John the Apostle: The First Epistle

 

This letter exemplifies the Apostle’s pastoral care. He writes out of a concern about false teachers, offering not a formal rebuttal of their doctrines but nonetheless intending to protect Christians from their teachings—encouraging them to live according to orthodoxy, right opinion. John evidently writes to no specific church (as Paul usually does); this is rather a circular letter, one intended to be copied and ‘sent around’ to a number of Christian congregations. 

Commentators often write that the specific unorthodox, wrong opinion that concerns John is Docetism, which claimed that Jesus only appeared to have taken physical shape, that he remained a pure spirit who gave his witnesses the illusion of bodily life. This would make sense of John’s initial insistence on the physical reality of Jesus: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life” (I.i)—that is, God incarnate, whom we heard, saw, felt—this is the Person John invokes. “From the beginning” refers to the opening words of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was with God.” With Jesus Christ, that Word has “become flesh,” living among the Apostles; “the life was manifested” (I.ii).

Because the Word of life has been manifested in the living Person of Jesus, “we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father” (I.ii). “We,” John, serve as the living witness of the living Word, that which has existed from the beginning, the Archē, the origin that gave form to the heavens and the earth. It is significant that John associates two of the three ways in which he has known God with his own physical organs, but not the first way. He saw Jesus with his eyes; he felt Jesus with his hands. He does not mention that he heard Jesus with his ears, only that he heard Him. He not only heard God but he believed the Word that he spoke, which is an operation of the mind. It is the mind, which apprehends and believes that Word; the mind is more important than any sense perception. ‘Seeing is believing’ but what you see isn’t always what you get; you may be looking at a mirage. What you feel is solid, physically real, but it (pace Machiavelli) it tells you nothing. Only words can convey the Word.

This leads to a problem, however. What of the believers who never heard, saw, or felt God? How are they to believe?

“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that you also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ (I.iii.).” What I, John, have witnessed, I now witness, declare, testify to you. As Jesus passed the Word to me, so I pass it on to you. I do so in order that you may have fellowship with me, be like-minded, alike in spirit, as I had fellowship with Him, Father and Son. “And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full” (I.iv.). His written words bring assurance of the spoken Word, itself written down by the apostles who heard Him. The telos or purpose of writing these words expressing that Word is to bring your joy to fulfillment, your joy in salvation.

What is the substance of that Word? And why should it bring you joy—that is, what is He saving you from? “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (I.v). The message of the Word transmitted now to you, in writing, comes first in a metaphor, in “light,” as indeed in the beginning there was not only the Word of God, as the Gospel of John says, but the light, as the Book of Genesis says. “If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth” (I.vi). Without light you cannot see where you are walking, cannot follow the true way which the light illuminates for us. As the culmination of the acts of creation which began with the words, “Let there be light,” the good of the human being, which alone brings him joy, must follow that way of life, that regime of God, or else it will stumble and fall into misery. False words, lies, darken the mind; they contradict the words which convey the Word, which rightly guides our actions. “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (I.vii). The life-blood of God is the only kind of blood that cleanses; all other kinds of blood leave a stain. But a sacrifice aims at cleansing, and that was the effect of the sacrifice Jesus made on the Cross, for those who attend to His words and walk in the way they map out for human beings, for their good and their joy in attaining it.

However, “if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (I.viii). If our own words, our own testimony before one another and before God, claims sinlessness for ourselves, we lack self-knowledge. The truth is not in us. But sin is. By so speaking, remaining in the sin we refuse to admit in words, we sever the bonds of true fellowship with God and with each other. We don’t ‘enlighten’ ourselves, when it comes to our sins; only God can do that, although we can turn our backs on Him and walk some other way, exile ourselves from His regime. The truth that the light illuminates is that when we deny that we sin we ‘have’ sin, whether we say we do or not. We testify against ourselves. Speech is the bond of all communities. Speak falsely and you break the bond, dissolve the community, by ruining the trust truthful words establish.

Nevertheless, “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I.ix). That is, if we do have the truth in us, if the light that is God does illuminate our minds and hearts, and if we confess, speak out, use words to speak the truth about ourselves, to say that we have sins, God will cleanse us of them. He does this because, first of all, His actions never contradict His words; he is faithful to His covenants with His people, including his guarantee to save those souls who put their trust in Him with respect to their salvation. He is also just, a fair-dealer, not one to betray the trust souls who trust Him. When it comes to wrong acts, justice can inflict punishment but it can also seek the rehabilitation of the criminal. God is just in both ways. His fidelity and His justice lead him to forgive our sins; not only has He said He would do so, He knows us to be incapable of cleansing ourselves from our sins, needing His grace, His sacrifice, on our behalf to make us worthy of fellowship with Himself and with one another. Is there a difference between “sins,” which we have, and “unrighteousness,” which can be removed? There might be, in the sense that ever-sinful human beings might still follow the light along the right way, within the regime, the Kingdom, of God. It will be the written words of God, and the fellowship with other members of God’s regime—here, one of the Apostles—that we may become more mindful of that way, winning our consent to return to it when we walk off its boundaries. 

If, rather, “we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us” (I.x). By denying that we commit sins we accuse God, pretending that He violates His own commandment against false testimony. This reverses the right relationship of judge and those judged. We then commit injustice; we then commit infidelity to God, to one another, and to ourselves as individuals. We have lost our self-knowledge as creatures of God, rightly ruled by Him by the light that is His Word, as conveyed by His words and those Spirit-guided writers who have set it down for us to read, long after their bodies, and Jesus’ body, departed from the earth, where we can no longer hear, see, our touch them.

John calls his addressees “my little children” (II.i), recalling the theme of transmitting the Word, this time not through space but through time. He is their father inasmuch as he brings the words of the Son who followed His Father to the apostles. In commanding them “that ye sin not” (II.i), John exercises paternal authority, paternal wisdom, and paternal care. Knowing that human beings will commit sins despite the divine commands, he reminds them of divine grace; “if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (II.i), a defense attorney in the divine court. As members of God’s regime, before its court, the unrighteous have a righteous defender, one on whom we can rely, one who won’t betray us even when we unrighteously betray the Father.

More than an advocate, Jesus Christ is “the propitiation for our sins”—the appeaser of the Father’s anger at us, the unrighteous. He took the penalty of God’s wrath upon Himself for us, an act by which the Father showed us His own graciousness, having sent His Son for that purpose. And not for the sins of the members of the Father’s regime, the sons in the Father’s family, did Jesus become the Christ; he did this “also for the sins of the whole world” (II.ii). All human beings are invited to become members of God’s regime and family.

“And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments” (II.iii). That is, we have self-knowledge but also knowledge of our fellows as members of God’s regime, His family, by obeying our acknowledged Ruler, by ‘being ruled’ in accordance with His commands. We know Him by knowing His mind, His stated intentions; to be laws, commands must not only be thought but promulgated. “He who saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him” (II.iv); saying must not only match doing, doing must match saying. “But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily”—truly and verifiably—is “the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him” (II.v). 

As the saying goes, What’s love got to do with it? God issued His laws out of love, as a parent does in commanding a child ‘for your own good.’ God’s love is perfected when those He loves do what is best for them. In obeying God’s commands we prove not to Him (who knows us already) but to ourselves (prone to self-deception at least as much as deception of others) that we are “in” Him; even more firmly and intimately than as consenting subjects of a regime or obedient children in a family, we are members of His body. And like members of a body, we move with that body. “He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked” (II.vi). Jesus walked in the way of His Father, the way of life set down by the Father’s commands, including His laws, part of the righteous order of His regime, His family. 

John then addresses not “little children” but “brethren”—fellow Christians in their status as more nearly equal to himself, not as persons obligated to obey commands but as persons receiving commands. “I write no new commandment unto you,” he assures them, “but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning,” “the word which ye have heard from the beginning” (II.vii). God commands have always prohibited sinful acts. In this sense, we are under no new regime, with no new purpose, issuing no new commands. The Son faithfully obeys the laws of the Father, and so commands us to do.

However, it is also “a new commandment I write you, which thing is true in him and in you: because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth” (II.viii). The Word is new in the sense of a renewal. Israel has been the light unto the nations—outside them, beckoning them. Now, the regime and family of God have been extended to the nations; it is now in them, insofar as some among ‘the Gentiles’ have consented to God’s rule and therefore to the true ‘way.’ Love rules from ‘inside’.

As the ‘spirit’ of God’s lawful commands, agapic love animates not only the relationship of God and man but the relationships among men themselves. “He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness until now. He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.” (II.ix-xi). Light permits knowledge; agapic love enable the mind to direct our ‘steps’ rightly along the ‘way’ of God’s regime, whereas hatred of fellow citizens blocks the light, prevents the hater from knowing not only the way but the destination the way leads, God’s purpose in setting down His way.

John now discloses his own purpose in writing this letter. Insofar as he writes to them as “little children,” he wants them to know that their “sins are forgiven you for his name’s sake”—one’s “name” being one’s reputation, and Jesus’ name being the Christ, the Savior (II.xii). The Father forgives your sins, your violations of the laws of His regime, in faithfully upholding the purpose for which He sent the Son, a purpose announced in his “name,” his title within the Father’s regime, his reputation. Rulers depend upon their reputation, and the Father upholds his son’s reputation just as Jesus upheld the reputation of His Father. As “little children” they have “known the Father” (II.xiv), understood his intention in sending His Son to take the acts that have enabled the Father to forgive them, thanks especially to the Son’s words on the Cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

John writes to his correspondents as “fathers” or his equals insofar as they too have “known [God] from the beginning” (II.xiii). Some commentators identify the “little children” as new believers, particularly new Christians, and the “fathers” as the mature believers and/or perhaps as Jewish believers as distinct from Gentile converts.

Finally, he writes to “young men,” who have “overcome the wicked one,” the ‘Satan’ or ‘enemy’ of God, His regime, His commands (II.xiv). Young men have strength. Insofar as they have shown strength in overcoming the one who would subvert God’s rule, the strength to resist sin, John’s addressees deserve their own good reputation, good standing in the regime of righteousness founded by God.

In their strength or ‘youth’ the citizens need encouragement and continued right direction. “Love not the world,” John tells them, “neither the things that are in the world” (II.xv). “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (II.xv). Why not? Because “all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world” (II.xvi). Lust is love misdirected, love directed away from the Father, the Creator of the world, toward the world He created. It is love unworthy of a human being, whom God made capable—alone among the creatures of the earth—of loving the true Ruler of the world. “The world passeth away; and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever” (II.xvii). The Creator-God is eternal, unlike the world He created. Love of the eternal, being godly or God-given, is also eternal, unlike the love of flesh, love of the visible, love that comes through the eyes and not through the ears. Although the apostles saw and touched Jesus, they loved Him as the Word of God, loved Him insofar as He told them things lastingly meaningful to their ‘hearts’—that is, their minds and their sentiments as perceivers of the invisible, the things that can only be heard, not seen or touched like bodies which, for all their beauty, are dumb.

Addressing his correspondents again as “little children”—as knowers of God, as sinning members of His regime who understand nonetheless that their sins are forgiven—John reminds them of something else “ye have heard,” something about the wicked one, the enemy, whom they have overcome in their capacity as “young men.” “Ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now there are many antichrists,” many enemies of God and His regime (II.xviii). By this, “we know that it is the last time” (II.xviii). 

The antichrists “went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us” (II.xix.). That is, although they behaved like ‘missionaries,’ the antichrists had the opposite intention: subtracting from instead of adding to God’s family or regime. They are ‘expatriates’ and, worse than that traitors, pretended citizens and brethren who were never truly such. They did not partake of the spirit of God’s ecclesia or assembly. Whereas Jesus made manifest the Word of God, the antichrists make manifest the wrong word, the wrong teaching, the anti-Christian word. To put it in terms of the American regime, it is as if a legal citizen of the United States were to renounce the principles of the Declaration of Independence, maintaining that all men are not created equal with respect to their unalienable rights.

By contrast, the remaining true Christians “have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things” (II.xx). “Unction” means authorization; specifically, it refers to the anointing of the new monarch’s head with an oil that symbolically confers supreme authority. For Christians, this authorization by the Holy Spirit confers knowledge of “all things,” meaning all things needed for salvation from the many other ‘regimes’ that enforce anti-Christian principles. Therefore, “I have not written unto you because you know not the truth, but because you know it, and that no lie is of the truth” (II.xxi). If Jesus embodies the Logos and if the Holy Spirit enters into the souls of Christians, conveying that Logos and anointing them with its authority, then logos or reason, thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, rules out lies, any ‘word’ that contradicts the truth of God.

“Who is a liar but he that denies that Jesus is the Christ?” (II.xxii). This is the premise of John’s logical argument, founded on the Logos and on logos, that he who denies the Christhood of Jesus denies the truth, contradicts the truth. “He is antichrist”—against the true claim that Jesus is the Christ—who “denies the Father and the Son” (II.xxiii). And therefore “whoever denies the Son, the same has not the Father: but he that acknowledges the Son has the Father” (II.xxiii). Father and Son constitute a family; logically, there can be no father without a son (or daughter) and no son (or daughter) without a father. To deny the Son-hood, the Christhood, of Jesus is to deny his true title to rule, effectively denying the Father whose intention it was to send His Son to embody His supremely authoritative commands, His Word, to human beings.

The Holy Spirit, conveying the Word or commands of God to those who became Christians, following the Word that Jesus as Christ embodied “abides” within the souls of Christians. John commands Christians to keep “that which you have heard from the beginning,” God’s Word, the founding declaration of God’s family and regime, within themselves, within their minds and hearts (II.xxiv). Let that authoritative and authorizing Word “remain in you”; if you do, “you also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father” (II.xxiv). You will have within yourselves the Holy Spirit, the mind and heart, of God as Father, God as Son.

Why should I want the Holy Spirit within me? Because God’s commands include His covenant with us, and that covenant entails “the promise he has promised us, even eternal life” (II.xxv). All other covenants are ‘worldly,’ temporary. They can be tempting to ‘sign on’ to, but, John says, “I have written unto you concerning [these things] that seduce you,” deceive you (II.xxvi)—perhaps more precisely, things that would deceive you if you had not the Holy Spirit to remind you of the truth. “The anointing which you have received of Him abides in you, and you need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teaches you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it has taught you, you shall abide in Him” (II.xxvii). The authority-granting anointing also granted the knowledge that authorizes right rule, since it was an anointing by the Holy Spirit, who knows all that is needful for salvation, for eternal life in the best regime.

Since the Holy Spirit ‘enrolls’ members of God’s family and regime invisibly, how are we to know who is a brother, who is a fellow-citizen? Partly by the words they speak but mostly by their actions: “If you know that [God] is righteous, you know that every one that does righteousness is born of him” (II.29).

In the third chapter of his letter John discusses more precisely the character of that enrollment. We know God initially through hearing His Word. With this, we begin also to “behold”—to see—the “manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us,” the way of that love (III.i). Seeing is the use of the light of knowledge to know the way. We behold the way, the kind of love the Father’s love is, the love that makes us “sons of God” (III.i). This love is not erotic/desirous but agapic/graceful, an expression not of God’s need (He obviously has none) but of His care, His benevolence. He ‘adopts’ us into His family. As a consequence, “the world knows us not because it knew Him not” (III.i). The world did not recognize Jesus as the Christ, and therefore does not know Christians as sons of God, members of the ruling family.

“Beloved, now we are the sons of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is” (III.ii). In this “last” time Jesus will appear, or reappear, this time “as He is”—knowable not only in hearing but in sight (III.ii). His transformation will cause a transformation in Christians, too; we shall, like God, “be what we shall be,” beholders of Christ as He is. A new sight, a new form of knowledge, transforms the seer, the knower. This will enable us to become more like Him, to increase our ‘family resemblance’ to Him. In the meantime, “Every man that has this hope in Him purifies himself, even as He is pure” (III.iii). 

A Christian purifies himself, just as any obedient son or law-abiding citizen makes himself ‘more like’ the other members of the family or the regime by steadily acting according to the rules of the family or regime. Steady acting brings habituation, ‘habits of mind and of heart’ that accord with the prescribed way of life. “Whosoever commits sin transgresses also the law; for in sin is the transgressing of the laws” (III.iv). ”Commitment’ here means ‘habituation,’ steadiness of action. Such a person habituates himself to the way, the path, of some other family, some other regime. 

All human beings sin, just as all members of families and countries disobey the commands of the rulers, including their rules or laws. This doesn’t mean that they are no longer members of the family or the country but it does mean something must be done about them if the family or country is to survive. Christians “know that He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him there is no sin” (III.v). By that visible act, the sinless Ruler demonstrated Himself ready to redeem or forgive the sins of the ruled, forgive transgressions of the commands He issued to them. He will not forgive the transgressions of those who have renounced His regime altogether. 

Insofar as Christians “abide in Him” they “sin not”; those who sin—sin habitually—show by their actions that they “have not seen Him, neither known Him” (III.vi). In the Gospel of John XV.iv Jesus tells His disciples, “Abide in Me and I will abide in you.” Abiding means staying; “in” suggests a very close, intimate bond between Ruler and ruled. It is a condition that points from being a family member by adoption toward being a family member by birth, being ‘born again.” 

Hence John commands, “Little children, let no man deceive you: he that does righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous” (III.vii). The deceiver will induce you to go in the wrong direction, along the wrong path or way. “He that commits sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning” (III.viii); the devil rebelled against God’s regime and has sought to add to the body of those ruled by him. Because this happened, God “manifested” His Son, “that he might destroy the works of the devil,” redeem those caught in the devil’s regime. Here the metaphor of birth appears: “Whosoever is born of God does not commit sin; for [God’s] seed remains in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God”; there is no sin in his ‘DNA,’ as it were (III.ix). The human being who abides in God and in whom God abides may think or behave in contradiction to this nature but it is still his nature. This is the strongest family bond of all, analogous to biological inheritance in being ineradicable so long as the human being exists. According to God’s covenant, that life will be eternal.

Visually perceptible acts of righteousness express invisible agapic love. “For this was the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another” (III.xi) as children of God and therefore brothers in Christ. Cain remains the example of brother-murder. As one who abided “in the wicked one,” Cain murdered Abel because “his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous” (III.xii). Brothers in blood, they were enemies in spirit, members of rival spiritual families. It is then no wonder that the world hates Christians, just as Cain hated Abel. “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him,” having opposed the regime of eternal life, just as the member of God’s family wants life for his brother. Far from killing his brother, the Christian will imitate Christ, “who laid down his life for us” (III.xvi). Those who shut themselves off from agapic love for a brother in need cannot be said to have “the love of God” abiding, dwelling, in him (III.xvii).

The physical reality of Jesus and of His physical act of self-sacrifice are, then, decisive for knowledge of Him and of Christian conduct. “My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth” (III.xviii). That is how “we know we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before Him” (III.xix). Shifting back to the regime metaphor from the family metaphor, John envisions a court in which God judges us. “For if [or “whenever”] our heart condemns us” God “is greater than our heart, and knows all things” (III.xx). By overruling our just apparently self-condemnation, God exercises His superior knowledge not only of ourselves but of the spiritual order within which we exist. Given the agapic love manifested in this judicial act, we are rightly humbled and accepting of God’s rule. Further, “if our heart condemns us not, then we have confidence toward God. And whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.” (III.xxi-xxii). As Christians, our hearts have the Holy Spirit abiding in them, aiding our self-knowledge and self-judgment. If what we intend and do pleases God, the Holy Spirit will so advise us. Sight being the way to perceive actions, God will see the right things we do, consistent with the promptings of His Spirit and the Word of His Son.

What does God want us to do? “This is His commandment,” first, “that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ” and, second, that we should “love one another” (III.xxiii). “And he that keeps His commandments dwells in Him, and He in him. And hereby we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit which he has given us.” (III.xxiv). This teaching may be compared and contrasted with Aristotle’s definition of politics, which he finds first of all in the relationship of a husband and a wife. Husbands and wives rule and are ruled, in turn. This reciprocity in ruling is the model of the political life, in contrast with kingship (rule for the good of the ruled) and tyranny (rule for the good of the ruler). John understands God’s rule as a kingship, rule for the good of the ruled, but it is a kingship whose bond is remarkably ‘tight’ or intimate, inasmuch as God’s subject abide in Him, and He in them; more, God’s agapic rule secures the good of the ruled by knowing the defects, the sinfulness, of the ruled and by forgiving them, so long as they abide in Him, within His regime, unlike the ‘apostates’ or ‘traitors’ who reject God’s regime and enroll in the regime of the devil.

At the beginning of the fourth section of his letter, John addresses a problem crucial to his argument, the problem of how to distinguish Christians from “antichrists.” After all, those who separate themselves from God’s assembly often claim that the assembly has gone wrong, that they are the true Church. We are leaving, come with us. “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (IV.1). But how are we to test persons animated by a spirit that is invisible and, even if it were visible, hidden within their minds and hearts? The Signers of the American Declaration of Independence acknowledged that only God can judge “the rectitude of our intentions,” yet in some proximate sense human beings must ‘judge’ or assess the motives of those we encounter.

Here, John writes, is how to “know…the Spirit of God” (IV.2). First, “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God,” while those who deny this are animated by “the spirit of antichrist,” which “even now already is…in the world” (IV.3). You will know them by their words. Knowing them, you overcome them, you are not deceived by them, because Spirit of God is “greater” than “he that is in the world” (IV.4). The more you hear from them, they easier they are to recognize. “They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world hears them” (IV.5). The world wants to hear about itself, about its concerns, and the antichrists want the world to hear them. Christians, however “are of God: he that knows God hears us; he that is not of God hears not us” (IV.6). We can distinguish “the spirit of truth” from “the spirit of error” not only by the substance of the words we hear but by their effect, by noticing who it is that listens to what we say and who it is that listens to what they say.

Beyond words, Christians can tell fellow Christians from antichrists by observing actions. “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God; and every one that loves is born and God, and knows God” (IV.7). Conversely, “he that loves not knows not God; for God is love” (IV.8). To know God is to know that He is love (which is not to say that love is God). A child shares the nature of his father; Christians are children of God; Christians share (some) of the nature of God (in modern terms, they will have love in their ‘DNA’). Such love is manifest to the Christian by looking within himself but, when considering others, into whose souls we cannot see, we see love or the lack of love in actions. This supreme example of this is God Himself, into whose mind and heart no one can see, but whose love “toward us” was “manifested,” made visible, “because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him” (IV.9). “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (IV.10). What kind of God do those who renounce the Church uphold?

Logical arguments concerning practice or action typically contain ‘if/then’ clauses. If x, then y: y follows logically, necessarily, from x; there is no contradiction. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another” (IV.11). Since “no man has seen God at any time” insofar has he abides or dwells within us, our acts of love toward one another give evidence of that abiding, that indwelling (IV.12). Further “his love is perfected in us” (IV.12); that is, it reaches its telos, its purpose and culmination. Loving one another, and doing so increasingly, manifests by action the intentions of Christians, against which the intentions of antichrists can be measured. This is how we “know” and not merely guess that “we dwell in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit” (IV.13). 

Although we cannot see the work of God’s Spirit within anyone other than ourselves as individuals, but can only listen for it in their words and look for it in their intentions as these manifest themselves in loving actions, John himself has in fact “seen and do[es] testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world” (IV.14), as stated in v. 9. In the face of that world, which doesn’t know it wants to be saved and consequently does not listen to Christians, “whosoever shall confess”—say out loud and act in a manner that follows logically from what we say—that “Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God” (IV.15). This saying expresses what is inside us, that “we have known and believed the love that God has to us,” that the God who is love dwells or abides in us (IV.16). 

It is that abiding or indwelling that perfects “our love,” so that “we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world” (IV.17). Human nature has its telos, the perfection of its natural powers of body and soul, and especially of its reason, which distinguishes our nature from that of other living species or ‘kinds’. Adam could be ‘tasked’ with naming the other species in Eden precisely because he could recognize differences among those ‘kinds,’ through his capacity to think according to the principle of non-contradiction, of reason. This capacity doesn’t save us from sinning, however, and therefore does not save us from the consequences of sin. For that, Jesus Christ’s sacrifice and the Holy Spirit’s indwelling alone suffice. Only through that sacrifice and that Spirit can we achieve our true telos, which is living with God under His regime in his ‘state’ or kingdom, which is Heaven.

Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. We rightly fear God for the punishments He can inflict upon us if we depart from His regime, His way. But fear is not the end, the purpose, the telos, the perfection of wisdom. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love.” (IV.18). We did not initiate this love; He did. Christians have only responded to that love, with ours, but ‘only’ is nonetheless all-important when it comes to salvation from the punishments we would otherwise rightly fear. 

Returning then to the problem of testing, “If a man say, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he that loves not his brother whom he has seen how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (IV.20). The test of genuine fidelity to God, the visible and audible test, is love of brother, love of neighbor. That is the part of agapic love Christians can witness in others, as distinct from the part of agapic love they can witness in themselves and witness or confess to others. Loving one’s brother—the audible, visible, touchable human being in front of me—is the command that follows, and logically follows from, the command to love God. “And this commandment have we from Him, that he who loves God love his brother also” (IV.21). God speaks to us in order to say what we must do, and God’s words themselves are also actions, as seen in the act of Creation, speaking the world into existence, and the act of Crucifixion, saving that part of the world that sees and listens to Jesus Christ from the ruin inherent in the regime of God’s enemy and that enemy’s allies, the antichrists.

That is how can I can test others. How can I test myself? In that, I have a resource unavailable when I consider others: introspection. “Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten by him” (V.1); if you love the Father, you love His Son. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “the great writers of antiquity,” being “part of an aristocracy of masters,” had difficulty conceiving of human equality. “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.” [1] Christianity makes the idea of human beings’ equality before God ‘thinkable.’

The consequence of this is to extend our love of the Son of God to all the sons of God. “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep his commandments” (V.ii). Christians believe Jesus is the Christ, born of God; that belief is the foundation of their knowledge of our love of neighbor, a love commanded (as we know from His words) by Jesus as the Christ and the Son of God. The command we know, obeying because we believe the One who commanded it is who and what He said He is, is “not grievous” or heavy (V.3); we therefore have no excuse to disobey it. We find obedience to the command to be a light burden because whoever “is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, our faith” (V.4). The world, unloving and unfaithful, finds obedience to Jesus’ commands to love God and neighbor to be unbearable; strengthened by Holy Spirit, Christians do not find it so. “Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” (V.5). 

Jesus overcame the world for whomever believes in his Savior as the Son of God. “This is he that came by water and blood, Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood” (V.6). Commentators dispute the meaning of “water,” many associating it with baptism and recalling that water and blood both flowed from Jesus side when a centurion pierced it with a spear as He hung on the Cross. Jesus also “came” by water when He walked on it, and he proved His mastery over water by calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee. These images recall water as the condition of the cosmos before God ordered it—fluid, chaotic. If blood symbolizes life, the giving of blood sacrificing life, water may mean the setting-apart of the one who is baptized with it, citizenship in God’s kingdom as holy or separate from the kingdoms of this world; insofar as water also symbolizes chaos, rule over it symbolizes the triumph of the Son of God, and through His grace the children of His household and kingdom, over the worldly kingdoms. John the Baptist was entitled to perform the ceremony of separation but only the Christ can both separate His children from the world and sacrifice His life in order to save their lives.

Baptism and sacrifice are acts. How can we know what they signify? Only by the mind, the capacity for understanding both deeds and words. But human minds can err. What guarantees the truth of their interpretation? A  superior mind: “It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth” (V.6). A body can baptize; a body can bleed; only a mind can witness. “There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one” (V.7). The Word is Jesus, the Logos made flesh. In a court of law, it is better to have three witnesses to testify to the truth of actions than it is to have only one. The Trinity, the three ‘persons’ or personae of God, are three in one: God as Father/Lawgiver; God as Son/Savior (from the stern verdict based upon the Law); God as Holy “Ghost” or Spirit, as the One who enters the minds of Christians and guides them respecting the substance of their belief. The Spirit is the link between heaven and earth. “There are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one” (V.8). That is, baptism and sacrifice are outward evidences of Christian belief, whereas the Holy Spirit witnesses the minds of Christians, leading them to those right actions of separation from the world and sacrifice for the sake of ‘worldlings’ or subjects to the worldly regimes. In denying that Jesus came in the form of a physical body, Docetists could affirm baptism but denied the blood, the sacrifice, the Cross.

Other men will see what we do, hear what we say, but “if we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater” (V.9); indeed, “he that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself,” in the form of the Holy Spirit (V.10). To deny that witness is to make God “a liar,” inasmuch as God gave us his Word, the “record” of “his Son” (V.10). That record clearly states that God’s Son’s sacrifice of His life on earth gave us “eternal life” so far as we trust in Him at his word—Himself embodying as well as speaking that Word, a Word of God the Father and from God the Father. “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (V.12). 

In conclusion, John tells his correspondents that he has written to them as fellow Christians to reaffirm the knowledge of their salvation, knowledge founded on their belief “the name of the Son of God” (V.13). The name of the Son of God is Jesus, meaning ‘deliverer’ or ‘rescuer.’ To believe in His name is to believe that He is what His name indicates that He is. “This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us” (V.14). Hearing us, He will heed our requests, but especially our requests to “deliver us from evil,” as the Psalmist writes. For example, “If any man see his brother,” his fellow Christian, “sin a sin which is not unto death, he [the petitioning Christian] shall ask, and he [Jesus, the Christ] shall give him life” (V.16). Not so, the one who commits “a sin unto death: I do not say that he [the petitioning Christian] shall pray for it” (V.16]. If “all unrighteousness is sin,” what is the specific form of unrighteousness that is a sin unto death, a deadly sin? (V.16). There are, famously, seven deadly sins, but all who commit them may be redeemed. It may be that the sin unto death simply means a sin that a sinning brother Christian continues to commit until death; or John might be saying, even more simply, that prayers to redeem a sinner will not avail after his death. 

Or is the sin unto death idolatry, disbelief in God? John lists three things Christians know, based on our belief in Jesus as Son of God and as the Christ. “We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not” at least insofar as he remains cognizant of the water and the blood of his rescuer; the “wicked one,” Satan, “toucheth him not,” cannot claim him for his regime of ‘the world, the flesh, and the devil’ (V.18). We also “know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness” (V.19). In actions, then, and also in ‘family’ or in ‘regime’ Christians are distinct from and opposed to the ‘family’ or ‘regime’ of Satan. They are safe, ‘saved,’ because Jesus overcame, conquered ‘the world’ by the water and the blood of the Cross. Finally, “we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, in his Son Jesus Christ” (V.20). This third thing Christians know is itself threefold: we know the Messiah, the Rescuer has come; we know He has given us “an understanding”—not only a set of facts but the meaning of those facts—and we are “in him,” within His Spirit, a spirit who is true in the sense of being real and true in the sense of being trustworthy. “This is the true God, and eternal life” (V.20). Therefore, “little children, keep yourself from idols,” from the untrue—gods who are false and untrustworthy, agents of the evil one whose name means ‘enemy.’ 

 

Note

1. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. II.i.3.

 

 

William V. Frame: The Dialogue of Faith and Reason: The Speeches and Papers of William V. Frame. Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2006.

 

Note: William V. Frame was my academic adviser during my time at Kenyon College, 1969-1973. He taught comparative politics and introduced me to the study of Charles de Gaulle. He eventually chaired the Kenyon Political Science Department before going on to a career in corporate banking. These two paths served him well when he became president of Augsburg College, a Lutheran liberal arts college from 1997 to 2006. His book consists of a carefully arranged sequence of (mostly) speeches to audiences at the College, reflections on the character of Christian liberal education in contemporary America.

 

Frame situates his talks carefully within the College he governed as its chief executive officer. “Each was intended to draw into view a defining aspect of the college. It was this intention that led me back time and again to the foundings of the college, and then forward to contemplation of its modern mission”— and, it might be added, ‘above’ to its Christian character. With respect to the founding principles of the College’s regime, “during the nine years of my tenure, I became increasingly fascinated with the Reformation itself and the two giants who formed its traditions in Theology and Education—Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. The Reformation, he learned, was “modern but alternative to the Enlightenment; Christian but calling us into the world in service; rejecting works righteousness but discovering in unwarranted grace the motive power of our good works; faith-based but intellectually demanding and respectful of human reason.” Such “has been Augsburg’s great gift to me”—most immediately, Augsburg College, more remotely but decisively, Augsburg, Prussia, where Melanchthon wrote the Augsburg Confession in 1530, a document later integrated into the Peace of Augsburg, “the first formal truce in the dispute between the [Roman Catholic] Church and the Protestants.”

He introduces his book with a speech given near the beginning of his presidency, at the College’s convocation ceremony in September 1997. On that occasion he pointed to the distinctive character of the place: “We have chosen—you and I—the one college in this part of the world”—he means Minneapolis, and he is almost unquestionably right—that “is dedicated to the provision of an education that is both practical and profound; that simultaneously supplies knowledge of the world and self-knowledge; that seeks liberation of the soul from cant of all kinds, both ancient and modern, and cultivates the capacity for obedience to the enduring principles revealed by both reason and faith; that silences our noisy prattle so that we may hear our calling, and returns us the new and literate voice of reflection so that our vocations—all of which will be pursued under the ascendant influence of urban, global and technological forces—are not only gifts to ourselves but serviceable to others and to God as well.” That distinctive character derives from the conjunction of two things: the founding of the College by “people self-consciously free of moral guidance by public opinion or governmental edict who wanted nevertheless to live rightly”; and the founding of the United States of America “by people anxious to give greater—not lesser—sway to the moral and ethical requirements of various faiths” precisely by establishing what Abraham Lincoln called “a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.” That is, Augsburg College could be founded and perpetuated within the American regime because that regime afforded political liberty, along with the political means of defending it, to any set of people—in this case, a set of Lutherans from Norway—who consented to rule and to be ruled under the United States Constitution, which instantiated in civil form the laws of Nature and of nature’s God, understood to consist of the unalienable natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Without the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church, what would take its place? Luther said, “The fine liberal arts invented and brought to light by learned and outstanding people—even when those people were heathen are serviceable and useful to people in this life.” By “serviceable” Luther mean not ‘pre-professional’ and surely not something conducive to “self-expression or personal success,” but vocational in the Christian sense, attending the ‘calling’ of God in the midst of the world and following it throughout life. “The capacity for reverence is the bedrock of our honor of God and of our respect for human excellence.” “Only a college that puts faith into the crucible with reason and cultivates the capacity for reverence as the foundation stone of humility, can effectively provide the setting in which free men and women can fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal or ejection of officially authorized moral regimen—a vacuum too often filled in our time by the various progeny of nihilism and value-relativism—with a voluntary embrace of the good.”

In Part One, Frame gets right into the heart of the fundamental question facing any educator in a Christian liberal arts college. Do “the elements of Faith” in his college’s foundations “allow adequate room for Reason” and, complementarily, do “the disciplines of reason demanded by this mission” tolerate faith? Although “I have not and never will succeed,” “I would like to draw every member of the faculty away from partisan commitment either to faith or to reason and toward acknowledgment that the presence of each enhances the reliability of the other.” As Luther and the American Founders both acknowledged, reason and faith differ but they intersect. Luther called them the Kingdom of the Left and the Kingdom of the Right, neither meaningful without the other; the American Founders called them the laws of nature’s God, that is, laws stated in God’s revealed Word but also discoverable by means of human reason—for example, the unalienable rights upheld in the Declaration of Independence. To clarify this, Frame remarks the ‘Socratic turn’. The ’empiricists’ and ‘realists’ of Socrates’ Athens held, with Thrasymachus, that justice is the will of the stronger. They took their bearings from ‘natural philosophy,’ which had discovered a cosmos consisting of matter in motion. In such a cosmos, insofar as beings in it can speak, power is indeed the ultimate reality and ‘justice’ is what the most powerful say it is. Yet one of those powers, the powers of speech, leads the mind that exercises it beyond the empirical, toward the realm of ideas. The existence of varying opinions among speakers brings their opinions into conflict, inasmuch as those opinions contradict one another. In that collision of opposites, that dialectic, the ‘weaker’ argument—the one not propounded by the physically stronger—may overthrow the ‘stronger’ argument. 

At the same time, Platonic dialogues show Socrates and his interlocutors at times reaching an impasse. There is often a “point at which speech reaches its limit and can go no farther.” “It is at this point that the instructed student can look up and just for a moment glance at the formal notion of beauty or at the formal notion of justice.” This moment of noēsis or insight amounts to little more than a glance, and should therefore implant due modesty in the one who glimpses it. At the same time, that “glimpse leaves an ineradicable mark on the soul, and the possessor of that soul, down through the ages, will burn and reach for confirmation of the truth which it senses beneath the articulate level of knowing.” There may be times, as Luther would be the first to insist, that the Spirit of God amplifies and corrects what dialectical reasoning reckons, and this is where pagans differ from Christians. But the Spirit of God, too, speaks, conveys Logos, respects the principle of non-contradiction which is the core of rational thought. No one can believe a self-contradictory speech, once he perceives the self-contradiction, because such a speech has no meaning in the first place. The Apostle Paul “is responsible for the conclusion that you can’t get faith from reason,” that “faith is a gift, not an achievement.” But that doesn’t make faith logically incoherent, somehow absolving it from the need to meet the criterion of rational truth. In “describ[ing] the Gospel as ‘foolishness’ from the point of view of Reason,” Paul means to say that you can’t reason your way to “the Good News of the Cross,” not that reason is foolishness in the eyes of God. Reason rather needs to understand its limits, as it should when it proceeds dialectically not dogmatically. 

From his early childhood on an Appalachian farm to adolescence in a small town, to college (where he “led the fraternity chorus, had my own dance band,” and drove a cool car, Frame stumbled into graduate school, where “I encountered for the first time a form of learning that illuminated life,” the life he’d been living thoughtlessly. “I read a Platonic dialogue line by line with a small group of friends—voluntarily, no credit.” He then discovered philosophy as the love of wisdom, an inquiry into “the business of living: Who around us is living the best life? What distinguishes the good life from its alternatives? What is the nature of the noble and the beautiful, and why should we embrace these instead of such attractive alternatives as the powerful, the advantageous, or the pleasant?” He found that “the whole starting point of that great classical inquiry was an act of faith—a conviction, confirmed time and again by the testimony of thoughtful, open-minded, decent people but without demonstrable ‘facts’ or ‘hard’ data—that the universe, nature, made sense.” It was “composed by means of principles which people could grasp, and that those principles were implicit in ideas and ‘values’ as well as material.” What Christianity adds to this is the teaching of Revelation, of the God-given, ‘by-grace’ glimpses of the Person who created nature granted to human beings by that Person, through that Revelation. What Martin Luther “taught me” was that “faith is a form of knowing; that each of us relies on a conviction about the moral structure of life that cannot be vindicated by the facts and data that modern academe in its flight from conclusive recommendation of moral principles, or particular ways of life, depends upon. That Christian faith, as I learned it from Martin Luther, freed me from living rightly at the behest of duty” by seeing that the grace of a loving God absolves us from fulfilling the counsels of perfection that are true but humanly unattainable.

But what about those who hide not behind moral relativism but behind a moral absolutism that insists on fulfillment in this world, indeed, and very ambitiously, by the whole world? “Each student comes into the college with a whole raft of opinions about the admirable and the objectionable. At the very least, we must ask them to answer a fundamental question: Where does this bunch of opinions come from?” For the most part, they come not from Plato’s Socrates, Aristotle, or Cicero—from the ‘ancients.’ They come from the ‘moderns’ (even when those moderns call themselves ‘post-moderns’). For Machiavelli and Bacon, logic is less a matter of speech, less what Frame calls a “bridge-builder” between the human mind and the nature of which it is a part, as a tool for controlling nature. “‘We are going to know the truth about nature,’ Bacon seems to say, ‘not be communicating with it but by “vexing” it. “We shall poke it with a stick and watch it react.'” The modern mind in principle alienates itself from nature, makes itself foreign from it. “Ultimately, alienation is a phenomenon inside the soul of an individual. As a college in the city, we have a challenge in that we are inviting our students into the midst of modern distraction. If we don’t run this college, so as to break the tyranny of that distraction and open up other realms of thought, we are remiss in our obligations as a college.” Accordingly, “we have declared the city the new field for our mission activity, replacing Madagascar and China and Japan.” The near should replace the far, with “joint and collaborative work” not “directed by a central bureaucracy.”

Within that uncivil, because modern, city, civility can be made to stand as a Christian virtue. “There are those who believe that our religion is a ‘private’ matter, and that it has nothing to do with politics or economics—except to teach us, perhaps, that the two elements of this world that are truly corrupting—position and wealth—are the hallmarks of politics and economics, respectively.” Indeed, “many of see the act of voting as the key political act, just as we see ‘belief’ as they key element in our religious lives,” as “private in the secretive sense,” nobody’s business but our own. “But we Lutherans are called into the world in service”; Lutherans “have been given a little sliver of the Cross,” a burden, an obligation. To discharge that obligation will require the Christian to disagree with, to contradict, many regnant opinions. “Whoever reaches for a universal ipso facto reaches beyond the political and instantly comes into tension with it,” as Socrates knew before he tried and illustrated thereafter. The language of civility” enables one to do that, without destroying the indispensable bonds of fellowship among citizens in a country that recognizes speech and religion as free by their very nature, stunted if suppressed. “The speech of the city,” civility, “aims at agreement and ‘equity,’ not Truth or God or Perfect Justice. The participant in civil conversation is the citizens, not the philosopher, or the Preacher, or the true Believer.” “Plato knows that the order supplied by the city is the vital condition of the philosophic enterprise.” That enterprise must therefore proceed civilly. So it is with Christianity. “Christian Theology doesn’t appeal to the citizen but to the human being; not to the law but to the Gospel; not to peace but to the Peace that passes all understanding.” In making that appeal, the philosopher and the Christian both necessarily inflect the way of life of the city. The American Founders understood that they could do so in ways that would do well in the city, and for it, but only if neither withdrew from the city nor addressed it uncivilly, with contempt. Civility forms the basis for something even better than itself, friendship, “the human relationship that was crucial to the successful operation of the dialectic for both Socrates himself and for Plato’s Socrates,” along with the fellowship of the religious congregation. 

What then of the office-holder within a civil society—specifically, the vocation of a president governing a Lutheran liberal arts college?  “There may be other jobs like this, but I’ve never had one of them.” He sought guidance, therefore, not among his contemporaries but among his predecessors. “I, for one, will look for the future of this college among the principles of its founding,” he announced, upon assuming office in October 1997. Those principles “suppose that the human condition is superficially relieved—not fundamentally changed—by the modern techno-mastery of nature or the replacement of national by global societies.” That, it might be noted, will depend upon how far modern techno-mastery of nature goes toward altering human nature, and whether Lutheranism can thrive in “global societies” (whatever they may be) without the protection of the nation-state, upon which it depended for protection from the global (that is to say) Catholic society with which it was surrounded in the sixteenth century.

For his part, within the circumstances of modern life, Frame worked to strengthen citizenship within Augsburg College itself by “transform[ing] employees into engaged citizens of that polity” and by “deriv[ing] leadership authority entirely from understanding of and commitment to the institutional self-definition” set down by its founders. This definition of the principles of the College’s regime then must be adapted to the immediate and like future circumstances of the College, crystallized in the form of what amounts to a social contract among the several “constituents” of the College, including not only employees but students and alumni, accomplished in a series of committee meetings. Initially, the president can serve as the arbiter among the several constituencies, but crucial to his task is to “a structure of institutional governance,” a “home for lasting leadership.” By these acts he intended to re-connect the people within the College to its original founding principles, after some forty years of responding to such practical necessities as financial solvency and the renovation of its buildings. “Academic leadership is possible only when the academy is founded as a polity, leadership in it is understood as a form of statesmanship, and institutional rehabilitation as an undertaking of citizenship,” citizenship aiming at the Madisonian end of seeking the permanent and aggregate interests of the community rather than the interests of the several groups within it. “The effort to make a polity out of a college is inspired by the Aristotelian (and teleological) proposition that, “Whereas the comes into existence for the sake of mere life, it continues for the sake of the good life.”

A college requires collegiality, that is, “the key element of social capital—trust.” By this Frame did not mean ‘Trust me’ but ‘I trust you.’ “Here, senior administrators are empowered to act outside the presence and blessing of the CEO”; “they are, after all, employees of the [College] vision not of the CEO, and so they are encouraged to establish their own reputations as leaders. This they cannot do except through the freedom to design the strategies for their particular jurisdictions through which the vision is realized.” As for the president, he “must take them as peers, reserving only two exclusive responsibilities—to relieve them of duty if they dissipate social capital and to maintain the official version of the mission and its reconciliation” with the overall goals of the College in its immediate circumstances. In this way, the way of limited but institutionally well-designed and responsible government, Augsburg College could become a civil association “that Tocqueville thought could restrain the growing epidemic of individualism,” by which he meant the ‘privatization’ of human life under conditions of social egalitarianism. Whereas Luther “intended vocation, especially for the lay professions, to reconnect the individual with society through work,” a Lutheran college in the modern world, now in many respects severed from the “ancient civil ideas at the dawning of the modern moment,” must itself work harder to teach its students but also its faculty and administrators, some of those ideas.

Here Frame sharply departs from the principles of the American founding. Given the “three critical axioms” supplied by Luther—”that we can do nothing of value by ourselves,” that is, without God’s assistance; “that our redemption by Grace does not erase the limitations of our humanity and so in this world, even Christians remain in need of law and the thrall of reason”; and “that the service we give the world through work in gratitude for our redemption is corrective and is therefore offered in both love and hope for the world”—is, he asserts, “challenged” by “the idea of natural right.” In his estimation, natural right “strained the relationship between citizen and society” by holding that “the individual is shaped by certain natal forces that are prior to and beyond the salutary reach of civil society.” This “leaves us alienated and individualized.” Lutheran vocation specifically and Christian vocation generally “survived the victory of the natural right position largely because that victory was never consolidated,” thanks to the soberer ‘moderns’ (Rousseau, with his critique of Enlightenment rationalism, and the prudent institutionalism of such thinkers as Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Madison) and also to “the political history of the United Kingdom,” guided as it has mostly been by blunt common sense. Since all of the thinkers he mentions considered political institutions as means of securing natural rights, Frame may mean that the Enlightenment conception of natural right tended toward French-Revolutionary-like dissolution of institutions, the ambition to re-make human societies even as modern science invites us to master nature, by poking it with a stick and watching it react. He may also mean that “nations and communities” “derive their legitimacy, their very identities, from history,” by which he means not the movements of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit but traditions, myths, legends. However this may be, Frame again inclines to overlook the political thing Luther never took for granted, and needed, the thing that stands between the civil association and “global societies”: the nation-state. Given his background in comparative politics, this may strike the reader as especially odd. 

He himself supplies a corrective for such mis-thinking by considering the tragic story of King Oedipus. “His hubris was the condition of both his intellectual brilliance (he won the presidency by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx) and his radical lack of self-knowing.” From this monitory example he takes three lessons. First, self-knowledge “is not private even though it is exclusive to its owner”; one really does need to listen to the voices in the Chorus, even if determined not to obey them slavishly. Second, self-knowledge, especially in the soul of a king or president, “is constituted in part of learning, and about things that are profoundly public, it is acquired social, not in isolation.” Finally, in its quest for self-knowledge, by that quest, the soul (as it were) emerges as it engages in its vocation. For example, “the vocational president” will need “to be both serious and careful about his or her use of the rhetorical arts; he or she must do as did Churchill—labor incessantly over his impromptu speeches.” A college president is a sort of miner. His work consists of digging into the college over which he presides—not only by learning its founding principles but by studying how it has applied, misapplied, or even at times forgotten or knowingly rejected those principles, failed to live up to them even as it has believed itself to have been surpassing them. Only then can he refine his own vocation.

What is this talk of vocation, this “life of service”? In Part Three Frame addresses this question, which he regards as “the greatest contribution of the Reformation,” offering “the Faithful a life fully engaged in civil society and yet theologically legitimate,” even as “the individualizing and anti-political propensities of the Enlightenment were beginning their ascendancy.” “Now that the a-social human habits rationalized by the Enlightenment have proven unsatisfying, the idea of vocation is coming into its own,” he hopes.

Frame found these habits not mitigated but reinforced during his first job in liberal education at Kenyon College, which he doesn’t name but accurately describes as “a ‘highly selective’ liberal arts college in the countryside of the Midwest,” “purposely set well away from the city” by its founder, the marvelously-named Philander Chase, Ohio’s Episcopal Bishop, in 1824. Although Kenyon “introduced me to two of the critical axioms of the teaching vocation: great teachers begin and remain as serious student—of themselves as well as of the world—and learning improves life,” these “did not jell with the outgoing and service-oriented aspects of vocation.” At Kenyon, “most of us on the faculty preferred theoretical or classroom wisdom far above experiential learning.” “we diagnosed in those days; we did not propound therapies to advance civility or improve society,” whereas a city (he next worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago), “compels its aficionados to construct a coherent interactive public life.” 

In his next career, at the Bank of Chicago, what Frame “wanted most was knowledge of how the commercial republic, so long the subject of my teaching and writing, actually worked.” To his surprise, he found corporate life “far more humane—more candid and encouraging,” than academia and also, “shockingly, full of better-educated people.” “The international division that I joined after banking boot camp had six or seven Ph.D.’s, not counting those in the country-risk and economic-analysis units. More musicians and artists were on my floor than at the entire college. Perhaps most surprising, there was more hunger for serious conversation than among my faculty colleagues.” And more trust. “Contrary to the academic arguments about the role of self-interest in financial transactions, I learned that the only deals that hold together and lead to new interchanges are mutually satisfactory ones. In the corporate world, a trusted colleagues’ word is better than a signature on a legal document.” Such as “the radically social character of [commercial]-corporate life,” where “no transaction was completed” unless “it could be publicly described as meeting the interest [each party to the transaction] held in common.” It was this experience in modern corporate life that prepared his mind for Lutheranism. Trust is a form of faith, and trust implies knowledge of the person trusted. Con artists will be ‘outed.’ His corporate experience “facilitated my fruitful contact with Luther” for Christianity as a faithful vocation, by “forc[ing] me to deny my original academic view that the private realm is the exclusive venue for personal growth.”

This helps to explain both the strength and the principal weakness in Frame’s analysis. Corporate life has spread itself throughout the world. Far more than socialism, which has repeatedly fallen back on nationalism when crises erupt, it has proved a vehicle for internationalism or ‘globalism.’ At the same time, corporate life is indeed very much like socialism, when seen within the corporate body itself. Its ‘foreign policy’ may be competitive/’capitalistic,’ but its ethos is socialist. It is therefore disappointing but understandable that Frame can write, “One of the needs of society in our time is help in transitioning from national and regional parameters to global ones.” Like many corporate capitalists, he envisions ‘one world’ ruled by—well, he doesn’t come out and say it, but—corporate capitalists. Nation-states will go away. Christian vocation will aim “at the needs, not the preferences, of the world,” eliciting “the whole range of our gifts.” It transpires that both Christians and corporate bankers know better what’s best for us than we do. In Christianity, Jesus understands knowledge in a particular way. His sheep hear his voice because “I know them, and they follow me.” Now, “the distinctive characteristic of a sheepfold is that each of the sheep who constitute it is known. They don’t know; they are known.” Divine knowledge of the sheep “forms the sheep into a Sheepfold,” into the ecclesia, the Church, God’s assembly or regime. This way of rule makes sense in a liberal arts college—its students still young, even if adults. And Christianity of course insists upon the consent of the governed; like the college admissions process, it’s a two-way street. It isn’t clear that corporate bosses will much concern themselves with that. Evidently willing to take this risk, perhaps hoping to mitigate it, Frame set Augsburg College firmly along the path of the ‘internationalists’ mantra, ‘Think globally, act locally,’ with Minneapolis as its locale. There he stood, and he would do not other—at least as long as his presidency would last. This was his vocation, and the vocation he set for his colleagues and students.

To understand the path of Christian vocation as it relates both to the liberal arts college and the world into which its graduates will venture, Frame points wisely and emphatically to Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon will help in the task of “get[ting] hold of both the promise and problem of vocation.” As the newly-hired Professor of Greek at Wittenberg University in 1518, just after Luther posted his 95 Theses, Melanchthon taught many courses, including history, medicine political theory, rhetoric, “lov[ing] most of all to move among them at the gathering point, which he called Philosophy—the love of wisdom.” This included theology. His joy in learning and teaching, and his formidable capacity for both, finally earned him the title, Praeceptor of the Germans. His early book, Loci Communes, became “Lutherdom’s bestseller,” second only to Luther’s translation of the Bible into German.

Melanchthon “blamed the political and moral collapse of Europe, but also the waywardness of the Church, on the decline of the ancient learning.” The Church had misunderstood antiquity, making of it a form of logic-chopping, of sophistry. By reading ancients in the original languages, Melanchthon could “leap over the dark valley of Scholasticism and get directly into conversation with the ancients, and with Aristotle in particular.” The greatest among the ancients, he discovered, did not direct their energies toward verbal deceit; on the contrary, they exemplified “the highest pre-Christian form of vocation.” They suffered two defects. The lived “these model lives of service in the narrow, cohesive, self-sufficient communities which had been stricken by empire, and then by chaos,” namely, the ancient poleis. And they overlooked original sin, “accomplish[ing] their work by means of a high regard for the human potential that was unacceptable to Luther’s and Melanchthon’s notion of fallen humanity,” a regard caused by their “conviction that reason and virtue were natural allies.” In refusing to believe that, Machiavelli was right. Unlike Machiavelli, however, Melanchthon never rejected Christianity on the supposition that it is too unworldly to engage in civil life. He “set out to extract and isolate” the “vaccine” of civility “through scholarship and then infuse it into Christian society through the medium of his students.” “Without civility, vocation would flounder on the selfish propensities of fallen humanity.” Although this by no means diminishes the indispensable character of divine grace, love of one’s neighbor needs the supplement civility provides, simply because the work of the Holy Spirit within us “is regularly frustrated by our egocentrism and our individualism.” This “idea of vocation was the principal contribution of the Reformation to the capacity and willingness of the Christian to love the neighbor as the self,” and the idea “had to be made at home in civil society.” “This is true whether or not the particular civil society in question was overwhelmingly Christian.” Without the “forms and images of virtues,” Melanchthon wrote, “which we follow in all decisions and in our judgments on all matters,” without the “humanity” which “shows the way to live properly and as a citizen,” men “are not very different from beasts.” With Aristotle, Melanchthon affirmed that man is a political animal.  Political philosophy, he wrote, can teach “the precepts for civil life [that] are necessary” for peaceful life with one another in a political community. In Frame’s words, “neither Christ nor the Gospel provide these to us” (Machiavelli’s complaint), but that wasn’t His, or their, purpose. Christ “expounded something else, about the will of god and trust in God, which human reason could not understand.” Aristotle, and behind him Homer, pointed the way to something else, “the sociality that is the bedrock condition of civility.”

The central chapter of the book describes Melanchthonian civility as “the reconciliation of faith and learning.” Frame’s occasion for writing it was a speech describing the College’s projected Center for Faith and Learning, an institution whose mission it was “to establish a mutually advantageous relationship of faith and learning for application in every discipline in our curriculum and for infusion into our recruiting of students, solicitation of donors, and management of the extra and co-curricular life of the college,” a task which will require the “very development and cultivation of civility in the learning community itself and in the relationship of the college with its neighborhoods, its industry, and its global relations with Church and society.” Just as Melanchthon and Luther together created in the crucible from which the Reformation actually emerged a new political science”—one distinct from the new political science of Machiavelli and Bacon—and “a new theology which widened the availability of the Gospel as a blessing for human life on this side of the grave and for believers as well as strangers,” so too, one infers, the Center was intended to develop a still newer political science, and perhaps a new theology, designed crucially to inflect the emerging “global” society and the corporations likely to guide it. If this came to pass, would Lutheranism do a better job at influencing a world government than it did in influencing the Prussian, and eventually the German state? One can only pray that it would.

Under the Dark Ages and then Scholasticism, “the disciplined study of literature reduced the quality of Theology,” rather as (one infers) certain late-modern philosophers and ideologues have reduced the quality of theology in the past two centuries or so. The Luther-Melanchthon “reform of both church and education, took form in the heat of the moment—in their joint effort to save and restore the Church and to recover learning from the only civilization that had so far as they knew, properly cultivated Philosophy—the ancients, particularly the Greeks.” Especially (again) political philosophy: from the civic life of the ancients he took what he called the “first law” of any “governing assembly, whether in the state or in the church,” namely, “freedom for those who speak and patience for those who listen.” Melanchthon continued, “How our century is afflicted more than anything else by the fact that the mighty cannot hear free speech, and not even any thought of freedom.” This is where learning intersects with civic life, and with the civil life inside God’s assembly. “Learning is accomplished only in community, by way of what he called ‘disputation’—not in an isolated carrel in a library, but in the classroom and ultimately in the town square.” The “eloquent deliberation” Melanchthon esteemed in the ancients “adds coherence to community be deepening its knowledge of itself.”

Melanchthon of course sees the danger in such well-turned rhetoric as clearly as the philosophers he studied did. “The liberation of thoughtfulness, armed by high literacy and powerful rhetoric, opens the possibility that the greatest rhetor, rather than the wisest, will wind the day. This danger explains Melanchthon’s very heavy emphasis on moderation.” In his understanding, moderation is a virtue cultivated not only by careful moral habituation of the young but by the intellectual character of dialectics within a Christian framework. That is, if nature, “the essence of creation,” is “a work of mind,” the mind of God, and “therefore accessible to reason,” the capacity to make logical distinctions, then the practice of deliberation in an assembly and the dialectic employed therein must moderate, limit, the power of rhetorical flourishes. In the assembly you get to answer back, not just sit back. To take the most malign ‘German’ example, what Hitler told you was unanswerable, on pain of death. By contrast, “dialectics, and the collateral rhetorical skills on which it depended were, for Melanchthon, instruments designed to keep the ‘fallen’ human mind attentive to nature rather than itself, to keep the disputation focused on the truth rather than on a particular expression of it or on the reputation of the expresser, and to make of the truths so discovered additions to the coherent substance of the community, rather than the exclusive secrets of an elite”—this last phrase a jab at the ‘Straussian’ political scientists who were his colleagues at Kenyon. (He does, however, laud Strauss for his recovery of political philosophy, the philosophizing of Socrates as depicted in the Platonic dialogues and as practiced by Aristotle.)

In this, Luther remained Melanchthon’s beau ideal of a statesman. The Great Reformer, he wrote, “adorned and defended civic life as it has never been adorned and defended by anyone else’s writings.” Luther “both knew the state and accurately perceived the frame of mind and wishes of all those with whom he lived,” understanding the Christian Church itself as a polity, having “read most avidly ancient and recent ecclesiastical writings and all works of history, relating their examples to the present business with outstanding dexterity.” Contrary to Machiavelli’s complaint about Churchmen, Luther, “said Melanchthon in the funeral oration, did not allow his piety to blind him to human reality.” The result, as Frame puts it, was that “the University, in which Theology and Philosophy meet and mingle, is the training ground of the response to the call, which the reformers named as vocational life.” Machiavelli and the ancients agreed on one thing, that civil life could not be made “dependent on an active, regularly intervening God, and not to forces that were perfected in heaven or some place other than right here.” What Machiavelli rejected, and what the ancients didn’t know, what Luther did know, is that “two kingdoms are better than one.” 

Why? “What Luther and Melanchthon saw in the contemporary landscape of early sixteenth century Europe was a Church that had ascended from literally nothing to so mighty a position that it had absorbed political as well as religious authority” under the rulership of priests. Their majesty, mystery, and authority simultaneously denatured politics and corrupted religion by reserving political rule to an elite against which there could be no earthly appeal, no ‘back-talk’ or public deliberation, and by polluting the sacred, removing from it the innocence of doves and leaving it only with the prudence of serpents. In opposition to this, Luther and Melanchthon wanted to know what those who receive and keep faith in the Christian God “will do when we get the faith.” They urge that we “feel such gratitude for the unwarranted act of grace which has freed us from the embarrassment of our human limitations that we give up our lives to the service of our neighbor,” to “move forward in faith and into congregation, parish, party and polity.” In this way, both the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man “hold sway, simultaneously, among us.” To argue, as Machiavelli does, that this shared rule fatally bifurcates the human soul, makes it incapable of surviving in this world, the Kingdom of Man, overlooks or despises the fundamental trust upon which all human regimes depend.

As Providence (or Fortuna?) have it, the state of Minnesota during Frame’s presidency at Augsburg “possessed one the nation’s highest levels of ‘social capital'” or trust. Minnesotans could and did ‘bond’ with one another as a society of “similar or similarly situated people,” presumably a middle-class population with no shortage of ethnic Norwegians. To thrive in an increasingly ‘globalized’ world, in which “the ethnic and socio-economic diversity” of the Minnesota population was set to “expand dramatically,” Minnesotans would also need to enhance their capacity for “bridging,” for “reach[ing] across the boundaries of age, gender and socio-economic status and cultural and religious identity, then to find a joint and public purpose that pulls us together for social action.” To aid in this, the College could admit “emigrés from central Africa,” who are “among the most highly educated representatives of their societies” and ones “quickly absorbed into their new world despite their cultural and religious diversity.” What is more, the College should aim at “reconcil[ing] diversity (understood to include age, experience, cognitive capabilities, gender, sexual orientation”—what might Luther and Melanchthon say to that?—along with “religion, culture, and ethnicity).” Perhaps most immediately, “we need to run this business as a college!” That is, since “the corporate and academic worlds in the United States presently stand in desperate need of each other but remain isolated by a profound mutual distrust,” Augsburg should lead the way in their reconciliation.

With respect to ‘diversity,’ academe’s much-valorized goal, forever receding, for about half a century now, “I regularly rejected the pluralist approach,” “whereby the community is literally constructed of the differences it includes.” As he learned from Plato, “the unity of a diverse community is created by its ‘one-ness’ rather than its diversity.” That is, “the diverse elements which originally constitute a society issue in a new kind of person, largely by means of a process of interaction with a founding vision or constitutional act,” as in the founding of the United States. (On the basis of natural right, it should be added, contra Frame’s earlier remarks at least as they might be interpreted.) This vision seeks to “narrow the existing gap at Augsburg” between the liberal arts and professional knowledge or ‘expertise,’ between “experiential and theoretic wisdom,” between knowledge gained through action and knowledge gained by observation, and between reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem—all without denying the distinctions between the elements of those pairings. To bring discrete dimensions of human life closer together is neither to succumb to pluralism or moral relativism, the way of incoherence and ultimately of civil war, nor to mush them together in a Hegelian or Marxist synthesis, the way of modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism.’

Neither Hegel nor Marx but Jeremiah serves as a better guide. “As part of his call to the Jews in exile to sop dreaming idly of a return to Jerusalem and start constructing a decent life for themselves among their captors, he forecasts a new Covenant.” Christians see that new Covenant in Jesus’ call “to close the gap that all laws suffer to one degree or another—the gap between behavioral and heartfelt compliance.” In so doing, He “liberated us from our sin” by means of His graceful offer of forgiveness. Our acceptance of that offer does not “extinguish our sin” (“if that were done, we would become gods ourselves, and leave behind our defining humanity”), does what Abraham Lincoln would later imitate in his 1838 Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield: maintain that law-abidingness finds indispensable support in the spirit of lawfulness against the “towering genius”/tyrant (Lincoln is likely thinking of Napoleon, then dead only 23 years). Just as Lincoln called that spirit, that “reverence for the laws,” the “political religion” of the American nation, so did Jesus demand that reverence for God’s laws, founded in reverence for God, animate the new polity, the new assembly or ‘church,’ the new regime consisting of reverent Jews and Gentiles alike. Does Lincoln “not illustrate by the clarity of his effort, the direction to which we are called by the Reformation?” A direction taken “in the name of a profound freedom accomplished not alone by the order sanctified by Washington and the Patriots of `76, but by that more complete freedom provided by the Gospel.” 

Both the Declaration of Independence according to the Spirit of `76 and the Gospels place equality into the forefront of human deliberation, of human politics. Tocqueville saw this clearly, recognizing the importance of both the Christian equality of human souls before God and the natural equality of human souls as members of the same species, not to be separated by racial or class distinctions that treated any person as subhuman. But neither for Jesus nor for the American Founders, Lincoln, or Tocqueville did equality mean similarity. Indeed, “to the degree that equality amounts to similarity it is not satisfying,” failing as it does to give play to human excellence. Augsburg College, “for example, doesn’t want to be or feel equal” in that sense; it intends “to be outstanding, and to be recognized as such in the world.” How else could it participate in any degree to guiding the world? “All of us have been given but one Christ. But each of us has been given that Christ!” Such equality “does not bring God to our side, but more precisely it brings Him to each of us,” freeing us “to do and be our best,” opening “for our individualism a way to do God’s work” in the Kingdom of Man, which after all belongs to Him as much as the Kingdom of Heaven. And to do that work “in an outstanding way.”

It is hard to resist the conclusion that William V. Frame did his work at Augsburg College in an outstanding way. His concessions to some elements of the regnant niaiseries of ‘diversity’ might well have been intended as politic accommodations carried to an impolitic extent. His eagerness to partner with international business corporations hoping to bring about some sort of ‘globalism’ or world government was likely ill-judged. But it is hard to doubt that his own governance of the College was anything but a blessing to it, an elevation and enrichment of it.

 

 

 

 

 

Paul the Apostle: The Epistle to the Ephesians.

John Stott: Ephesians: Building a Community in Christ. Notthingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 1998.

 

Throughout the Bible, God founds regimes for His people—beginning with the simple regime of the Garden of Eden, which Adam rules as His vicegerent. The Bible also looks forward to a final regime for human beings, to be founded after the coming of the Messiah. Between the regime of Eden and the final regime, there have been several regimes, including both a republican and a monarchic regime for the ancient Israelites. There have also been several forms of ‘states,’ that is, communities vastly differing in size and centralization of authority—again ranging from tiny Eden to the Israelite empire at its peak.

The universal character of the Christian ‘state’ also required a new kind of regime. If God no longer legislated primarily for a particular people, giving them a fully articulated regime while leaving the other nations, the ‘Gentiles,’ to their own political devices, what would this new regime look like? And if God did not intend to rule the world’s nations directly until the advent of the Messiah—if there was to be no legitimate ‘world government’ until then—how could the new regime advance throughout the nations? Would rulers and peoples of existing nations not regard the new founding with considerable suspicion?

Saul of Tarsus’ spiritedness, his zeal in persecuting Christians, found itself redirected toward the founding and perpetuation of this new regime after his now-famous conversion on the road to Damascus. The Christian ecclesia or assembly, the Christian church, would be the institutional or formal element of the Christian regime, a regime ruled by God according to the purposes revealed in the Old and New Testaments. The Jewish community would continue to find authoritative guidance in the substantial body of law delivered through Moses in the Pentateuch. Paul addressed that community in his Epistle to the Hebrews. His main efforts concerned the Gentiles, peoples living under the rule of human laws and worshipping a variety of ‘gods,’ many of them declared enemies of the God of the Bible since the earliest days of Israel and indeed before that, when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt.

Located on the coast of Ionia, now a province in Turkey, Ephesus had been a Greek colony, its patron goddess Artemis. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the ‘Seven Wonders’ of the ancient world. The empires of Lydia, Persia, Macedonia, and the Seleucids ruled Ephesus before the Romans seized it in 129 BC. The emperor Augustus made it the capital of the Roman colony in Asia Minor. As a cosmopolitan and commercial city, a port city, it proved fairly open to Christian evangelism; Paul had lived there between 52 and 54 AD. However, its still-vigorous cultic societies were well-known for their practice of sorcery, so while Ephesus afforded Christian founders a degree of tolerance, they would also find determined enemies there. 

By 62 AD, Paul was imprisoned in Rome. The salutation of his letter to the Ephesian Christians identifies who he is, what he is, and the source of the authority which entitles him to address them as their ruler: “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God” (1:1) He also identifies his addressees: “the saints which are at Ephesus” and “the faithful in Jesus Christ.” Some interpreters claim that “saints” refers to Jewish converts, “the faithful” to Gentile converts; others claim that the distinction suggests that Paul addresses both the Christians at Ephesus immediately and Christians everywhere, wherever the letter may eventually circulate. Paul might also be suggesting the following nuance: “saints” emphasizes the fact that they are Christians in a place, a place with a regime foreign to the Christian regime, a place also limited in territory in a way the Christian state is not; “the faithful” emphasizes their own regime and state, ruled as they are by the universal God.

Paul offers a triple blessing. “Grace be to you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual [pneumatikos] blessings in heavenly places in Christ” (1:2-3). This reciprocal blessing proceeds from God and His Son through Paul to the Ephesians, then from Paul back to God the Father and to Lord Jesus Christ—that is, from one who is ruled to his Ruler(s)—and finally to the blessing from Christ to both Paul and the Ephesians. These blessings have the effect of showing the bonds that unite Christians to Christ and to His Father, while simultaneously showing that these bonds are invisible, spiritual, in Heaven not on earth, even as both Paul and the Ephesians now live on earth, one of them literally imprisoned on it. For Christians, members of a new kind of regime and a new kind of empire, physical bonds matter less than spiritual bonds.

What is the character of these spiritual bonds? Christ has “chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy”—separate from other regimes—”and without blame”—innocent of wrongdoing—and “before him in love [agape]” (1:4). The Ruler of the regime chose His subjects, not the other way around, from the other peoples ruling themselves in other regimes, to be law-abiding or blameless not only out of fear—the binding sentiment of most regimes, and one them in this—but out of the specific kind of love Christianity brings to prominence. Agapic love seeks not the possession of the beloved but his good, his perfection. As Paul elsewhere is never shy to remark, the radical defects of human beings make them impossible to perfect without divine power, manifested in the divine graciousness animated by that love.

At the same time, Christians also seek to serve their Ruler’s good. God has “predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved” (1.5-6). Here the image of the ruling body shifts from the regime of a political community to the regime of a family—far more intimate. Jesus is God’s Son; we Christians are Jesus’ adopted children. This puts His children under an obligation of gratitude; God deserves the praise of His glory precisely because He has adopted us, done something indispensable for the achievement of our good. 

Through the centuries, most Christians have taken the strong language of God’s choosing of His people “from the foundation of the world,” His predestination of them, to mean that He has predetermined who will become a Christian, a ‘saved’ human being, even before human beings were created. Supplementing this is the argument that if God foreknows all events they are ‘as good as’ predestined. The question turns on the weight the interpretation gives to the word ‘predestinated.’ If Christians were predestined by God to become Christians, regardless of their own will, agency, intention, then God’s intention is mysterious. Why did He select these people and not those—especially since His grace demonstrably has no correlation with the discernible virtues of the individuals chosen, as distinguished from those not chosen? If, however, ‘predestination’ means instead that God wants all of his human creatures to join Him in His regime but leaves them free to choose whether they do join—if He leaves room for human consent—then their praise for the glory of His grace becomes a moral obligation, a matter of consent, and also more of a genuine good God’s creatures can bestow upon God.

What is clear is the foundation of human gratitude to Christ. He redeemed them “through his blood,” through the sacrifice of His life, obtaining forgiveness for otherwise-indelible sins against the Father from the Father. In Christ “we have redemption”; that is, we are ransomed from slavery to the harsh non-Christian regimes, all of them condemned by God the Father as contradictory to His laws, His way of life. This is more than liberation alone. “The riches of his grace” preeminently amount to “wisdom and prudence,” sophia and phronēsis (1:8).The knowledge of Being, which philosophers seek, theoretical knowledge, and the knowledge all men, but especially political men, seek, the knowledge of practical affairs, of ‘what to do’ in the shifting circumstances of life in this world, both require divine assistance. But, as in the case of ‘free will’ or consent to God’s rule, interpreters have varied regarding the part human ‘agency’ plays. Does God simply lead men to their theoretical and practical discoveries? Or does he grant a certain ‘space’ for their own efforts? However this may be, obedience to God’s regime in His empire evidently heightens both theoretical and practical intelligence. As the Word of God, the Bible makes you smarter.

In what way has God added to, or simply provided, the discoveries of these two kinds of wisdom? He has “made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed to himself” (1:9). That is, He has revealed to us certain matters that we could never discover on our own, and has done so for His own purposes, dependent as He is on no one. The good God seeks from us—indeed commands from us—is our just gratitude for the gifts of life, liberation, and wisdom. Our gratitude pleases Him without making Him in any way dependent upon us. His regime is not ‘political’ in Aristotle’s sense of politics as reciprocity of ruling and being-ruled. God rules but is not ruled in turn. His regime is what Aristotle calls kingship: the rule of one over the many, for the sake of the good of the many, as distinguished from tyranny, the rule of the one over the many for the sake of the one. The good rule of the one over the many may also serve the good of the one, and the bad rule of the one over the many may surely be bad for the one, even if he supposes it good. In that sense there is reciprocity of goods if not of rule. But in the case of divine as distinguished from human rule, the good of the One entails a humble, just duty of the many to the One; the One doesn’t need that offering, being capable of ‘happiness’ without any such homage, any such subjects, at all.

God’s founding of His regime has yet to be completed. In “the fullness of times” he will “gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will: that we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ” (1:10-12). The regime of God in its future perfection will encompass all of His creation; the adopted children within His family will receive membership in this regime even as children of a human father receive their inheritance of property from him. The twelfth verse, central to the first ‘chapter’ of Paul’s epistle, repeats the purpose of this regime insofar as human beings contribute to it—the praise of God’s glory—and the terms in which it is permissible to offer it—as beings who have trusted in, have had faith in, Christ as their sacrificial redeemer. Underlining the dependence of human beings on God, and the independence of God on human beings, the subjects are to praise God’s glory; God’s glory exists whether or not they praise it, God having been glorious whether human beings existed or not.

To enter God’s regime, one must first trust Christ—consent to His rule—then hear “the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation” (1:13). After believing it, you then receive the royal seal, the “Holy Spirit of promise,” which is the “earnest” or guarantee of the family inheritance “until the redemption of the purchased possession” (1:14). Having acknowledged the Ephesians’ membership in the regime, Paul thanks them and tells them that he prays that the Father will “give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him” in three ways: knowledge of “the hope of his calling”; what “the riches of the glory of his inheritance” are; and “what is the exceeding greatness of his power” toward all those under His regime (1:17-19). These powers were manifested in His raising of Christ “from the dead” and His setting of Christ “at his own right hand in the heavenly places” (1:20). That is, God’s power is so great that it can not only reverse death but it can raise His Son beyond the reach of the regime that killed Him, and indeed “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come” (1:21). The spiritual, Christian regime is indeed enforced, not by human rulers but by God.

The Father has set His Son at His right hand—that is, the hand of strength—so as to give him authority over “all things in the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all” (1:22-23). Although the Roman regime had broken Christ’s body on the Cross, the Church is His new ‘body,’ of which He is the “head” (1:22). Political communities or states, families, and bodies all have regimes—the latter still suggested by our term ‘regimen,’ a plan of diet and exercise.

The first ‘chapter’ of the epistle thus describes a regime with a ruling body compared initially to a family, then to a physical body. The regime consists of a father and a son ruling their subjects, children, or members. The unique character of these rulers is their holiness, their separation from and superiority to all ordinary families, all ordinary bodies now alive on earth. The purpose of the regime is wisdom and prudence, knowledge of both ‘being’ and of practice. Since a fully-articulated regime also consists of forms of rule—the ruling structures or institutions—and a way of life, readers may expect or at least hope for an account of those things.

Just as the rulers of the Christian regime are holy, so the subjects are also set apart. Christ has “quickened,” made living, his subjects; you “who were dead in trespasses and sins,” walking “according to the course of this world”—its way of life, its regime— according to “the prince of the powers of the air,” who rules “the children of disobedience” in all other regimes, has in effect done for you what His Father did for Him: raised you to life out of a spiritual death (2:1-2). The way of life of the prince of the powers of the air leads to death; that way is disobedience to the way of life of God. Since the subjects of God’s regime within the city of Ephesus manifestly remain physically alive, this new life must be spiritual. Paul emphasizes this by calling the non-Christian regime one guided by “the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh, and of the mind”; to live in that way is to live the way of beings who “were by nature the children of wrath” (2:3). This is why he compares the Church to a body; the natural body and the natural mind love ‘erotically,’ aiming at possessing those things that the body and the mind crave by their nature. Lives lived according to erotic love consist of ways of life that resist God’s way of life. 

“But God, who is rich in mercy,” loves not erotically (there is nothing he needs, nothing he yearns to possess) but agapically (2:4); in justice, He could leave us in the way of life we have chosen, but by his grace He has chosen to save us from our own way of life, inviting us back into His regime. He has “raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (2:5). His purpose in raising us above the natural regime of the human body and mind is to show us “the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus” (2:7). Beyond the riches He has already bestowed upon His people in ‘this’ life, He will give them still more after their bodies die. Among these gifts will be companionship with his Son, rather as family members keep company with one another.

Paul makes it clear that Christians’ newfound, elevated status was strictly “the gift of God,” having nothing to do with our own efforts (2:8)—which are ruled by the prince of the powers of the air, through natural eros. Human nature has been misdirected, but as “created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in,” that nature has now been redirected, placed into a new regime entailing a new way of life, this one marked out by God and involving works that are good, no longer misdirected.

Gentiles are uncircumcised, unmarked by the physical practice that symbolizes membership in God’s regime, Israel. Without Christ, you were “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world” (2:11). But thanks to a different shedding of blood—not of your own blood, by circumcision, but of Christ’s blood, by crucifixion—you have become members of His body, His family, under His regime. Christ shed physical blood, sacrificing the life which blood supports and symbolizes, in the world He created. When His Father raised Him to life at His right hand in Heaven, both Father and Son revealed a life beyond physical life in this world. But that better life can only come through obedience to God’s regime, as His Son demonstrated in the Garden of Gethsemane by determining to obey His Father’s command to submit to crucifixion for the sake of the human beings He had created.

In this way God is “our peace,” having made Jew and Gentile “both one,” breaking down “the wall of partition between us, “abolish[ing] in his flesh,” on the Cross, “the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; or to make in himself of twain one new man,” like Saul himself, a man at peace with himself (2:14-15). This new man, neither Jew nor Gentile, has also reconciled with God, being now “in one body by the cross” (2:16). By allowing His human body to be destroyed, Christ showed the way toward rejecting the erotic love of misdirected human nature by replacing that love with self-sacrificing and humble agapic love. Erotic love is the way of “wrath” in the sense that it aims at possession, aiming at what I want to be mine and not thine, which must lead to conflict, to war over who gets what he wants and who is left empty-handed. But if through Christ “we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father,” then we have no more cause for conflict (2:18). This is how Jesus “preached peace” (2:17), how His regime brings the union all regimes aim at but none other can deliver, misdirected as all of them are.

“Now therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners; but fellow citizens with the saints; and of the household of God” (2:19). Here the metaphor shifts. Not only are we members of one body, children of one family, but also citizens of one house, the “foundation” of which is “the apostles and prophets” (again, both Jews and Gentiles) and the “chief cornerstone” of which is Jesus Christ (2:20). The cornerstone ensures that the foundation is square; a square foundation is a stable foundation for the house. The house upon which the foundation is being built, consisting of the citizens God has chosen is “a holy temple” (2:21)—a new temple to replace the one in Jerusalem. You are “builded together” as a “habitation of God through the Spirit” (2:22); you, the Church or assembly of God’s people, are the new house of God, the new ‘body politic’ not insofar as you are of flesh, whether living flesh marked by circumcision or the solid and stolid ‘flesh’ of a stone temple, but a meta-physical, beyond-physical, house designed by God according to his architectural plan. Like a body or a family, a building has a ‘regime’: a ruler or owner; a structure designed by the architect; a ‘way of life’ determined by the owner but also partly determined by the structure; and a purpose or set of purposes such as shelter and comfort for its ‘citizens’ or residents.

Paul’s body now lives not in a physical temple but in a Roman prison. Although an outlaw in the eyes of the Roman regime, I am not, he writes, so much the Romans’ prisoner as “the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles”; the “cause” or reason I am so imprisoned is to be a sacrifice, a sacrifice parallel to if not equal to that of Jesus, a sacrifice of the body in the service of the Spirit (3:1). In prison I can write this letter disclosing the “revelation [Jesus Christ] made known unto me” regarding the “mystery of Christ” (3:4). In previous times this mystery “was not made known unto the sons of men” (3:5). The revelation to Paul, a Jew, was that the Gentiles he had been persecuted “should be fellow heirs” to God’s inheritance (3:6). “I was made minister,” thanks to God’s grace, grace given “by the effectual working of his power” (3:7). Paul was given a ruling office in God’s regime. Just as ‘ministers’ in an ordinary political regime on earth execute the intentions of the ruler, the sovereign, so Paul has been selected to execute the intentions of God. To the question, ‘Who died and left you in charge?’ Paul answers, ‘Jesus died and left me, among others, in charge as His designated ‘representatives’ as executors of his Word. Paul’s physical weakness, his incarceration, serves to highlight his spiritual authority.

In addition to his office as God’s minister, Paul is also a preacher of that Word, God’s spokesman. “Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ” (3:8). Why “the least”? Perhaps because he had been a persecutor of Christians: Paul does not say. What he does say is the purpose of his ministry and of his preaching: “To make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ” (3:9)—the last a fact not made known in God the Father’s revelations to Moses and his earlier prophets. The intent of Paul’s activities as minister and preacher in God’s regime is to “make known” the “manifold wisdom of God”—wisdom being the virtue most needed in a ruler (3:10). This newly revealed matter, centering on the existence, words, and actions of the Son, must be promulgated, as all legitimate commands are. Paul is a messenger ordained for that purpose, the human promulgator of God’s promulgation to him. This means that the ‘new’ regime is really the original regime; what is new is the revelation that the Son was there all along, that the Father created the world through Him, and that this authorizes him to unite Jew and Gentile in one regime, by this promulgation “unto the principalities and powers” (3:10).

Any subject, and any citizen, will want access to his ruler or rulers. The Father has set down his “eternal purpose,” for which end He made “Christ Jesus our Lord” (3:11). Christians “have boldness and access with confidence” to Jesus through their “faith of him” (3:12). For this reason, Paul’s physical imprisonment, the effect of the power of the Roman regime over him, should not cause the Ephesians to “faint,” to ask ‘Where is God?’—to suppose that the foundations of God’s regime are unsteady, not worthy of confidence and courage (3:13). On the contrary, Paul’s “tribulations” will serve “your glory” (3:13), again in imitation of Christ’s greater sacrifice. Paul prays for them, “bow[ing] my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (3:14). The image of bowing is the image of the bow; the ‘goddess’ of Ephesus was Artemis/Diana, the huntress whose weapon was the bow. She is to be replaced by Christian ‘hunters’ and ‘fishermen,’ spiritual huntsmen and huntswomen. Paul prays that the Father “would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man” (3:16)—inner strength or power is spiritual not physical, agapic not erotic, the presence of the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit and of His Son in the human soul. Paul further prays that Christian souls, “rooted and grounded in love” (3:17), will comprehend the vast dimensions of God’s regime, no longer restricted to the Israelites but to the nations, the Gentiles, as well; that they will know Christ’s love for them; that they will be “filled with the fullness of God” (3:19). As His new body, family, temple, city, you are His dwelling place, inwardly, in your hearts—that is, in your minds, newly repurposed for the purposes of God’s regime. 

Paul expresses this in a paradox, praying that the Ephesians will know the love of God, “which passeth knowledge” (3:19). This means that they will know that God’s love exists by perceiving it inside themselves, without knowing why God offers it to them. To be filled with the fullness of God is a form of personal knowledge, not ‘abstract’ knowledge, just as one might say he knows a human person without being able to say what his chemical composition or other impersonal characteristics are. 

Not only does God’s knowledge surpass man’s knowledge, His power far exceeds human power, in part because what He can do far exceeds “all that we ask or think” (3:20). Human power is limited in part because human knowledge is limited. The new knowledge available in the ‘new’ regime will enhance the power of human beings in the way Paul shows, by praying to God in the knowledge that He is the Father of our Lord, our ruler. Prayerful appeals to God as Father of our Lord, our Ruler, remain within the bounds of God’s just and gracious regime because they honor the right Person: “Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end” (3:21). In all regimes citizens and subjects are expected honor the rulers of their regime; when the rulers are no longer honored, revolution, regime change, may follow. That attitude of honor, along with the criteria for defining what is honorable, limits the uses of the powers they request from their rulers, and also limits the powers the rulers may use in attempting to meet those petitions.

Having established the major premises of his argument in the first half of the epistle, Paul reaches his first conclusion, his first ‘therefore’ clause. “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation wherewith you are called” (4:1). Since I am less the prisoner of Rome than the willing “prisoner” of Jesus Christ, having prayed to Him to ask that the Ephesians know Him, he now ‘prays’ to the Ephesians, requesting that they follow the way of life God has established for them in His regime. A prisoner is confined; to walk is to be free; to walk along a given path is to consent to follow the restrictions and draw nearer to the end of that path. The first half of the epistle consists of teaching first principles and praying for their fulfillment among the members of the Church, although to describe Paul’s teaching as the enunciation of principles alone is incomplete and somewhat misleading, as the ‘principles’ include the filling-up, the animation, of human souls with the Holy Spirit, a Person not an abstraction. The second half of the epistle consists of Paul’s exhortation to actions in accordance with those principles.

To follow the way of life of the Christian regime requires four virtues: “lowliness” or humility; “meekness” or gentleness; “longsuffering” or patience; and forbearance “in love” (4:2). Forbearance was originally a legal term meaning abstaining from collecting a debt; here, the forbearance derives not from self-restraint but agape. All of these virtues aim “to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (4:3). If the Church, God’s regime in its this-worldly manifestation, is to survive and prosper, like all bodies, families, buildings, and cities it must have some bond, some ligament, some structural tie to hold it together. Since the Church is first of all a spiritual unity, this bond cannot be sustained ‘automatically,’ like the bonds that sustain bodies and buildings do. A spiritual union requires moral and spiritual bonds—that is, those moral virtues most consistent with the rule of the Holy Spirit, the Son, and the Father. While the classical virtues of courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice are all esteemed by God and His people, these less natural virtues are the ones that put obedience to God above self-sufficiency or self-rule. They are the virtues that ‘shine’ less, giving glory to the Ruler and conducing to a willingness to abjure self-assertion and work toward the good of the regime as a whole.

There is not one bond of unity but seven. They are: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and “one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (4:6). This follows from the premises of the argument Paul has already cited. The Church body differs from natural bodies, animated by agapic instead of erotic love, by Spirit not ‘flesh,’ aiming at, hoping for, full citizenship in God’s regime. Central to the list is the Ruler of the regime, its “one Lord” (4:5), Jesus Christ—as indeed the matter of ‘who rules’ must be of central importance in any regime. God the Father is at once universal (“Father of all”), superior to (above all members of the regime), pervasive (“through all”), and present within each member (“in you all”). 

But how can God the Father be universal, superior or “above,” pervasive, and present “in” each member of His regime, all at the same time? Universal and superior are manifestly consistent attributes; there is no contradiction in saying that a Being rules everywhere. It is the seeming contradiction between God’s ‘aboveness’ and His pervasiveness and ‘in-ness’ that can cause confusion. God’s pervasiveness evidently refers to the Church as a whole, whereas His ‘in-ness’ refers to each individual member of the Church. How so?

Paul explains that “unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ” (4:7). The Father acts through His Son, who ‘measures out’ God’s grace, giving different gifts or abilities to different persons. The Son is the link or bond between the universal and infinitely superior Father and both human individuals and human organizations. When the Son “ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men” (4:8). Picking up his theme of imprisonment, Paul compares Jesus’ resurrection from the tomb to a liberation from jail, a liberation from the debtors’ prison in which all human beings are confined because they have violated God’s laws, and from which Jesus freely gives those prisoners their own freedom in God’s regime. He even liberated dead men from Hades, having also “descended first into the lower parts of the earth” (4:9). “He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens that he might fill all things” (4:10). Earth, Hell, the heavens, and Heaven: all the parts of God’s creation have now been ‘filled’ by Christ, used for His purposes. 

What were the gifts Christ gave to human persons? They are the distinct but coordinate gifts needed to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. A prophet of God receives direct revelation from God; a pastor or a teacher doesn’t receive such revelation, and does not need to receive it, having the revelations entrusted to the prophets available to him in the Bible. The purpose of actions in accordance with these various gifts is “the perfecting of the saints,” the “work of the ministry,” and “the edifying of the body of Christ” (4:12). Whereas the perfection of the natural person by natural means is ethics, as seen in the four ‘classical’ virtues, the perfection of the Christian as a citizen of God’s regime requires the four Christian virtues as revealed to those gifted by God in these enumerated ways, and then taught by those ‘gifted’ persons to the Church members both as individuals and as citizens and subjects of the regime.

This teaching will continue “till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (4:13). Just as citizens of earthly regimes emulate the heroes held up by that regime, so the imitatio Christi will remain the task of each Christian. Paul exemplifies this in seeking to free the Ephesians from their earthly ‘prison’ while in Rome’s prison. In imitating the Ruler of the Christian regime, Christians intend to “henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine”—every breeze and every storm directed at them from the prince of the air—”by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive” (4:14). Philosophy, and especially Socratic philosophy, is the human cure for sophistry and rhetoric; philosophic dialectic is the means by which the philosopher can question sophists and rhetoricians, expose the contradictions in their arguments. Socratic philosophy does not, however, provide definitive answers to the questions, it raises, or at least to all of them. God’s revelation does provide answers to many of those questions, although the revelation is always partial, with God reserving some mysteries for Himself.

“Speaking the truth in love,” Christians “may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ”—from whom “the whole body is fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in that measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love” (4:15-16). The Christian regime, like all regimes, seeks to educate its citizens. It does so, however, not only for the sake of the rulers, for the sake of their glory, but in agapic love—for the sake of the ruled. Paul here has recourse to his metaphor of the Church as a body, the most tightly organized of the several entities to which he compares the Church. Agape edifies or strengthens the body, builds it up, and at the same time does so justly, in right measure, as the head of a natural body animates and directs the inferior members. 

This leads Paul to his second conclusion, his second “therefore” clause. “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind” (4:17). Through His apostle, the head of the Church ‘body’ directs its members onto the way of life of the regime of God, and away from the regimes of other nations insofar as they depart from God’s regime. In its vanity or futility, the natural human mind (in fact unnatural, not in accordance with God’s original intention for it) leads all other regimes to some extent into wrong ways of life. Under those regimes, their “understanding [is] darkened,” “alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (4:18). They are blind, alienated, and ignorant because they are animated by the wrong love, erotic or possessive love.

This leaves room for acknowledging that some regimes lead citizens and subjects in worse ways than others do, depending upon how much their ways intersect with Christian ways. Paul’s teaching also explains why he, and many other Christians, wind up in prison, or on other forms of the Cross. Christians live in the regimes of man, ‘the City of Man,’ while reserving their final allegiance to the regime, the City, of God. This may provoke the wrath of the regimes of men in which they live, which quite often dislike competition over the question of who rules and who does not rule. Christians live in the City of Man, but the City of God lives in them. That conflict will remain as long as the earth is not yet the new earth, under the rule of Jesus Christ.

As Christians, human beings who now acknowledge that “the truth is in Jesus,” men have “put off” the “old man,” who is “corrupt according to the deceitful lusts” of erotic love, and are “renewed in the spirit of your mind,” “put[ting] on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (4:21-24). Without feeling the need for the competition, the wars, resulting from erotic or possessive love, Christians no longer feel the impulse to lie. A Christian can “speak truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (4:25).

Paul is no utopian. He does not claim that Christians will no longer become angry. Indeed, Jesus Himself became angry on occasion, expelling money changers from the Temple at Jerusalem in one notable instance. There is righteous anger, and there is sinful anger; righteous anger is for the defense of God’s regime, whereas sinful anger serves the ‘lusts’ or erotic love of the one angered. “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath,” giving no “place to the devil,” the prince of anger. Similarly, given our existing physical nature, we must eat. We must still acquire things, possess things, satisfy bodily eros to some extent. Therefore, “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth” (4:28). As for the natural mind, “let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers” (4:29). In each case, anger, greed, and the power of speech and reason are not only moderated—let not the sun go down on the first, let one work for bodily things, not steal them, let the mind use speech for truth-telling, not lying—but redirected agapically toward the good of others—indignation at offenses to God, charitable giving of the fruits of labor, Christian witness to partners in conversation.

With the right kind of love, Christians can begin to “put away” bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking, along with “all malice” (4:31). With the right kind of love, Christians can instead “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (4:31). The grace-beyond-justice of God should be reciprocated not toward God, who doesn’t need our grace, but toward one another as citizens of God’s regime. Christian love of God is just gratitude; Christian love of men, whether fellow-Christians or even enemies, is graceful, more than just.

This brings Paul to his third “therefore” clause: “Be you therefore followers of God, as dear as children” (5:1)—children of God, not vacillating children of men. Children of God imitate God, “walk[ing] in agape, as Christ also has loved us” (5:2). Erotic love must not be perverted to fornication, uncleanness, or covetousness, for the sake of the ‘name’ or reputation of the Church, the honor God’s regime ought to merit. The speech of Christians should be centered on their gratitude to God, not “filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting” (5:4). Persons who speak and act in that way, who walk in that way of life, have no “inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God” (5:5). As with speaking, so with listening: “let no man deceive you with vain words” (5:6), words empty as the wind that carries them to your ears. 

If there are citizen-subjects of God’s regime, and also those alien to it, foreigners, how to tell the difference? There are no physical markers; there aren’t even political borders to cross or town walls to protect. This too is a problem of knowledge, a difficulty in discerning truth, separating it from falsehood. The best human beings can do to distinguish “the children of light” from the children of darkness is to observe “the fruit of the Spirit” (5:8-9). The observable actions of men are the most reliable windows into their souls. “The fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth”; this is the proof or test of Christian citizenship. Typically, the “unfruitful works of darkness” are hidden from men because they are shameful, but there can be no shame in exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit—and no pride, either, inasmuch as they are the fruit of the Spirit, not the fruit of our own natural virtues. Evil things are “made manifest by the light”; ‘shining a light on them’ makes them visible. The Spirit is the light, and that light shines forth from its fruits, with neither shame nor pride.

For this reason, Jesus commanded the dead to awaken and arise, “and Christ gave them the light” (5:14). If you awaken you need the light to see the way, and not to stumble over things you otherwise would not see. “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools; but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil,” “understanding what the will of the Lord is” (5:15-17). Unlike the will of a human being, the will of God is by definition wise, inasmuch as God is the ultimate reality; insofar as human beings are given to know the will of the Lord they are wise, enlightened, “filled with the Spirit” (5:18).

In this, Christian unity means both sameness and differentiation: sameness in the sense that all understand the will of the Lord, as given by the Holy Spirit through the Word of God, itself delivered to them by God through His prophets; differentiated in that members of God’s regime should speak to themselves “in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord” in gratitude” (5:19). Each singer brings his own voice. In this Paul sees what Aristotle saw about unity in a sound political regime. Some would-be regime founders, Aristotle writes, attempt to homogenize the many elements of the polis. But this is to reduce “a theme to a single beat.”

Closely related to anger, but in appearance opposite to it, is fear. Just as there is good anger and bad anger, so there is good fear and bad fear. Bad fear is the fear of men. Good fear is fear of the Lord, which the prophets of Israel called the beginning of wisdom. Although Paul emphasizes the obligation of love of God and neighbor over the obligation of fear of God, he never forgets the necessity of fearing God. “Submit yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (5:21); “wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord,” because “the husband is the head of the wife”—giving direction to the household—even “as Christ is the head of the church” (5:22-23). Further, as Christ is the savior of the Church, so the husband protects the household. This leads to Paul’s next “therefore,” which is really an argument from analogy: “as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing” (5:24). Those who assume that this spells tyrannical rule of husbands over wives should guess again. Paul writes “as the church is subject unto Christ.” The Church is rightly subject unto Christ because Christ loves the Church not erotically but agapically, and husbands are to follow His standard. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it,” sacrificing his life under torture (5:25). His purpose in so doing was to “sanctify and cleanse” the Church, “washing [it] with the water of the word,” so that “he might present it to himself a glorious church,” a church “holy and without blemish” (5:25-27). “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.” (5:28) This is why a man shall “leave his father and mother,” his flesh and blood, “and shall be joined with unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh” (5:31).

If Paul and Aristotle concur in understanding a sound regime as analogous to a musical harmony, blending many into one, they diverge somewhat in their understanding of marriage. Aristotle regards the family as the foundation of the polis. The husband is the head of the household, but rule over the children and slaves within the household is shared by husband and wife, who rule reciprocally, “ruling and being ruled in turn.” This is the political relationship, strictly speaking. In Paul, the husband rules absolutely, as Christ does His Church, but with the agapic love that seeks the good of the beloved. The closest thing to absolute rule with agapic love in the Aristotelian family is the rule of the parents over their children, a rule that aims at the good of the children. 

Christ’s love of the Church, the Church’s status as “members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones,” is “a great mystery” (5:30, 32). Paul doesn’t say why it is mysterious. It may be because the head of the body would usually sacrifice the other members of the body to preserve itself, but Christ is the head of the body of the Church, yet He sacrificed Himself for the sake of His members. The mystery, however, dissolves with His resurrection, his placement at the Father’s right hand; His sacrifice was real, but it issued in His return to rule over His church on earth, from a seat above the heavens. As to husbands still on earth, “let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband” (5:33). Do husbands not sometimes go so far as to sacrifice themselves for their wives and children? When they do, they imitate Christ.

This brings Paul to consider the children in the family. “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (6:1). This isn’t blind obedience, but obedience in the Lord, who gives light. Honoring your father and mother brings the benefit of living well and long. Just as fathers should be reverenced by their wives, they should be honored by their children, but again with indispensable condition that they do so lovingly, not provoking their “children to wrath”—that is, to the natural, unrighteous anger Paul has already criticized. “Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (6:4). The Lord’s nurture and admonition, opposites in one sense, equally bespeak His agapic love. That love frames and pervades the Christian family, even as it frames and pervades the Christian Church or assembly. 

Regarding the third element of the household, the slaves, they too shall obey their masters “according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ” (6:5). They should obey their masters “not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart” (6:6). In Aristotle’s household, the husband and wife rule the slaves absolutely, aiming at the good not of the slaves but of themselves. (This is why Aristotle may be said to subtly question the moral foundation of slaveholding.) In Paul, slaves obey masters not insofar as the masters are human—human nature as it exists now is no badge of honor, and no measure of justice—but because in doing service “in good will” they serve Christ, indeed imitate Him (6:7). And they do so “knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free” (6:8). This is the equality of master and slave. In ordinary life under the nations’ regimes, slaves are not citizens. But they are citizen-subjects under God’s regime, a kingdom not a tyranny because the Ruler rules for the good of His people.

What kind of military protection does this regime need? Being a spiritual regime, without physical power on earth, the Church may seem weak. On the contrary, Paul insists. It is strong in the way that it needs to be strong in order to fight the war it must fight. “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” (6:10-11). This strength, this armor, consists first of wisdom, ‘theoretical’ and practical, second of the moral strength to resist temptation. Both wisdom and moral strength are crucially informed by the Holy Spirit, with whose wisdom and strength Christians can “wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12), a struggle they must lose, and were losing, without the Holy Spirit. “Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand” (6:13). As Stott remarks, “A thorough knowledge of the enemy and a healthy respect for his powers are necessary for victory in war” (58). 

Paul’s final set of metaphors consists of the armor and weaponry for the spiritual warrior who defends and advances the spiritual regime. His belt is truth; his breastplate is righteousness; his marching boots are “the gospel of peace”; his shield is faith; his helmet is salvation; his sword is “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (6:13-17). The sword of the spirit thus hangs on the truth; righteousness protects his heart; salvation protects his head, which directs the course of the rest of his body. His boots protect his feet, which march in either defensive or offensive operations; since the aim of any war is peace (as Aristotle observes) the Christian war aims at peace, peace on the only terms that can endure, the peace of agapic not erotic love. The shield of faith is “above all” the other accoutrements of battle, as it enables him “to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked” (6:16). Paul puts the defense of the faith above its advancement, although he was himself perhaps the most effective evangelist the Church has seen; he doesn’t want to extend the range of Christ’s regime at the expense of allowing it to rot from within. Hence his epistles to the several Christian churches.

What action does Christian warfare consist of? Prayer and vigilance: Christians should be “praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints” —with guidance from God and care for all members of God’s city. What role will Paul play in this war? As God’s ambassador: He shall “open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel,” its witness to Gentiles as well as Jews; even in the prison, “I am an ambassador in bonds,” an ambassador who, unlike other ambassadors, stays in one place and speaks not ‘diplomatically’ but “boldly, as I ought to speak” (6:19-20). He is an ambassador who appoints his own ambassador, who is not imprisoned but free to travel to Ephesus, so that “you may know our affairs, and that he might comfort your hearts” (6:22), showing them how Paul bears witness to the Gospel even as he sits in a jail of the Roman regime. The epistle itself shows that, too.

Paul ends with a blessing. He wishes peace to his brothers in the Christian family. He extends agapic love and faith to them, as well. This peace and this love are from “God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (6:23). This peace, and not any peace, is the aim of Christian warfare. To peace and love with faith he adds the wish for the grace of God for all those who “love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity” (6:24). Just as agapic love must be protected by the shield of faith, that love itself must be real, not feigned, in a spiritual regime, a regime not satisfied with mere outward compliance with its laws.

Paul thus contributes to the founding of the Christian regime in Ephesus and, by extension, anywhere. He identifies its Ruler; he describes its way of life; he discusses its purpose. Of the four elements of a regime identified by Aristotle, he takes little note of the regime’s form or structure, its ruling institutions, although he does list the functions of its several officers, including his own. The unique character of this regime is its spirituality. It does not fight physical wars. It exists within other regimes, threatening them in challenging their spiritual foundations. With regard to those other regimes, the Christian founding is at once the least threatening and the most dangerous of all foundings. It in no way resists the physical power of those regimes, posing no military threat, no threat of domestic insurrection. It does resist—more threatens—their underlying claims on the human soul.