Breaking Down Dividing Walls

Ephesians, ecological peacemaking, and the Bible's language of power

We don’t usually associate the letter of Ephesians with nonviolent peacemaking. Yet a disciple of the apostle Paul, writing in the name of Paul, and penning a letter from prison like Paul, wages a relentless campaign of reconciliation—all inspired by the witness of Jesus.

The author sees the cross of Christ as a peacemaking nexus point that breaks down dividing walls of hostility. Somehow, for the author, Jesus’s blood spilt on a Roman cross ended the cycle of retributive violence. In place of domination, it offered suffering love. It eradicated barriers between Jew and Gentile, oppressed and oppressor, and all groups long separated: “For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14).

As we come to terms with our apocalyptic ecological crisis, many are discovering that a hostile wall, constructed by our own actions and industries, separates us from Earth.

Earth is longing and groaning for Christ’s peace, for a reconciled and mended body.

We are desperate for ecological peacemaking.

Ethicist Larry Rasmussen’s book Earth-Honoring Faith teaches me that:

Sometime around the middle of the last century, we changed.

Earth changed.

In the 1750s, the trajectory of industrial growth climbed slowly, and then in the 1950s, unfettered growth catapulted beyond anything Earth had witnessed before.

CO2 levels rose sharply in the last sixty years, causing New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert to warn that they’re on track to nearly double that of preindustrial levels.

The global economy doubled.

We shifted the supply of the world’s energy from human and animal labor, to oil, coal, and natural gas. We paralleled our expansive industrial growth with skyrocketing population increases, from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to around 7 billion people in 2016.

The Planet You Inherit with Larry Rasmussen

When people multiply, and industry expands, and when a wall or Earth-fissure of hostility spreads, blessings and curses attend reality as well.

Rasmussen names other dramatic increases, increases that, when measured on graphs, likewise shoot up like hockey sticks during the years 1950 onwards.

Here’s what exploded in just several decades: foreign direct investment, water use, damming of rivers, urban population, paper consumption, McDonald’s restaurants, species extinctions, great floods, ozone depletion, and on and on. (See Earth-Honoring Faith, chapter 2).

We’re now living in what some people are calling the Age of the Anthropocene, which means the age in which humans have developed the capacity to change Earth irrevocably.

A wall of hostility between Earth and humanity expands over the globe. It’s revealed in Arctic ice melting, ocean acidification, Florida coasts threatened, and the Marshall Islands facing the terrifying prospect of being covered by water.

What have we done?

What’s wrong with us?

Why haven’t we changed even though we know the facts?

We have now become conscious that Earth’s vital signs are lagging.

Headlines confirm it regularly, but we are not rushing to the emergency room.

We are simply continuing business as usual, and worse, in denial of the dividing wall, and the death we are creating.

We are the problem, and yet the crisis has ballooned to become so large and seemingly insurmountable that we do not know how to act.

It feels that we are in the grip of an unseen, nearly unnamable power, a power that paralyzes us from saving ourselves and preserving the planet.

The writer of Ephesians knows that walls of hostility are constructed through power.

The writer dares to name such powers of division as both structural and spiritual.

The writer uses ominous terms to describe these realities, such as: principalities, powers, rulers of this present darkness, and spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places.

This is the biblical language of authority, and elsewhere in the New Testament, such words are overwhelmingly used to describe political, economic, or structural power.

When Mark’s Jesus says Gentile rulers “lord it over” their followers, he’s referring to imperial rulers (Mark 10:42).

When John wishes to describe Jerusalem’s people of influence, he calls them “authorities” (John 7:48).

When Luke’s Pilate brings together the leaders to determine Jesus’ fate, he’s referring to the chief priests and the Roman officials.

These are the rulers, the powers, and the principalities of the Gospels.

The Ephesians’ writer dwells in the same politically charged world as the Gospel writers. The writer is a prisoner of the Empire, proclaiming peace amidst hostile divisions. And yet the writer moves beyond the literal naming of power into the realm of the symbolic. There are specific people, such as Pilate, the chief priests, and the imperial soldiers, but there are also ideologies, religions, governments, corporations, and structures that reinscribe division and alienation from our common planetary home.

And so the biblical language of power is particular, while also being fluid, multivalent, and evocative.

Powers and principalities are more than simply Pilate or Augustus or Nero or a CEO or a President.

Power takes on force, a culture, and a personality greater than the sum of its parts, and larger than the individual leaders at the helm. The writer of Ephesians knows that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against these larger dimensions that create hostility: principalities, rulers, and spiritual hosts.

Photo by Artem Shubas on Unsplash

It’s long clear now that behaviors such as changing light bulbs, recycling, and even driving electric cars, while all commendable, are largely impotent in the face of such power. Such networks of power are dedicated to denying and suppressing truth about Earth’s suffering at our hands. The spiritual flipside of dark money lobbying networks is what the Ephesians writer dares to name as world rulers of this present darkness, principalities and powers. In the ancient world, they called them demons.

In a demythologized time, we’ve lost the mythic ability to name Powers.

Pentecostal Christians read this passage in Ephesians about the so-called “armor of God” and imagine they are waging war against airborne, invisible devils.

Liberationists embraced the concept of structural evil, but applied it one-dimensionally to corporations and governments.

And yet principalities and powers will not be pinned down with the ease of clarity. Their biblical and sociological meaning shifts, shuffles, and points to deeper, broader, more mysterious forces, realities at once spiritual and material, what Walter Wink calls “the inner aspects of external manifestations of power.”

Here’s where nonviolence peacemaking arises: To wage spiritual struggle against such powers of division requires not only the suffering love of Jesus; it also requires a powerful peacemaking stance by the collective body of Jesus, which is historically called the church.

The author uses the word “stand” four times in Ephesians 6:10-18, and it’s both a defensive and offensive position. The writer takes language from Rome’s military lexicon, describing the church in a spiritual formation akin to imperial soldiers. Romans used an aggressive formation called “the wedge”: They gathered legions together in a triangular shape, protected by shields, and used the concentration of soldiers to smash their way into enemy lines. The writer is saying that the vocation of the church is not passive. The church contending against world rulers and spiritual hosts must not sit on the sidelines of global crises, waiting for issues to become less controversial. The church is a community of active resistance to injustice that stands in spiritual combat formation. (My read of Ephesians here inspired by Ched Myers and Elaine Enns, Ambassadors of Reconciliation).

I know many readers have difficulties with the language of warfare. But spiritual combat in the Bible is far different than the Pentagon’s wars. The weapons of spiritual power do not harm bodies or Earth; they advance a loving realm through a belt of truth, a breastplate of justice, shoes of peace, a shield of faith, a helmet of salvation, and above all, by unceasing prayer (Ephesians 6:14-18). Such spiritual power links hands with Ghandi’s satyagraha or truth-force and Martin Luther King’s active nonviolence.

Of course, there’s a cost for such spiritual confrontation. Sometimes spiritual warriors land in jail. King wrote his own letter from behind Birmingham’s bars, and the writer of Ephesians likewise wrote as an ambassador of peace shackled by chains. Today, some of the most courageous voices confronting unjust powers are imprisoned.

To name such powers is to make real the reconciling vocation of Jesus: “For he is our peace, he has made us one, he has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14).