Ted Grimsrud—September 15, 2023
In the first post in this three-part Theological Memoir, “Embedded Theology,” I gave an account of my first two decades of life with a focus on how my “embedded theology” led me to accept the “blank check” regarding my loyalty to the American Empire, even to the point of being (reluctantly) willing to go to war if called. This acceptance of the blank check was, if anything, strengthened when I became a Christian and was taught that the “gospel” included an embrace of American patriotism.
The second post, “Jesus’s gospel of peace,” describes the circumstances around the transformation of my perspective due my encounter with Jesus—an embrace of Christian pacifism and a rejection of the blank check that involved a deeply critical disposition toward the American Empire. I also briefly sketch the Bible-oriented theology that undergirds that critical disposition.
My encounter with the gospel of peace has defined the rest of my life. Right away in 1976, I sought to bring together the two main elements of this new exciting vision for life and faith: First, an embrace of Jesus’s gracious and humane call that love of God and neighbor are the core meaning of life. Second, an ever-widening analysis in our social and political context of the vicious, expansionist, profoundly violent American Empire. From the very start, for me, these were two sides of a single coin. The call to love illuminated the realities of the Empire and the realities of the Empire continually challenged me to understand the practical and embodied character of the call to love. The more I studied the Bible, the more convinced I became of the radical nature of this story of God’s call of a people to bless all the families of the earth with their message of shalom. In this post I will outline my critique of the American Empire.
The American Empire without blinders
For the past 47 years I have learned to observe the American Empire without blinders. For me, the ability to discern has been empowered by the message of Jesus and the broader message of the Bible. Sadly, Christianity and the Bible in practice have failed to provide most Americans the guidance and enlivenment needed to challenge the Empire. All too often Christians have blessed wars and injustice, even slavery and Native American genocide as the will of the God of the Bible. The challenge to live as Christian pacifists in the American Empire remains very difficult.
What does it mean to see the American Empire without blinders? I think of two images, one from the book of Revelation, one from my childhood. To see the Empire without blinders is, I imagine, like being among the first listeners to readings of the visions collected in Revelation. One hears chapters 17 and 18 and realizes with a shock that the glitzy, all-powerful, eternally benevolent Roman Empire is instead nothing but a harlot. The fancy exterior hides a corrupt interior where humans are enslaved, and prophets murdered. Or, I can remember when I was a kid. A travelling basketball team, the Harlem Travelers, came to our town for an evening of outrageously funny and classy entertainment. Then the next year they came back again, the same players. And I realized that they weren’t actually all that funny or witty or even very good basketball players. They were after a few bucks. And once you see the unblindered reality, you can’t go back to the illusions.
Without blinders, I quickly came to realize that the American Empire was not at all what it claimed to be. Our wars were not “good wars,” but nasty, dirty, brutal wars that as a rule were fought on behalf of rich people and corrupt military leaders. We were good at destruction but not at actually helping poor people and victims of oppression. There was very little that I could discern from the message of Jesus that did not point to the moral repulsiveness of the Empire’s ways in the world.
A problematic history
As I learned more, I understood that American history was complicated. My European ancestors came to possess this land only through the profoundly violent and ruthless dispossession of those who lived here before. The growth of the US as an economic superpower owed everything to the involuntary, brutal, and breathtakingly exploitative use of the labor of enslaved people. Even when formal slavery ended, the brutal exploitation of descendants of the enslaved continued, down to the present.
That history was glancingly acknowledged in my schooling, but never in a way that posed a challenge to the embedded theology of the basic goodness of the Empire and of its wars. We never wondered how it could be that we would owe a blank check to a nation state that was built on so much blood and injustice and trauma.
With World War II (the “good war”), the dynamics of Empire got even worse. I wrote about this in my book, The Good War That Wasn’t—And Why It Matters. The US ended that war utterly victorious, barely scratched in a world full of other powerful nation-states—the winners and the defeated—who had been brought to their knees by the unprecedented devastation of 80 million or so dead (about ½ of 1 percent of whom were Americans). The American economy was, in 1945, going full bore; we had suffered very little, and—crucially —we had emerged with unquestioned moral prestige. In other words, the US may have had more potential to shape the world for the good at that moment than any other country ever has had.
And what did we do with it? Let me mention one example. We ended the war with a display of unimagined brute force, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had an option, then. We could join with our main allies in the war, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, perhaps also France, and treat the atomic bombs as something to be managed together—and hopefully never to be used again. Or, we could go it alone, utilize our monopoly, and expand our power in order to attain a genuinely unipolar world order. We could us our power to collaborate with others—or to seek to dominate. It turns out it was very close call. President Truman’s cabinet was evenly divided. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, was actually the strongest advocate for sharing. But Stimson’s side lost the debate. In a narrow vote, the choice to dominate prevailed.
As it turned out, the assumption that we could even have a monopoly on nuclear weaponry was faulty. Unknown to our leaders, the Soviets had had spies high up in the Manhattan Project, and it took only a little time for them build their own bombs. The Cold War was underway, a war that time after time was accelerated by the Americans, leaving the Soviets mad at work to catch up. Several times since 1946, we have only narrowly avoided total catastrophe—nuclear war. It is actually a miracle that it hasn’t happened—and the American Empire keeps making our arsenal more deadly.
A different kind of vision for what might have been after World War II was hinted at in the formation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But that vision can only be glimpsed in the actual history. The UN has never been allowed to be very effective. It’s potential to facilitate genuine peace and cooperation has not been realized—the American Empire has not wanted that.
The American Empire at work
There was another moment in the months after the end of World War II that reveals a lot about the actual dynamics of the American Empire. During the war, the right-wing leaders of Greece had quickly acquiesced to Nazi occupation. A vigorous and quite effective movement emerged that was supported by the Soviet Union but was mainly local in its makeup. After the war, the Germans left and a struggle emerged between the leaders of resistance movement, who were quite popular in the country and presented themselves as leftists, and the former leaders, conservative, even authoritarian, and not very popular. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin insisted that he would honor the agreements among the Allies at the end of war to allow for self-determination in western Europe. In fact, the Soviets did not aid the leftists in Greece’s civil war. But the US did offer a lot of aid to the rightists, who eventually won and instituted years of military dictatorship in Greece with negative repercussions down to this day.
I only learned about the Greek conflict fairly recently. But it caught my attention. As I mentioned, my uncle Bill lost his life in Greece in 1947. He was a US fighter pilot who flew on behalf of those generals who took over and ran Greece in despotic ways. I was never told that part of the story. My uncle did what he was told by his military superiors who did what they were told by their civilian bosses. That is the way the blank check works. It basically requires that we accept the nation-state, when it calls, as our moral guide, not Jesus’s gospel of peace.
The post-World War II history of the American Empire follows closely the template established in Greece, occasionally with direct involvement of the American military (such as Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq) and more often with more covert intervention to buttress authoritarian, even fascist forces around the world (such as Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, and numerous others).
The gospel of peace
So, how do we live out the gospel of peace today within the American Empire? To reflect on detailed directives will take another long post (perhaps in the not too distant future). Let me instead close just now with two images from the book of Revelation that have general relevance. The gospel of peace may be symbolized by two images—the sword of truth, and the leaves that heal.
In Revelation 19, Jesus rides forth to the final battle, we are led to think. But he has only one weapon, a sword that comes from his mouth. And there is no battle. He simply captures his enemies and throws them into the lake of fire. The only blood in the scene is blood on Jesus’s cloak, already shed before he arrives to the battle that ends up not being a battle. This symbolizes his victory on the cross. The sword from his mouth, of course, is his word of truth. Jesus’s message of peace, we could say. The image of a sword usefully conveys a sense of the gospel of peace as confrontive, sharply critical of the powers of Empire and oppression, a message of discernment that sees through the lies of the idols and exposes them for what they are. This sword is a weapon, not to kill but to resist, to confront, to challenge.
Then in Revelation, a couple of chapters later, we end with a vision of paradise, New Jerusalem, a time of healing. It is crucial that we see in this vision the healing of the nations, the healing of the kings of the earth. The gospel of peace is confrontive but in a way that allows for, even leads to, healing for not only the vulnerable, the victims, and the prophets and witnesses—but also for the empire loyalists, also for the kings of the earth themselves. I don’t think this is a promise that everyone will inevitably be healed. It’s a promise of possibility. Anyone can be healed. The empires can be transformed. Most of all, this vision of how transformation happens, is a promise that love is always right. It is a comfort to know that the gospel of peace is living and active and will not return void.
Part one: Embedded theology//Part two: Jesus’s gospel of peace
Thinking Pacifism 
Thanks for this excellent conclusion, Ted. I find your summation of the Abrahamic/Jewish “calling”, on through the biblical prophets as helpful, and something very little understood by almost all Christians. My own grasp, after essentially a Bible major and 3-year seminary degree, followed by decades of much further reading and study, I know is minimal (I’ve recently focused mostly on NT and Christian origins study, which has included a lot on Second Temple Judaism.)
Anyway, good summaries can go a long ways, if adequately promoted/heard.
As you know well, Western Christendom has gone through some major fluctuations on both broad paradigms of reality/theology, and on the issues of “two kingdoms”. Classic liberalism’s failure (shown especially via WWI) helped spawn Fundamentalism and it’s renewed embrace, in the USA, of “American exceptionalism”, Empire, and essentially “might makes right”.
Now, Christian “liberalism” struggles, while Evangelicalism/conservative Christianity (Protestant AND Catholic) mostly has been co-opted by authoritarianism and its totally self-absorbed current “leader”.
Liberalism needs, among other things, to discern “spirits”, and to embrace how God’s spirit is expressed, not only in formalized government, but also in individuals, and in communities as individuals gather and purposely transcend differences and squabbles (Jesus had a fair bit to say about this) when possible, or going separate ways
(peacefully) when not possible short-term, still living out “kin-dom” principles.
Ted, thank you for your teaching.
Jesus teaches a paradigm of His peacemaking which I see that He employs throughout history, including Revelation, in the confrontation between religious leaders and Himself over the woman caught in the act of adultery.
First, He responds in silence. He writes in the dirt, but He is silent. This royal silence prepares the crowd for what He does next. Next, He says to the mob that anyone who is without sin can cast the first stone. As Earl Palmer has taught, Jesus is saying, ‘I know what you say about the woman, but what do you say about yourself?’ Upon reflecting upon their morality and injustices, the men walk away. John notes that the older men leave first. Older people have endured more struggles and failures, and thus experience more ambiguities in life. Younger people are more idealistic, seeing more in simple black and white.
With the mob gone, now Jesus addresses the woman without the hostile audience. “Where are your accusers?” Jesus asks her. This is similar to asking ‘Where are your demons?’ as a demon is an accuser of the children of God, the followers of Jesus, which Jesus comments upon in Revelation.
Jesus speaks the words of mercy and thus peace, “Neither do I condemn (Greek, weigh down) you. Go and sin no more.” Jesus removes the sources of injustice, violence, and alienation. This is what He does when Jesus removes Satan, demons, the Beast, the Dragon, false prophets, false teachers, and death into the lake of fire.
And while Jesus is with the woman in the outer courtyard, around the candles used to light up Jerusalem at night during the Feast of Tabernacles, He makes one of the great ‘I am’ statements. “I am the light of the world.” Note, the first thing God created is light.