Ephesians 2:11–22
The second chapter of Ephesians is one of my favorite passages in the New Testament because it provides an alternative framework to how I’d often heard the work of Jesus characterized. The writer takes on a metaphor of citizenship to explain salvation rather than a metaphor of retribution. “Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel,” they write, “and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (v. 12). The letter continues, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (v.19). The foundation of God’s salvific work is in what we today call might amnesty, the granting of citizenship regardless of status under existing legal frameworks.
While I’ve found this passage illuminating in work concerning migrants and the immigration system in the United States, it applies equally well to the carceral system in my country. Preaching about our salvation through the lens provided in Ephesians 2 rather than various metaphors that use retribution and punishment as their base can help us provoke our imaginations when it comes to the prison system and conceiving of its abolition.
Often, when Christians speak of the role of Jesus, they do so in terms (consciously or unconsciously) of a punishment avoided. Salvation is not about the construction of a new world and new relationships, but of Jesus absorbing the punishment we deserved. Penal substitutionary atonement theory certainly has some strong roots in the New Testament (e.g., Romans 3), but it is far from the only biblical metaphor to explain the work of Jesus. Additionally, speaking constantly and exclusively in these terms bolsters our (again, conscious or unconscious) support of systems of incarceration. Penal substitution elevates a retributive theory of justice, which (along with white supremacy) is at the heart of justification for the American penal system. Ephesians elevates a different way of speaking.
The author mixes a few metaphors, one of citizenship and one of architecture. In the first, in salvation, Jesus provides a legal status that was not afforded to us under the existing law. We become citizens not through existing provisions, but by the “amnesty of grace” (a phrase borrowed from theologian Elsa Tamez). If our own salvation depends on rejecting legal frameworks and overturning the existing system, how might imagining the abolition of prisons become more reflexive and natural for us?
The second metaphor is one of architecture. God’s work in Jesus destroys and builds—it destroys the wall that divides citizens and non-citizens and rebuilds a structure that is a “dwelling place for God,” in its place. In the United States, the prison system often strips people of many of their rights as citizens, creating a “dividing wall” between people who have endured the caceral system and those who have not. If our own salvation depended on the destruction of these kinds of walls, again, how might imagining the abolition of prisons become easier for Christians? Further, salvation does not simply destroy (or abolish, a term Ephesians even uses in the NRSV) the systems that create “the hostility between us”, salvation requires the building of something new. In Ephesians’ vision of salvation, our relationships are righted and we are “built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” Many Christians conceive of their salvation individually, but the author of Ephesians resists that impulse. Instead, our salvation results in a righted arrangement of our relationships with one another. The prison industrial complex consistently and persistently disrupts our relationships with one another and actively dehumanizes those within its walls. Such a system is diametrically opposed to Christian salvation as conceived in Ephesians (as opposed to receiving some support through a penal substitution metaphor). How much easier would it be to bring Christians to the gospel of abolition if we actively spoke of salvation, justification, and grace as Ephesians does from our own pulpits?
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his)is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina. You can find more of his work at wespearsnewsome.com.