The Armour of God

A strange constellation of objects floats in the flattened space around Christ’s crucified body: hammer and nails; discarded dice; a bloodied dagger; flails; a classical column bound with rope; a crowing rooster; disembodied hands—some furtively exchanging coins, others clasped together in prayer or guilty evasion.

These untethered symbols are the Arma Christi, the arms of Christ, a medieval pictorial tradition in which the story of Christ’s Passion is distilled into an array of iconic motifs, rather like a series of deeply loaded, devotional emojis.

But this is a paradoxical armoury, featuring ‘weapons’ of limited use in battle. Instead, Christ’s arsenal is stocked with all the objects that contributed to his own torture and persecution. The central item is the cross of the crucifixion, on which he was killed. The daggers, swords, flails, and nails are not readied for physical combat against Christ’s enemies, but rather glisten with his own blood. Little vignettes are displayed like war trophies, but instead of celebrating moments of triumph, they represent instances of defeat, such as Judas’s kiss of betrayal and Pontius Pilate washing his hands. Like the ‘Armour of God’ described in Ephesians 6:10–17, the arms of Christ are metaphorical, readied to strengthen one’s internal resolve in spiritual, not physical, warfare.

Christ’s sacrifice subverts earthly notions of power and might by defeating death through love, forgiveness, and faith. Viewers of Roberto Oderisi’s devotional painting could contemplate each symbol of the Passion as a reminder of Christ’s spiritual endurance in the face of torture and execution, thus fortifying themselves through prayer.

Similarly, Ephesians culminates in a rousing call for its addressees to stand firm in their faith, girded-up internally by the immaterial word of God rather than the material arms of earthly combat.

References

Cooper, Lisa H., and Andrea Denny-Brown (eds). 2014. The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. With a critical edition of ‘O Vernicle’ (Farnham: Ashgate)

This is a photograph documenting a performance by activists protecting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation from the threat of the Dakota Access Pipeline, an oil transportation system intended to cut across sacred landscapes and waterways. The performers are brandishing mirrored shields designed by the Indigenous artist Cannupa Hanska Luger to protect the protestors from the police and the forces behind the DAPL.

The idea of the mirrored shield may be traced back to antiquity, with the epic hero Perseus defeating the Medusa by deflecting her deadly stare. Luger’s Mirror Shield Project uses the same method of combat in poetic form, by reflecting the symbolic violence of the authorities back at themselves (Lee 2023: 185–86). The shields are tools of non-violent resistance, allowing their bearers to stand firm, armed with truth, righteousness, and peace.

The language in Ephesians 6 encourages the listener ‘to stand’ against the ‘wiles of the Devil’. This echoes tropes in ancient Greek literature in which ‘standing firm’ with defensive arms was associated with virtuous strength, whilst cunning and airborne attacks were considered tools of devilish warfare (Asher 2011: 732). Mirror Shield Project conveys similar rhetorical ideals, protecting the protestors from police surveillance planes, rubber bullets, and water cannons, while using a device that simply reveals things as they are, truthfully and honestly.

The mirrored shields create an ‘armour of light’ (Romans 13:12), prompting all viewers (including us) to reflect on our implicit role in struggles over God’s creation, both at Standing Rock and within humanity’s ongoing attempts to colonize nature. Ephesians 6:10–20 also asks its readers to re-frame any localised conflict within a much greater cosmic war against the forces of darkness.

Keeping the eternal faith sometimes means losing the temporal battle; the Dakota Access Pipeline has been operational since Spring 2017.

References

Asher, Jeffrey R. 2011. ‘An Unworthy Foe: Heroic Ἔθη, Trickery, and an Insult in Ephesians 6:11’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 130.4: 729–48 muse.jhu.edu/article/465775

Bradnock, Lucy. 2023. ‘Art History and the Landscape of Crisis’, Art History, 46.1: 8–11

Lee, Robyn. 2023. ‘Art, Affect, and Social Media in the “No Dakota Access Pipeline” Movement’, Theory, Culture, & Society, 40.7–8: 179–92

The original recipients of Ephesians would probably have imagined a Roman soldier’s accoutrements when they heard the list of elements making up the ‘whole armour of God’ (deSilva 2022: 325). However, Christians in sixteenth-century Nuremberg would more likely have visualized the ‘shield of faith’ and ‘helmet of salvation’ in a heraldic format, like the fictitious coat of arms represented here in an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.

The combination of a rampant lion and crowing rooster does not identify an actual heraldic bearer; instead, this is a coat of arms for the ‘everyman’. Like the author of Ephesians, Dürer has conjured an imaginary armour that can unite communities across earthly borders under one rhetorical flourish. As a form of image that can be reproduced, prints like Dürer’s engraving needed to speak to broad audiences across geographical and cultural divides.

Similarly, Ephesians was written to instruct and encourage a wide range of people, perhaps as a circular letter. Potent metaphors such as the ‘armour of God’ are successful precisely because they are universally adaptable, speaking to individuals and communities across time and space.

As a picture, Dürer’s open-ended heraldry invites viewers to gloss the arms with their own allegorical interpretations. Perhaps the lion symbolizes Christ. The silent cockcrow on the helm could recall heraldic representations of the Arma Christi popular in Dürer’s day, reminding viewers of Peter’s denial of Christ (Hughes 2023: 505). The rooster calls us to be mindfully attentive to possible hidden messages in the composition, just as recipients of this text are urged to ‘keep alert with all perseverance’ (Ephesians 6:18) and—elsewhere in the New Testament canon—‘not [to] sleep, as others do, but [to] keep awake ... and put on the breastplate of faith and love’ (1 Thessalonians 5:6–8).

Dürer’s engraving and the New Testament’s epistles sharpen and fortify their recipients’ intellectual and spiritual strength through allegorical contemplation of imaginary arms, which may be adopted by anybody.

References

deSilva, David A. 2022. Ephesians, New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Hughes, Frances Rothwell. 2023. ‘Thinking with Heraldry on the Eve of the Reformation: A Drawing by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch’, Art History, 46.3: 484–511