Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

The whole package of dominant triumphalist faith adds up to “God and country,” with “country” being the tail that wags the dog of “God.”

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.

And 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!

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.

The violence of the cross is not what God does, the violence of the cross is what God endures. The cross is not what God inflicts upon Christ in order to forgive.

But the idea of waging peace by patience instead of waging war by violence has been lost where the church has been willingly conscripted into serving the nation’s military agenda. War is the ultimate impatience.

If I read the Bible with the appropriate perspective and humility I don’t use the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus as a proof-text to condemn others to hell. I use it as a reminder that I’m a rich man and Lazarus lies at my door.

King Jesus is not the best version of Caesar; King Jesus is the anti-Caesar. This is what “Jesus is Lord” has always meant.

The command to hamstring horses should not be read as an act of animal cruelty but rather as a prohibition of accumulating the means to wage large-scale wars of aggression.

One parade derives its power from a willingness to crucify its enemies. The other derives its power by embracing the cross and forgiving its enemies. One is a perpetuation of the domination systems of empire. The other is the only hope the world has for true liberation.

I cannot let Easter come and go without quoting this poignant passage 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.

You can’t absolve the sin of being pro-torture by claiming to be pro-life.

what Pat Robertson is doing; he is taking a Messianic passage that the Apostles, church fathers, and Christians throughout church history have claimed is fulfilled by Jesus Christ and applying it to...Donald Trump! This is idolatry. He might as well say, “We have no king but Trump.”