Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

As long ago as the sixteenth century, Martin Luther boldly voiced a vigorous either/or for Christian faith in terms of a “Theology of Glory” and a “Theology of the Cross.” By the former Luther referred to an articulation of Gospel faith that smacked of triumphalism that was allied with worldly power that specialized in winning, control, being first, and being best. For Luther, that theology was all tied up with the European imperial of his time. By the contrast of a “Theology of the Cross,” Luther referred to the risky way of Jesus that is marked by humility, obedience, and vulnerability standing in sharp contrast to and in opposition to the hunger for “Glory.” The “way of the cross,” for Luther, is demanding and costly because it contradicts the dominant way of the world.

The Roman catacombs have become a kind of symbol for pre-Constantine Christianity, a subversive underground movement challenging the idolatrous claims of empire, a dangerous countercultural society confessing that because Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not. Christians praying underground in the Catacombs and Christians martyred above ground in the Coliseum have become the two enduring icons of the Christianity that predates Christendom.

We didn’t see Christianity as a form of civic religion in service of American values but as a direct challenge to the assumed cultural values of America.

The Jesus of the Gospels is far more suited for an F.B.I. Wanted poster than for being the poster child of American values. While the historical Jesus certainly wasn’t a hippie, he was obviously dangerous and subversive. After all, Rome didn’t crucify people for extolling civic virtues and pledging allegiance to the empire. In announcing and enacting the kingdom of God, Jesus was countercultural and counter-imperial. This is why Jesus was crucified. His crime was claiming to be a king who had not been installed by Caesar.

In a culture that venerates materialism and militarism, the only way to truly follow Jesus is to be countercultural.

The earliest believers’ shared life of following Jesus together was called the Way, not because it was the way to heaven (the afterlife was never the emphasis), but because they had come to believe that following Jesus was the new and true way to be human. And because the lifestyle of the Way was such a radical departure from the way of the Roman Empire, it’s no surprise that people viewed the Way with great suspicion and often derided it as a cult.

The most radical thing about the early Christians wasn’t that they worshiped Jesus as God—the Greco-Roman world was awash in gods. Indeed, from the very beginning Christians did believe that Jesus was God, but the radical and dangerous thing about them was that they worshiped Jesus as emperor! This is what they meant when they confessed, “Jesus is Lord.” The titles “Son of God,” “King of Kings,” “Savior of the World,” “Prince of Peace, and “Lord of All” were already in circulation as imperial titles on Roman coins when the Christians began re-appropriating them in their worship of a Galilean Jew who had been crucified by a Roman governor. This was dangerous.

It wasn’t the religion of the Christians that got them in trouble per se, but the political implications of their religion. Because the Christians belonged to a different cult than the Roman Empire, they developed a different culture and became a counterculture movement—a counterculture that the authorities sometimes deemed threatening and periodically sought to violently suppress.

The original Jesus movement was not a pietistic religion of private belief about how to go to heaven when you die. The original Jesus movement was a countercultural way of public life. It was the kingdom of Christ, and as such it was a rival to the kingdom of Caesar.

If Christianity is not seen as countercultural and even subversive within a military-economic superpower, you can be sure it is a deeply compromised Christianity.

are we really comfortable with using Paul to trump Jesus? That is what’s being done! Why is it that we are so prone to interpret Jesus in the light of a particular reading of Paul? (A reading of Paul that I—and many others—would argue is a conditioned misreading of Paul.) Why not take the Sermon on the Mount at face value and insist that any interpretation of Paul must line up with Jesus? Why not center our reading of Scripture with Jesus? I’m quite sure Paul would be entirely happy with this approach!

What Paul is doing in Romans 13 is calling Christians living in the Roman Empire to obey civil laws and not be drawn into violent revolutionary movements. Paul understands that the kingdom of Christ is never established by violence and the Roman Empire cannot be converted to Christ by violence. What

So this is my question to American Christians who are fond of using Romans 13 to call for endless military buildup and waging what can only be an endless “war on terror.” Why are the American Revolutionaries of 1776 exempt from Romans 13? Shouldn’t they have been “subject to the governing authorities”[8] as Paul says? Is the use of Romans 13 to call for Christian support of American waging of war principled and consistent, or is it self-serving and inconsistent?

Are we using Romans 13 to help clarify how Christians should live as “exiles” within an empire, or are we using Romans 13 to endorse the militarism of our favored empire?

we should never forget that the man who wrote Romans 13 was executed by the government for not submitting to the governing authorities out of fidelity to Christ!

To pit Paul and Romans 13 against Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount is bad hermeneutics ...and even worse Christianity.

The Christian is countercultural not just in opposition to the powers that be—for opposition can easily adopt the violent means that both Jesus and Paul condemned—but in opposition to violent power altogether. The sword is never really countercultural, but the cross always is.

Those lamenting the end of Christendom are grieving over what was a mistaken idea all along. The kingdom of God does not come through political force and cultural dominance but through the counter-imperial practices of baptism and Eucharist.

If the world is to be changed by the gospel of Christ, it will not be changed on the battlefield or at the ballot-booth, but at the Communion table where sinners are offered the body and blood of Jesus in the form of bread and wine.

It’s not the task of the church to “Make America Great Again.” The contemporary task of the church is to make Christianity countercultural again.

And once we untether Jesus from the interests of empire, we begin to see just how countercultural and radical Jesus’ ideas actually are. Enemies? Love them. Violence? Renounce it. Money? Share it. Foreigners? Welcome them. Sinners? Forgive them. These are the kind of radical ideas that will always be opposed by the principalities and powers, but which the followers of Jesus are called to embrace, announce, and enact. And the degree to which the church is faithful to Jesus and his radical ideas is the degree to which the church embodies a faith that is truly countercultural.

I’m not sure why Protestants abandoned crucifixes for empty crosses, but I think it was a mistake. I know that Protestants often argue that Jesus didn’t remain on the cross; but he didn’t remain in the manger either, and Protestants don’t seem to have an objection to Nativity scenes.

For Christians living at such a far remove from the first century the depth of this scandal may be hard to grasp, but the crucifixion of your hero would be the last thing a Jew or a Roman living in antiquity would boast about. And yet the early Christians did boast about it. Paul readily admitted that this was foolishness to Romans and offensive to Jews. But Paul also said it was the power and wisdom of God, contending that “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”[5] Paul doesn’t mean that when God is weak, God is still stronger than humans. That wouldn’t be scandalous but just a typical boast about conventional power. Rather Paul is saying that God’s power is weakness!

Whatever it means for the world to be saved, God does not do it through the worldly means of power involving politics, weapons, and war, but through the unconventional means of utter powerlessness—through the crucifixion of a Galilean Jew who preached the kingdom of God.

The gospel is about the cross and the cross is about a scandal. The cross is a scandal because it involves shame. But who is shamed by the cross? Is it the naked man nailed to a tree or the principalities and powers who in their naked bid for power put him there? To answer this question honestly is to enter deeply into the scandal of the cross.

Every crucifix reminds us that our systems of civilization built around an axis of power enforced by violence are not to be trusted. The myths, monuments, anthems, and memorials of every empire are designed to cleverly hide the bodies of the weak who have been trodden down by the mighty in their march to “greatness.” The cross is the unveiling. The cross is the great truth-telling. The cross is the guilty verdict handed down upon empire. The cross is the eternal monument to the Unknown Victim. Yes, the cross is where the world is forgiven, but not before the world is found guilty.

Violence is so prominent in the Bible because violence is the problem the Bible must address.

The violence of the cross is not what God does, the violence of the cross is what God endures.

God does not employ and inflict violence; God absorbs and forgives violence. The cross is where God in Christ transforms the hideous violence of Good Friday into the healing peace of Easter Sunday.

When the Apostle Peter in the imperial capital wrote his first letter to the Christians living in the Asian provinces of the Roman Empire, he addressed them as strangers, foreigners, exiles, or resident aliens.[11] Peter uses this term for these new believers, not because they were actual foreigners, but because now that they had been baptized into Christ they had pledged their allegiance to a new kingdom and were to live as those no longer fully at home in the Roman Empire.

Peter opens his letter by calling its recipients foreigners and closes his letter by saying, “Your sister church here in Babylon sends you greetings.”[12] This is Peter’s cryptic way of telling Christians living in the provinces that Rome was not “a shining city upon a hill,” but an idolatrous empire in rebellion to God. Rome was not the Eternal City, but Babylon...and Babylon is always falling.[13]

René Girard says, “the fact that no one ever feels they are the aggressor is because everything is always reciprocal ... The aggressor has always already been attacked.”[16]

The contagion of violence drives the logic of expositional escalation until so many are dead it’s exhausted for a time. But only for a time. This is what John the Revelator portrays with the four horseman of the Apocalypse.[17] The white horse of conquest is followed by the red horse of war (because people resent being conquered), followed by the black horse of famine (because war is the most senseless waste of resources), and the pale horse of Death is always the final wraith rider. The endless repetition of this cycle is what we sanitize as “world history.” So when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday he rides a donkey, the colt of a donkey—anything but a horse! On Good Friday Jesus puts an end to the vicious cycle of retaliatory violence that has kept the world from healing.

It’s not yet another war that will heal the world, but the wounds of Christ. Calvary was the last battlefield that made any sense. After Calvary, every other battlefield is a failure to understand that the ways of Cain and Caesar, the ways of war and greed, all died in the body of Christ on Good Friday.

Where the church adopts the form of a crucifix there is hope for the world.

Of course this is really nothing new. The church in every western power after Constantine has at some point succumbed to the Siren seduction of empire and has conflated Christianity and nationalism into a single syncretic religion. Rome, Byzantium, Russia, Spain, France, England, and Germany have all done it.

When the church lacks the vision and courage to actually be the church, it abandons its high calling of proclaiming the Lordship of Jesus and panders to power, soliciting its services as the high priest of religious patriotism. When the church colludes with the principalities and powers, it can no longer prophetically challenge them. A church in bed with empire cannot credibly call the empire to repent.

the kingdom of Jesus does not have troops.

The consistent attitude of the early church toward the vocation of waging war is reflected in the words of Saint Cyprian (200–258) when he said, “The hand that has held the Eucharist will not be sullied by the blood-stained sword.”[2]

When the case is made that it is the American military that defends Christian religious liberty, we should listen to the early Christian philosopher Lactantius (240–320) who said, “Religion must be defended not by killing but by dying, not by violence but by patience.”[3] Sadly, we are no longer a patient church.

War is the ultimate impatience.

Often this is done by equating combat deaths with Jesus’ nonviolent sacrifice of love. At the Courthouse in Andrew County, Missouri, where my father served as judge, a new war monument was dedicated on Memorial Day, 2017. It included this inscription: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. John 15:15.” The obvious implication is that Jesus’ death at the hands of the Roman Empire is somehow similar to the death of American soldiers who are killed while prosecuting war. It’s true that both deaths are sacrificial, but the nature of these sacrificial deaths is quite different. The failure to see the clear difference between Jesus sacrificing his life while forgiving his enemies on the cross and the sacrifice of a soldier slain while waging war on a battlefield is an indication of the degree to which a commitment to militarism has obscured the implications of the gospel. But when waging war is regarded as a religious sacrifice, such confusions abound.

In civic religion, war is always publically remembered as an act of sacrifice. Public remembrances of war are deeply liturgical because war is memorialized as a sacrament within civic religion.

Stanley Hauerwas has taught us that nationalism is a religion with war as its liturgy.

To vainly die in war is the worst thing that can happen within the civic religion of sacrifice, because a vain sacrifice is a failed sacrifice, and failed sacrifices threaten to unravel the social cohesion that sacrificial religion provides.

The deep fragmentation from the failed sacrifices of the Vietnam War is still felt today and is what lies behind much of the right-left political divide. Interestingly, it was during the Vietnam War that the American de facto state church shifted from Mainline Protestantism (which often opposed the war) to conservative Evangelicalism (which unequivocally supported the war).

So what is the role of the church in a world that careens toward catastrophic war? Is it to shout hurray for our side and assure the masters of war that God is with us? Of course not! It’s this kind of hubris and folly that led to the calamity of millions of Christians killing one another in the name of national allegiance during the two world wars.

What about patriotism? Is it permissible for a Christian to be patriotic? Yes and no. It depends on what is meant by patriotism. If by patriotism we mean a benign pride of place that encourages civic duty and responsible citizenship, then patriotism poses no conflict with Christian baptismal identity. But if by patriotism we mean religious devotion to nationalism at the expense of the wellbeing of other nations; if we mean a willingness to kill others (even other Christians) in the name of national allegiance; if we mean an uncritical support of political policies without regard to their justice, then patriotism is a repudiation of Christian baptismal identity.

Yes, America, I love you...but not like that. Not in the way of supreme allegiance and unquestioned devotion. You see, my heart belongs to another. I’m a Christian and I confess that Jesus is Lord. The Savior of the world is the crucified and risen Son of God, not “We the People.” The gospel is the story of Jesus, not the American story. I know your sixteenth President claimed that America was “the last best hope of earth” and nearly every president since has echoed this creed, but it’s simply not true. The last best hope of earth is Jesus, not you.

I know you hate to be reminded of what you call “the past,” but the truth is it’s not past and you need to be reminded of it whether you like it or not. I’m talking about your twin original sins. The brutal enslavement of Africans for the sake of “The Economy” and the ethnic-cleansing of this land’s indigenous inhabitants. You seem willing to acknowledge the sin of slavery. (Though you still have a long, long way to go in righting the entrenched wrongs of racism.) But you appear incapable of acknowledging your other great sin—the sin of genocidal ethnic cleansing. You want to pretend it didn’t happen and get mad when I bring it up. But you’re going to have to face it. I don’t know exactly how you can atone for this sin, but I do know that you have to face the ugly fact that you built your nation on stolen land atop buried bodies. In building your “shining city upon a hill” you became Cain. You killed your brother. You can receive the mercy of God as Cain did, but you have to be honest about what you did to Abel—the aboriginal people who first populated this land. America, you’re my home, but my home is haunted by native ghosts.