December 4, 2023
Sitting at the gate, I see the need for a new metaphor for framing Christian resistance to evil. For my seventy-six years, the defining metaphor has been a militaristic metaphor, with a whole theology of just-war being created to rationalize inhumanity, and a spiritual-warfare mentality to explain the inhumanity through a demonic lens.
Wrestling
"Tangled Blessing," by Lauren Wright Pittman, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57095 [retrieved December 5, 2023]. Original source: Lauren Wright Pittman, http://www.lewpstudio.com/.
I can remember as a child hearing the phrase “kill a Commie for Christ,” and singing, “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” with a crusaders’ mentality “marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before.” Later in adulthood I remember being told being by others that exorcism was the go-to means for defeating the devil. Both ideologies are still around (even if sometimes described differently) but neither is acceptable—and never should have been.
A militaristic metaphor can never be justified as Christian when it means bombing the hell out of each other with maniacal aggression. A spiritual-warfare metaphor cannot stand when it ascribes to demons attitudes and actions which have their genesis in our fallen-world hardheartedness that produces egotism/ethnocentrism. We must have a new metaphor for a Christian resistance to evil.
I find it in the wrestling metaphor Paul gave us in Ephesians 6:12. Problem is, we lost that metaphor because Paul himself mentioned it in the context of militarism, putting on the full armor of God. In fact, some translations enforce the militaristic metaphor by using the word ‘fighting’ instead of wrestling. But the Greek word is more nearly a contest metaphor than a militaristic one. By turning the Greek word toward militarism, we take off the table a form of resistance more Christian than warfare (literal or spiritual) can ever be.
The wrestling described in the Greek word is an unarmed, “close-quarter grappling” [1]—not even close to missile-driven devastation or demonic confrontation. Wrestling comes from the gymnasium, not the battlefield or the realm of evil spirits. And in that context, it is akin to Paul’s exhortation to “train yourself in godliness” (1 Timothy 4:8 NRSVue). Paul is using the image of the athlete, which “was common in moral exhortation.” [2]
And that’s the point—our disagreements are, at root, moral and ethical. [3] Consequently, the metaphor we need to use is wrestling, not warfare. The struggle is about muscles, not munitions—an ecclesial Body building process, not a societal body-destroying one. Overcoming evil with good is never justified by a scorched-earth, slaughter-of-the-innocents campaign.
I have a lot of work to do in order to make the wrestling metaphor operative in my life, and I will write more as I am able. Today, I end only with a question, will you join me in calling out the warfare metaphor (literal or spiritual) as unChristian, and engage in the presentation of the wrestling metaphor as the one we must use as followers of Jesus who said if we live by the sword (literal or figurative), we will die by it?
[1] ‘The SBL Study Bible,’ note on Ephesians 6:12.
[2] ‘The SBL Study Bible,’ note on 1Timothy 4:8.
[3] I am grateful for the ways David Gushee has helped me to understand this, and for movements like the Poor Peoples Campaign which model nonviolent resistance to evil.