Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

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.

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. Sure, the prosperity gospel extols materialism and the religious right celebrates militarism, but these are nothing but attempts to smuggle the idols of Mammon and Mars into Christianity.

But eventually the Jesus Movement was absorbed by the Charismatic Movement and would be slowly seduced by the siren songs coming from the prosperity gospel and the religious right. The gradual synthesis of the gospel with material prosperity and political power happened gradually enough, and with enough biblical proof-texting, to make it seem plausible.

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.

The book of Revelation is the attempt of John of Patmos to inspire fidelity to Christ among believers who are facing the powerful seductions of the emperor 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.

It wasn’t the religion of the Christians that got them in trouble per se, but the political implications of their religion.

Because the early Christians refused to venerate Rome and the emperor in even benign and symbolic ways, they were viewed as unpatriotic.

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.

Though it’s well known, it still needs to be emphasized that Jesus and his two most important apostles, Peter and Paul, were all executed by the Roman Empire. Why? Not for their religious beliefs about an afterlife, but because the kingdom of heaven they announced and enacted posed a challenge to the dominant myth that Rome had a manifest destiny to rule the nations and a divine right to shape history.

Why is it that we are so prone to interpret Jesus in the light of a particular reading of Paul?

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?

Tying the gospel to the interests of empire had a deeply compromising effect upon the gospel, as seen in the sordid history of the church being mixed up with imperial conquest, colonialism, and military adventurism around the world.

The kingdom of God does not come through political force and cultural dominance but through the counter-imperial practices of baptism and Eucharist.

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.

I tried to imagine the worshipers who gathered in this church a thousand years ago. Why did they come? They didn’t come to hear a motivational talk or a “practical” sermon; they didn’t come to hear a praise band. They came because it was a sacred place where the sacraments were present.

Trite and tidy answers about the meaning of Good Friday are how we domesticate the cross. This is the bane of atonement theories. Instead of the crucifixion remaining the pivotal event in a compelling story, it’s turned into a sterile formula. The cross is diminished to one of the Four Spiritual Laws or a waypoint on the Roman Road. This is how the cross is sanitized and made mechanical. The storyline is lost and the scandal is swept aside.

“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! Think about that for a moment and you will realize that such an assertion is still scandalous today.

The gospel is not motivational talks about happy marriages, being debt free, and achieving your destiny. That all belongs to the broad world of proverbial wisdom. It’s fine as far as it goes, but it has little or nothing to do with the gospel. The gospel is about the cross and the cross is about a scandal.