Canter Bridge

Paul might be accused of possessing a rather egregious blind spot when it comes to matters of what we blithely label ‘social justice’. In this final chapter of his letter to the Ephesians, he counsels submission and a posture that is easily misconstrued as passivity in the face of the regnant social stratifications of Greco-Roman society.

‘Stay where you are’ is—prima facie—about as radical a statement as his social conscious is able to produce.

Such an understanding of the apostle would, in my view, be fallacious. Yet the history of interpretation and the facile indignation with which moderns so often dismiss Paul is evidence enough that Paul-as-moral-lightweight represents a plausible conclusion for many readers.

Closer examinations suggests otherwise. Paul is engaged in a shrewd tactical accomodation with society as he encounters it. Even as he counsels non-revolution, he erodes the very underpinnings of class-and-gender distancing that make possible such stratification and the superiority-inferiority dynamics that lubricate the entire system.

Paul is in fact neither a moral pacifist nor a social revolutionary. Instead, he is an eschatological militant. He believes that the Christian message creates a new humanity, a new society, one that is not to be achieved by garden-variety utopian strategies. Rather, it will be the fruit of the inexorable determination of God to renew his creation in stupendous fashion by the most gradualist of tactics, by the sheer lunacy of the cross, and by the self-abnegating principle that makes that cross a victory rather than a colossal defeat.

Paul’s counsel to slavemasters to leave aside threats in their dealings with slaves who are in fact their brothers is a mere tip of the iceberg. Under the rhetorical waters lies a mass of enormous proportions that will in time undo the assumptions that make it possible for one man to own another or for a male to denigrate a female. Or, indeed, for a father to provoke his children to rage and derive that pleasure from it that can only be called evil, though a domestic evil that will never give way before the full frontal attack that an impatient revolutionary might prefer.

Paul is a gradual militant. The occasionally exasperating slowness of his method is obvious in the way he adapts the Greco-Roman ‘household code’ to Christian purposes. The apostle’s militancy, on the other hand, shows through in his diagnosis of what ails this world. That disease is not, in his view, product of mere human weakness or even of our impressive way with hypocrisy and moral compromise. Rather, we live in a world that is itself locked in cosmic combat with powers larger than ourselves.

What follows is for Paul no idle flight into metaphor:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Paul can counsel both patience and aggressive armament because he understands that the lay of the land has far more to do with immense powers arrayed against each other with a considerable population caught in between than with a social defect that is amenable to the labors of competent do-gooders.

Paul’s world is a far more dramatic scenario than our exhausted, feeble modern version. To borrow a phrase from disdainful summary of the attitude he shows towards social position, Paul ‘knows his place’.

It is that of a shrewd warrior: carefully armed, choosing his battles, respectful of his adversary, tactically cunning, open-eyed to the final realities of life and death.