The sign of contradiction: Church defense and the liturgical gun

The contradictions of church defense

No good statistics exist on the frequency of church shootings, but in the twenty-first century as many as 813 fatal attacks have occurred in churches. ¹ From the more high-profile incidents such as First Baptist Sutherland Springs, in which twenty-six died, and the Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. Church, where white supremacist Dylan Roof murdered nine members of a prayer group, to the numerous and more isolated incidents, church security has become a more prevalent question. By one statistical survey, Baptist churches are involved in nearly a quarter of all deadly incidents since 1999, making an evaluation of this question among Baptists even more pressing. ²

Before digging too deeply into the ethics surrounding armed presences in church, however, consider for a moment the most recent paradigm of the “good guy with a gun,” Stephen Willeford. In the wake of the shootings in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Willeford was hailed as a national hero for shooting the fleeing assailant. Although not a member of First Baptist, Willeford disabled the gunman, who then took his own life before being arrested by the police. Before the National Rifle Association, Willeford said, “We are the people that stand between the people that would do evil to our neighbors.” He said, “I’m nothing special. Look at you guys. Every one of you would do what I did.” ³

Yet the story of Willeford is more complex than can be accounted for by the “good guy with a gun” narrative, in which virtuous actions are undertaken as actions without material costs. Among the many accolades received, Willeford was awarded a rifle emblazoned with the text of Rom 13:4. This rifle was given in recognition of his actions from the San Antonio-based Sons of Liberty Gun Works. The Bible verse, which refers to the “servant of God who carries out wrath on the evildoer,” must be held in tension with Willeford’s own reflection on the day: “We aren’t designed to take the life of another person. It damages us. It changes us.” ⁴

Willeford’s statements in this interview reflect, perhaps unwittingly, two truisms within historical Christian teachings on violence. Although certain forms of lethal behavior have been permitted through the Christian tradition, whether capital punishment, justified killing in war, or authorized killing by law enforcement, Willeford’s second statement has also been held: killing changes us. This statement is true because killing, however authorized or justified, runs counter both to the teachings of Jesus and the fabric of our moral nature. ⁵ The most ardent supporters of justified use of force will attest to this: the taking of life is not a part of God’s design for creation, nor is it without cost.

What we hear in the testimony of Willeford forces Christians to account for lethal self-defense in a different way to which we are accustomed. The defense of churches centers not on the defense of one’s neighbors (which the just war tradition treats amply), but the defense of itself. In the testimony of Willeford, what makes the question of lethal defense complicated is the morally complex texture of lethal defense. On the one hand, love of one’s own self (and with this, a qualified preservation of one’s own life) is well-enshrined within Christian moral thinking, ⁶ but on the other, taking of life leaves a kind of indelible damage on the soul. ⁷ Even if done for the sake of others (in this case, fellow church members), the tension remains, now further complicated by a lack of firm justification from the Christian tradition, which has typically treated lethal force as justifiable only when authorized by a sovereign body, whether a king or a state.

With the rise of more high-profile church shootings, a variety of private security firms have begun offering their services to churches to ease this tension. These include some firms which are specifically Christian in orientation. The National Organization of Church Security and Safety Management (NOCSSM), for example, takes as its founding Scripture the text of 1 Chr 9:21–27, in which gatekeepers keep watch over the house of God. ⁸ Through security services, private security teams, and an annual national conference, NOCSSM emphasizes armed protection of churches. In his profile, president Chuck Chadwick cites Luke 22:36, in which Jesus tells his disciples to sell their cloak in order to procure a sword. ⁹ The companies represented under the NOCSSM umbrella are but a few of the growing number of entities designed to guide a church into the practicalities of armed defense. The services offered by these firms are expensive, however. More frequently, then, churches engage lay members who participate in “hospitality teams” or “security ministries.” This leads to the heart of the question: what does it mean for a Christian morally to engage violence when the violence one does is seemingly at odds with both Christ and one’s created moral nature?

Since the Reformation, the “private/public” distinction has served as one way to reconcile these commitments. A Christian is free to serve the public good (such as armed defense), for the world is run by law, whereas the body of Christ is run according to the freedom of the Spirit. ¹⁰ Despite its storied history, this mode of resolution remains, I think, unconvincing, not because of its distinction between the life of the Spirit and the life of the law, but because it threatens to treat the Christian moral life as one subject to existential dictates. In other words, given the area of social engagement, the moral mode of behavior of the Christian should be subject to different modes of action. ¹¹ Others have made appeals to the fallen nature of the world imposing certain necessities of history which tragically fall short of the ideals of the Kingdom of God, such that life prior to the eschaton is full of miseries which require the Christian to take up behaviors which fall short of the perfectionist vision of the Sermon on the Mount. ¹²

If we do not wish to divide ourselves into either public/private selves or to propose that what is impermissible in one context becomes not only permissible but justified in a different context, then we must not divide the moral agent and ask the Christian to become in effect two different people. To be sure, tasks which are done in church are distinctly different than those done in the workplace, but this statement is not the same as saying that the agent of action is a different moral agent. A more promising line than the “two spheres” or the “tragedies of history” arguments above, which divide the duties of the Christian between idealized and realistic or between their inward disposition and outward form, is one which would see the moral life of the Christian as unified, and yet yielding a differentiated form of faithfulness. Put differently, for the Christian, who we are in church and in our engagements with the world are united by the singular work of God, which issues forth in a singular pattern of God’s activity. These activities are differentiated—the worship service is not the workplace—but the same God is Lord of both.

Contemporary theologian Oliver O’Donovan makes such an argument. In commenting on patterns of ministry given to Christians, particularly in relation to the core sacraments of the church, O’Donovan reminds his readers that any claims to faithful ministry and witness beyond the context of worship are bound to the person and work of Jesus Christ, made explicit in worship:

The sacraments are Christologically determined, the church’s communications and ministries are Pneumatologically determined. There is more flexibility, more historical change in patterns of ministry than in the sacraments; yet there is consistency in the divine mission of the Spirit, and there is consistency too in the ministries the Spirit bestows. ¹³

What is at stake for O’Donovan is linking the temporal life (and the confronting of one’s moral challenges) together with the once-and-for-all work of God in Christ. If the work of Jesus the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, are the work of one God, then there can be no contradiction of their work, even if over time the works of the Spirit amplify and situate the work of God in historically appropriate forms. Put differently, the tension that the Christian should rightly feel is not one in which the ways of Jesus are pitted against faithful ministry, but in which the ways and work of Jesus provide the firm basis for the Spirit’s improvisations in time and space.

With this framework, then, we finally arrive at the question we should be asking, which is ultimately not a question of justification, as if we could divide the self according to context. Rather, the proper question for armed defense of a church is a theological one, asking human moral agents to be consistent in their witness to God. Our true question is this: In what ways is armed protection of the church—as a work of the Spirit—compatible with participating in the ongoing life of the church—the work of the Son?

The framing of the question holds two theological truisms: (i) the work of the triune God is never divided; and (ii) the ongoing work of the Spirit follows from the work of the incarnation of the Son. Christians are unable to pit the two against one another without risking pitting true God against true God. Jesus, of course, lived in a day prior to open attacks on the church, and thus Christians since Jesus have had to work out their responses to this question in fear and trembling. Whatever their conclusions, however, Christians, living by the Spirit, must take their first cues from that which the Spirit refers backwards: the work of Christ. To claim to live in the world by the Spirit is to have our actions, thinking, and theologies governed by the One who sends the Spirit. Accordingly, our reflections on church protection must begin by seeing in what ways these responses are governed by Christ’s own celebrated presence among the body of the church: in baptism and Communion.

Baptism, Communion, and preservation of the body

To ask the question of how Christians should approach the issue of armed defense of the church is to ask first what it is that Christians are defending, and only then to ask how it is to be properly defended in light of what it is. For this reason, I have not begun with a discussion of the ethics of violence, but with an exploration of the material acts through which the church emerges into the world which refuses the church: baptism and Communion. For only after one attends to what the church is can one then answer questions about what it means to defend it, and if anyone can claim to be of the Spirit in doing so.

These acts are performed from within the economy of God’s grace, as a response to and participation in God’s grace already operative in the faith of the participant. In participating here, and through them in the life of the gathered church, the believer is made into one of the baptized, entering into the death and life of Jesus. The Spirit then continues the work of Jesus not in repetition but in amplification and perfection of what begins in the water and at the table. ¹⁴ To be a Christian is to submit to this life of God, being remade in the totality of one’s life in the image of Christ—a journey which begins in baptism and on which Communion accompanies us.

If the discipling work of the Spirit follows from the work of Christ, what is it that is happening in baptism and Communion? To be a member of the body of Christ is to be a part of a body which now makes claims on the shape of one’s life, not by having made a voluntary vow, but by having one’s very identity claimed by the work of Christ. But the work of the ordinances does not create a hermetic social body, a work of God that is impervious from outside influences, in a two-fold sense. The ordinances themselves draw in material elements (water, bread, and wine) that are common to all society; no water or food is distinctly Christian. Rather, those things that are common to society are taken up by Christ’s body and made more than they were, transfigured into signs of God’s work in Christ. Because of this, the church finds itself intimately knit into the world—a body that exists as the witness to the grace of Christ within a common world sustained by God. ¹⁵

What we see already in the fundamental actions of the church illuminates the perpetual challenge for churches in their entanglements with society around them, particularly as pertains to their defense of the church as a social entity. On the one hand, the church is not immune from the world and thus cannot pretend that incidents such as the shootings at Mother Emmanuel and in Southerland Springs do not happen; to be a church in the world is to be open to possible violence against it. On the other hand, the church is to take these things from the world insofar as they are remade toward the ends of Christian discipleship. The church is not a monoculture immune from external influences, but, by the power of God, remakes the best of our natural impulses toward the end of Christ.

With respect to the relation between church and world, baptism and Communion signify not a closing off of the world, but a necessary porous relation to the world—one which requires the Christian to receive the good which is common to the world and to refuse that which is inhospitable to it. ¹⁶ If so, then it cannot truly engage the world by seeking first to defend against it, for the Christian life proceeds from their life in Christ outward, not in reverse fashion. In Christ’s own body, “the walls of enmity have been broken down,” ¹⁷ and the death of Christ represents the great patience of God toward a hostile creation. ¹⁸ In the two common ordinances of the Christian faith, this same identity is conferred. The waters of baptism, most frequently referred to in the early church as cleansing or reconciling waters, signify this most difficult of unions, i.e., the union of God with that which is not God (creation). ¹⁹ Likewise, the meal of Communion is spoken of as that meal which joins together those who are unlike one another, in the same manner as God joins to creation. In the ritual acts of baptism and Communion, which speak of our life with God, we find the nature of the Christian life (humanity being taken up by God) mirrored in the very nature of the ordinances themselves: we who are unlike God are accepted and taken up by God. In the water, bread, and wine, we are joined to God, to one another, and to our neighbors. When we approach the question of defending the church body, this is the founding pattern. In baptism and Communion are seen the works of God that create and sustain the body of Christ in the world. Any work of the church, then, which claims the mantle of the Spirit must conform to this pattern, improvising to the degree that it does not violate this founding precedent.

As indicated earlier, there are any number of ways of resolving the question of lethal force in the Christian tradition, some of which emphasize the justifiable use of lethal force in self-defense. This position was most popularly codified by the medieval church doctor Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas argued that the intent of the action is not first to end the life of another but to preserve one’s own existence. Therefore, lethal self-defense is distinguished from murder by its intent. ²⁰ In many ways, Aquinas’s articulation is far more restrained and nuanced than the kinds of realism which would allow for killing in some kind of “time between the times,” suggesting that the death of others is permissible in the fallen world before the eschaton when it is impossible to take up the Sermon on the Mount as a real way. But turning again to O’Donovan, if what the church does, both in what Christ has done to creation and in what the ordinances are, is to reformulate natural impulses toward God, then the valorization of self-defense as a primal value is mistaken:

On any interpretation, Thomas permits acts that may foreseeably kill the assailant—on the presumption that we have a greater responsibility to save our own life than our assailant. This presumption is dubious. True, our own lives are the more familiar responsibility, since we dutifully eat and drink and take precautions against illness every day, while saving another’s life is a rare occurrence. Yet when another’s life does fall into our hands to risk or to preserve, our primary business is with it, not with ourselves, even if that life happens to belong to our enemies. ²¹

Put differently, the natural impulse toward preserving one’s own existence, an existence given by God, is a good impulse for Aquinas; existence is the greatest of all temporal gifts of God. But this gift must, through the body of Christ, be reordered, turned around, rehabilitated toward care of another’s life, even when that life belongs to the one who is attacking you.

For the Christian, defense of oneself or of another cannot be achieved at the expense of another’s life; the irony of an attack is that the enemy enters into the view of the Christian, calling forth from the Christian not retribution but the duty to preserve the attacker’s existence before God. When viewed in light of the nature of what Christians are called to be (the body of Christ), the question of church defense is framed differently, as the Christian cannot conceive of the “natural” apart from how the natural is taken up and rehabilitated by the work of the Spirit. For the Christian, there is no natural “as such,” but only the natural awaiting its redemption and perfection in Christ. Accordingly, the natural impulse toward self-preservation, if it is to be used, must be reframed as preserving the lives of others, even one’s enemies.

In church security teams, one finds a natural impulse toward protecting that which one loves (ourselves, our families, children), albeit an impulse in need of reframing and redeeming. We live, however, in a world, and particularly in a US culture, which is pressed down and overflowing with guns. And to this degree, the gun must be reframed, and dare I say it, redeemed. In what follows, I do not propose a kind of security tactic that could disarm the armed without error. Others have done this and I will not repeat this work, not only because such trust in nonviolence’s effectiveness is unmerited, but because the effectiveness of any ethic is secondary for the Christian to its fidelity. In what follows, I propose that guns, like other elements of creation, must be taken up into the worshipping body, that they might be reframed and redeemed.

Two sets of concerns emerge at this point in arguing for a refusal of lethality. Even if I myself do not take up arms for my own defense, what about the defense of others, namely, fellow Christians? And what about defense of those others who also may be gathered among the church on a weekly basis, namely, non-believers or seekers? To the first, fellow Christians, defense comes in multiple forms, not all of which are lethal, and to arrest someone’s progress is not inconsistent with one’s life of worship. For just as in church we speak of removal from the fellowship for the sake of one’s repentance, or of not using one’s gifts unilaterally without respect for the life of the body, so by analogy it becomes permissible to speak of restraint of an attacker that does not rise to the level of lethal force. To restrain that which is harmful to the body is not the same as killing it, if we seek the ultimate good of even that which attacks the body of Christians. This argument is not for the efficacy of these actions by any means, but an approach consistent with our baptism. The second follows then from the first: Christians would protect the non-Christian as they would a fellow believer, both as a potential member of the body of Christ and in order to bear witness consistently to the truth of what is happening in worship: that the church is a body being formed into the likeness of the Christ who suffers our violence for our sake.

The sign of contradiction: The liturgical firearm

To approach the gun is not to approach it as sui generis, an unsubstitutable kind of tool; as the argument goes, if it were not a gun, people would use rocks or knives for violence. In homicides between 2013 and 2017, however, guns contributed to the deaths of one or more parties in two-thirds of the incidents reported, nearly ten times the number of deaths of any other implement. ²² Guns, built for efficiency of force, whatever secondary purpose they may engender for sport or recreation, are designed first and foremost for lethality.

The efficiency for the task of defense is, therefore, part of their appeal in church security, but the use of firearms for church defense is not a trend that will be deflated by better statistics or by exegetical arguments. We are not, anthropologically speaking, brains on a stick who are morally changed solely by better arguments or by more powerful argumentation. ²³ Likewise, to propose that guns are something that are “out there” as opposed to our lives “in church” is unhelpful. As I have suggested earlier, the logic of baptism and Communion, and of God’s work more broadly, is that although God’s work creates a rupture between past and present existence and possibilities (between our past sin and our future redemption), God’s work is one that takes up and restores the full range of creation. Who we are “out there” is always present to us “in church” in order that creation might be redeemed.

To address guns and the persistent question they pose to Christians is not to treat this question as one that belongs to Christians’ temporal existence or as an accommodation that Christians must make to certain social exigencies, but a question that is already deeply intertwined with how we worship, pray, and believe. Our willingness to use firearms in self-defense, in other words, is a problem that must be dealt with in worship and through worship. ²⁴ Accordingly, addressing lethal defense within church must be approached theologically and from within the worshipping life of the church. It is rightly dealt with not as a preached topic (for this attitude is once again to treat guns as an intellectual rather than an affective problem), but within the folds of the worship service. We unlearn our theologies not solely by learning new arguments, but by prayer, by worship, by silence, and by engaging in the bodily work of discipleship, that our hearts, affections, minds, and bodies might be attuned to the Spirit of God.

One recent proposal, made by Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin, moves in this direction by literally “beating guns into plowshares,” turning implements of violence into artistic objects. ²⁵ Martin, the founder of RAWtools, takes the injunctions of the prophets literally, turning firearms into gardening tools through metalworking. ²⁶ Throughout their book, Beating Guns, they offer detailed stories about the rise of gun culture and the proliferation of guns within US society, as well as numerous arguments about the use of guns. Yet ultimately what is commendable about their approach is that the arguments are in service to a more holistic and bodily argument: the physical undoing of a weapon lays the groundwork for hearing the intellectual arguments.

In the final chapters of their book, one rightly sees that the problem is ultimately not just about guns, but about the assumption embraced by many Christians that violence within the world is necessary. And so, the book ends the way it begins, with the authors turning toward bodily morally formative practices of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Strangely, however, the work of moral formation occurs in a way that avoids the guns themselves. In other words, having deconstructed the guns into works of art, Christian formation for Claiborne and Martin now emphasizes practices of peacebuilding and reconciliation. It is to question what kinds of media we should consume and to rethink the cultural stories we take for granted. ²⁷ The guns themselves, the physical objects which enact the violence, recede from view in the process of formation, reduced to aesthetic showpieces that do not play a role in the moral reformation that should take place after the guns are gone.

The irony of moving guns out of view as the task of moral formation begins is that the guns still, I think, retain their place at the center of our moral process. Claiborne and Martin’s proposal at the book’s close is one that is constructed not around a positive vision of the Christian life, one of celebrating the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but is one of negation: making peace, reconciling opposites, and refusing violence. Thus, the positive moral formation is still governed by what is opposed but yet absent, the violence represented by the gun, the unspoken void which is constantly kept at bay by reaffirmations of what one does not want to be. Although the destruction of guns occurs in the onset of the book, the ideology of guns and self-defense remain firmly in control of the moral formation project, as what one does is governed by what one does not want to do. My contention is that their impulse to “beat guns into plowshares” is not wrong, but incomplete. To follow the metaphor of Scripture, to transform a weapon into a farming implement is not to forget about the weapon, but to keep it fully in view, albeit now put into a different service, a different narrative, and subject to a different end. If we are seeking to confront the ideology of the gun, what is needed is not a suppression of violence or our tendencies toward it, but a perpetual facing of it, a keeping it in view, though dismantled!

For centuries, in liturgy and in art, Christians have centered these negative images, for it is by keeping these spectacles before us that we allow their imaginative power to be undone. Consider two examples: the cross and the martyrs. The cross, a Roman tool of torture and power, becomes central to Christian reflection on the ways of God’s redemptive work in the world, but not in a way which encourages Christians to pick up the cross in the same way. Through his letters, Paul renarrates the torturous intent of the cross as having been broken by Christ’s work, ²⁸ a renarration which occurs only as one keeps the object in view. Similarly, the deaths of the saints at the hands of their persecutors throughout Scripture are kept in view, for it is through remembering, renarrating, and keeping these deaths in view that we learn how to undo regimes that claim the power of life and death over God’s people. ²⁹

In the case of guns, the most prevalent means of interpersonal violence, keeping them in view in worship can be accomplished, not as a glorification of their violence, but as a vehicle to meditating on their defeated power and placing them within a proper narrative. The presence of guns is, on the one hand, incoherent with the confessions we make through baptism and Communion, the acts in which God gives new life through the common element of creation. On the other hand, the presence of guns in church might serve a positive function, that of deflating our claims to corporate moral perfection by their very presence. In the next section, I therefore propose a new use for guns in church: that we neither deny that they exist, nor treat them as that which we use “in an emergency,” but that they persist among us in the manner that builds on Claiborne and Martin.

For a Baptist context, what I am offering here is both a provocation and an invitation. Baptists have historically been averse to any kind of iconography in worship, an attitude stemming from various Protestant concerns about idolatry. For the work that is done in a Baptist context through the preaching of the Scriptures is to make Christ present, absent any visuals that would interfere with this or in some way be seen as mediating the presence of God. In what follows, however, I propose something that would raise the question as to whether or not images might assist in enfleshing the preached Word. Might they do so particularly as pertains to what God in Christ has done among us in redeeming the hostile, as well as inviting us to consider whether other more regular forms of imagery, such as that of Christ and the saints, might perform this work as well on a regular basis, even for Baptists.

The spectacle and the sign of contradiction

In Christian teaching, a sign of contradiction is typically a person whose holiness invites persecution, both by the world and occasionally by those within the church. ³⁰ Viewed in this way, as an object transformed from one ordered toward lethal ends to one now used in worship, the mutilated guns of Claiborne and Martin aid in unlearning of the gun’s imaginative power. As a sign of contradiction, they become a liturgical aid in worship that reminds the congregation that it can neither disavow the violence of the gun (for it is part of “the world” that we bring with us to worship) nor embrace its violence (for it is a tool that operates in contradiction to our baptism). In proposing a liturgical use for the mutilated gun turned into an object to aid in worship, I am affirming that Claiborne and Martin were partly right: the deconstruction of a physical object points toward another possible end for our lives, but only if we continually keep its possibilities and temptation in front of us, recontextualized by the space of worship. In the same way that Christians hold up the cross and the martyr without glorifying the violence inherent in either, so the deformed firearm, embraced within the space of worship, becomes a contemporary object to spur our worshipping imagination.

As philosophers of the visual arts have long noticed, the relation between art and moral formation can easily go awry. In a long line of criticism running through the latter half of the twentieth century, art was perceived as mechanistic propaganda, dubiously replicating a political message that ensnares the viewer. Photography, in particular, became targeted as feigning “authenticity” while simultaneously portraying simply a seductively stylized consumer message. ³¹ Conversely, there is no guarantee that a viewer will “get” the meaning of an image intended by the maker; images in isolation cultivate meaning in the mind of the viewer alone, having no intrinsic meaning that can be read off of them.

Placement of articles such as the mutilated gun within worship, however, operates between the dangers illuminated by these two critiques. When situated in worship, art such as Martin’s cannot mean anything and everything, in that its placement within the liturgical context of the worship of the crucified and resurrected Jesus rules out certain interpretations, while opening up others. Echoing Susie Linfield, to see art such as Martin’s rightly means looking beyond the frame to where the frame is situated, in this case the worship space and the acts of worship taking place. ³² By placing the gun here, in its transfigured state, worshippers are presented with a new way to conceive of what guns are, why people reach for them, and what their relation to the body of Christ is.

In placing the mutilated gun here, likewise, worshippers begin to build the bridge between their lives “in here” and their lives “out there”. Unlike the images of the cross and of the saints, both of which speak to the negation of violence by the work of Christ, the mutilated gun is different, for the cross and the witness of the saints are both vehicles by which our union with Christ occurs, whereas the gun bears neither of these functions. In the same way that the work of the Spirit completes the work of the Son, so whatever we learn from the mutilated gun and its transfiguration must follow from the pattern set by the images of the cross and the saints. Our refusal of the gun’s violence is not the instrument of our salvation, but by the Spirit it is one of the vehicles by which our lives are brought into conformity with the work of the Son.

The spectacle of the mutilated gun, situated within the congregation, likewise invites a plurality of reflections and a plurality of formations by the Spirit moving out of the liturgy. Some will encounter the gun as an object of revulsion, spurred by either past association, political affiliations, or cultural connections. Some will encounter it quixotically, unsure what those things “out there” have to do with the work of the church occurring “in here.” Some will embrace its presence, perhaps as a sign of the church body’s direction or because of their prior associations. But as co-participants in the body of Christ, the sign of contradiction of the gun is something for the congregation to own together and a sign that challenges them together. It is a vehicle by which the Spirit will invite transformation of its viewers, and which will, in turn, offer fresh challenges for the question that animates this article: In what ways is protection of the church today—as a work of the Spirit—compatible with the ongoing life of the church—the work of the Son? The question posed becomes a question posed to the body, a corporate question that must be answered together.

As I indicated earlier, in a Baptist context, the constructive work of orienting our moral vision is done through the preached Scriptures, with any kind of additional aid seen merely as illuminating the Scriptures. For this kind of formative work to work adequately, however, the mutilated gun must ultimately be paired with the image of Christ, for two reasons. First, to have only the gun as a fixed liturgical element risks elevating the refusal of violence to a primary cause for the congregation: that to be Christian is above all else to be nonviolent. Although I am operating from the premise that a Christian confession entails the rejection of violence, elevating nonviolence to primary confessional status is to elevate something other than the person of Christ. Secondly, only when fixed next to the person of Christ does the meaning of the mutilated gun becomes clear: it is the golden calf which the Word has melted down and melts down repeatedly in our practice and in our spirit. The refusal to kill is not a one-time decision, but a moral disposition that must be learned and relearned, for violence takes many forms, some overt and some more sustained and subtle. When the meaning of the gun is thus illuminated by the context of worship, in which the things of creation are caught up, transformed, and reborn under the sign of the crucified and resurrected Jesus, what the congregation does by the Spirit both in that space and beyond it follows from the prior work of the Son. As we consider then what it means to protect the body of Christ, to claim the inspiration of the Spirit means that one must follow the image of the Son, as seen and received in baptism and Communion.

Conclusion: Worship and/of the gun

Protestants in general are tempted to attend to the spoken Word as the center of worship, and in doing so, interpose the Word with the preached Word, to treat God (and later the work of discipleship) as a matter of mental but not bodily reorientation. In offering an aesthetic, rather than analytic, way of addressing the ethics of armed defense, my hope is that one might remember that worship is about the renovation of all things in the presence of the Word, not about content that presumes that the Word is not present among worshippers. To put art at the center of the argument is to return to Paul’s dictum that as believers behold Christ crucified, they shall be changed in their thinking and living.

Unlike the icons that invite worshippers to gaze upon the glory of God and be changed, spectacles such as these invite us to gaze upon their brokenness and be challenged concerning the ways in which these weapons are yet alive. The mutilated gun speaks no words and preaches no sermons, but invites its beholder to be troubled by it, both for what it is and for what it yet means. As one then seeks to answer the question, “In what ways is protection of the church today—as a work of the Spirit—compatible with the ongoing life of the church—the work of the Son?”, one is equipped by knowing negatively what this means, and freed to seek a variety of positive answers framed by the transformation of creation that is engaged through baptism and Communion, proclaimed in worship, and seen enshrined in the mutilated weapon that now aids in the worship of the triune God.