I'm posting here a short article by Thomas Atwood, one of Commonweal Institute's supporters. In a time when fundamentalism is on the ascent in America, many progressive Christians find it difficult to know how to speak with the fellow Christians about how their political values relate to their faith. Thomas' article was an eye-opener for me.
Thomas Atwood's article:
It's high time that progressive Christians reclaimed the public spaces and stood up to the Christian Right — because fundamentalist views don't speak for us, and they speak even less for the historical Jesus of Nazareth. I'm reading an excellent book by John Dominic Crossan, possibly the greatest historical Jesus scholar of all time. The title is God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now. Mary Ratcliff’s post "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" reminded me of Crossan’s three main points. Crossan summarizes the disjunction between theology and reality as follows:
1. Civilization's normalcy cannot exist without violence, or the threat of violence.
2. Judeo-Christian images of the divine have always included a violent, retributive God on the one hand, and a nonviolent, merciful God on the other. This is as true of the Christian New Testament as it is of Hebrew scripture. These contradictory images coexist independently, developed in parallel by authors with radically different theologies and views of the world.
3. Christians must choose between the violent God of the Book of Revelation and the nonviolent God of Jesus and Paul.
From the earliest Babylonian creation myths to the Left Behind series, the mythology of redemptive violence has traveled side by side with the mythology of nonviolent justice. Empires proclaim peace through victory, while saints and sages proclaim peace through justice. The literalism proclaimed by fundamentalism is a much more effective ideology for maintaining elitism and kleptocracy, because it frames the systemic exploitation and violence of human history as divine mandate. In the words of Crossan, the Book of Revelation “deradicalizes the nonviolent Jesus on the donkey by transforming him into the violent Jesus on the battle stallion.”
The fundamentalist Right would reject Jesus of Nazareth if he appeared in their churches. I daresay they would be as repulsed by him as were the literalists and elitists of first-century Palestine. He sat down to dinner with the same social outcasts, government bureaucrats, and transgressors of sexual taboos that conservatives revile at every opportunity. If he were alive today (and some might claim that he is), Jesus would be about the business of embracing diversity, designing programs that heal psycho-social diseases, and relieving economic pressures on families caused by commercialization and systemic debt. What he did then, he would do now. Some would worship him, some would ridicule him — and some would kill him.
Jesus proclaimed an already-present, here-and-now Kingdom of God in direct opposition to the imperial theology that defined Roman culture. Most English translations of the bible use the phrase “Kingdom of God” for the Greek “basileia tou theou.” A more precise translation is “Imperial Rule of God.” Basileia, in the Greek-speaking Roman empire, was the office and power of an absolute monarch, used for Roman emperors beginning with Augustus. Jesus' alternative vision of a world with God in charge was not lost on the Romans, and they executed him. In Crossan's view (and mine), Christians today are “bound to whichever of these visions was incarnated by and in the historical Jesus.”
Twenty years later, Saul of Tarsus appears on the scene. Few are aware that massive scholarly consensus tells us that only seven of the thirteen New Testament letters attributed to Paul were written by Paul himself. The seven letters that scholars believe were written by the historical Paul are as follows:
• Romans
• 1 Corinthians
• 2 Corinthians
• Galatians
• Phillipians
• 1 Thessalonians
• Philemon
Scholarly consensus is that three letters are probably not from Paul:
• 2 Thessalonians
• Collosians
• Ephesians
Three letters were certainly not written by Paul:
• 1 Timothy
• 2 Timothy
• Titus
The neo-Pauline letters inserted later by the early church transform him from a radically egalitarian Paul who welcomed women into his ministry to a liberal, then conservative Paul who told women to be quiet in church and obey their husbands. Admonitions to wealthy members of his congregations about how they treated the poor, entreaties to free Christian slaves, and proclamations of equality in Christ Jesus give way to a progressively liberal, then conservative agenda.
Fewer still are aware that Roman inscriptions throughout the empire proclaimed Augustus Caesar as “Divine,” “God,” “Son of God,” “God from God,” “Redeemer,” “Liberator,” “Lord,” and “Savior of the World.” Paul's counter message was also hard to miss, and it is likely that he also died at the hands of the Romans. The ultimate irony of Christianity's eventual merger with the Roman empire under Constantine is that the original, authentic voiceprints of Jesus and Paul survived at all, despite the inevitable impositions of orthodoxy.
Progressive Christians have been silent too often and too long in an American public discourse dominated by the harsh, punitive, and violent messages of the Christian Right. We are called to better understand the roots of our tradition, and challenge the fundamentalist view of God as an archetypal strict father who cannot be appeased except by the torture and blood sacrifice of his son.
As those responsible for bringing Judeo-Christian culture into the 21st century, we must also reject the presumed inevitability of violence and injustice, and the nihilistic embrace of world destruction as fulfillment of prophecy. It is worthwhile to remind ourselves that even post-modern, secular European culture is an extension of Judeo-Christian culture. We live in the justice-seeking and deeply ecological branches of the tree. Our mission is to proclaim the images of divine mercy and justice found in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos — and to embody the nonviolent resistance and radical egalitarianism of Jesus and Paul.
References:
1. Robert J. Miller, “The Pearl, the Treasure, the Fool, and the Cross,” The Fourth R 18 (November-December 2005): 9
2. Crossan, John Dominic, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007