Is there an end in sight? The US Empire sinks ever lower [American Politics #9]

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Ted Grimsrud—April 22 2024

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” (Dylan Thomas)

I have come to feel one little sliver of gratitude for the current devastating violence that Israel (with the backing of the United States) is visiting on Gaza. It helps us see more clearly the reality of the US/NATO backing of the doomed Ukrainian war against Russia and the reality of the scaling up of American war cries in relation to China. The US Congress’s recently passed spending bill to fund billions for war and war preparation in Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan makes obvious the actual dynamics.

The motives of the US Empire: Corporate profit and domination

I’d say first of all, the US/NATO pursues these wars and possible wars in order to redistribute money from their taxpayers to corporate war profiteers. And, then, second, these wars and possible wars are justified as necessary to further the empire’s obviously failing agenda of being the dominant power in a “unipolar” world. This agenda, of course, is framed in terms of resisting the expansionist intentions of Russia and China. However, when we look at the whole picture in light of the destruction of Gaza, we see more clearly that there is nothing defensive about any of these situations—Gaza is simply about conquest and devastation. To see that about Gaza in turn helps us see what, in reality, the others are about as well.

A recent, typically insightful essay by Aaron Maté helps make all of this clear. He points out, first, that this new bill is all about directing money to the war corporations. He quotes House Armed Service Chair Mike Rogers: “Nearly all the money we’re spending to arm Ukraine [and, I may add, Israel and Taiwan] doesn’t leave this country,” but instead “goes directly to US companies and American workers to produce more weapons at a faster pace.” As it turns out, a lot of the money in this particular bill won’t even go to Ukraine or Israel in any direct way but rather will be spent simply to rebuild the American store of weaponry.

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The book of Revelation and peace, part I: The peace of the Lamb [Peace and the Bible #18]

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Ted Grimsrud—March 28, 2024

The book of Revelation has a pretty bad reputation among many people—not least because it is easily interpreted as portraying quite a bloodthirsty God. And many Christians have affirmed that interpretation. I first decided to study Revelation after hearing a teacher argue against pacifism by claiming that Revelation teaches that divinely initiated violence is part of Revelation’s End-Times scenario. This teacher coupled Revelation’s violence with the violence of the Old Testament stories such as Joshua to argue that sometimes God does want war.

I knew in my heart (though not yet my mind) that the Bible should not be read in such a pro-violence way. So, I decided to look closely at Revelation for myself. I discovered that indeed Revelation may be read in a very pro-peace way. My recent book, To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation (Cascade Books, 2022), articulates my latest understandings about Revelation’s peace message. In this post and one to follow I will share some of the key ideas in that peaceable reading.

The key step for me was my starting point in reading Revelation. I took very seriously the opening words of the book, “the revelation of Jesus Christ” and read the book expecting it to complement the story of Jesus in the gospels. I was open to be proven wrong about Revelation’s Jesus-linked orientation, but I first wanted to see if indeed Revelation did further Jesus’s own message. That is, I read Revelation asking, “What (if anything) does Revelation teach us about peace?” rather than “What does Revelation teach us about the future?” or “What does Revelation teach us about a violent, pro-war God?” Along with the opening words that refer to Jesus, I also quickly recognized that the key image (in a book full of images, symbols, and metaphors) in the entire book was the image of the Lamb. Clearly, this Lamb image was meant to evoke Jesus and, as I came to recognize, to keep the various visions and imagery anchored in Jesus’s message.

I will develop two aspects of the Lamb image in what follows. In this post I will discuss “the peace of the Lamb.” With the Lamb’s peaceable orientation in mind, I will then turn to “the war of the Lamb” in the next post and show that Revelation’s “war” is actually a struggle for peace on earth that uses thoroughly peaceable methods.

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The politics of Paul and the way of Jesus as seen in Romans 13 [Peace and the Bible #17]

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Ted Grimsrud—March 25, 2024

The Apostle Paul was a follower of Jesus. And his social views actually complement Jesus’s rather than contradict them, contrary to what many Christians have believed. In this post I offer a detailed look at the infamous passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans that, one could say, has launched many ships and other weapons of war. Romans 13:1-7 often serves as a counter-testimony in Christianity to the idea that Paul may have taught a principled nonviolence in agreement with Jesus. As well, Romans 13 is often seen to go against the idea that Paul understood Jesus’s peaceable way as normative for Christian social ethics.In reading a number of writings where Christian thinkers argue against pacifism, I discovered that in every single case—across a wide spectrum of theological positions—those who reject pacifism cite Romans 13:1-7 as a major reason. I will show why this text should not be read as counter to pacifism.

Setting the context for Romans 13:1-7

Our interpretation of Romans 13:1-7 should begin with reading these verses in light of their broader biblical context. Our passage is not the only place in the Bible where the political Powers are addressed. From Egypt in Genesis and Exodus, then Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and down to Rome in the book of Revelation, the Bible shows empires rebelling against God and hindering the healing vocation of God’s people. The entire Bible could appropriately be read as a manual on how people who follow Torah in seeking to love God and neighbor negotiate the dynamics of hostility, domination, idolatry, and violence that almost without exception characterize the world’s empires.

Romans 13:1-7 stands within this broader biblical context of antipathy toward the empires. If we take this context seriously, we will turn to these Romans verses and assume that their concern is something like this: given the fallenness of Rome, how might we live within this empire as people committed uncompromisingly to love of neighbor? Paul has no illusions about Rome being in a positive sense a direct servant of God. Paul, of course, was well aware that the Roman Empire had unjustly executed Jesus himself (and, according to tradition, in time executed Paul as well). As evil as these Powers might be, though, we know from biblical stories that God nonetheless can and does use the corrupt nations for God’s purposes—nations that at the same time remain under God’s judgment.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul surely had this biblical sensibility in mind as he addresses Jesus’s followers in the capital city of the world’s great superpower—the entity that had executed Jesus. Paul begins with a focus on the perennial problem related to empires—idolatry (see my previous post, “Paul’s critique of idolatry”). He discusses two major strains of idolatry in chapters 1–3: (1) the Empire and its injustices that demand the highest loyalty and (religious) devotion and (2) a legalistic approach to Torah that leads to its own kind of violence (witness Paul’s own death-dealing zealotry).

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Paul’s critique of idolatry [Peace and the Bible #16]

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Ted Grimsrud—March 22, 2024

The Apostle Paul has often been interpreted as a major influence in moving Christianity away from the peaceable message of Jesus. I want to counter that interpretation, though, by noticing key peace themes that are present in Paul’s thought and by challenging one key text interpreted to support the idea that Paul accepted violence. So, I will focus on Paul’s critique of idolatry in order to show how central to Paul’s theology the way of peace is. Then, in my next post I will offer an interpretation of the infamous Romans 13 passage that shows that those verses actually offer a peaceable message.

The idolatrous roots of violence and injustice

The biblical story portrays violence and injustice having roots in idolatry. If we use violence as our criterion, we could say that whenever human beings justify violence against other human beings, they give ultimate loyalty to some entity (or “idol”) other than the God of Jesus—loyalty that demands violence, always contrary to God’s will as expressed by Jesus. Paul joins other biblical prophets in rejecting any kind of loyalty that would justify violence.

I will consider Paul’s critique of idolatry and focus on the first three chapters of his letter to the Romans. He takes on two types of idolatry. He criticizes the idol of the Roman Empire (which is manifested as what I will call the idol of “lust”). Second, he critiques those (like Paul himself before he met Jesus) who believed that loyalty to Torah requires judgmental violence in defense of the covenant community (what I will call the idol of “judging”).

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How the story of Jesus’s resurrection points toward peace [Peace and the Bible #15]

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Ted Grimsrud—March 18, 2024

Christianity, it seems, owes its existence to on-going presence of Jesus among his followers after he was executed by the Romans. Against all expectations including their own, Jesus’s disciples within a few days of his death proclaimed that God had raised Jesus from the dead. Ever since, Jesus’s resurrection has been a rallying cry for Christian faith. It was quite a turnaround, because in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s arrest and execution, it appeared that his movement had met its end.

The shock for Jesus’s followers

Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion were a devastating blow to his followers’ hopes. They “had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21); in the days that followed the shattering of those hopes they scattered and wandered around Judea. Jesus’s most prominent disciple, Peter, led the desertion by Jesus’s followers. They concluded that God had abandoned their leader—in line with Deuteronomy 21:23: “For a hanged man is accursed by God.” Jesus’s mission seemed to have ended up for naught. His message about God’s mercy, it appeared, proved to be no match for the forces of powers-that-be in their society. Whatever the disciples may have thought about the possibility of resurrection from the dead at the end of time, they clearly seemed not to have imagined that it would apply to Jesus in the immediate aftermath of his death.

A few of Jesus’s followers did remain close to him—Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s mother, a couple of others. They seem to have remained simply out of love for him and as an expression of solidarity in their grief, not that they expected his resurrection. Though the story tells that Jesus alluded to resurrection as he spoke of his likely death, it seems that no one actually understood him to mean his personal resurrection prior to the general resurrection at the end of time. The events of Easter Sunday took everyone by surprise.

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The death of Jesus and the weakness of God [Peace and the Bible #14]

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Ted Grimsrud—March 15, 2024

Christianity has focused a great deal of its theology on the death of Jesus and its purported cosmic significance. This emphasis has not had an altogether positive result. To mention just one of the problematic outcomes, viewing Jesus’s death as the necessary sacrifice that somehow enables God to offer salvation to sinful human beings has placed an act of terrible violence at the heart of Christian faith—thereby greatly weakening the peaceable impact of Jesus’s life and teaching. When some sort of punitive “justice” that needs to be “satisfied” by Jesus’s violent death is seen to be part of the essence of God’s character, it greatly increases the likelihood that Christians will also see themselves and their institutions as agents of such “justice”—that is, as agents of divinely approved violence. The long legacy in the “Christian” West of the state as the wielder of such violence in warfare and in criminal justice bears witness to the dark legacy of theological interpretations of Jesus’s death.

I suspect that part of the appeal for seeing Jesus’s death as salvific for Christian theology has been a large emotional investment in the notion of God being victorious and in control. If Jesus is God Incarnate and the Savior, how can it make sense that he would die such an ignominious death? How can it make sense that God would face such a defeat? How can it be that God’s control could be breached by such a horrendous and blasphemous act as executing the Christ? One way to understand traditional Christian atonement theology that makes Jesus’s death into such an efficacious act is to recognize it as a way to turn defeat into victory, to turn weakness into overwhelming power. But what if such a move actually has led to many problematic consequences—turning a peaceable story on its head and making it into a story that has underwritten a great deal of violence? And what if such a move actually misconstrues the story of Jesus’s death itself—and in doing so misses the main points of that story that would indeed have major peacemaking consequences? Perhaps it is no surprise that the truly peaceable and transformative message we find in Jesus’s life and teaching has been so seldom evident in the long history of Christianity these past 2,000 years.

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Twilight of the American Empire: A Time for Despair?

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Ted Grimsrud—March 12, 2024

The more I learn about the history of the United States, the more I question whether this country has ever had an actually functioning democracy. In the mid-19th century, abolitionist leaders Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison argued with each other about whether the problems with the then oppressive American slavery-embracing nation-state were due to roots found in the Constitution or more in spite of the Constitution. About 100 years later, a similar debate emerged between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. I find myself inching in the direction of Garrison and Malcolm and their views that the Constitution is a much bigger part of the problem than the solution.

Regardless of what we think about the original intentions of the Constitution, though, the facts seem to be that it has failed to prevent the emergence and growing reality of an American oligopoly characterized by the rule of a wealthy (and ruthless) elite at the expense of the wellbeing of the mass of the nation’s population—in defiance of the actual will of the people. I suspect that the US has always by and large been an oligopoly and that the myth of popular self-rule has always been mostly untrue. Nonetheless, things seem to be getting worse, and we currently face an extraordinary crisis with no hint of a creative way out of it.

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What did Jesus mean by the “Kingdom of God”? [Peace and the Bible #13]

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Ted Grimsrud—February 5, 2024

I believe that one important indicator that Jesus had a “political” agenda (as I have discussed in my previous two blog posts, “Peaceable politics and the story of Jesus” and “Did Jesus have a political philosophy?”) is simply his prominent use of the term “kingdom of God” (or its equivalent in Matthew’s gospel, “kingdom of heaven”). This seems actually to be a complicated metaphor—it’s not obvious exactly what Jesus meant. But that “kingdom” has political connotations cannot be questioned. As a simple definition of “kingdom,” we may say it is a stable community of people that is led by a queen- or king-like ruler. In whatever sense Jesus had in mind of “community” and “ruler,” he did have in mind some sort of political entity.

I have long been ambivalent about our using the “kingdom of God” metaphor today. It seems hopelessly archaic, not to mention patriarchal. It breathes of a world of domination and hierarchies. Yet, Jesus—as I understand him—opposes patriarchy, domination and hierarchies. Is there a better way to understand his metaphor, then? I think so, though I am still not fully comfortable making the term a regular part of the faith language. But rather than simply dismissing the metaphor, I think we would be well served to try to figure out what Jesus himself meant by it. What was he trying to convey? May we affirm his intent even if we seek to find more contemporary language to articulate it? To work at answering these questions, let’s look at the biblical history of the notion of the “kingdom of God.”

The failed territorial kingdom of the Old Testament

The initial picture of the kingdom of God in the Old Testament is of Abraham’s descendants, a community of freed slaves who God led out of Egypt. After the exodus from slavery, God provides the people with a set of laws (Torah) that calls for a social order that in many ways would be an alternative type of politics in contrast to the domination-style politics of the Egyptian empire. The liberation was led by Moses, whose role was to be a kind of extemporaneous prophet, not a permanent king-like leader and not a military leader sitting atop a permanent war-making machine. God is presented as the true king of the people; that is what makes the community an expression of the “kingdom of God.”

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Did Jesus have a political philosophy? (Peace and the Bible #12)

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Ted Grimsrud—February 2, 2024

I am finally returning from an extended break to continue my “Peace and the Bible” blog series. My most recent post, December 18’s “Peaceable politics and the story of Jesus” was the first that dealt with the New Testament after a number of Old Testament posts. I have several more planned on Jesus and then will consider some issues regarding both Paul’s writings and the book of Revelation. Before returning to my planned outline, though, I want to linger in this post on some issues that came up with my last one.

Politics, philosophy, and pacifism

I started by noting that the “Peace and the Bible” theme helps us focus on just how political the concerns of the Bible are. For most Christians, I imagine that point seems clearer in relation to the Old Testament than the New Testament. I suggested, though, that the New Testament actually “presents a kind of political philosophy” that has at its core “a commitment to pacifism, a commitment based on the centrality of Jesus Christ to the Big Story the Bible tells.” In thinking about this assertion, I decided I should reflect a bit more on what I am trying to say.

I pointed out that “Christians have tended to miss the social implications of the New Testament part of the story because of assumptions about both politics and Jesus.” One way to further analyze the issues is to suggest, in very much a general sense, that we might recognize two types of thinking about how to understand the cluster of issues related to (1) “political philosophy,” (2) “pacifism,” (3) “biblical faith,” and (4) “Jesus-oriented discipleship.” One way is to perceive that those items #1 and #2 belong to a certain kind of thinking and that #3 and #4 belong to a very different kind of thinking. The other way would be to argue for understandings of those terms that recognize that they all may (and should!) be understood together in a way that leads to redefining them all.

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Peaceable politics and the story of Jesus (Peace and the Bible #11)

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Ted Grimsrud—December 18, 2023

In my blog series on “Peace and the Bible,” I am showing just how political the concerns of the Bible are. Most people I know find it easier to see that in the Old Testament than the New. In the second half the series, I will argue that the New Testament presents a kind of political philosophy. This philosophy has at its core a commitment to pacifism, a commitment based on the centrality of Jesus Christ to the Big Story the Bible tells. Christians have tended to miss the social implications of the New Testament part of the story because of assumptions about both politics and Jesus.

Politics have been seen as directly tied to running governments and the necessary use of violence. Jesus indeed did not talk about running governments or using violence. However, if we define politics more broadly as the way human beings order their lives together in social groups, perhaps Jesus and the rest of the New Testament were engaging in political behavior. Once we think of politics in this wider sense, we will be more open to recognizing that Jesus indeed was interested in politics—and, actually, very little else. When Jesus spoke of the “Kingdom of God,” perhaps what he had in mind was not some other-worldly existence but a reimagining of politics in this life—in line with the political dynamics in his Bible (what we call the Old Testament). The notion that Jesus spoke only of the personal sphere actually has little support in the texts.

If Jesus did indeed care about politics, then that Christians understand him to be the model human being and the definitive revelation of God would seem to require them to take seriously Jesus’s political witness. If we do take the story of Jesus seriously as an account of a peaceable way of ordering our social lives, our other question will be how relevant that account should be for our present-day political convictions and practices.

Who was Jesus?

At the very beginning of the story of Jesus in Luke’s gospel—the song of Mary in 1:46-55 upon her learning of the child she will bear—we learn that this child will address social reality. He will challenge the power elite of his world and lift up those at the bottom of the social ladder. This child, we are told, will bring succor to those who desire the “consolation of Israel.” Those who seek freedom from the cultural domination of one great empire after another that had been imposed upon Jesus’s people for six centuries will find comfort. From the beginning, the story presents this child in social and political terms.

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