Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

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.

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.

Jesus was “subject to the governing authorities,” but in doing so he shamed the principalities and powers in his crucifixion and was vindicated by God in his resurrection.

But it is precisely the powerlessness of God enacted by Jesus on the cross that saves the world.

What the cross tells us is that when the Son of God entered our world—the world created by Cain and all the kings who followed in his bloody wake—our systems of violent empire and sacrificial religion nailed him to a tree. This is the moment when the principalities and powers who run the world were put to open shame; their claim of being wise and just was shown to be nothing but an empty sham. What they called wisdom and justice was nothing more than a cheap disguise concealing

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

The cross is not the violent appeasement of a pagan deity, but what God in Christ suffers as God pardons the world. 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.

Here is a sacred mystery: When we bring our wounds to Christ, it does not increase woundedness, but tends toward healing.”

But those who rally around a crucified Savior gain the capacity to become something truly new and other. With that newness and otherness comes the possibility of embodying a healing presence in our wounded world.

The people of God are sustained by the Holy Spirit, not hydrogen bombs.

One of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that in it we find the narrative told from the perspective of the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, the conquered, the occupied, the defeated. This is what makes it prophetic. We know that history is written by the winners. This is true—except in the case of the Bible it’s the opposite!

Every story is told from a vantage point; it has a bias. The bias of the Bible is from the vantage point of the underclass.

If I can accept that the Bible is trying to lift up those who are unlike me, then perhaps I can read the Bible right.

Oppressors have an easier time psychologically justifying their cruelty if their victims are a vilified other.