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Cultivating Martial Virtues for Spiritual War

Writer's picture: Robert HaslerRobert Hasler


Imagine you were tasked with preparing for an impending battle. What would be your strategy? What kind of soldiers would you want?


They’re important questions, but not the first question. Before ever considering how you would win or with whom, first you would have to answer this fundamental question, What kind of war am I fighting? How you answer that question informs your answer for everything else.


The first time that I taught The Gospel of Mark, I had my students take out a piece of paper and answer a single question: What is the Gospel? 


This being a class of well-catechized teenagers from Reformed families, the answers were fairly predictable. Words like justification and atonement were ubiquitous. Each student had his or her own unique spin, but they all basically boiled down to a singular theme: Christ died on the cross to pay the penalty for my sins so I could have eternal life with him. 


Their responses to my prompt were not terribly surprising. In fact, it is a fairly common summary of the Gospel in most evangelical circles today. But, as I did with my class, let’s compare that definition against Jesus’s own words in the early verses of Mark’s Gospel:


“Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’” (Mark 1:14-15).


Herman Ridderbos once said that the arrival of the kingdom of God is “the central theme of the whole New Testament revelation of God.” Why then does it so rarely get a passing mention in our Gospel presentations? In a word, our hermeneutics. It is so tempting to make our individual selves the central character of the Bible–as if all roads in Scripture culminate in my personal salvation by my personal Savior. 


While the ordo salutis and one’s individual justification are important, reading the Bible through such an individualist lens blinds us from appreciating the kingdom of God as the essential biblical theme that it is. In short, it causes us to misunderstand the kind of battle we’re in, and the second-order effects are enormous.


For example, limiting our conception of the Gospel to the forensic declaration of individual justification produces Christians with values and characteristics to match. The “cage-stage Calvinist” comes to mind who is overly bookish, pedantic, and argumentative largely because his hermeneutic requires him to be. 

But what if we understood our individual justification as one piece of a story bigger than ourselves? What if we understood it as one battle in a larger war? How might that change our character?


In his book Creation Regained, Al Wolters rightly expands our horizons to see the cosmic scope of the biblical story. From the Old Adam to the New Adam, the Bible describes an epic contest between two regimes, God and Satan, both of whom “lay claim to the whole of creation.” “Involved in the dispute between these two kingdoms are two sovereigns,” Wolters says, “who contend for the same territory and who lead two opposing armies into the field.”


As Colossians 1:13 confirms, our primary identity as Christians is that of enlistees into a spiritual army. “Our life is military,” said Thomas Watson, “Christ is our captain, the gospel is the banner, the graces are our spiritual artillery, and heaven is only taken in a forcible way.” 


When we understand that spiritual warfare is more than a metaphor–that it is a fundamental feature of reality–it should cause us to rethink what values we want to cultivate within ourselves and in our communities.


One such example is grit. Christians in a spiritual war need to be able to take a punch without losing the will to fight. Grit also encompasses the willingness to “rejoice in our sufferings” as Paul says in Romans 5:3. Gritty Christians rejoice in hardship because they know it’s the trials that produce and reveal true character and that God’s grace is sufficient when they fail. Having endured the worst the Enemy can throw at them, they rejoice with hope because they know they cannot be defeated so long as they are united by faith to Christ Jesus. 


We need grit for the internal battles of temptation and personal sin. We also need grit in the public square where Christians are increasingly maligned. When the culture accuses Christians of being morally backwards and prejudiced in a myriad of ways, will Christians have the grit to smile back and advance with love, faith, and hope in the Lord? 


Hand in hand with grit is courage. Exhortations to be courageous are common in many churches, but do we fully appreciate what it implies about the situation we’re in? Aristotle defined courage as the mean between fear and confidence. In other words, one can only be courageous when he fully understands the danger that surrounds him. I fear most Christians confuse courage with what Aristotle calls confidence–foolish disregard for the Enemy’s capabilities and tactics. There is no virtue in blindly rushing into every online scuffle, nor is it courageous to pretend as if the real spiritual battles being fought in our culture are unworthy of our time and effort. The good soldier picks his battles prudently but is courageous and decisive when the time to strike arises. 


Finally, Christian soldiers need to be loyal. It is the sweetest of blessings that we do not fight this spiritual war alone. In Ephesians 6, the seminal text on spiritual warfare, the Apostle Paul urges Christians to gear up for the fight ahead. There are six Greek imperatives (or participles functioning as imperatives) in Ephesians 6:10-20. Not one is singular. Every one of Paul’s orders are in the second-person plural form. In other words, God’s Word has no intention of commissioning a bunch of spiritual Rambos. Rather, it says that we fight together like a Greek phalanx. 


Loyalty has become something of a taboo in many evangelical circles. The culture pressures Christians to publicly condemn one another because of their voting patterns. Those who are most vociferous in their scorn are rewarded with seats at the most prestigious of tables. Others participate by sorting into churches and denominations where they won’t have to put up with undesirables. 


It is a problem that has plagued the church since its inception. We love the idea of the church but too often scorn those actually in it. Our disloyalty to one another for the sake of what we think is loyalty to Christ is a recipe for disaster. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”


For better or worse, who we have is who we got. A house divided against itself cannot stand. An army too preoccupied with denouncing one another rather than setting its sights on the Enemy is an easy target. Of course, there will be times when an individual’s offense is so egregious, or the commitment to truth so great, that disassociation is necessary. But we should be extremely careful about applying checks on God’s electing grace. We don’t always get to choose who we share a foxhole with, but we are a band of brothers nonetheless.


As our hermeneutic grows to recognize our part in a larger spiritual war, martial virtues like grit, courage, and loyalty among others will grow in importance with it. Like any earthly army, we must train to fight, and that includes shaping soldiers to be the kind of soldiers who fight well. 


Robert Hasler is Assistant Pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Burke, Virginia. This post was also published at Real Clear Religion. This was used with permission from the author.


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