Abstract
Gun violence is a serious problem in the United States. Mass shootings are now almost daily occurrences, and no one, not even Christians, seems to know how to stop them. Last year, the Pew Research Center found that although almost half (48%) of Americans consider gun violence as “a very big problem in the country today,” and about “40% of Americans live in a household with a gun.” 1 People are divided on this issue along geographical and rural/urban lines, political ideologies, religious convictions, gender, and so on.
Coming from Indonesia, where gun ownership and therefore mass shootings are not part of the culture, I was shocked on my arrival in the United States to see the obsession with weapons, and even more so that certain churches actually incorporate guns in their worship.
How did this happen? Why are certain cultures, and certain people, obsessed and others repulsed or head-shakingly baffled by this attachment to guns? The U.S. gun culture in some ways stems from British commercial and colonial interests that were largely sustained by the gun industry. Historian Priya Satia, in her expansive study on the relationship between the British Empire and guns, points out that “British colonialism was a larger instance of the spread of private property in which guns figured centrally… As currency, commodities, weapons, symbols of power, and more, guns were critical to eighteenth-century colonialism—to British trespass abroad.” 2
Whatever the empire and the origin of a particular form of colonialization, property, guns, and violence are all historically connected to one another. This short essay, of course, will not untangle the complexity of reasons that have led to gun violence in America. However, the familiar passage in Eph 6:10–20 about putting on the armor of God provides a reflective moment for Christians who live in a world historically, economically, and politically obsessed with guns. I draw attention to two points in particular.
First, although traditionally the letter to the Ephesians has been attributed to Paul, many (if not most) modern scholars have questioned his authorship of it. Whoever wrote this letter describes Paul as “an ambassador (presbeuō) in chains” (Eph 6:20). This particular expression is unique to Ephesians, and appears nowhere else in the New Testament. The word presbeuō also occurs in 2 Cor. 5:25, in which Paul describes the followers of Jesus as “the ambassadors of Christ.” Instead of attaching the word ambassador (or “being an ambassador”) to Christ, the author of Ephesians reminds the readers that Paul is “an ambassador in chains,” describing him as a captured, subjugated apostle. The fact that Paul was a colonized person living under the rule of the Roman power is our first entry point for reading the discourse on the whole armor of God.
The second point to note is that the “whole armor” refers to an imperial tool for subjugation and control. Belt, breastplate, shoes, shield, helmet, and sword were the common equipment of Roman soldiers. They were symbols of Roman power and Roman glory. It was through the might of its armies that the Roman Empire occupied distant spaces and established the so-called peace, the Pax Romana, throughout that far-flung empire. As ancient historian Benjamin Isaac puts it: “[T]he Roman army functioned as an army of conquest or was organized for conquest even in long periods of peace, but…in certain areas it [also] served first and foremost as an army of occupation, which could evolve into an internal security force in some parts.” 3 The subjugated or colonized people, however, those who lived under the Roman regime, had to experience “the trauma of military terrorization”—to quote New Testament scholar Richard Horsley. 4 In light of the first point above, why in the world would a subjugated person who knew what it was to be in chains use language about weapons so positively?
The author of Ephesians seems to be trying to imitate the empire’s modus operandi. However, the imitation is slippery. For the author is refining, retooling, altering—subverting—the symbols of the power of the empire here, and using them for a different purpose. From this author’s hand, the belt becomes truth, the breastplate righteousness, the shoes are the readiness to proclaim the good news of peace, the shield is faith, the helmet is salvation, the sword (of the Spirit) is the word of God. The armor and weaponry are not the imperial tool after all! In the field of postcolonial studies, this device is often known as “mimicry”—a concept introduced by critical theorist Homi Bhabha. Mimicry is a condition in which the colonized becomes “almost the same, but not quite” as the colonizer. A colonized subject imitates the colonizer, but in a slippery way. Bhabha states that in order for mimicry to be effective, it “must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.” 5 Mimicry, therefore, is a form of resistance through difference, slippage, or excess. Such difference or slippage is a subversion by turning the imperial tool around and reappropriating it to a different purpose. This is what is going on in Ephesians 6.
In 6:11, the slippage of the imperial representation specifically aims at resisting the wiles of the devil. The “devil” is then further explained in 6:12 as rulers, authorities, world powers (kosmokratoras), and spiritual forces of evil. Biblical scholar and theologian Walter Wink published a trilogy of books on the powers (Naming the Powers, 1984; Unmasking the Power, 1986; and Engaging the Powers, 1992), which I find helpful. In Naming the Powers, he explains kosmokratoras as the unseen structure of the systemic powers (including the imperial powers) that control the world. Particularly useful for our purposes, Wink states: “We must not neglect to mention here the spirit of empire, which perpetuates itself through a succession of rulers which was so powerful, in the case of Rome, that it was able to sustain the madness of three emperors in one century (Caligula, Nero, [and] Domitian).” 6 Any evil systemic/spiritual powers that become the machine of oppression and injustice are demonic, and thus have to be resisted. In other words, through mimicking the empire, the author of Ephesians resists the imperial power by using its own tools.
How does all of this relate to the problem of guns in the U.S.? Just as Roman imperialism expands itself through military power, modern empires also sustain and expand themselves through their military power, their weapons, specifically their guns. The gun culture is the military culture, the culture of death. No wonder that Martin Luther King, Jr., in a powerful sermon at New York City’s Riverside Church in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam war, reminded America of “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” King prophetically declared that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” 7
The author of the letter to the Ephesians similarly insists that Roman military might is not the source of true strength. True strength comes from the Lord (6:10) by putting on truth, righteousness, and the willingness to proclaim the good news of peace, and from faith, salvation, and the word of God (6:13–17). To choose such true strength and turn away from behaviors and values that lead to spiritual death, this letter exhorts followers of Jesus not to align ourselves with the powers that control the world through military might and guns, but with those who are in “chains”—the subjugated and the marginalized.