A Prophet of God’s Justice: Reclaiming the Political Jesus (Part 1.1)

Chris Marshall | Wednesday, 28th May 2015


INTRODUCTION
In this article I want to offer an appraisal of some of the political themes that emerge in the gospel accounts of the ministry of Jesus. My thesis is radically simple (as well as simply radical)—it is that Jesus was an overtly political figure, that he had an identifiable political platform, and that the political values, commitments and priorities we see displayed in his teaching and praxis ought to play a determinative role in shaping and directing all subsequent Christian engagement in the political process.

So the proposal itself is quite simple. But it is also, in truth, quite radical. It is radical because it contradicts the conventional view of Jesus as a thoroughly apolitical figure, someone who had no interest in, perhaps even an antipathy towards, political activity. According to the usual view, Jesus came as a spiritual saviour, not a political activist. He proclaimed a heavenly kingdom, not a worldly kingdom. He was concerned with the salvation of souls, not with the transformation of society. He called for personal righteousness, not for political change. He may well have had a theology (after all he talked about God a lot), and possibly even an ethics (consider the Sermon on the Mount), but he certainly didn’t have a politics (he had nothing to say about the role of the State, and little more about the state of society).

We are all familiar with this way of thinking. It is taken for granted by many sincere Christians, especially in conservative churches, and is firmly entrenched in the popular imagination as well. A non-political Jesus has been a basic tenet of both Christian piety and a good deal of standard biblical scholarship for a very long time. Preachers and scholars alike have assumed an almost total divorce between the aims of Jesus and the concrete political issues of his day. It is not surprising then that many people today would be perplexed by, or distinctly uncomfortable with, any talk of a political Jesus.

But is a non-political Jesus historically (or even theologically) credible? Is it really possible to isolate Jesus from the social and political problems of his time? Is it true to the gospel narratives to do so? If the kingdom of God which Jesus proclaimed had nothing to do with the kingdoms of this world, why did the worldly rulers of his day conspire to kill him? How could Jesus claim to be the long-awaited royal messiah of Jewish expectation without coming to terms with the political and military implications of that role? Was Jesus the only Palestinian Jewish teacher of his day who was unaffected by the intense sufferings of his people languishing under Roman imperial domination and indifferent to their yearnings for national liberation? And why would the Romans condemn Jesus to death by crucifixion—a form of execution used primarily to intimidate provincial rebels and discourage resistance to imperial rule—if he were merely an innocuous, otherworldly spiritual guide who posed no real threat to Caesar’s dominion? Can Jesus’ death be satisfactorily explained without consideration of his perceived political significance?

Obviously not, as a growing body of Jesus scholarship now recognises. Indeed in their attempt to give account of the historical Jesus, several scholars now appeal to the so-called “criterion of crucifiability”. By this they mean that no putative reconstruction of the life and ministry of Jesus can claim to be historically plausible if it does not adequately explain why he ended up suffering the politically-expressive penalty of crucifixion. Given that crucifixion was reserved mainly for slaves and rebels among subject peoples, the fact that Jesus experienced such a fate must surely indicate that the Romans considered him to be an insurrectionist of at least some kind. The longstanding failure of Christian interpreters to reckon sufficiently with this brute fact betrays, one might suspect, not just a failure of historical imagination, but also an instinctive anti-Judaism (a failure to take seriously Jesus’ role as a first-century Jewish prophet), as well as an incipient Docetism (a failure to take seriously Christ’s full humanity and the historical situatedness of the incarnation).

There is a second reason too why my thesis about the politics of Jesus is more radical than it might appear. To propose, as I have, that the political values and priorities evident in the words and deeds of Jesus ought to exercise normative authority for subsequent Christian political activity is radical because it flies in the face of the way the mainstream Christian Church has itself exercised political power and influence down through much of its history, at least since the time of Constantine. As we will see, in his own teaching and activity Jesus presented a stark alternative to the ruthless and coercive political practices of the Roman Empire and its client Jewish and Herodian rulers, and paid the ultimate price for doing so. Happily Jesus’ alternative political vision was vindicated by God through his resurrection from the dead, and subsequently by the rapid spread of communities of his followers throughout the world professing loyalty to the lordship of Christ rather than to the lordship of Caesar.[1]

But in time the empire struck back. Having failed to suppress the Christian movement by force, it chose to co-opt it. Christianity became the State religion. The maverick Jewish prophet who had inspired this new religious movement was increasingly forgotten, or was rather transposed into a heavenly imperial lord who, on the one hand, secured eternal salvation for the faithful by the merits of his death and resurrection, and, on the other hand, authorised the existing empire to carry on its politics much as before, though with some modifications. It wasn’t long before the institutional church itself began to replicate in its own life and behaviour the hierarchical structures and coercive instincts of the wider imperial order, craving prestige and honour for its bishops and clerics and promoting its own self-interest on earth by a pernicious combination of flattery and battery.[2]

In this new Christendom setting, to be a Christian no longer required, at least for the majority of believers, and certainly not for those in positions of authority, any conscientious commitment to the egalitarian and peacemaking politics of Jesus of Nazareth. It simply required the good fortune to have been born into the Christian empire, and the good sense to subscribe to orthodox Christian belief. In Christendom’s orthodoxy the figure of Christ came to function more as the central link in the doctrine of salvation than as a meaningful paradigm for Christian values and praxis. Tellingly the church’s historic creeds are all but silent on ethics in general, and on the strenuous ethical demands of Jesus in particular. Arguably it is this omission that allowed the church historically to bear the name of Christ yet do the work of the devil at the same time. In the interests of doctrinal orthodoxy, the church raised armies and waged war, tortured heretics and burned witches, persecuted dissenters and compelled conversions. It was only able to do so because it had first depoliticised the teaching and example of Jesus; it had silenced the prophetic voice which had once railed against oppression and hierarchical domination.Quote Block Marshall1Thankfully the church no longer burns witches or deploys its own armies. But most confessing Christians, and a disappointing number of our pastors, bishops and theological educators, not to mention our politicians, are still disturbingly deaf to the political dimensions of Jesus’ preaching and practice, and to its far-reaching implications for shaping an authentically Christian political witness today. But why is this the case? Why do modern readers of the gospels still commonly, if not completely, miss the political ramifications of Jesus’ proclamation? And why is it that today’s Christian voice in the public square is so often bereft of any anchoring in the story of Jesus, whether explicit or implicit, thus allowing alternative sources of authority, such as conservative middle class values and morality, to fill the vacuum? Whence comes this depoliticised Jesus?

THE DEPOLICISATION OF JESUS
There are, I think, five main factors that have permitted, and continue to perpetuate, the profound depoliticising of Jesus that prevails today, both within the church and without.

1. Politics ancient and modern: The first, and most determinative, reason why modern Christians fail to notice the political character of Jesus’ activity is that we work with a very narrow conception of what constitutes “political” activity. We come to the New Testament with the modern dichotomy between church and state in our minds, and think of politics in terms of the science and art of government, the concrete operation of centralised institutional mechanisms for running society. Because Jesus did not form a political party or run for office in the Sanhedrin, because he did not lay down a blueprint for society or theorise about the nature of social or economic institutions, modern readers quickly conclude that he was an apolitical spiritual teacher who kept himself aloof from the sordid realities of political life. He accepted that people owe to Caesar the duties of good citizenship, his real concern was that his hearers rendered unto God what was God’s, namely their wholehearted love and spiritual devotion.

From this it follows that the conflict Jesus is constantly embroiled in in the gospels is to be viewed as a religious conflict with religious leaders over religious issues, not a conflict with political leaders over political issues. Jesus is seen primarily as a religious reformer who evoked predictable hostility from the religious establishment because of his new religious views. This goes hand in hand with the presumption that it is the ethnic identity and religious belief of Jesus’ hearers that are most important for understanding Jesus’ interaction with them, much more so than the enormous social, economic and political disparities that existed among them. Jesus’ contemporaries are all lumped together as “Jews” who adhered to the religion of “Judaism”. All other differences among them in terms of social location and historical experience are considered secondary or even irrelevant to appreciating the thrust of Jesus’ message and the goal of his mission.

But all this is highly questionable. It is patently anachronistic to project onto ancient Jewish society (or any other traditional society for that matter) the modern Western distinction between church and state. Religion, politics and economics formed an indivisible unity in Jewish Palestine, and indeed in antiquity in general. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day also exercised political control, with access to the corridors of power being determined by personal wealth and hereditary claim and hence open to only a tiny elite. The law of Moses was the law of the land, and the Sanhedrin, chaired by the high priest, was the major arm of domestic government. The Temple was the centre of spiritual and civil authority, as well as the powerhouse of the Jerusalem economy and a cause of huge economic strain on the common people. It was also the primary institution for conferring legitimacy on the Rome’s high priestly client rulers, who themselves were finally responsible to the Roman procurator.

From this it follows that Jesus’ conflict with the scribal and priestly authorities, which looms so large in the gospel accounts, was simultaneously a conflict with the political managers of the nation, as well as with those who controlled most of the nation’s wealth, much of which had been expropriated from the peasantry. As Richard Horsley points out, the primary division in first century Palestine was not one between finely nuanced schools of theological interpretation but between the rulers and the ruled, between the tiny minority of wealthy power brokers and their retainers, and the vast majority of ordinary people, who were typically indebted and always vulnerable to abuse.[3] The gospels make it clear that it was to this latter group Jesus primarily directed his mission. It was a target audience which, because of it severely oppressed condition, was already highly politicised; it was perpetually prone to social unrest and a fertile recruiting ground for the many popular movements of protest and revolt that sprung up in Jewish Palestine during the Roman period. To imagine, then, that Jesus could address the liberating message of God’s kingdom (itself a political category) to this exploited and downtrodden group without thereby engaging in political activity, and politics of the most subversive kind, is to fail to reckon with the semantic content of Jesus’ language and the concrete socio-political realities of the period.

It is true, of course, that Jesus did not speculate about the structures of human society in the manner of a Greek philosopher or modern policy maker. He was a prophet not a philosopher. Nor did he lay out a master-plan for the operation of societal institutions. Had he done so, it would have long since become obsolete and irrelevant. But this does not mean that he was indifferent to political affairs. Politics is essentially about the exercise of power—social, economic, cultural, religious and coercive power—in the polis, in society, and about these matters, as we shall see, Jesus had much to say.

Moreover the political ramifications of what he taught and practiced did not escape his opponents. Jesus’ message and lifestyle, his disregard for certain traditions and customs, his accentuation of the Torah’s central imperatives of justice, mercy and faithfulness, his claim to divine authority over the evil powers that oppressed God’s people, his high-handed action in the Temple precincts, his consorting with outcasts sinners, and much more, were perceived by his enemies as a challenge to the very cornerstones of Jewish society and ultimately to the Roman provincial peace.[4] It is not surprising therefore that those most antagonistic to Jesus’ articulation of the rule of God were those in positions of religious, political and military power in the ruling establishment of Israel, both Jewish and Roman. They had a vested interest in the way things were and had most to lose from Jesus’ demand for the reordering of personal and social relationships in accordance with the eschatological will of God.[5]

2. The interpretive grid of post-Enlightenment individualism: A second factor that perpetuates apolitical readings of the Jesus story is the distorting influence of Western individualism. Modern interpreters tend to view Jesus as a solitary figure who interacted with other detached individuals on a one-to-one basis. He did not engage with civic groups or political institutions or social networks but only with receptive (or sometimes hostile) individuals, summoning them to personal conversion and spiritual renewal.

Now it is demonstrably true that Jesus interacted with individual personalities, like Nicodemus and Jairus, Bartimaeus and the Roman centurion, the Gerasene demonic and the woman at the well, and he showed a striking respect for individual conscience and choice. It is also true that he required of a select group of his followers a willingness to subordinate the responsibilities of family life to the more urgent demands of extending his message to others. Some individuals had to abandon homes and businesses, and to forego obligations to parents and local communities, in order to join Jesus on his itinerant preaching ministry.[6] In this sense Jesus prioritised individual responsibility over the obligations of social convention. But it would be a huge mistake to conclude from this that Jesus was solely concerned with the spiritual welfare of autonomous individuals or that he encouraged the disintegration of communal life by detaching people permanently from their social environment.

It is crucial to recognise that in pre-modern Jewish society individual identity was inherently relational in character. People derived their sense of selfhood, personal esteem and well-being from their participation in wider social networks, especially those centred on the extended family and the local village community. Western individualism promotes the deception that human personhood and fulfilment are somehow inherent in individuals as free-wheeling, self-aware autonomous agents. The ancients knew better. No person is an island; humanity requires co-humanity; self-knowledge derives from fellowship with others.[7] The reality is that people’s lives are always embedded in social networks and shared cultural traditions. That being so, it would have been impossible for Jesus to address the circumstances of individuals without at the same time affecting the character of the communities to which they belonged, which were in turn deeply affected by the wider patterns of colonial domination and exploitation.

It is worth observing that even when Jesus interacted with individual figures he usually did so in public space, under the notice of the “crowds”. When Jesus visited towns and hamlets to teach and heal, he typically went to the synagogue where the whole village populace would gather. Synagogues in the first-century were not just religious institutions; they were also places where community education, discussion and decision-making took place. They were the local assemblies in which the more-or-less self-governing village communities of Galilee and Judea managed their own affairs. As such they were quasi-political entities, and in visiting them “Jesus was more like a politician on the campaign trail than a schoolmaster … more like a subversive playwright than an actor”.[8]

Read the next instalment in this series here. This article originally appeared in On The Road 32.


[1] Cf. Acts 10:36; Rom 10:9, 12; 1 Cor 12:3; Phil 2:11; Rev 17:14.

[2] Cf. Alan Kreider, The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom (Harrisburg: Trinity, 1999), esp. 33–42.

[3] Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: the Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 59–60; also William R. Herzog, Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God: A Ministry of Liberation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 90–108.

[4] Cf. Luke 19:39; John 11:50.

[5] See Christopher D. Marshall, Faith as a Theme in Mark’s Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 179–82.

[6] On this see the seminal book by Martin Hengel, The Charismatic Leader and his Followers (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1981).

[7] On the implications of this for human rights theory, see my Crowned with Glory and Honor: Human Rights ion the Biblical Tradition (Telford: Pandora, 2001).

[8] N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996), 172.


Prof Christopher Marshall is the Diana Unwin Chair in Restorative Justice in the School of Government at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. He specialises in New Testament theology and ethics, peace theology and practice, and restorative justice (both theory and practice), and is an expert in the study of contemporary Anabaptist theology. His books include Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment and Compassionate Justice: An Interdisiciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice.

Globalisation and the Ten Commandments

John McKinnon | Monday, 4th May 2015

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century an ideological battle raged between the forces of communism on the one hand and those of capitalism on the other. As is often the case, this ideological battle assumed religious fervour with capitalism and, in particular, it’s more laissez-faire forms, assuming the mantle of the “Christian” economic system. By the early 21st century, free market economics and its close cousin, globalisation, appear to have won wide acceptance, at least in the West, as embodying Christianity in society.

The foundation of these beliefs—in addition to their springing from the battles of the twentieth century—appears to be in the belief in individual freedom and reward for effort. Texts such as 2 Thessalonians 3:10 and the Parable of the Talents lend support to such idealization of entrepreneurship. However, with widening inequalities and 17% of the world in dire poverty (over one billion live on less than $1.25 per day),[1] it is worth re-examining whether further globalisation and spreading of free-market capitalism is in fact a biblical response to the current crisis.

THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT
In looking to the Bible for ethical guidelines at a societal level, the Pentateuch is a natural starting point. Here we find the Ten Commandments, universally accepted by Christians as the ethical foundation for a just society. The eighth commandment, “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15), not only seems clear in its implications but also is accepted beyond Christianity as foundational in any societal context. However, as we shall discover, the elaborations and specific applications of this law given throughout the Pentateuch demonstrate a much deeper principle than a simple prohibition and raise significant ethical implications for today’s economic debate.

Patrick Miller, in his essay “Property and Possession in the Light of the Ten Commandments,”[2] demonstrates that far from being a simple statement protecting general property rights, the eighth commandment has a complex trajectory throughout both the books of the Law and the narrative sections of the Old Testament. This trajectory, summarised briefly below, highlights the positive ethical implications of the commandment.

Miller first looks at the prohibitions against stealing people—“Whoever steals a man, whether he sells him or is found in possession of him, shall be put to death” (Exodus 21:16). The version found in Deuteronomy (24:7) specifically refers to slave labour or sale for gain. The force of this commandment is that no one can appropriate another person for economic gain. That is, people are not goods to be bought and sold or used for economic exploitation. This point is furthered in some of the Sabbath regulations. Slaves (as a result of economic deprivation, not kidnap) are not only to be released every seven years, but this freedom must be accompanied with liberal economic benefit (Deut 15). Thus the commandments ensure that one who is in bondage, even through economic deprivation, becomes a recipient of economic benefit. An individual’s freedom and economic possibility was not permitted to be stolen, regardless of how it came to be imperilled in the first place. While the commandments acknowledge that humans become caught in economic bondage, it insists that this situation never become permanent and that people always have opportunity for a fresh start.

Secondly, Miller examines what he calls the legal trajectory of the eighth commandment in each of Exodus and Deuteronomy. Exodus 22:1–15 contains a set of laws relating to theft and restitution. In most cases the theft relates to those objects that are means of livelihood and production. It is not property rights as such that are addressed but particularly those things that people need to provide food, clothing and the other necessities of life. Verses 5–6 address the wider issue of loss of the means of subsistence, either deliberate or accidental. The underlying principle here is that of justice and fair dealing. In verses 10–13, the concern is to provide protection in the case where someone has lent property or provided safekeeping for property. It appears that God wishes to ensure that these social virtues are not endangered by concern about the liability or risks taken on. A further interesting law is described in Exodus 23:4–5. Here, one is required to look after the property of an enemy.

Deuteronomy 22:1–4 elaborates this command and makes it clear that there is a positive responsibility to care for a neighbour’s economic wellbeing. As Miller states: “The divine instruction about loving one’s enemy thus begins not in the New Testament but in the moral dynamic effected by the eighth commandment.” In Deuteronomy 24:10–13 the laws relate to the situation of a person becoming indebted. In this case, the creditor is not permitted to use their economic advantage to deprive others of basic necessities. In verses 12–13 the emphasis is not on the loan or debt but on ensuring that the poor have access to basic necessities. This is expanded to include the payment of wages in verse 15. Chapter 24 concludes with laws describing a process whereby the poor can have access to the land and its productivity. This highlights the fact that the property laws were not about protection of property of the rich from the poor but about ensuring that the poor had access to basic needs and to the means to provide a livelihood for themselves and their families.

Finally, Ephesians provides a relevant summary of the Pentateuch property laws. Ephesians 4:28 says, “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, … that he may have something to share with those in need.” Just as in the Pentateuch, Paul here describes a positive action. In Miller’s words, “the trajectory of the eighth commandment explicitly opens up from a narrow reading of the commandment as aguard of private property to a positive inducement to generosity.”

GLOBALISATION AND TRADE
Economic globalisation is simply the term used to describe the phenomena of increasing international trade in goods, services and capital. As such, it involves diminishing national sovereignty in favour of increased power for the owners of capital and the producers of goods and services. As this power has become increasingly concentrated, we can identify clear breaches of the ethical principles derived from the eighth commandment and its applications in Hebrew law.

A major cause of poverty in the world today is debt. In the 1970s and 80s many poorer nations borrowed heavily from banks in the richer nations. Much of this money was squandered by corrupt dictators, leaving poor nations with massive debt and no means to repay. The situation is such that debt servicing far exceeds aid payments and has resulted in the decline in many essential services such as health and education. African countries spend four times as much on debt servicing as on healthcare. In some cases the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has assisted in debt restructuring but this has usually involved conditions such as the privatisation of utilities, reductions in government spending and the introduction of user pays principles. This can be contrasted with the Pentateuchal principle that debt, no matter how incurred, not be permitted to deprive the debtor of basic necessities or economic well-being.

The increasing freedom of international investment and finances has allowed many companies to become “multinationals”, that is, to operate across national borders. In fact, this freedom has resulted in a concentration of market power as companies have purchased competitors and used their size to dominate small markets. The aim of corporations is, of course, to increase profit. Poorer countries generally earn money by selling primary produce to richer countries. In the case of at least three of these commodities, coffee, cocoa and bananas, the market is dominated by a small number of large corporations. The market power of these corporations means that the prices received by the producers has remained low and a tiny fraction of the price of the final product as sold in the US or Europe. In many cases these “cash” crops have replaced subsistence food crops thus making the producers totally dependent on the global markets and a few large multinationals. Coffee prices have been highly volatile, varying by up to 80% over the period since 1990,[3] and at times many small producers have been forced to forego basic necessities. Retail prices of coffee products have not fallen since monopolistic corporations have increased profit margins. Once again, we must consider this in the light of the commandment’s insistence on economic wellbeing and the assurance that fair wages are paid and that people have the means to provide their necessities.

The third aspect of globalisation is the move to free trade and the removal of barriers to trade. While increased trade is a way to increased prosperity, free trade has often eroded the ability of national governments to protect their citizens against exploitation by foreign corporations. In recent times, just five companies have controlled 87% of worldwide banana production. These companies have sought to use free trade rules to prevent the European Union from choosing to import higher cost bananas from former colonies. This would devastate the incomes of producers in these places.

Wealthy countries also maintain high subsidies for agricultural producers. These subsidies not only lock out imports from the poorer countries but also encourage significant over-production. This surplus gets dumped on poorer countries thus further damaging the market of local producers. Such “theft” of markets denies these producers the means of economic livelihood and surely comes within the moral ambit of the eighth commandment. Free trade is actually something of a misnomer. Protectionism is still rampart throughout the world. However, international bodies dominated by richer countries have been able to shift the balance of the rules so that poor countries exporting to rich counties face four times the tariff barriers. Similarly, intellectual property and patent rules protect corporations in rich countries and effectively lock poor countries out of the market for lifesaving medicines and technological advancements. Patent protection for seeds and fertilisers directly impinges upon the productive capabilities of farmers in poor regions. Once again, we see the basic needs of the poor subjected to the need of the rich for high profitability, in contravention of the eighth commandment.

Similarly, cases of multinational corporations moving factories into poorer countries to exploit low wages bring to mind the commandment’s applications to slavery. This exploitation, which involves very low wages and appalling conditions, is often the only possible employment or income the workers have access to. They therefore have no option but to remain in the exploitative situations. They are not free and do not make enough money to have any other options.

SUMMARY
The commandment against stealing is far more than a simple protection of private property. It is expanded within the Pentateuch into a positive encouragement to generosity and a set of principles for caring for the poorer members of society. When the principles behind these expansions are applied to the forces of globalisation and global capitalism at work in the world today we find much that contravenes the commandment: “Do not steal”. We must face the conclusion that a significant amount of activity within the global economy is simply stealing.


[1] World Bank, 2011.

[2] Patrick Miller, “Property and Possession in the Light of the Ten Commandments,” in Having: Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life (ed. William Schweiker and Charles Mathewes; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 17–51.

[3] Information provided by the International Coffee Organization.


Dr John McKinnon has worked in finance, international development and philanthropy and has degrees in mathematics, biblical studies and development studies. He currently manages a charitable foundation and sits on a number of non-profit boards, and serves as the current President of the Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ).

Escaping “Religion” — With the Help of the Blues

Doug Hynd | Monday, 4th May 2015

Christians engaged in conversation about their faith are often confronted with the assertion that “I’m religious but I don’t go to church”. The next time it happens to me I have decided that I am going to say, “How interesting. I’m a follower of Jesus but I’m not interested in being religious.”

Beyond the shock value of giving an unexpected response is my deep conviction that being a Christian really has nothing to do with being “religious”. The unthinking identification of being a Christian with “being religious” drastically distorts both our understanding, and our practice, of being disciples of Jesus. Unfortunately the connection in both the church and the public mind between being a Christian and being “religious” is so close that it is going to take a good deal of effort to even begin to disentangle the two.

Let me try and start the disentangling by posing some questions. Why do we as Christians care about being “religious” and think that being “religious” is an area of common ground rather than difference? Why have we accepted the confinement of the Christian faith within the sphere of the “religious”? Or, to put it more controversially, why do we think that the appeal to an interiorised, disembodied and individualised faith is adequate as an account of the Gospel vision of what God was up to in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus?

Our uncritical acceptance of this confinement, and the limitation of the power of the gospel to a “religious”, private dimension of our lives has had devastating consequences. It has left the Christian community complicit in the destruction of human lives, their livelihood, their communities and the created order by unfettered state violence across the globe over the past few centuries.

The story about the separation of “religion” and politics in Europe as it is usually told is that the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants were the reason for the development of the “secular” state. A state free from “religious” control was necessary to ensure tolerance and suppress the violence of competing religious forces. This story gains its substantial plausibility against the background of the co-option of the Christian church by the Roman Empire, the subsequent emergence of Christendom and the justification by theologians and church leaders of the use of imperial violence to enforce conversion to the Christian faith.

Emerging from some recent scholarship about the wars of religion, however, is a substantially different account from the story we summarised above about the emergence of a secular society and the confinement of “religion” to the realm of individual choice.

William Cavanaugh has strongly challenged the commonly accepted story about the “wars of religion” and has retold it as the story of the invention of religion as a sphere of life disconnected from our public, communal, and social life. In “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,”[1] the story is not about wars arising from the inability of differing “religions” to live with one another. The story is rather about the emergence of the state as “sovereign”, with a total monopoly of power within a limited geographic area, and its drive to eliminate all possible rivals and limitations of its authority.

The “Wars of Religion” were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birthpangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between “Protestantism” and “Catholicism,” but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order. … to call these conflicts “Wars of Religion” is an anachronism, for what was at issue in these wars was the very creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs without direct political relevance. The creation of religion was necessitated by the new State’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subects.[2]

The story on this telling is very different from “what everybody knows”. We could not have had “wars of religion” according to Cavanaugh, because “religion” in the way we understand it did not exist at that time. Instead, “religion” was carved out during this time as a separate dimension of life, an internal belief system, detached from any significant bodily expression as a consequence of, and essential element in, the emergence of the modern state. “Religion” and politics were carved out as separate spheres of life as an essential element of the concentration of power in the hands the state.

What is at issue behind these wars is the creation of “religion” as a set of beliefs which is defined as personal conviction and which can exist separately from one’s public loyalty to the State. The creation of religion, and thus the privatization of the Church, is correlative to the rise of the State.[3]

The church, along with all the other sources of authority and power in medieval society, was brought within the scope of the state’s control. The results were far reaching.

The concept of religion being born here is one of domesticated belief systems which are, insofar as it is possible, to be manipulated by the sovereign for the benefit of the State. Religion is no longer a matter of certain bodily practices within the Body of Christ, but is limited to the realm of the “soul,” and the body is handed over to the State.[4]

Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, addressed to Christians at the heart of the then imperial power, comes immediately to mind. According to Paul our bodies are to be a living sacrifice to the Messiah Jesus, No other authority can claim that degree of authority over our bodies.

Handing over of the control of our bodies to the uncontested power of the state was to surrender ourselves to unthinking participation in violence generated in pursuit of the survival of the nation state. The death toll of those whose lives have been offered up on the altar of nationalism, in the cause of the survival of the state, has been appalling, beyond our imagination in the period since the sixteenth century. The (relative) silence of Christians in failing to name this reality for what it is—to tell the truth about this—has been and remains a scandal that hangs over our claim to be followers of Jesus “who came preaching peace.”

… the term “religion” has accompanied the domestication of Christianity. It has facilitated the marginalisation of the radical claims of the gospel and the transfer of the Christian’s ultimate loyalty to the supposedly rational spheres of nation and the market. The church is now a leisure activity: the state and the market are the only things worth dying for. The modern concept of religion facilitates idolatry, the replacement of the living God with Caesar and Mammon.[5]

To question the identification of Christian discipleship with religion is to open up from a very different angle the question of a non-religious Christianity raised by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his famous Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer was not, as assumed by liberal theologians of the 1960s, arguing for the reduction of Christian orthodoxy to the best insights of modernity. In a recent sermon Thorwald Lorenzen summed up recent Bonhoeffer scholarship around this issue.

Bonhoeffer rejects two alternatives. There is the sectarian alternative that Christians tend to withdraw from the world. Let the world be the world. The church which is often portrayed as a ship would then stay in the safe harbour and never brave the storms of life.

And then there is the liberal alternative where Christians and the church so identify with the ways of the world that the impression is given that the world does not need the Gospel and that people must not be challenged with the option of faith in Christ.[6]

Bonhoeffer, if he did not diagnose the issue of “religion” in quite the terms of Cavanaugh, was I would argue trying to say something similar in his cryptic account from prison of a “non-religious” Christianity. In Bonhoeffer’s account, “religion” tends to separate reality into holy and profane, sacred and secular. Reality, however, as Bonhoeffer understood it, cannot be divided into two spheres. In Jesus Christ these two spheres have become fused to constitute one reality in and through Jesus Christ. Reality is therefore one and our life as Christians should express that unity.

How can we find our way out of the confinement of faith and discipleship within the sphere of “religion”?

Habits ingrained in our language and habits of thought, as powerfully as the identification of Christian discipleship with “religion”, are difficult to break. To name and to diagnose the issue as I have tried to do is only a minor step forward. The weight of popular theology and the assumptions embedded in the language of most sermons reproduce the confinement. Some of our liturgical practices, such as the sharing of our common meal, dying to the powers of this world in baptism, and economic sharing through the offering speak against the limitation of Christian faith to the sphere of religion. Much of our gathered worship stands as a mute, unarticulated witness to the oneness of a “non-religious” life to which we are called by Jesus. There are some helpful resources available to assist us in the work that needs to be done along this line. John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics comes immediately to mind, along with the work sponsored by the Ekklesia Project.

Another way forward is to crack open our imagination to the possibility of a discipleship beyond the limits of “religion”. We have the resources, given in the work of musicians such as U2 and Bruce Cockburn over the last decades, expressing a world engaging faith that subverts the secular-sacred divide.

If these seem too elite in their style and intellectual in their lyrics for your taste, why not start with listening to the blues as a way of reshaping our vision? I glimpsed this possibility recently when on successive evenings I attended an overflow lecture at St Mark’s [National Theological Centre] on the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a concert by the American blues guitarist and vocalist Eric Bibb.

There is an interesting and suggestive link between the blues and the life and witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The turning point of his life from being “a theologian” to being a “Christian” seems to be located during a time when he was participating in the life of the black Christian church in New York. The Negro spirituals became part of the gift that he brought to his students in the illegal seminaries of the Confessing Church.

In the blues there is an embodied and earthy quality that subverts where it does not dissolve the line between the “religious” and the “secular”. There is a quality of “spirit” in the songs about love, work, oppression and an earthed and embodied quality in the songs of discipleship and faith.

The concert in Canberra by the American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter Eric Bibb embodied for me in the music, the lyrics and the performance this undivided approach to life. After nearly two hours of songs of love, faithfulness and struggle unobtrusively the music changed slightly in focus, though not in their style and character.

The closing bracket of songs began with a call to prayer, “The Needed Time”, an acknowledgment of dependence and connection, an invocation to Jesus to “come by here”, even if “you don’t stay long”. And come by here ‘he’ clearly did as those present in Tilley’s Bar and Restaurant unwillingly came towards the end of an evening of music of engaging performance and moral presence. Perhaps better expressed, the presence of Jesus was explicitly named for the first time, though ‘he’ had been there all the time.

The final song, a traditional blues number, with its powerful evocation “I want Jesus to walk with me”, had the sophisticated, religiously indifferent audience attentive in a focussed, almost longing silence as the plea went out modulated through the blues melody and the lyrics, lyrics that registered the pain, and loneliness of the human journey in its echo around the café.

I want Jesus to walk with me
I want Jesus to walk with me
All along life’s pilgrim journey
I want Jesus to walk with me

When my heart is almost breaking
I want Jesus to walk with me

Here was the penetrating call of a faith that was wholehearted. The autonomous consumer and self reliant, rational individual of market capitalism was nowhere in view. “Religion” as an experience—disconnected from the reality of human life, joy and pain, faithfulness in relationship and the call to struggle for justice—was not what this was all about. Bodily life as a gift, to be lived in the journey with the ‘truly Human One’, expressed powerfully and truthfully in the performance, gave a new vision of what my commitment to living a wholehearted “non-religious” discipleship could be.


[1] William T. Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11/4 (1995): 397–420.

[2] Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough,” 398.

[3] Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough,” 403.

[4] Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough,” 405.

[5] William T. Cavanaugh, “God is Not Religious,” in God is Not…:Religious, Nice, “One of Us,” An American, A Capitalist (ed. D. Brent Laytham; Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), 112.

[6] Thorwald Lorenzen, “Remembering a modern Saint and Martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer: February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945.”


Doug Hynd is a former public servant currently completing a PhD in theology at the Australian Catholic University. He has taught on issues of church and society and Christian ethics as a sessional lecturer at Charles Sturt University. Doug is also an editor of On The Road. You can follow him on Twitter.

Poetry as Learning and Unlearning

Lucy Jarasius | Monday, 4th May 2015

My experience of poetry involves patterns — thinking patterns, word patterns, moving patterns.

There seems to be a connection and a flow of informative energy as the mental concepts, descriptive word groupings, and somatic sequences take shape. Generally this comes as a fast-flowing process of mental pictures and word combinations that I am not expecting. It is as if the words and phrases arrive in my mind marrying ideas and images not previously consciously acknowledged as “connected”. The metaphor of “joining the dots” expresses something of the process. The usual meanings of words and habitual constructions of concepts are challenged and rearranged, bringing new realisations, fresh understandings and expanded knowledge. This I find an incredibly interesting creative stimulus.

Through the writing of poetry and subsequent performance of it, I have found that I learn new things. Sometimes this involves bypassing or deconstructing previously learned ways of perceiving and doing things, though at other times prior knowledge provides a helpful foundation. Poetry, for me, has become a new avenue through which I can become more intimately and holistically acquainted with things that are important in my experience of spirituality. Poetry has also become a portal of beauty through which I walk my Christian faith, navigating life in the midst of today’s complex and often violent world. Quote Block Jarasius1 Because I choreograph movement to further express and explore the concepts in many of my poems, another dimension comes into my emerging-pattern picture. A deep intensification occurs in the “dot-joining” exercise. Perhaps this is a result of mind and body working together, informing each other through their respective and unique dynamics. At times, I experiment with other artforms in conjunction with poetry, such as music, song, film, visual art etc. Sounds a bit endless, I know, but there is a lot of joy to be experienced through humble beginnings, and most of my performance poetry is just that!


Some recent traumatic events in my family caused me to ponder perceptions about relationships, about “relatedness” in terms of genetic or “blood” relationships, and about how much easier it is to perform violence in a context where “the other” is objectified, dehumanised, perhaps even “demonised”.

Around the same time I saw the Russell Crowe film, The Water Diviner, a powerful Australian story about family, relatedness, and “embracing the enemy”, set in World War One.

I was a little stunned to hear some very familiar music in the background, as scenes of the gory battlefield unfolded. One example was the track Newton’s Cradle from Ludovico Einaudi’s album In a Time Lapse, which was featured during the battle scene in The Water Diviner. One of my own recent works — a poem exploring narcissism and violence and accompanied by choreography — featured the same track, and it was somewhat surreal, but oddly satisfying, to find a connection between my “creative intercessions” and a movie well worth watching.

At this time, as ANZAC themes are revisited, this year being the centenary of one of the most well-known military campaigns in our history, I invite you to read through the following poem several times whilst listening to Newton’s Cradle. [Listen here] I pray some connections are made, some things may be learned — as well as unlearned — some inspiration comes, and some love flows.

Who is my sister? ©Lucy Jarasius 2015

who is my sister?
my brother, my mother, my father?

in law
break the law out of its alien trends
that wends its friends to non-neighbourly hard margins
barging over lines drawn in the sands quick-to-judge
parched, stiff-sniffing
dividing
un-divining refreshment below the surface

there is something thicker than water
it flows
And knows
And grows
…when the trials arrive

bLOod
flows
thin-spilling, yet congealing
knows no bounds to the pain
as it cries up from the ground
grows cold

…thicker than water?
blood?

mayhaps something flows from another stream
sourcing from realm faith-divined
undividing
me-and-’er-ing into the wide estuary of humanity adrift on a sea of despair
body of water
known through bucketing too-many-to-list tears
grown, message unbottled, filling an ocean of spent emotion
when The Trial arrived

something knows
how to quench the pleading thirst in the eyes of the lonely
how to quell the rising tide violent
how to quest heal-bent relentlessly, life-threatened-midst creatively
the best yet to come, believing relatedly
never really too belatedly

something grows
when emptied
when giVEn
when chosen
by the living
no matter the hurt, the pain, the imagined loss gained
when the trials come
…when they don’t

there is something thicker than water!


Lucy Jarasius currently resides in Sydney with her husband, Andrew Park. She works for Salvos Counselling, and is the Asia Pacific Connection for the International Christian Dance Fellowship, which she coordinated for nine years (1997–2006). Lucy also runs sessions/workshops for people to experience and explore arts, faith and culture in relation to peace-building and mission.