclesial pronouncements about nuclear weapons as an "intolerable evil," the churches have yet to form a practical ethic of non-cooperation and militant resistance.
The author of Ephesians does not leave us uninstructed, fortunately, closing the epistle with a consideration of what tools are appropriate for the struggle of peacemaking in a world at war. The tactics of the devil are to be renounced (6:11); we cannot resist demonic ends with demonic means. This means that the church must not be induced to revolutionary methods that equate killing people with the eradication of evil. The struggle is not against human victims but against the powers in high places (6:12), an idiom revealed by recent scholarship to mean the very institutions and structures of domination in our world.
The church will stand its ground against the "tests" of history (6:13) only if it adopts the nonviolent weaponry of the Spirit. Here is the final transformation of Isaiah's appropriation of Old Testament "Holy War" traditions (see Isaiah 11:4-5; 52:7; 59:14-17). Our defense is solely truth, justice, the gospel of peace, faith, and liberation (6:14-17a); our offense is based on the Word of God (6:17b).
The epistle then concludes with an exhortation to prayer and watchfulness by Paul, the model Christian warrior (6:18-19). In his example, the call to preach the mystery of the gospel to the powers has reached the inevitable conclusion of nonviolent struggle: He is now a "diplomat in chains" (6:20).
EPHESIANS IS A manifesto for Christian engagement with the ideologies and structures of violence in our world. We may note the fact that the epistle begins with a vision of peace and ends on a note of protracted "warfare." This is indeed the movement of any genuine vocation of peacemaking. Far from advocating a withdrawal from conflict or a romantic illusion about the goodness of all people, it rather seeks to expose the institutions of enmity and violence and respond with a militant but nonviolent politics.
Both worldly warfare and the enemy-constructs used to justify it are abolished in Christ. The only enemy is enmity itself; the Holy War against evil has become the Messiah's "peace war." Hence not only must the ideological legitimations of hostility be renounced, but we must also unmask the way in which the structures of bipolar domination perpetuate injustice and suffering throughout the world.
The cryptic comment that "it is shameful to even mention the atrocities being perpetuated in secret" (5:12) surely takes on renewed meaning in [all times] of national security states and covert policies of intervention. When will the mythological heroes such as Trident and Titan be unmasked as the false gods of our age?
The vision of Ephesians confronts the host of political and philosophical "realisms" that so strangle our moral vitality today. These realisms have demonstrably failed us. The epistle calls us to enlist in a way that finds striking new relevance in [any] "age of ultimatum," haunted by the demonic specter of annihilation.
The church is called to give its own life to rediscover and proclaim reconciliation and to resist and expose at every turn the powers of death in our time. In so doing we can shatter our complicity with [hostility] and reclaim the "good works which God has prepared for us, that we should walk in them" (2:10). May our gospel again become the gospel of peace, "to the praise and glory of God" (1:14).
Ched Myers lived and worked in Southern California and was finishing a book on the gospel of Mark when this article appeared.
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