Tag Archives: Empire

On Lording

Over at Storied Theology there’s some nervousness about anti-Roman studies within New Testament.

Did Jesus resist Rome?  Was Jesus anti-Roman?  Would Jesus have taken up arms against Rome if he had the means?

Take this into account:

And he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves.” (Luke 22:25-27 ESV)

In my opinion, Jesus was anti-lordship, anti-domination of others, and in this way, he was anti-Roman.  It’s difficult to say if Jesus would have defended his homeland if he had had the army or weapons.  We’d like to think not.  But one thing is for sure, Jesus wanted to change hearts, and that’s what he did.  Against a Roman way of life.

So, when in Rome, don’t do as the Romans did.

The Lectionary Experience: Mark 3:20-35

And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.” And he called them to him and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house.
“Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”
(Mark 3:20-35 ESV)

Jesus is essentially saying, “if I am the satan (the adversary) and I am casting out demons, then good news, folks, the satan’s kingdom is gonna fall!!!  But no, really, if you want to destroy the satan’s kingdom, then you first have to bind up the satan, and then destroy his house.”  In other words, Jesus has bound the satan and that’s why he’s cleaning house.

A couple of existential observations.  Notably, in the First Testament, the three times the satan is mentioned he is at least twice a prosecuting attorney for God, most memorably in the prologue to Job.  With this in mind, it is fascinating, to see Jesus claim that the satan is bound, and then proclaim the forgivness of sins (nothing to do with the cross) over the children of man.

Nevertheless, we know that in the period between the Testaments, that the character of the satan grew in stature and power into the figure we encounter in canonical and non-canonical apocalyptic literature.  But here too, the satan is never simply “Satan” as many often imagined, but the satan is connected with the evil political powers of the day (see here for an example).

With the large accusatory Temple scene in Mark 11-12, we know that Jesus is attacking the corrupt powers (especially the scribes, see 12.28-40) of Jerusalem leadership.  With these three points in mind, I submit the following as a clue to the existential concerns of the text.  First, Jesus is calling out the scribes and other Jerusalem leadership for perpetuating evils, oppression, etc.  These evils are built on the premise that they run the system which negotiates sin and retribution between God and the masses.  Jesus, having bound the satan, is cleaning house with the forgiveness of sins, emptying the power of the corrupt leadership.

The existential concern is behind the premise that people need forgiveness of sins in order to be right with God.  With the existential crisis being that the people have no control over their own destiny, the forgiveness of sins meets crisis in several concerns.  First, it is identity with the people of God, a sense of belonging with the other righteous.  Second, the cost for peasants to have to participate in the sacrificial culture is an economic strain.  The forgiveness of sins, reduces this burden.  Finally, corrupt leadership tries to answer the the existential crisis, where they have no control over their own destinies, to try to control the destinies of others.  In some ways, the forgiveness of sin breaks their power to control the destinies of the people.

A good existential reading then will first focus on the identity, the economics, and oppression, before making too much of what “blaspheming the holy spirit” might mean.

Are there existential concerns that I missed?

Story Saturday: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”

Huck Finn’s letter to Jim’s new owner:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:”All right, then, I’ll go to hell”- and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”

via Rachel Held Evans | “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”.  Stop by her blog, and read her inspiring interpretation.

The Never Changing God: An Example

As promised: a petite example of existential interpretation.  So I’ve chosen a petite passage to consider.

For I the LORD do not change; (Malachi 3:6 ESV)

It’s an idea that I heard in Sunday School, you probably did too.  God doesn’t change.  Like Jesus in Hebrews, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

It’s an ontological claim, about God’s being.  It’s theology.  Maybe, for some churches, it’s even doctrine.  But for me it’s quite an irrelevant statement.

Let’s pretend even, that this holds true for the rest of the canon.  God never changes (I doubt that it does hold true).  A theologian may ask, “What does it mean for God to never change?  God will not break covenant?  God will love me the same forever?

But an existential analysis asks instead, “What in human existence finds it necessary to have an unchanging God?”  If the biblical writer included it, it must have been important on a human level.

I do not intend to answer this question in full, but here are some suggestions.  Human leadership is inconsistent and unjust.  The people are being ruled by foreign powers who go back on their word because they can.  Humans have too high expectations for human leadership.

Now, as I stated in the proposal for this blog, the priority for the church should not be to form a theology or doctrine around such a statement, but to constantly address the problems of human leadership.

In this example, I have not dug down to the existential crisis.  As it was a simple petite example, I simply wanted to exemplify the types of questions and solutions involved in such an interpretation.

2,000 More Years of Critiquing Rome

Professor Byron states in a recent blog:

It has become quite popular over the last few decades for New Testament scholars to bash ancient Rome and suggest that when first century Christian writers use terms like gospel, Lord, savior, kingdom, etc, that these authors are deliberately critiquing Rome and its emperors. Some modern scholars have pushed this interpretation so far that the New Testament looks less like a theological book and more like a political manifesto. And perhaps that is part of the problem. Too often some of these interpretations of “Rome’s gospel” are clearly motivated by frustration with American hegemony. And while I think American policy does need to be critiqued and criticized, I am not sure that authors like Paul and others were doing same thing with Rome as some modern scholars suggest. To hear some New Testament scholars talk there was nothing good about ancient Rome and that the world would have been better off without it.

This got me thinking: Did everyone in the ancient world hate Rome? Which then reminded me of the scene from the Monty Python film Life of Brian in which the Jewish rebels are planning to kidnap Pilate’s wife because they hate the Romans. But of course, as the below clip makes clear, not everything about the Romans was all that bad.

(See the link to his blog for the Monty Python video)

In my view, Professor Byron is somewhat correct when he notes that such perspectives are motivated by “frustration with American hegemony.”  This stems from, what is in my view, the great anti-American Empire triumvirate from Boston: Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Richard Horsley.

However, this criticism is also based on a separate field of studies called Postcolonial studies, which analyzes texts from the colonized (see this introduction).  Particular studies have been done to look at colonies of the British Empire and see how they produced texts/art while being colonized.

Let’s be clear.  Every Empire does great things as the Monty Python skit suggests, but the question is always: “At what cost?”  Sure we like your aqueducts, your smooth roads, and your safe seas, but if the cost of these is human lives (Revelation 18.13), then is it really worth it?  But what Postcolonial criticism of literature has shown, is that even if the writers do not openly critique or show contempt for the Empire, there acts of writing still question the center and act at least in small forms of resistance.

Revelation critiques Rome with apocalyptic language.  The Gospels critiques the Roman way of life without naming the Empire.  And Paul has to jump through Imperial hoops to spread the Gospel and help the poor.  And why are there even so many poor that Paul has to help in the first place?  So certainly, every book in the New Testament doesn’t cry out, “Down with Rome!”  But the difficulties of Empire cannot be ignored when engaging the New Testament, or any of the Old Testament either (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece…)

The problem I think Professor Byron has is that such criticism is all to prevalent these days in biblical studies. The first reason is that Postcolonial Criticism is a relatively recent development in biblical scholarship.  But the other reason is simply that for nearly 2,000 years, Roman Imperial oppression was almost totally ignored in biblical studies.  So in order to have a “little more balance,” we may need another 2,000 years of critiquing Rome.