Anabaptist Ethics and Same-Sex Marriage (Part 2)

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Bruce Hamill | Monday, 13th July 2015

Read Part 1 of this series

In the first half of this article, Bruce discussed that New Testament ethics is apocalyptic in nature, characterised by the newness of creation established by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Here he moves to apply this approach to ethics to the topic of marriage.

MARRIAGE IN AN APOCALYPTIC PERSPECTIVE
How then might an apocalyptic and Anabaptist Christian ethic affect our thinking about marriage?

My case for a rethinking of the definition of marriage to permit same-sex marriage comes under four headings: (1) institutional reform, (2) the normativity of eschatology for Christian ethics, (3) embodied salvation: the relevance of biology and psychology, and (4) the role of marriage in sanctification.

The “good newness” of the apocalypse that is the Messiah Jesus had a significant destabilising impact on the social world of Jesus own time. It is a theme of the gospels that Jesus is constantly in conflict with the moral authorities of his Jewish world and ultimately with the Roman world as well. At the heart of this moral revolution lie two ethical moves embedded in both his practice and his teaching: i) his extension of neighbour-love to include enemy-love, epitomised in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and ii) his ethic of non-violent resistance — “You have heard it said ‘an eye for an eye…’ but I say to you do not (violently) resist the evil doer”. In both cases Jesus is confronting ethical and religious orthodoxy head on. The long-term impact of this moral revolution is difficult to overstate.

For the purpose of this argument, what is important to notice, is that this new ‘way’ leads and cannot help but lead to serious institutional reform for those apocalyptic Jews for whom Jesus was Messiah.

1. Institutional Reform
We have noted Jesus’ critical engagement with that most sacred of institutions — Torah. The creative use of Torah in service of the gospel became a feature of New Testament writings. Similarly other institutions did not come off unscathed in their encounters with Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’ willingness to run-roughshod over purity codes is well known. This in turn was taken up in Peter’s vision in Acts leading to a radical revision of the way ethnic identity was related to the institution of the ‘people of God’. In forming his small community of disciples, Jesus’ approach to the institution of the family could be regarded as subversive. Perhaps most obviously Jesus was an intrepid reformer of the Sabbath and its associated practices.

The question thus arises whether Jesus’ motto ‘the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’ (Mk 2:27) might well apply to marriage.

It is consistent with all of this that the protest wing of the Catholic Church, which calls itself the Reformed tradition, understands itself to be committed to the constant reform of the institutions within which disciples of Jesus seek to live their lives — ecclesia reformata semper reformanda [“the reformed church (is) always to be reformed”]. For them it is first of all a refusal to make idols of our institutions. This is certainly not a license for arbitrary social novelty. But the institutions within which the people of God live their lives are not platonic forms; they are not eternal and immutable simply by virtue of an idea or definition. There is constant pressure from the Triune God for their reform. The working out of the gospel means that the church is always learning how to be the church in ordered and structured ways.

Should we exempt marriage from such reforming processes? It seems to me that the onus is clearly on the traditionalists to come up with a reason.

However before moving too quickly we need to note that the rejection of a platonic view of the institution of marriage is not the same as the abandonment of all definition. We still need to address the question of when a marriage is not a marriage. To put it another way: we need to distinguish between reform and merely changing the subject. To reform an institution is not to reject it but to affirm some purpose for which that institution exists, even if that purpose is itself being rethought in the light of something new.

If, for example, the primary purpose of marriage were procreation there would hardly be a case for reforming marriage to allow same-sex marriage. However as many have observed,[1] in the second creation narrative in Genesis 2 procreation is secondary to a more primary purpose, namely companionship (Gen 2:18–25) and indeed the latter is the explicit reason given for the creation of a complementary partner for ‘adam’. It is this purpose which is developed and redefined in the New Testament in terms of communion, especially the eschatological communion of which the ecclesia, the community of the Messiah, is a foretaste.[2]

2. The Priority of Eschatology
If the institutional reform which so characterised the advent of the new aeon is the outer frame and mandate for an ongoing process of organising all of life under Christ, then the inner frame which guides the logic of Christian ethics is Jesus Christ and his mission.

Here we return to the methodological implications of apocalyptic theology for ethics. Since the ‘good newness’ of this apocalypse is not an evolution of something already immanent within the old aeon, or a logical progression from its premises, it follows that life in Christ, in the ‘time between the times’ cannot be defined by anything other than Christ. The old aeon is the context to which Christ comes but it cannot provide the norm for life in the new aeon. Ethically speaking, this is indeed ‘the year of our Lord’, a time in which eschatology (apocalypsed in Jesus Christ) has a certain logical priority for Christian ethics. The defining moment for history becomes also the defining moment for Christian ethics (its norm).

Thus in Christian ethics, nature and the structures of creation play a subordinate role to the ‘new creation’ in Christ. This is a complex claim, and though it seems a clear outcome of Paul’s gospel it is expressed in mixed and ambiguous ways in his ethics.[3] Eugene Rogers argues that that at least two things are clear for Paul: God can and does, on occasions, work counter to ‘nature’,[4] and, secondly, since grace transforms nature, nature is not normative.

Jeffrey Stout summarises Rogers’ argument well:

Natural Law is an important Christian idea… but an ethic of natural law always runs the risk of treating untransformed nature as normative for Christians whereas the whole point of the body of Christ is to transform the natural. The Christian norm for sexuality is not natural law, it is rather human nature transformed, eros swept up into agape.[5]

This latter point finds its clearest expression in Galatians 3:28 when Paul claims not only that oppositional pairs Jew/Gentile and slave/free (with their correlative institutions, nationhood and slavery) are not determinative of life ‘in Christ’, but also that the complementarity of male/female is similarly subordinated to life ‘in Christ’. His switch of conjunctions from ‘or’ (Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free) to ‘and’ (male and female) is a clear reference to the Genesis narrative (‘male and female created he them’ Gen 1:27). This is worth pausing with. Paul is not merely claiming that, for the purposes of Christianity, it doesn’t matter whether you are male or female. His claim is much broader. The ‘male and female’ structure of creation no longer matters. Clearly Paul is not claiming that either slavery, ethnicity or marriage no longer exist for the people of God, but rather that they are all relativised in the light of their ‘end’ (eschatologically). The great complementarity of ‘male and female’ may still exist, but it does not normatively define life in Christ. Jesus Christ, the one ‘in whom and for whom’ (Col 1:16) we are created provides not merely momentum for change, but a new norm towards which all our practices and institutions ought to be redirected. His form of life defines the forms of life in which we live. The good life is an embodiment of his future made possible now.

Paul understands marriage in precisely this context when, in Eph 5:31–32, he sees the marriage relationship as a sign referring to Christ’s relationship to the church — “’and the two will become one flesh’. This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church.” It is the way in which Paul, on the one hand, talks about marriage in male/female terms (Eph 5:32) as a sign, or perhaps icon, of the mystery of the love of Christ, and on the other hand declares those same male/female terms to be non-determinative of our life in Christ (Gal 3:28) that leads Rogers to argue that other terms and relationships could bear witness to the same reality (Christ’s relation to the church).

What Rogers and Rowan Williams[6] before him are arguing is that the point of marriage, as the church is learning to practice it in the light of the eschaton, lies in our human expression of the divine love, the love of Christ for the church. In becoming ‘one flesh’ we learn in the most bodily way possible what it means to share the love of Christ and thus be his body as we give our bodies to one another, imaging the one who gave his body for us. I will say more on this in a moment.

3. Embodied Salvation: The Relevance of Biology and Psychology
The apocalyptic context and eschatological norm in no way suggests that the Christian life is somehow divorced from the ‘old creation’ or from biology and history after the manner of gnostic ontology. It is for the reorientation and reconstruction of this creation that Christ comes. In seeking to take seriously the biological and psychological context in which marriage is practised, we will rely on relevant scientific disciplines. In the ancient world of the biblical writers there was little understanding that the dynamic processes of human desire might be constrained and structured according to a same-sex orientation as well as a heterosexual one. Inasmuch as science has deepened our understanding of these matters it provides a significant mandate for reconsidering the modes of marital expression that the kingdom of God might take among the people of God.

When Paul in Romans 1 (assuming it is Paul and not the words of a protagonist as Douglas Campbell argues[7]) considers same-sex desire and practices as impure he does not consider them in the context of a Christian couple seeking to discipline their sexual orientation in practices of love. In stark contrast he is thinking about same-sex desire and practice in the context of idolatry and the pagan temple. However, what is most difficult about Romans 1 is that rather than appeal to the gospel of the new creation he reverts to the language of nature and purity in his comments regarding same-sex relations. This and his judgements about men with long hair stand out as exceptions to his normal approach to Christian life and ethics (1 Cor 11:14-15).

In the final section we will do what Paul does not do in Romans 1, namely consider the possibility of same-sex marriage as a practice within the context of the Christian life.

4. Marriage as Sanctification
According to Rogers the biological and psychological context of the Christian life is such that, for some of us, there are some partners who are “apposite without being opposite”. Assuming then that this kind of institutional extension for the sake of such biologically apposite partnerships were possible, does it matter whether the church marries them or not? What matters here, says Rogers, is sanctification (rather than say mere satisfaction). Indeed, what matters are communities of sanctification which are structured as institutions of discipleship. Rogers talks of marriage as a sacrament, rather than an institution of discipleship, as I do, though I think the differences fade provided one’s account of discipleship is communal and participatory. For Rogers the sacramental marriage is a community within the community of the body of Christ, which in turn exists within the communal Trinitarian life of God[8].

Indeed the same passage in Ephesians where Paul talks of the one-fleshness of marriage as a kind of icon of the love of Christ — a living symbol of God’s salvation — he also talks of it in terms of neighbour-love intrinsic to the body of Christ. “He who loves his wife loves himself, for no man ever hates his own flesh…” (Eph 5:28–29). This two-fold aspect of marriage — both as symbolic witness and as formative discipleship — is expressed the 2010 report of the bishops of the Episcopal Church:

Marriage bears witness to both of the great commandments: it signifies the love of God and it teaches the love of neighbour.[9]

This latter aspect treats marriage as the ascetic discipline of learning to love our nearest neighbour as our self. This point is important because, as Rogers stresses,[10] bodies matter in salvation. Because we are being saved as embodied creatures in all the particularity of our limitation, then we should seriously consider revising the limits of our doctrine of marriage.

Rogers describes same-sex marriage as a species of complementarity — not the ‘rigid complementarity’[11] defined by procreative biological pragmatism alone — but ‘Christologically disciplined complementarity’ defined by the process of learning in all the particularity of one’s bodiliness both ‘the love of God and God’s people’.[12]

CONCLUSION
Let me summarise the argument as a whole. Marriage — that ancient institution serving the nurture of companionship and human flourishing in love — has for most of Christian history been assumed to be defined by the biological complementarity of ‘male and female’, although not necessarily by procreation. In Jesus and the apocalyptic Christian writers not only does the coming kingdom relativise the institution of marriage to this ‘time between the times’, it sets it, and all the other institutions within which we live, under the authority and judgement of Christ. In doing this it re-establishes marriage in terms of a new purpose for disciples of Christ — indeed a two-fold purpose — to bear witness to the new creation seen in the love of Christ for the church and to practise the life of that new creation in intimate acts of mutual and bodily self-donation. This ethical revolution reaches its clearest expression when Paul concludes that even creational structures like ‘male and female’ do not define life in Christ. It is thus a small step with the benefit of biological and psychological science to conclude that other creational structures such as same-sex orientation might, for some, provide a more appropriate vehicle for the discipline of marriage.

God, grant us the serenity
To accept the things we cannot change
The courage to change the things we can
and the wisdom to know that we probably don’t know the difference
And that you, our God, are, nevertheless, not limited by our incapacity.
— Modified ‘Serenity Prayer’

[1] Christian Perspectives on Marriage: A Discussion Document (PCANZ: May 2014), edited by the Doctrine Core Group of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. In this document two of the anonymous contributors make this point. c.f. contribution 2, especially p. 11, and contribution 7.

[2] Procreation certainly features in the first creation narrative in association with the creation of male and female, however as the scriptural narrative progresses it plays a minor role, especially in the New Testament. Arguably the task of ‘filling the earth’ as a species’ responsibility is a completed one.

[3] In this respect I am thinking particularly of the role of nature in Romans 1:26-7 on ‘unnatural’ intercourse and 1 Corinthians 11:14-15 on ‘unnatural’ hairstyles for men.

[4] Later in Romans Paul characteris

es the process of grafting Gentiles into Israel as an ‘unnatural’ act of God (Romans 11:21–24).

[5] Jeffrey Stout, “How Christianity Transcends the Culture Wars: Eugene Rogers and Others on Same-Sex Marriage,” Journal of Religious Ethics 31/2 (2003): 175.

[6] Rowan Williams, “The Body’s Grace”, in Theology and Sexuality (ed. Eugene Rogers; Malden: Blackwell: 2002), pp. 309–321.

[7] Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 313–593.

[8] Stout, “How Christianity transcends the culture wars” p. 175

[9] I refer to the 95 page ‘Theology of Same-Sex Relationship’ published in the Anglican Theological Review (Winter, 2011) and cited by Eugene F. Rogers Jr in “Same-Sex Complementarity: A Theology of Marriage” in The Christian Century (May, 2011).

[10] Rogers, “Same-Sex Complimentarity.”

[11] Rogers, “Same-Sex Complimentarity.”

[12] Rogers, “Same-Sex Complimentarity,” writes, “Christ trains — or orients — all desire to God. Saying there is ‘no “male and female”’ denies, therefore, strong forms of the complementarity theory, according to which a woman remains incomplete without a man or a man incomplete without a woman. Taking that theory to its logical conclusion, effectively denies the Christ in whom all things are “summed up” (Eph 1:10)”

Rev Dr Bruce Hamill is the Minister at Coastal Unity Parish, a Presbyterian Church in Dunedin, New Zealand. He has a PhD in Systematic Theology from the University of Otago.

Anabaptist Ethics and Same-Sex Marriage (Part 1)

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Bruce Hamill | Thursday, 9th July 2015

INTRODUCTION
I recently attended a Pastoral Theology conference which had the theme of “discipleship and formation in community”. It was not an Anabaptist conference but it could well have been. ‘Discipleship and formation in community’ is a good summary of the Anabaptist ethic. The Anabaptist tradition is not ‘liberal’ but ‘confessional’. It takes what happened in Jesus of Nazareth in the first century to be the turning point of the world rather than the developments of the 18th century enlightenment. Moreover it sees these events as a theological centre and not merely a historical turning point. For the Anabaptist world the specific reality and history of Jesus of Nazareth is ethically decisive for human existence and life in community.

I what follows I will, firstly, attempt to persuade you, dear reader, that this Anabaptist ethic is helpfully located in the theological tradition of apocalyptic theology — a tradition which is enjoying somewhat of a revival in our time and is arguably the dominant tradition within the New Testament itself. Secondly, I will attempt to show that this tradition provides strong support for extending our institutional practices like marriage in ways that make them available to same-sex couples. Here I will draw on the ground-breaking work of Eugene F Rogers Jr (and others).

NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS AS APOCALYPTIC ETHICS
The revival of apocalyptic theology in our time has been well documented. And I will not attempt to trace the diverse developments of apocalyptic thought that have arisen from the second half of the 20th century to today.[1] For the purposes of this essay I will simply clarify what I mean by apocalyptic theology by summarising New Testament apocalyptic. Obviously this strand of the New Testament is not the only source for understanding the moral life in the New Testament. I will contend however, that as the dominant strand it allows us to see conflicting modes of ethical reasoning in scripture for what they are — exceptions that prove the rule (perhaps the rule of faith encapsulated in the confession ‘Jesus is Lord’?).

In talking of New Testament apocalyptic theology I need to state at the outset that I am not concerned, in the first instance, with a literary genre, but rather with a certain mode of thinking which arises out of core experiences and confessions. To identify these I would begin by distinguishing between the notions of eschatology and of apocalyptic. If the eschaton refers to the end or fulfilment of God’s creative purposes then apocalyptic thought begins at the point where eschatology overlaps with Christology — the point where God’s fulfilment of humanity is revealed (apocalypsed) and arrives in the life, death and resurrection of the Messiah, Jesus. Once the resurrection, a central concept in Jewish eschatology, was aligned with Jesus of Nazareth the apocalyptic trajectory of Christian theology was set in motion. It was only a matter of time and spiritual experience before Paul would conclude that participation in Christ, in his death and resurrection, was nothing less than the arrival of a new creation (Gal 6:15, 2 Cor 5:17). It is this conclusion that defines what I am referring to as apocalyptic, namely, that newness of creation established by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

This realisation finds expression in a range of ways throughout the New Testament. Jason Goroncy has recently observed[2] that in the artistry of Luke (for example) the first proto-eucharistic Emmaus-road meal concludes with a clear echo of Genesis; “and their eyes were opened”. Something like a new creation (perhaps a re-creation) begins, according to Luke, with a reversal of the primal meal in the garden.

In 1 Corinthians Paul describes his readers as those ‘on whom the fulfilment of the age has come’ (1 Cor 10:11). In John’s gospel, Colossians and in 1 Peter this apocalypse is light in contrast to darkness. In 2 Corinthians Paul compares this light in the darkness with the first light of the creation narrative in Genesis 1 (2 Cor 4:4). John’s Jesus describes both perception of and entry into the kingdom of God in terms of a birth from above (Jn 3:3–21). Indeed the New Testament is pervaded by a stark contrast between the world as it is and the new age arriving with Jesus. The ‘anthropological earthquake’[3] that comes with the resurrection of the crucified is not merely anthropological, but at the same time ‘cosmic and historical in scope’[4].

Moreover this contrast that the New Testament highlights is not merely a matter of difference but of animosity (‘the world hates you’, Jn 15:18). This hatred is reflected in their crucifixion ‘of the Lord of Glory’ (1 Cor 2:8). It expresses itself in conflict by different means from both sides (‘the darkness has not overcome it’, Jn 1:5; ‘the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of this world’, 2 Cor 10:3).

The arrival of a new creation comes as liberation to a world in bondage to ‘principalities and powers’. The unified character of these principalities and powers and the bondage in which they hold the world is seen by Paul to mean that the world can now be envisaged in terms of two spheres — the sphere of Christ and that of Adam. Thus in the apocalyptic perspective the darkness into which Christ comes is seen as having both a differentiated texture (principalities and powers) and a unity (Adam). If to be human is to be part of a world, rather than in some kind of autonomous independence, we find ourselves caught up in this great and world-changing act of liberation.

The epistemological implication of this stark contrast is that a logical gap opens up between the old aeon and the new. In 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 1:18–25; 2:6–8) the new aeon inaugurated by Christ crucified is incomprehensible as foolishness and inexplicable by the standards of the world (1 Cor 3:18). In 2 Corinthians the ‘god of this age’ (2 Cor 4:4) — presumably a reference to the unity of the principalities and powers represented by Satan — is the source of the blindness which defines ‘the present evil age’ (Gal 1:4). Moreover, for John, even the scriptures do not of themselves, apart from the presence of Jesus, provide access to the life of the age to come (Jn 5:37-39). One is reminded of Jesus’ refrain in Matthew 5, “You have heard that it was said … But I say to you”. As the stories of the Emmaus Road and the Ethiopian Eunuch suggest, these scriptures need to be reopened and interpreted from the post-resurrection perspective of the age of the kaine diatheke. With a new hermeneutic comes a transformation of mind (metanoia) as a prerequisite for Christian ethical reflection on the will of God (Rom 12:2).

We will return in the latter part of this paper to the ethical implications of this logical gap. At this point is it sufficient to note that when Christ commissions his disciples to go to all nations (Matt 28:19), it is not for the sake of obedience to Torah that he sends them out, but to ‘make disciples’. A new covenant calls for a life centred on and disciplined by Jesus’ own life and risen presence. For the Christian the moral life is one of discipleship — a process of working out our salvation which is simultaneously the work of the Spirit of Christ within us.

Indeed because, in an apocalyptic perspective, Jesus is not the epitome of what we already knew to be good, the emphasis for Paul in describing the process of discipleship is placed on how we are acted upon rather than on our action. So we read ‘those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first born within a large family’ (Rom 8:29). 2 Corinthians puts the same issues differently when Paul argues that the Spirit who is both Lord and the Spirit of the Lord sets us free so that we who ‘with unveiled faces, reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory’ (2 Cor 3:18).

And, of course, as both of these key passages remind us, this Christ-disciplined life is communal. It is described in the New Testament as a participation in Christ’s death and resurrection and thus a baptism (Rom 6:1–14) into a new common life together — a ‘large family’ — whose life is both enacted and given in a common meal (1 Cor 10:14–17) — a meal that offers a counter-formation to the sacrificial pagan cultus (1 Cor 10:18–21). To cut a long story short it is best described as discipleship and formation in community.

Next instalment: Marriage in an Apocalyptic Perspective

[1] The principle sources of contemporary apocalyptic theology flow through Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonheoffer, William Stringfellow, Rudolf Bultmann, Jürgen Moltmann, John Howard Yoder, Ernst Käsemann, Louis Martyn, Paul Lehmann, Christopher Morse, Nathan Kerr and many other diverse thinkers.

[2] Jason Goroncy, in a private conversation.

[3] James Alison, “Befriending the Vacuum: Receiving Responsibility for an Ecclesial Spirituality” (2009), http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng57.html.

[4] Nathan Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Theopolitical Visions; Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 13.

Rev Dr Bruce Hamill is the Minister at Coastal Unity Parish, a Presbyterian Church in Dunedin, New Zealand. He has a PhD in Systematic Theology from the University of Otago.

Prayer as a Weapon: Clasped Hands as Nonviolent Uprising

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Matthew Anslow | Tuesday, 23rd June 2015

Last month Matt Anslow delivered the Tinsley Lecture, the annual public lecture of Morling College’s Tinsley Institute on mission, evangelism and ethics. His topic was Prayer as a Weapon: Clasped Hands as Nonviolent Uprising.

Transcript

“To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” (Karl Barth)

On March 21 a group of nine Christians, myself included, held a peaceful prayer vigil in the office of Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison. We were praying about and protesting the inhumane asylum seeker policies of the Australian government.

Five of the group were eventually arrested for trespassing, though the charges were later dismissed in court. A similar vigil has subsequently been held in Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s office.

Our act of civil disobedience, taking the form of public prayer, generated numerous responses. We have received much support—far more, in fact, than we would have expected—from church leaders, people of all different faith traditions, atheists, and media.

Our action also attracted its fair share of disapproval, ranging from personal abuse to theological diatribes. Much of this centred on our use of prayer.

On the one hand were the fashionable and cheap shots taken at us by some atheists, those who ridicule the practice of prayer without, apparently, understanding what prayer actually is. (This is in contrast to those atheists who have shown a deep respect for our action, some having even attended our recent public prayer vigils, despite that it stems from a worldview they do not themselves hold.) One contrarian, in a comment on a Huffington Post report of our action, exemplified the kind of inanity I am talking about: “Well they should have been arrested for thinking that prayer was going to do anything at all.” Such a comment betrays a common assumption that prayer has only instrumental value for Christians.

On the other hand were those Christians who, in addition to quoting (largely without a sense of context) parts of Romans 13:1–5 and Matthew 6:5–8, asserted the private nature of prayer, to the exclusion of public expressions such as demonstrated by our action. (Admittedly this is even more puzzling given that many of the same people would be dismayed by talk of the removal of The Lord’s Prayer from the opening of Parliament.)

In what follows I want to argue for a silhouette vision for prayer in the public sphere as an alternative to both ‘unscientific’ instrumentality and private piety.

I do not expect what I will write will be convincing to those who do not share my worldview; I accept this out of hand. After all, as Stanley Hauerwas has suggested, “Christians must live in a manner that their lives are unintelligible if the God we worship in Jesus Christ does not exist” (emphasis mine). It would be unreasonable to expect people with very different assumptions about the world to agree with me. Likewise, it would be equally unreasonable to subject prayer to a legitimating standard based on assumptions that those who practise prayer do not necessarily hold.

I do, however, hope to open up a different conversation about some unknown or neglected aspects of prayer, both amongst those who do not believe prayer has any ‘use’, and amongst those who see prayer as entirely or even primarily a private affair. I deem this to be a worthwhile conversation given the number of recent acts of prayerful protest, such as that undertaken by our group, those at Whitehaven’s new mine at Maules Creek, and the ongoing Swan Island Peace Convergence.

Prayer as alternative language
In George Orwell’s well-known story Nineteen Eighty-Four one of the values of the ‘Party’ that governs the fictional nation of Oceania is ‘Ignorance is Strength.’ Ignorance, in the form of falsified history, becomes a value because of its ability to control subjects through destroying memory and thus independence.

One of the ways in which such ignorance is achieved amongst the populace is the rewriting of language in the form of “Newspeak.” In this rewriting of language it is not that new words are invented, but rather that old words are destroyed, and retained words stripped of any secondary meanings that are deemed to be undesirable (“unorthodox”) by the Party. The effect of such a reduction in language is the limitation of critical thought. This is made abundantly clear to Winston, the main character, by his friend Syme:

In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

In other words, inasmuch as thought itself is based on words and language, the redefinition and reduction of language suppresses thought. Control of language, then, has the very real potential to cause an epistemological crisis, not merely for an individual, but for a society. None of this is to make a case for or against a Wittgensteinian understanding of vocabulary and truth (“The limits of my language means the limits of my world”); rather, it reminds us of the vast influence of language on thought and knowledge. Vocabulary, at the very least, forms a foundational framework for how we conceive of reality and, most pertinently for us, ethics.

The act of prayerful civil disobedience that my friends and I committed was in response to an issue about which thought and knowledge have been co-opted by drastic shifts in language. Think of terms and phrases like ‘Illegals,’ ‘border protection,’ and ‘tougher policy.’ What do these mean in the context of the asylum seeker issue, and how have they been changed for this purpose? The notion of tougher policy is an interesting example. When I was a child I was taught that to be tough meant to stand against bullies and perpetrators, not the weak and desperate. How language changes…

Much ink and many pixels have been spent in discussing these and other uses of language in regard to asylum seekers, and I will refrain from repeating such discussion. Wherever our language has come from, what we have now is a set of incoherent language forms—not unlike the absurd ‘Ignorance is strength’­—that have shaped the very attitudes, the very conception of reality, of a good portion of the Australian population regarding asylum seekers.

Of course, such issues of language and epistemology are not restricted to the issue of asylum seekers. In his 1978 essay ‘Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems,’ farmer and poet Wendell Berry notes the industrialisation of our language:

Now we do not flinch to hear men and women referred to as ‘units’ as if they were as uniform and interchangeable as machine parts. It is common, and considered acceptable, to refer to the mind as a computer: one’s thoughts are ‘inputs’; other people’s responses are ‘feedback.’ And the body is thought of as a machine; it is said, for instance, to use food as ‘fuel’; and the best workers and athletes are praised by being compared to machines.

The effect of this “revolution of language” on our values has been profound according to Berry, since it has shifted our very images of life and work from being organic to mechanised. It is no wonder then, he thinks, that our food systems have become polluted and exploitative. The same problems of language could be exported, in one sense or another, to any of the major issues faced by humanity.

What has this all to do with prayer? My contention is that prayer should not to be viewed in a reductive way that sees it primarily in instrumental terms as a petitionary means to seek a desired outcome. While petition is indeed a component of prayer, at least as Jews and Christians understand it, it is not in the crude cause-and-effect sense assumed by most detractors of religious devotion. If we can speak of prayer having an instrumental element, it is the almost the opposite of what is commonly assumed. The aim of prayer is not primarily to change things ‘out there,’ since before we pray God knows what we need and his grace is abundant. On the contrary, prayer is instrumental inasmuch as it changes the one who prays.

Prayer is, in part, a retraining in language. By introducing and socialising people into a new vocabulary, prayer shifts the framework of thought and perception, since to make a habit of some form of language necessarily changes our thinking and perception. Such habits are slow transformations, much as rocks on a beach smoothed by waves over time. Prayer is such a habit. This in itself is not unique to prayer, since any new language set achieves an equivalent shift. But this is striking in regards to prayer for at least two reasons: first, prayer is rarely, if ever, thought of this way in the public sphere; and second, the language of prayer is, for Christians, fundamentally revelation.

After all, Christians do not actually know how to pray. That is the Scriptural testimony, at least; it is in fact the Spirit of God who knows how to pray (Romans 8:26), and, as Sarah Coakley has said, “The Spirit is always there, closer to us than we are to ourselves, closer than kissing, constantly begging permission to pray in us.” The language and habit of prayer is only possible because of the Spirit. This is important because it guarantees that genuine prayer is not the will to power.

Prayer as the Seed of Revolution
But it is not only that we do not know how to pray, but we also do not know what to pray. What is the content of this new language? For Christians, what we are to pray is taught to us by Jesus in the Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:9–13). All genuinely Christian prayer is derived from the Lord’s Prayer—“A disciple’s prayer is founded on and circumscribed by it,” (Bonhoeffer). In the context of the first century this prayer represented language that was at once liberating and unprecedented—a unique habitual set of language.

To begin with, the address of the prayer to ‘Our Father’ relativises all human relationships— before and above all other socially constructed roles, we are all siblings and therefore fundamentally equal. This address also thwarts any attempt to make the object of ultimate loyalty and devotion something less than the Father of all people, an obvious subversion of the Pater Patriae, the Roman emperor (‘Father of the fatherland’), and the temporal political realities he symbolises.

To pray “your kingdom come” is to reject the pretensions of all earthly kingdoms, structures with universalising ambitions that inevitably coerce and violate. It is to reject those [dis]orders that do not conform to the will of God. It is to be a person incorporated into a community shaped to participate in a new world that is unimaginable without revelation.

What is this new world? What is God’s will? Apparently its nature is reflected in daily bread for all and forgiveness of debts. Those shaped by such prayer over time learn to imagine an economics in which there is enough for all. Moreover, to make forgiveness a form of habitual language, and thus a pattern of thought, revolutionises human interactions, subverting expectations of retribution and favouring humility and the offer of merciful embrace.

Lastly, to ask that God “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” recognises that we are not to cut ourselves off from the world. We remain in the world and we have responsibilities within it, but we are not to ignore or succumb to the evils in it.

Such language is able to reshape the one who prays the prayer. They can come to embody an alternative reality to that reflected by nationalism, violence, greed and retribution. Prayer in the manner of the Lord’s Prayer can never be a merely private affair: it always has public and political implications. Prayer rearranges our very desire, and in doing so drives us to action. As Karl Barth says, “God, resists the torrent of human injustice and evil, and therefore . . . (Christians) cannot cease to oppose it as well in their own place and manner.”

When my friends and I prayed as an act of public protest against inhumane asylum seeker policies, what we are attempting to symbolise is that we are complicit in the problem. We are those whose desires need to be transformed through ongoing prayer, and in seeking to publicly dramatise this we hope to invite others (including the Immigration Minister) on the same journey, not for our sake, but for the sake of the more than 1000 children in detention.

If prayer is a weapon, an uprising against the world’s disorder as Barth says, it is a weapon that that we turn on ourselves as those disordered. In this sense prayer is a public act since the world is witnessing a moment in the needed transformation of our world and are thereby invited to take part. It is the seed of a nonviolent revolution.

I take Barth’s insistence that prayer is the beginning of a kind of uprising to be true. The act of prayer—including forming an alternative set of language habits to the world and relinquishing the will to control—is indeed radical, a kind of uprising. But what is implied here by ‘uprising’ is unique. Uprisings tend to imply a will to power, but prayer as uprising is the making of the purposes and will of another (namely, God) our own. Such an act of humility is a sign of openness to guidance and reconciliation.

Prayer as alternative historical consciousness
The phrase from the Lord’s Prayer that I left unexamined above is the second petition: “Hallowed be your name.” The act of prayer is an acknowledgement that we are not ‘ultimate’ in any sense.  To pray that God’s name is hallowed is not for God’s benefit—God is already hallowed. Rather, it is for our benefit, and the benefit of the world.

If prayer is to acknowledge that we are not ‘ultimate’, this implies that it is not our responsibility to generate a plan for history. And this is indeed good news, since all such historical goals eventually de-escalate into coercion for the so-called ‘greater good’. Genuine prayer, as a relinquishment of the necessity to assert such control, is the rejection of violence and coercion as a historical tool.

Prayer is, in a sense, an anti-weapon. It is the act of seeking to align ourselves to God’s plans for history, as Christ has done. And like Christ, the one who prays must be willing to embrace suffering as the only way of determining the meaning of history. In the words of John Howard Yoder, “The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.” Or as Tom Wright puts it, in prayer we “resonate with the pain of the world” because the Spirit of God who dwells in us also groans from within the heart of the world. In this way we get in touch with the living God who is doing a new thing. Prayer in the manner of Christ construes the meaning of history very differently to the powers-that-be.

Prayer is the willingness to be patient and to renounce imposing our own desires on others. It is part of what Yoder calls “the readiness to renounce our legitimate ends whenever they cannot be attained by legitimate means.” This does not exclude the possibility of confrontation, though confrontation is always accompanied by a readiness to forgive.

The action of my friends and I was hopefully a genuine expression of such patience. We did indeed engage in a confronting act, though we sought to invite rather than coerce those who were most responsible for the evil being protested. For us prayer was the most pertinent act in this circumstance because to protest on the basis of our own historical desires would indeed be coercive. Praying was a sign that we did not ultimately represent ourselves qua agents of change, but rather as those trying to be obedient to the will of God.

This, somewhat ironically, gets at the heart of Matthew 6:5–8, a passage that was continuously lobbed at us after our public prayer actions. The problem Jesus addresses here is not praying in public per se, but rather the use of prayer as an instrument for attaining social honour. To do such would be to seek after a reality where the one who prays is esteemed, rather than God and God’s reign over history. If, however, public prayer genuinely seeks the will of God and not the one who prays, then it becomes part of the activity of what Bonhoeffer calls “the Visible Community,” a community that seeks to display to the world a life of good works that glorify God (cf. Matthew 5:13–16).

—
Prayer is the beginning and means of a reorientation of human relationships around divine love and freedom as embodied in Christ.

This is one of the reasons why Christians pray in relation to asylum seekers, or any social issue facing humanity. It is only in recognising and confessing our own complicity in evil and the taintedness of our very desires that we can hope to be freed from these forces. A will conformed in prayer to that of the loving, suffering, nonviolent Christ is required to work towards the transformed relationships necessary for sustainable social change.

Such a transformed will can never be passive in the face of evil, as the God of Jesus Christ is not. For this reason prayer cannot simply be private. But such a transformed will can also never be coercive in response to evil, as the God of Jesus Christ is not. For this reason prayer cannot simply be instrumental.

On the contrary, prayer is a weapon that turns upside down the very notion of weapons, the very notion of history, and the very notion of humanity.

Matt Anslow is married to Ashlee, works for an international development NGO, is a PhD candidate in theology at Charles Sturt University, and is an organiser for #LoveMakesAWay. He and Ashlee live in a small [un]intentional community in Sydney where they try to put their convictions into practice in the context of the mundane. Matt is also an editor of On The Road. You can follow him on Twitter.

Atonement, Justice, and Peace: A Baptist-Anabaptist Conversation

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Darrin W Snyder Belousek & Respondents | Tuesday, 16th June 2015

On May 31 last year, Dr Darrin Belousek joined members of the Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) and guests for a day-conference exploring themes presented in his book Atonement, Justice, and Peace: The Message of the Cross and the Mission of the Church.

Dr Belousek’s talks, based on various parts of his book, explored the subject of atonement, in particular the controversial subject of penal substitutionary atonement. His talks were each followed by short responses by Baptist and Anabaptist scholars—Dr Graeme Chatfield, Dr Anthony Petersen, Matthew Anslow, and Dr David Starling.

The talks, including the responses, are linked below. The responses, having been edited in light of the conversations that occurred at the symposium, have also been compiled and published in the most recent issue of the Pacific Journal of Baptist Research.

Three additional talks have also been included, which were given by Dr Belousek at a gathering the day after the conference. Here Belousek explores issues broader than penal substitution, including reconciliation (1), economic and criminal justice (2), and peace and war (3). To download the files, it may be necessary to right-click the download links.

ATONEMENT, JUSTICE, AND PEACE CONFERENCE

Lecture 1—Jesus’ Death and Christian Tradition: Ancient Creeds and Trinitarian Theology
Response: Dr Graeme Chatfield—PhD (Bristol, UK); Baptist Minister; former lecturer in Church History at Morling College; Visiting Adjunct Professor in Church History and Historical Theology at TCMI Institute (Austria & Eastern Europe); Associate Dean, Australian College of Theology.

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Lecture 2—Jesus’ Death and the Old Testament: Atoning Sacrifice and the Suffering Servant
Response: Dr Anthony Petersen—Lecturer in Old Testament and Hebrew at Morling College; Baptist Minister; PhD (Queen’s University Belfast); Author of Behold Your King: The Hope for the House of David in the Book of Zechariah.

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Lecture 3—Jesus’ Death and the Synoptic Gospels: New Exodus and New Covenant
Response: Matthew Anslow—Educator for TEAR Australia; undertaking PhD on Jesus’ prophetic vocation in Matthew’s Gospel (Charles Sturt University/United Theological College); Anabaptist; editor of On The Road.

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Lecture 4—Jesus’ Death and the Pauline Epistles: ‘Mercy Seat’ and Place-Taking
Response: Dr David Starling—Lecturer in New Testament and Theology at Morling College; PhD (University of Sydney, thesis published as Not My People: Gentiles as Exiles in Pauline Hermeneutics); Baptist Minister.

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ADDITIONAL TALKS

Talk 1—Shame For Us: The Cross of Christ in the Drama of Reconciliation

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Talk 2—What is Just?: Repayment in Kind, the King of God and the Cross of Christ

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Talk 3—All Things New: Christ, Cross, and Creation

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Dr Darrin W Snyder Belousek is Lecturer in Philosophy and Religion at Ohio Northern University and in Religion at Bluffton University. He has published many articles, both scholarly and popular, in diverse areas: theology, consistent ethic of life, war and peace, social justice, ethics and economics, science and religion, and philosophy of science (subject of his Doctoral Thesis; he also has a degree in physics). He has recently published, Good News: The Advent of Salvation in the Gospel of Luke. A Mennonite, he has served for seven years in mission assignments through voluntary service and international teaching.

A Prophet of God’s Justice: Reclaiming the Political Jesus (Part 2.2)

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Chris Marshall | Tuesday, 9th June 2015

Read the previous part of this series here.

In the previous instalment, Chris began by describing Jesus’ two-fold political strategy as the prophetic denunciation of the injustices and social evils of the prevailing social order on the one hand, and the calling together of an alternative community to live according to the standards of God’s kingdom of justice and peace on the other. He also discussed two aspects of this strategy—1. a rejection of social discrimination, and 2. a critique of economic exploitation. Here Chris continues his discussion of aspects of Jesus’ political strategy.

JESUS’ TWO-FOLD POLITICAL STRATEGY (continued)

3. A mistrust of governmental power: The ministry of Jesus was conducted in the context of an occupied country. Ultimate power resided in Rome but indigenous rulers were allowed to exercise jurisdiction over their own territories, as long as they did so in the interests of the empire. In Jesus’ day, Galilee was controlled by Herod Antipas, while Judea was controlled by a Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, although internal affairs were administered by the Jewish Sanhedrin.

As a result, Jesus was confronted by three main forms of institutional or political power: the spiritual and domestic authority of the Jewish religious leaders, the civil authority of Herod and the Herodians, and the imperial and military authority of Rome. And he was critical of the way all three exercised their power.[1] The basic presupposition of his political critique was that sovereignty or kingship belongs exclusively to God. God alone possesses ultimate authority in human affairs, and God’s justice must be the measuring rod against which the exercise of all human authority is to be evaluated.

(i) Throughout his ministry Jesus was frequently opposed by Jewish religious leaders, both scribal and priestly. Jesus responded to their opposition with blistering denunciations of their conduct and role in society.[2] The most extensive example of this is found in Matthew 23. A careful reading of this chapter shows that it was not their theological views Jesus objected to; it was their misuse of religious power to entrench injustice. They used God’s law to “lock people out of the kingdom of heaven” and to overburden the weak without lifting a finger to help (vv 1–4,13–16). They abused their sacred trust to accrue personal prestige and kudos (vv.5–7). They presented themselves as paragons of virtue, but were full of extortion and greed within (v 25). They condemned the violence of the past, but were more than ready to shed innocent blood themselves (vv 23–39). Most tellingly, they majored on legal minutiae at the expense of what matters most to God: justice, mercy and faithfulness.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel! (Matt 23:23–24).

(ii) The Herodian elite were also threatened by Jesus and sought to destroy him (Mark 3:6; cf. 12:15). When some sympathetic Pharisees warn Jesus that Herod Antipas is out to kill him, Jesus sends a message of defiance back to “that fox” (Luke 13:31–33). Later when tried by Herod, he refuses to co-operate with his interrogation (Luke 23:6–12).

(iii) Jesus was also critical of Roman power. It is true that Jesus never voiced direct opposition to Roman rule, and he never called for the violent expulsion of the Romans from the holy land. But this does not mean that he was indifferent to Roman control or secretly approved of it. Several considerations show he was not detached from this issue. To begin with, Jesus’ entire mission presupposed a repudiation of the Roman boast that they had already introduced the Golden Age of “peace and stability”. His proclamation of the kingdom of God was tantamount to a rejection of the Pax Romana [“Roman peace”] as the order God intended. As Wengst observes, “anyone who prays for the coming of the kingdom of God, expects it very soon, and sees the sign of its dawning in his own action, has no faith in the imperial good tidings of a pacified world and human happiness in it; he does not regard this situation as the peace that God wants, but is certain that it will end soon”.[3] Jesus regarded the Roman Pax as a pseudo-peace and he refused to give his blessing to it.[4] Indeed he recognised that his mission would destabilise the present “peaceful” order because it was based on oppression and injustice.[5]

As well as this, Jesus’ ethical teaching and whole manner of life constituted an implicit criticism of the abusive use of power by Rome. The gospels present a Jesus significantly at variance with the values and the patterns in terms of which the Romans built their empire. Jesus opts for the sick and the poor; the Romans despised the weak and rewarded the strong. Jesus stresses humility and service; the Romans took pride in their own superiority. Jesus stresses the sharing of surplus possessions; the Romans enacted oppressive taxes in order to increase the wealth of the metropolis of Rome and its predatory elites. Jesus emphasises the sovereignty of God; the Romans affirmed pagan gods and the persona of the emperor. Jesus rejects the use of the sword; the Romans built an empire based on horrendous violence.[6]

Consistent with this, there are also several places where Jesus explicitly criticises the Roman authorities for the way they exercised their power. In one saying, which Luke significantly places at the Last Supper immediately prior to his arrest, Jesus underlines the coercive and self-serving nature of Roman rule.[7] In another he speaks disparagingly of the material trappings of Gentile rule and says that greater respect is owed to the least in the kingdom of God than to kings and rulers.[8] In yet another he anticipates violence and murderous opposition to the gospel from Gentile governors and kings.[9] Jesus’ most important statement on Roman authority occurs in the so-called Tribute Question, which I have already commented on.[10]

As well as speaking critically of the abusive use of power in surrounding society, Jesus required his discipleship community to turn prevailing patterns of power and greatness upside down. In this new society, there is to be no hierarchy of status, as prevailed in the contemporary religious community.[11] There is to be no domination of the weak by the powerful, no lording it over one another in the manner of Gentile rulers.[12] True greatness is shown by striving to be of least account![13] Leadership is servanthood.[14] And the wider social impact of the new kingdom community is not dependent on possessing human clout and influence, but on power of dependent faith, prayer and forgiveness.[15]

4. A repudiation of violence and war: Jesus knew full well that the existing system sanctioned violence to achieve its ends. He was well aware of the brutality of Roman rule. He spoke of Pilate’s ruthlessness, and of how the Romans domineered their subjects.[16] He knew that he himself would face torture and death at Roman hands,[17] and that his followers also faced the prospect of persecution and crucifixion.[18] He spoke gravely of the time ahead when the Romans would employ the dreadful horror of siege warfare against Jerusalem.[19] He also knew the violence that seethed beneath the surface of Jewish society.[20] Jesus was no starry-eyed idealist when it came to the subject of political violence.

Aware that the established order would use lethal force to oppose his kingdom-initiative, three existing options were available to him. He could take the Zealot option and strive to bring in the kingdom by military force. Or he could take the Qumran option and advocate the complete withdrawal of his messianic community into the desert away from the corruption of surrounding society. Or he could take the Establishment option and seek to make the best of a poor situation by co-operation or collaboration. Jesus rejected all three. Instead he chose the way of non-violent, sacrificial love and required the same of his followers (Matt 5:38–48). Jesus totally rejected war and violence as having any place in the exercise of God’s rule. To fight for the kingdom with the weapons of the enemy was to lose the kingdom by default. To fight for the kingdom by turning the other cheek, going the second mile, praying for one’s persecutors, loving one’s enemies, was to achieve true victory over satanic evil. It was a revolutionary way of being revolutionary. As Wright observes:

Anyone announcing the kingdom of YHWH was engaging in serious political action. Anyone announcing the kingdom but explicitly opposing armed resistance was engaging in doubly serious political action: not only the occupying forces, but all those who gave allegiance to the resistance movement would be enraged.[21]

It is here that Jesus’ exorcisms carried an important political message. It was common in Jesus’ day for people to ascribe the abject suffering of God’s people under Roman rule to the activity of superhuman demonic forces standing behind their pagan oppressors and their indigenous quislings. One manifestation of this spiritual tyranny was the susceptibility of vulnerable individuals to demonic possession. When Jesus cast out demons, therefore, he was not only healing the victims of societal dysfunction; he was symbolically challenging and defeating the spiritual authorities standing behind foreign repression. This is made extremely clear by the military language and imagery used to describe the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5:1–20, where a “legion” of demons is “dismissed” to enter a “troop” of unclean pigs, who then “charge” headlong down a slope and are “drowned in the sea”.[22] This episode is perhaps intended to underscore that personal and social liberation from the debilitating impact of colonial control is not to be achieved by military rebellion, and is not dependent on the violent expulsion of the Romans, but is available even now to those who embrace the renewing and peace-making power of God’s kingdom made available in Jesus.

Arguably it is by their compromise with military violence that the Christian credentials of so much conservative Christian politics are most open to question. It could not be sadder for Christian witness today that the two leading architects of the invasion of Iraq and the two most unapologetic proponents of the so-called war on terrorism are both confessing Christians who claim divine endorsement for their trust in the “tumult of war” (Hosea 10:14) instead of the “gospel of peace” (Eph 6:15) in their quest for international security.

CONCLUSION
Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God was a political gesture that impinged directly on the major dimensions of social and political life—the use of wealth and power, the exclusion of the weak and disadvantaged from full participation in the wider community, and the employment of lethal violence to protect the unjust status quo. Jesus was critical of the prevailing social order and called for communal repentance (cf. Matt 11:20–24). He also laid down a new ethic for his followers so that they could serve as an instrument of societal renewal. In his messianic community, the weak are to be honoured, wealth is to be shared, leadership is to take the form of servanthood, and the way of non-violent, sacrificial love is to prevail. The vision of the coming kingdom and its justice is to be the supreme concern of its existence (Matt 6:33). That is to say, the primary formative power over its way of life is not the past or the present but the future, the new day coming, the time when God will put all things to right. As a colony of the age to come planted in the midst of the old order, the kingdom community is to serve both as an alternative expression of human community that summons mainstream society to change (a city set on a hill, Matt 5:14), and as a subversive force for change within the existing socio-political order (salt and light, Matt 5:13, 16).

Such is also to be the concern of the Christian community today, even if its social and political matrix is very different to that of first-century Palestine, and even though the task of translating Jesus’ political vision into concrete policies today is extremely difficult. But in broad terms, inasmuch as the biblical vision for the kingdom of God is the setting up of a universal realm of peace and justice on earth, the church as the community of the kingdom is called to a twofold political task. On the one hand, it is to proclaim the breakthrough of God’s new order by giving visible expression in its own life to the peace, justice and righteousness of God’s kingdom. On the other hand, it is to work tirelessly for peace and justice in surrounding society, to struggle against the forces of the old age—forces of nationalism, militarism, materialism, sexism and racism—which Christ has dethroned and which one day shall finally yield to God’s glorious future. Such is the politics of Jesus.

This article originally appeared in On The Road 32.

[1] For a brief summary see M. Hengel, Christ and Power (Dublin: Christian Journals, 1977), 15–21; James D.G. Dunn, Christian Liberty: A New Testament Perspective (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1993), 27–52. More fully see Alan Storkey, Jesus and Politics: Confronting the Powers (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 1–94.

[2] See e.g. Mark 7:6–23; 12:1–12, 41–44; 13:9–10; Luke 11:42–44; 16:14-15; 18:9–14.

[3] Wengst, Pax Romana, 55.

[4] Cf. John 14:27; 18:36.

[5] Cf. Matt 10:34f; Luke 23:1–2.

[6] See R. J. Cassidy, Jesus, Society and Politics: A Study of Luke’s Gospel (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1983), 17.

[7] Luke 22:25 cf. Mark 10:42/Matt 20:25.

[8] Matt 11:18/Luke 7:25.

[9] Mark 13:9f/Lk 21:12–13; cf. Matt 24:9.

[10] Mark 12:13–17/Matt 22:15–22/Luke 20:20–26.

[11] Matt 23:8–12

[12] Mark 10:42–43

[13] Mark 9:33–37/Matt 18:1–6/Luke 9:46–48; Mark 10:13–16/Matt 19:13–15/Luke 18:15–17.

[14] Luke 22:26

[15] Mark 11:20–25. On this passage, see Marshall Faith as a Theme, 159–74.

[16] Luke 13:1; 22:24–27.

[17] Mark 10:33–34/Matt 20:17–19/Luke 18:31–34.

[18] Mark 13:9–10/Luke 21:12–13; Mark 8:34–38.

[19] Luke 19:41–44; 21:20–24; 23:27–31.

[20] Matt 23:29–36; Luke 9:7–9, 19; 13:31–35; Mark 13:9–13.

[21] Wright, Jesus and Victory, 296, cf. 450, 465, 564–65.

[22] On this see Richard Dormandy, “The Expulsion of Legion: A Political Reading of Mark 5:1-20,” Expository Times 93/10 (2000): 335–37; Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988), 190–94; Horsley, Jesus and Empire, 99–104.

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.

A Prophet of God’s Justice: Reclaiming the Political Jesus (Part 2.1)

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Chris Marshall | Thursday, 4th June 2015

Read the previous part of this series here.

In the introduction to Part 1.1 of this series, Chris said:

“In this paper 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.”

Having argued that “Jesus’ message of the dawning kingdom of God had significant political implications,” Chris changes focus in the remainder of this series to discuss the positive dimensions of Jesus’ political strategy.

JESUS’ TWO-FOLD POLITICAL STRATEGY
Broadly speaking Jesus’ political stance was characterized by a prophetic denunciation of the injustices and social evils of the prevailing social order on the one hand, including a strident declaration of divine judgment on the existing centres of power responsible for oppression and injustice, and, on the other hand, by the calling together of an alternative community to live according to the standards of God’s kingdom of justice and peace and thereby to model and effect the renewal of Israel as a whole. Commentators often underestimate the potential societal impact that such a “contrast society”, planted in the heart of mainstream society, is capable of. But, as Gerhard Lohfink observes, “the anti-social and corrupt systems of a dominant society cannot be attacked more sharply than by the formation of an anti-society in its midst. Simply through its existence, this new society is a more efficacious attack on the old structures than any program, without personal cost, for the general transformation of the world”.[1]

This twofold strategy of judgment and renewal, of confrontation and reconstruction, of political resistance and social revolution, is evident in at least four major areas of contemporary social life addressed by Jesus.[2] And, to reiterate my underlying thesis, it is the priorities, values and commitments we see at work in Jesus’ activity here that ought to furnish the normative framework for all subsequent political engagement in his name.

1. A rejection of social discrimination: Supremely characteristic of Jesus was his orientation to the social margins—the destitute, the weak, social outcasts, women, children, Samaritans, the physically deformed, those in prison, the sick and the possessed. The dawning of the kingdom of God, insisted Jesus, was good news for the socially disadvantaged.[3] It brought to them both the present comfort of knowing God’s acceptance and blessing despite their social exclusion and often self-blame, and the reassurance that God was now at work, through Jesus and mission, to end their suffering and restore them to freedom and wholeness.

Jesus combated social discrimination at two levels. He openly criticised the self-righteous arrogance of the religious experts,[4] and knowingly antagonized them by seeking intimate fellowship with sinners and outcasts.[5] At the same time, he assembled a new inclusive, egalitarian community in which the poor were to be given preference,[6] the sick and the imprisoned cared for,[7] women accorded dignity and equality,[8] children esteemed as models to be emulated,[9] and Samaritans and Gentiles embraced as equal objects of God’s favour.[10] From this it follows that any modern political programme that marginalises racial, ethnic or social groups, and which ignores or exacerbates the plight of the weak and downtrodden to promote the interests of the strong, even if it calls itself a “Christian” option, is diametrically opposed to the politics of Jesus.

2. A critique of economic exploitation: It is surely impossible to read Luke’s Gospel without sensing Jesus’ profound hostility to materialism and the relational and societal damage it causes. As an alternative source of security, the pursuit and hording of surplus wealth creates a barrier to radical trust in God and his kingdom.[11] Moreover, in a patronage-based economy the concentration of massive riches in the hands of a few was evidence of structural injustice in society. The rich prospered at the expense of the poor. Jesus’ words “for you always have the poor with you” should not be taken as a sign of his passive acquiescence to poverty in society.[12] They are, in fact, an implied rebuke, for according to Deuteronomy 15:11 enduring poverty was evidence of a failure to keep the laws of the covenant by practicing mutual sharing and collective responsibility.

Jesus’ use of the intriguing term “mammon of injustice” (Luke 16:9) may even imply that he saw in the single-minded pursuit of wealth an inherent tendency towards injustice. This is confirmed in his overt attack on the greedy rich of his day. “Woe to you who are rich now, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall hunger” (Luke 6:24-25). Jesus criticised the rich for three related evils: for accumulating unneeded surplus,[13] for ignoring the needs of the poor,[14] and for corruption and exploitation of the weak.[15] It is in this connection that we should probably understand Jesus’ climactic confrontation with the Temple establishment—which was undoubtedly his most overt and daring political-prophetic action.[16] There is no time to explore this extremely important episode here, but it was probably the way the Temple system had become integrated into the imperial system of domination and exploitation that Jesus most strongly objected to.[17]

By contrast, Jesus pronounced beatitude upon the poor. “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger, for you shall be full. Blessed are you who weep, for you shall laugh” (Luke 6:20-21).[18] Jesus is not here turning poverty, hunger and tears into “spiritual values” in themselves. The poor, the starving and the sorrowful are not blessed because of their condition but because God intends to reverse their situation. When God’s kingdom comes in its fullness, poverty and pain will be no more. In the meantime, God’s kingly power is at work in Jesus and his followers to bring healing and liberation and to create a new community to work against poverty, hunger and misery. Thus, as Klaus Wengst observes:

…the beatitudes prove also to be declarations of war against poverty, hunger and tears: they are concerned for radical change. They look to the coming kingdom of God for this change … But this expectation is not just to be waited for; it has a reality in behaviour to match. When Jesus turns to those on the periphery, in his fellowship with his followers, people are already filled, already laugh, who would otherwise be pushed aside and have nothing to laugh about … the hungry are filled and … the domination of one person by another has come to an end.[19]

Not only were the poor and hungry to find dignity and acceptance within the new community, but a whole new attitude to material possessions was to prevail therein. Following Jesus entailed a commitment to share one’s material resources with those in need.[20] A lifestyle of simplicity,[21] material dependence[22] and constant vigilance against the “deceitfulness of riches” (Mark 4:19) are to be the hallmarks of the new community. In these ways, Jesus’ followers were to live ‘as if’ the provisions of the biblical Jubilee were being enacted in their midst.[23]

How very different is the prevailing political landscape of global capitalist society today, which makes an idol of market forces, promotes consumerism as a means of political survival, and, while mouthing platitudes to the contrary, exacerbates the plight of the poor and dispossessed in pursuit of an ever-greater concentration of wealth and power.

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

[1] G. Lohfink, Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith (London: SPCK, 1985), 95. So also John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 40.

[2] For the section that follows, see, more briefly, my Little Book of Biblical Justice (Intercourse: Good Books, 2004), 49–64. No attempt will be made to assess the authenticity of the various sayings ascribed to Jesus, nor to delineate the redactional interests of the individual evangelists. The themes reviewed here are sufficiently pervasive in the gospel traditions to be confident that they substantially reflect the perspective of Jesus, even allowing for sometimes extensive redactional shaping of the materials by the gospel writers.

[3] Luke 4:18–20; Matt 11:2–6/Luke 7:18–35.

[4] See e.g. Matt 9:13; 21:31; Luke 6:24f; 16:15.

[5] See e.g. Mark 2:15–17/Matt 9:10–13/Lk 5:27–30; Matt 11:19/Luke 15:1–2; 19:1–10.

[6] See e.g. Luke 14:12–24.

[7] Matt 25:31–46

[8] See e.g. Luke 8:1–3; 10:38–42; Mark 14:3–9; 15:40–41; John 3:7–38, etc.

[9] Mark 9:36,42/Matt 18:1–5/Luke 9:46–48; Mark 10:13–16/Matt 19:13–15/Luke 18:15–17.

[10] See e.g. Mark 7:24–30/Matt 15:21–28; Mark 11:17; 13:10; Matt 8:5–13/Luke 7:1–10; Matt 12:18; 21:43/Luke 20:16; Matt 28:19–20; Luke 9:51–55; John 4:7–42.

[11] Mark 4:19/Matt 13:22/Luke 8:14; Mark 10:17–31/Matt 19:16–30/Luke 18:18–30; Matt 6:21; Luke 12:16–21; 14:1–14; 16:13.

[12] Mark 14:7/Matt 26:11/John 12:8.

[13] Luke 12:15–21; 16:19; 21:1–4; Matt 11:8.

[14] Luke 10:25–37; 16:19–27.

[15] Mark 11:15–19; 12:40/Luke 20:47; Matt 23:23/Luke 11:42.

[16] Mark 11:15–18/Matt 21:12–13/Luke 19:45–46; John 2:14–22.

[17] The literature on this episode is now substantial, but see especially Herzog, Jesus Justice, 112–43, 191–99.

[18] On this see my essay “The Moral Vision of the Beatitudes: The Blessings of Revolution”, in Faith and Freedom: Christian Ethics in a Pluralist Culture (eds. D. Neville & P. Matthews; Sydney: Australian Theological Forum, 2003), 11–33.

[19] Klaus Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Christ (London: SCM, 1987), 65.

[20] See e.g. Mark 10:17–30; Matt 6:2–4; Matt 7:7–11; Luke 6:35, 38; 8:1–3; 12:32–34; 19:1–10; 14:25–35; John 12:6; 13:29.

[21] Matt 6:19–34/Luke 12:22–31.

[22] Mark 6:7–13, cf. Luke 9:38; 10:4.

[23] Wright, Jesus and Victory, 295.

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.

A Prophet of God’s Justice: Reclaiming the Political Jesus (Part 1.2)

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Chris Marshall | Monday, 1st June 2015

Read the first part of the series here.

In the first instalment of this series, Chris asserted that most Christians are “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.” He then went on to discuss reasons for this ‘depoliticisation of Jesus’, namely narrow concepts of “politics” amongst modern Christians, and the distorting influence of post-Enlightenment individualism on interpretations of Jesus’ ministry. Here Chris discusses additional factors in the perpetuation of the depoliticisation of Jesus.

THE DEPOLICISATION OF JESUS (continued)

3. Fragmentary reading strategies: A third factor contributing to the prevalent depoliticisation of Jesus are the atomistic reading strategies employed by gospel readers and interpreters. All attention gets focused on isolated sayings of Jesus, or individual miracle stories, or the meaning of particular parables, with little consideration being given to how these individual items fit into the larger story being told by the evangelists or how they reflect the economic and socio-political realities of the first-century world in which the story is set.

This fragmentary approach is commonplace in both popular and scholarly approaches to the gospels. At a popular level, most preaching and devotional reading of the gospels concentrates on small tracts of text separated off from the larger narrative setting. Similarly church lectionaries, although a very ancient and helpful tool for engaging the full witness of Scripture, still do make a virtue out of breaking the gospel accounts down into very small units and distributing them throughout the year. More concerning however is what many gospel critics do. In the name of sound historical method, critical scholars apply “scientific” tests of authenticity to the Jesus-tradition in order to siphon off material that can be considered to be historically reliable. The limited amount of data extracted by this method is usually predominantly sayings-material—things Jesus said more than things Jesus did—since it is much harder to validate the historicity of third-person narratives which are full of fantastic features and clearly serve as Christian propaganda. The resulting collection of “authentic” sayings and parables are then treated as repositories of meaning in their own right, independent of the literary or historical context in which they occur in the gospel tradition.

The problems with this approach are manifold, not the least being that it inevitably reduces Jesus to a dehistoricised “talking head”, someone who hovers serenely above the mundane circumstances of ordinary life and communicates moral or spiritual insights in the form of decontextualised aphorisms, proverbs and parables, or by the occasional striking deed. But no real human being ever communicates that way. No one limits their speech to short sentences or brief sound bites unrelated to specific situations and disconnected from ongoing human relationships, or unhooked from the shared traditions, experiences and meanings of their audience. To try to understand the significance of Jesus’ words and deeds without reference to the concrete social and political circumstances of actual Jewish communities under Roman rule is like trying to understand the sermons and speeches of Martin Luther King without reference to the bitter legacy of American slavery, the injustices of segregation, and the struggles of the civil rights movement.[1]

The only way, then, to do justice to the individual words and deeds of Jesus is always to view them within the context of the larger gospel narrative of his life and mission, rooted as it is, and as Jesus himself historically was, is in the real life world of colonial Palestine, where prophetic and messianic movements of liberation were constantly springing up.

4. Jesus the prophet: Several times I have referred to Jesus as a Jewish prophet. There can be little doubt that the gospel writers present Jesus in such terms,[2] and in a good number of his own sayings Jesus refers to himself as a prophet.[3] His repeated warnings of impending judgment on the nation and its rulers are also evidence of Jesus’ prophetic persona.[4] It is precisely in his guise as a prophet that Jesus exercises such a politically-charged role. Much the same could be said for his messianic identity. It is extremely likely that Jesus saw himself as Israel’s awaited messiah, even if he was decidedly chary about employing the title itself, and he was indisputably executed by Pilate as a messianic pretender.[5] To claim messiahship was to assert a political function, since the most common expectation of the coming messiah is that he would be a princely warrior who would defeat God’s enemies, restore the throne of David, and lead Israel to universal sovereignty over the nations.

Yet there has been a curious reluctance among Christian interpreters to take seriously Jesus’ prophetic and messianic significance. This reluctance again has both popular and scholarly expressions. At a popular theological level, it is Jesus’ divinity that usually squeezes out his prophetic credentials. Jesus was not just a prophet, Christian apologists (rightly) insist, he was the incarnate Son of God, a divine being, not just a human being. Jews and Muslims may honour Jesus as a prophet, but, they (rightly) urge, we Christians know him as God’s only begotten son.

At a scholarly level, it is Jesus’ messianic self-consciousness that is more disputed. Many gospel critics are unconvinced that Jesus saw himself as a messiah, and while they may allow him the label of prophet in lieu, even that identity is stripped of much political content. There is even one strand of American scholarship that has now demoted Jesus further from the status of prophet to that of peasant sage or wisdom teacher or Cynic-like philosopher. These scholars, reacting negatively to the apocalyptic fantasies of American fundamentalism, strip Jesus’ preaching of all traces of apocalyptic judgment, leaving behind a harmless wandering bard who travelled around the countryside “teaching an alternative hippie-like lifestyle to a bunch of rootless nobodies”.[6] Why anyone, least of all Pilate, would want to crucify such a person is difficult to fathom.

But the evidence that Jesus considered himself to be a prophet, and was regarded by his contemporaries as such, is overwhelming. It is true that his closest followers soon came to regard him as much more than a prophet,[7] but they never saw him as less, and it was in the basic mould of a prophet that Jesus made his most decisive political impact. “Prophet” was a fluid category in Jesus’ day, embracing a wide diversity of functions and emphases.[8] Some prophets were clerical and establishment figures, others were more scholarly types; some were lone wolfs delivering oracles of judgment or deliverance, others were popular leaders of mass movements who modelled themselves on the great prophetic figures of the past, like Moses, Joshua and Elijah, and who proclaimed God’s imminent intervention to bring deliverance from Roman servitude and idolatry. Jesus fits best into this latter category of a popular prophet leading a proletarian movement of liberation and renewal, centred on a distinctive understanding of God’s kingdom and its implications. Distinctive it certainly was, especially in its foreswearing of hatred and violence toward the enemy, but it was not apolitical, for, as Wright observes, “anyone who was announcing God’s kingdom … was engaging in political activity. The question is, rather, what sort of politics were they undertaking, and with what end in view”.[9]

5. A kingdom not of this world: The four factors I have discussed so far that have served to depoliticise Jesus—the spurious separation of religion and politics, the distorting grid of Western individualism, the fragmenting of the gospel story into isolated bits and pieces, and the discomfort with Jesus’ prophetic or messianic office—all come to roost in the actual exposition of the text. Those who not only miss but positively resist the idea of a politically engaged Jesus cite two texts in particular as proof that Jesus wasn’t much concerned with political affairs. The first is Jesus’ response to Pilate’s question about whether he considered himself to be the king of the Jews

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” … Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” (John 18:35–38)

This text more than any other has been used by conservative interpreters to encourage Christian quietism and disengagement from political or social justice issues, since the kingdom which Jesus proclaims “is not of this world….it is not from here”. It is a heavenly, not an earthly, kingdom. The second text comes from the so-called Tribute Question passage, where Jesus is asked directly about whether it is acceptable to support Caesar’s regime through paying taxes.

Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it.” And they brought one. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were utterly amazed at him (Mark 12:13–17).

Upon this text a thorough-going, and thoroughly baleful, “two kingdoms” theology has been constructed, according to which the State is deemed to have rightful charge of social and political affairs, while the church has control of spiritual and religious matters.[10] Christians must therefore be good, obedient citizens in society in recognition of Caesar’s legitimate authority, but they should concentrate most of their energies in developing their relationship to God and serving the church, and leave worldly affairs to those whom God has appointed to rule. It would be no exaggeration to say that without this reading of Jesus’ famous words “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”, reinforced by Paul’s call to Christian submission to ruling authorities in Romans 13:1–6, the Nazi holocaust might never have happened.Quote Block Marshall3There is no time to exegete either of these two passages in detail here.[11] Suffice it to say that the familiar readings of both texts are dangerously misguided. Even in the context of John’s Gospel—the most “spiritual” of all the gospels—Jesus’ saying “my kingdom is not of this world” cannot be taken as an affirmation that God’s kingdom is a purely spiritual reality unrelated to worldly realities. After all it was out of love for this world that God sent Christ into the world in the first place, in order that “through him the world might be saved” (John 3:16–17). The term “kingdom” here, as always in biblical tradition, has the active force of “rule” or “kingship” or “power” more than place or territory or realm, so that what Jesus is really saying is that his style of exercising kingly authority is unlike that of other kings. His kingship conforms, not to brutal coercive rule of Herod or Caesar or Caiaphas, but to the compassionate, healing rule of God. It does not rest on violent coercion but on loving persuasion.

That is why in the second part of the verse, which is hardly ever quoted by conservative apologists, Jesus explains that “if my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews”. The thing that most differentiates Jesus’ kingship from worldly forms of kingship is its non-violence. His authority is “not from here”—it is not molded by realpolitik considerations. If it were, his followers would have launched a violent campaign to seize Jerusalem and install him on throne. Instead God’s kingdom exerts its power by peaceful means. It is still a political reality (it is still about power), but it embodies the politics of peace, not the politics of conquest.

Jesus’ reply to the question about tribute points in the same direction. Jesus’ enemies seek to trap him with a Catch-22 question: “Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Both Jesus’ questioners and Jesus himself knew full well that, according to God’s law, it was unlawful to offer homage to a pagan ruler who blasphemously claimed universal sovereignty for himself. In recent memory Jewish radicals had gone to horrifying deaths for their refusal to pay tribute to Caesar in the name of the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me”. But both parties also knew full well that, according to Roman law, it was obligatory to pay taxes and tribute to the imperium. So Jesus was trapped. If he endorsed taxation, he was in open breach of the Torah, at least in the eyes of the faithful. If he opposed taxation, he was in defiance of Rome and could well have to pay for it with his life.

In a brilliant riposte, Jesus evades the trap by snaring his opponents in their own petard. First he asks his interrogators to show him a denarius, the Roman coin used for tribute payment. The very fact that they can so quickly produce a coin exposes the insincerity of their inquiry. For their very possession of foreign currency confirmed that his questioners had themselves already opted for subservience to Rome, even while provoking Jesus to declare his Torah-based opposition to it. Jesus then asks them to verbalise whose image (eikon) and whose title the coin bore. In doing this he was both deliberately underscoring the blasphemous nature of the inscription on the coin, which ascribed deity to the emperor (“Tiberius Caesar, Augustus, Son of the Divine Augustus”), and reminding his hearers of who God’s true image bearers in the world really are, namely God’s own people (cf. Gen 1:27). Only then does Jesus make his climactic declaration about rendering to Caesar what is his due and to God what is his.

Given that Jesus had first intentionally highlighted the idolatrous nature of Caesar’s coinage, it is unthinkable that his final pronouncement was intended to be a straightforward endorsement of his listeners’ obligation to pay their taxes, though this is how it is often interpreted.[12] If his words amounted to an unambiguous affirmation of Rome’s right to levy tribute, it is hard to see how his enemies could construe them as sedition and report him to Pilate for “perverting our nation and forbidding us to pay taxes to Caesar” (Luke 23:2). If anything, Jesus’ statement is more naturally taken as a bold declaration of independence from Rome’s tribute-generating machine. But Jesus stops short of explicitly forbidding payment of tribute. Instead he draws attention to the fundamental principle at issue: One must first be clear on what rightfully belongs to Caesar and what rightfully belongs to God, then decide on the specifics of tribute. Of course every Jew knew the “earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1), and that their political allegiance was owed exclusively to Yahweh alone. That meant that nothing belonged of right to Caesar, least of all the God-given land of Israel and its produce (cf. Lev 25:23).

It does not follow from this, however, that Jesus was encouraging outright tax refusal by his Jewish compatriots, which would have been catastrophic. Instead he was inviting them to reframe the meaning of the payment they must make by turning it from a symbol of subservience into a symbol of resistance. Since Israel’s God is lord of all, Caesar could legitimately claim ownership to nothing—except one thing, the despicable coins minted in his own honour. So in returning these idolatrous coins to their pagan owner, albeit in the form of coercive taxes, Jesus’ hearers could understand themselves to be symbolically ridding God’s land of the symbols of imperial domination and reasserting their own vocation as God’s true image bearers on earth.[13]Quote Block Marshall2To sum up thus far: Once we cast off the modern blinkers we bring to the gospel story, it becomes clear that Jesus’ message of the dawning kingdom of God had significant political implications. His announcement that God’s long awaited reign was now asserting itself in the world, and his consequent summons for people to rally to the flag, had, as Wright observes “far more in common with the founding of a revolutionary party than with what we now think of as either ‘evangelism’ or ‘ethical teaching’”.[14] It is a drastic impoverishment of Jesus’ message and a blunting of its radical edge to suggest that Jesus was only concerned with the spiritual needs and personal conduct of individuals. The most fatal objection to this familiar portrait of Jesus is that it fails utterly to meet the criterion of crucifiability. As William Herzog observes:

If [Jesus] had been the kind of teacher popularly portrayed in the North American church, a master of the inner life, teaching the importance of spirituality and a private relationship with God, he would have been supported by the Romans as part of their rural pacification program. That was exactly the kind of religion the Romans wanted peasants to have. Any belief that he encouraged … withdrawal from the world of politics and economics into a spiritual or inner realm would have met with official approval.[15]

But that is not what happened. Instead Jesus and his movement were perceived by the imperial and colonial authorities to be a political time bomb that urgently needed defusing, and for very good reason. To understand why, it is important to recognize the methodology Jesus used to make political comment and work for social change, since the political options open to Jesus were quite unlike those open to us in liberal democratic societies.

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

[1] I borrow this helpful analogy from Horsley, Jesus and Empire, 13.

[2] Matt 13:57/Mark 6:4, cf. Luke 4:24; Matt 8:28; Matt 16:14/Luke 9:19; Matt 21:11, 26; Mark 6:14–16/ Matt 14:1–2/Luke 9:7–9; Luke 7:16, 39–50; 13:33; John 1:21; 4:19; 6:14; 7:40, 52; Mark 14:65/Matt 26:68; Luke 22:64; 24:19; Acts 3:22; 7:37.

[3] Mark 6:4/Matt 13:57; Luke 4:24/GTh 31; John 4:44; Luke 13:31-33. Jesus also regarded John the Baptist as a prophet: Luke 7:26/Matt 11:9; cf. John 1:22; Mark 11:27–33.

[4] For perhaps the most thorough recent analysis of judgment in Jesus’ preaching, see Marius Resier, Jesus and Judgment: The Eschatological Proclamation in its Jewish Context (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997). See also Dale C. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and its Interpreters (New York: T & T Clark, 2005), 56–110.

[5] Mark 15:1–38; Matt 27:11–32; Luke 23:1–46; John 18:28–19:38.

[6] Horsley, Jesus and Empire, 7.

[7] See Mark 8:27–30, cf. 6:14–16. To be sure, Jesus deems John the Baptist to be “more than a prophet” (Luke 7:26/Matt 11:9). But significantly, Jesus is only once referred to as a prophet outside gospels (Acts 3:22). His significance transcended established prophetic categories.

[8] On different types of prophet in the first century, see Wright, Jesus and Victory, 153–55; Herzog, Jesus Justice, 51–60. See also Morna D. Hooker, The Signs of a Prophet: The Prophetic Actions of Jesus (London: SCM, 1997) and David R. Kaylor, Jesus the Prophet: His Vision of the Kingdom on Earth (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994).

[9] Wright, Jesus and Victory, 203.

[10] See my fuller discussion in Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 16–30.

[11] On the tribute passage, see Wright, Jesus and Victory, 502–07; Herzog, Jesus Justice, 219–32; Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 307–17.

[12] Contra Oscar Cullman, The State in the New Testament (London: SCM, 1957), 34–38; W.D. Davies, “Ethics in the New Testament”, Interpreters’ Dictionary of the Bible II:171.

[13] So Herzog, Jesus Justice, 231–32.

[14] Wright, Jesus and Victory, 301. This interpretation fits well with the way Walter Wink, and others, understand the strategy underlying Jesus’ injunctions in Matthew 5:21–48. For a brief account, see Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), esp. 98–111.

[15] Quoted by Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus Against Christianity: Reclaiming the Missing Jesus (Harrisburg: Trinity, 2001), 236–36.

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.

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

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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.

Escaping “Religion” — With the Help of the Blues

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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.