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We guarantee our prosperity by a demonic devotion to the capacity to unleash hyper-violence upon our enemies. It’s why the maintenance of a multi-trillion-dollar war machine appears perfectly reasonable rather than ludicrously insane. You can’t claim to trust in God and spend trillions on weapons.
Christians should know that now abide faith, hope, and love. But if you feed on the empire’s liturgies of economy and security, you will be formed in the opposite of faith, hope, and love—a malformation of the human soul that is perhaps best described as fear. This kind of fear is a spiritual pathology ensuing from a toxic diet.
It’s fascinating to notice that the dreams of the prophets and the nightmares of kings are often one and the same. For example, Isaiah sees a day when “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains”[14] and we call it a dream; when Nebuchadnezzar sees the same thing, he calls it a nightmare. Whether you interpret the kingdom of heaven as an optimistic dream or a haunting nightmare depends on what you’re hoping for.
If our gospel is not especially good news to the poor, Jesus and his apostles would not recognize it as the gospel of the kingdom they proclaimed. Sadly, the church after Constantine has a long history of assuring their rich and powerful benefactors that the gospel is a spiritual message about how to go to a spiritual heaven after they die, and so they need not be concerned about the kingdom of heaven challenging their earthly privilege here and now.
Heck yes
Empires love that kind of rhetoric, whether it’s Rome as the “Eternal City” or America’s Novus Ordo Seclorum (New Order of the Ages) on the Great Seal of the United States, found on the back of every dollar bill. In a bid to claim eternal glory, King Nebuchadnezzar erected on the plain of Dura a hundred-foot golden rejection of the kingdom of heaven.
Israel. Two and half centuries later, the book of Revelation was written to warn Christians living in the Roman Empire about the seductive nature of the Great Harlot of Rome, cryptically called Babylon. Toward the end of the book of Revelation, a voice from heaven calls out to Christians living in the empire saying, “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that you do not share in her plagues.”[22]
This is literally america now
The birth announcement brought by the magi filled Herod with dread, and Herod’s fear of a baby shows just how fragile his ego was. And Jerusalem was afraid too. The citizens of Jerusalem were well aware of how dangerous life can be when a powerful ruler with a fragile ego is afraid. So all of Jerusalem was on edge—anxious about what the paranoid king might do.
The church has called this horror the Slaughter of the Innocents, but modern day kings and kingdoms have sanitized it with the Orwellian term “collateral damage.”
When contemporary superpowers adopt the ways of ancient tyrant kings, no matter how pragmatic the motives, we need to be honest about the fact that innocent people, even children, will be killed. We should always remember that the ends never justify the means; rather, the means are the ends in the process of becoming. If the means are death-dealing, the ends aren’t going to be life-affirming. You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb the world to peace.
account of the Slaughter of the Innocents. Stanley Hauerwas says, “Rome knew how to deal with enemies; you kill them or co-opt them.”[8] Usually the rich get co-opted and the poor get killed. The Temple elite of Jerusalem are bought off while the peasant babies of Bethlehem are killed.
and the new way of Christ. It’s the choice between the sword
Following the Jesus way of loving enemies and doing good to those who hate us isn’t necessarily safe and it doesn’t mean we won’t ever get hurt, but it does mean the darkness won’t prevail.
But what about those who want a risk-free Christianity of guaranteed security? If we are unwilling that we or our children should ever have to suffer for the name of Jesus, we concoct a Christianity where martyrdom is out of the question. And when martyrdom is no longer considered a possibility, we turn Christianity into a safe and anodyne civil religion in service of the empire.
Nothing less is truly pro-life. This is why a consistent pro-life Christian ethic opposes the death-friendly practices of abortion, capital punishment, torture, war, predatory capitalism, environmental exploitation, unchecked proliferation of guns, neglecting the poor, refusing the refugee, and keeping healthcare unaffordable for millions. Using an anti-abortion position to provide moral cover for pro-death practices and policies advantageous to the principalities and powers should not be confused with a pro-life ethic derived from the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.
Amen
In less than a dozen years Alexander conquered the world from Greece to India before dying in Babylon at the age of thirty-two.
This marks the first time that Jesus has allowed himself to be publicly recognized as Israel’s Messiah. Until this point whenever someone acknowledged Jesus as the Messianic king, Jesus would charge him to keep quiet. Now that Jesus has come to Jerusalem for his coronation (though he knows it will be by crucifixion), he not only allows a public proclamation of his kingship, he insists that it must be so. This moment—the arrival of Israel’s true king—is so auspicious, that if people don’t herald it, the rocks will.
If God’s solution for evil is to kill people who are evil, God didn’t need to send his Son—he could have just sent in the tanks.
the metaphorical picture of a triumphant Christ riding a white horse, the rider is drenched in his own blood before the battle begins, and the rider whose name is The Word of God prevails with a sword from his mouth, not a sword in his hand.
Empires are rich, powerful nations who believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their own agenda. Empires want to rule the world.
In the Bible we see God blessing nations in their unique diversity, but always opposing the hegemonic ambitions of empire.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Really? Creating “your own reality” could be a textbook definition of insanity. Reality is ontological being—and being is a gift from God. We can no more create our own reality than we can create our own universe. We may think we can, but that’s a form of insanity.
Turning someone else’s homeland into a wasteland is not exactly the same thing as bringing peace. And when Babylon is condemned for not letting prisoners go home, I can’t help but think of Guantanamo Bay and child immigration detention centers in Texas.
Nevertheless Babylon has a way of coming back—not the Akkadian-speaking kingdom of southern Mesopotamia, but the satanic dehumanizing spirit of empire.
Why does the demon describe what Jesus is doing as “interfering with us”? Because Jesus is announcing the arrival of a new kingdom—and ultimately there are only two kingdoms, the kingdom of the world ruled by Satan (the god and ruler of the fallen world) and the kingdom of God ruled by Christ.[19] Everything Jesus said and did was an interference with Satan’s kingdom including the whole world of dehumanizing empire.
Cain began to accuse Abel in his own mind, eventually plotting his murder. The first murder was not a crime of passion but premeditated. Satan had built a stronghold in the imagination of Cain.
and not something found in the biblical text. What we should take away from the use of the word “satan” and “devil” is that accusation, blame, and slander are the essence of the satanic and diabolical. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of advocacy—the unholy spirit is the spirit of accusation.
The kingdom of God is built on all that the kingdom of Satan is opposed to. Instead of rivalry, there is to be love. Instead of accusation, there is to be advocacy. Instead of violence, there is to be peace. Instead of domination, there is to be liberation. Instead of maintaining the vicious cycle of beastly empire, Jesus comes to establish the humane kingdom come from heaven. This is the gospel!
I understand the devil as more than a metaphor, but less than a person; the devil is a phenomenon—but a phenomenon so complex that it verges on self-awareness. Consider hurricanes. Hurricanes are meteorological phenomena; they are highly organized and extremely dangerous weather systems.
The devil has real existence...to a point. It seems that the phenomenon of the satanic is so real, so complex, so organized, that it almost comes into its own ontological existence. But alas, this is the limitation of evil—evil does not possess positive existence, only negation. As Augustine suggested, evil is only a hole in the fabric of goodness.
Sometimes their theological troubles are put as simply as this: “If all our woes are because of the devil, why doesn’t God just kill the devil?” Good question.
Why doesn’t God just destroy the (d)evil? Because the satanic phenomenon is inextricably connected with who we are. God cannot simply destroy the devil in one fell blow without destroying us too.
Jesus destroys the devil by calling us out of rivalry, accusation, violence, domination, and empire, into heaven’s alternative of love, advocacy, peace, and liberation—this is what the Bible calls the kingdom of God.
no, I believe the devil is much more real than that. The devil is the all too real dark spiritual phenomenon of accusation and empire that lies behind humanity’s greatest crimes—the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the medieval crusades conducted in his name, the lynching of black men in the Jim Crow South, and the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. The devil is also very real in a million smaller, yet still diabolical, acts of rivalry, accusation, violence, and domination that take place every day. Ultimately the Satan reaches its fullest form in the evils of empire.
from Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.[28]
My proposal to the Western church of the 21st century—the heirs of a now defunct Christendom—is to participate in the overthrow of the kingdom of Satan by reclaiming the resurrection as the announcement and embrace of the new way of being human inaugurated by Jesus Christ and his Easter Empire.
But the last thing an empire wants is a risen Christ judging its anti-life policies and practices. So measures must be taken. Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.” So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.[30]
The tomb of Jesus must be made secure by Roman soldiers because empires are always obsessed with security—it’s the one thing that is truly sacred. In my travels around the world I’ve visited many holy sites where I was required to remove my shoes—Hindu temples, Buddhist temples, Moslem mosques, and even some Christian churches in India. But the only place I’m required to remove my shoes in America is at airport security—in our secular age, security may be the only thing America holds sacred.
Do you see it? Do you see what has happened? Do you see the great reversal of the world order? A single angel comes from heaven and defies the security apparatus of soldiers and seals, of Tiberius and Pilate. The angel rolls back the stone, breaking the imperial seal and revealing a new world order—an order no longer arranged around death. “The guards trembled and became like dead men.” The once-dead man in the tomb is no longer dead, and those who formerly used the fear of death to shape the world now tremble and become like dead men. The fear-mongers are afraid and the death-dealers are
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Dostoevsky understood that a society so saturated in falseness, no matter how Christian, could not continue to endure. A house of cards or a house built on sand cannot stand forever. A society that has long been the heir of Christian legacy can easily forget that it is not by merely knowing the words of Christ, but by actually doing them that a Christian society stands upon a sure foundation.
In the Babylon in which I reside (hopefully as a missionary) the falseness is very strong right now—stronger than it’s ever been in my life. But most people are so sedated with the opiates of consumer culture and consumer religion that they never even suspect it.
Listen to these bracing words spoken not to antagonistic Pharisees but to those in the capital city of Jerusalem “who had believed in him.” You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Because I tell you the truth, you do not believe me.[2]
Pilate’s cynical reply is infamous. “What is truth?”[6] After having Jesus scourged, Pilate answered his own question about truth when he said to Jesus, “Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?”[7] This is Pilate’s truth, Caesar’s truth, Cain’s truth, Satan’s truth—the will to shape the world by violent power.
In an economic-military superpower, the truth is that money and power trump everything. That’s the truth that is the lie. That’s the functional atheism of religious people who pretend at faith but bow the knee to Mammon and Mars.
Let’s remember again the radical profession that we Christians make. We confess that Jesus is the world’s true king. We confess that Jesus is Lord...right now. The rightful ruler of the world is not some ancient Caesar, not some contemporary Commander in Chief, but Jesus Christ! Jesus is not going to be king someday, Jesus is King of Kings right now! Christ was crowned on the cross and God vindicated him as the world’s true king by raising him from the dead. This is what Christians confess, believe, and seek to live. We have no king but Jesus.
Our task is not to turn the world into a battlefield, our task is to turn the world into a garden.
The faith leader Caiaphas will give some lip service to this, because it’s in the Bible, but the faith leader will kick the can down the road saying, “All that peace stuff is for when the Messiah comes, but for now it’s all about power; for now we have no king but Caesar; for now proximity to power trumps everything.”
In light of this, how can we say that evangelicalism in white America is anything other than a failed experiment? When more than half of the adherents of a Christian movement cannot identify torture as immoral, what is there left to say?
In this present age, if we’re unwilling to live as a counter-imperial counterculture (as the first Christians did), I see no reason to believe that we can live in fidelity to Christ.
We’re not called to win but to be faithful.
Joshua learned it—we cannot assume that God is on our side; rather we can only seek to be on God’s side. So at the end of his life Joshua said to the congregation of Israel: Choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.[16]
