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.
Years later, at the moment of Jesus’s baptism, a voice from heaven speaks words that affirm his action: “Thou art my Son” (Luke 3:22). These words should be understood to name a vocation for his life more than to bestow some metaphysical status on Jesus as a divine being. “Son of God” was a term for kings (Psalm 2:7) with messianic connotations. It was used of one who was being called forth to work in history to bring about a kind of social transformation that will reflect God’s will for God’s people. That Jesus’s baptism was a kind of commissioning service may be seen in the events that follow shortly afterward. Jesus retreats deeper into the wilderness and there encounters Satan, the tempter. The specific temptations Jesus faced all had at their core seductive appeals to his sense of messianic (kingly) calling. He could rule the nations, he could gain a following as a distributor of bread to the hungry masses, he could leap from the top of the Temple and gain the support of the religious powers-that-be through his miraculous survival that would confirm his messianic status. That is, Jesus faced temptations concerning how (not whether) he would be king. He did not deny his calling as “Son of God;” he did reject these temptations to fulfill this calling through what he knew would be ungodly means.
Luke then tells of Jesus’s entry back into the world to which he was called to minister. In his home synagogue, Jesus spoke prophetic words from the prophet Isaiah that directly addressed social transformation. Isaiah’s prophecy referred to the installation among God’s people of the provisions of the year of Jubilee. To follow those provisions would restore in Israel the socially radical tenets of Torah: social equality and the enfranchisement of the oppressed, prisoners, and poor. Jesus affirmed, “these words are fulfilled in your hearing.” He thereby made clear that the fulfillment he had in mind was not the end of history but rather the transformation of social life within history. Jesus brought into the present of his life the hope for renewal that Isaiah prophesied. This renewal would find expression in a concrete transformation of social relationships in the actual world where Jesus lived.
Jesus’s identity at the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Son of God, the Christ, is linked from the beginning of his ministry with the powerful presence of the Spirit of God (4:14-21). This outpouring of the Spirit linked with Israel’s hopes for the healing of the world in history, in social and political concreteness. Jesus joined his verbal proclamation with works of healing. He drew great crowds and acclamation, and he attracted opposition. His townspeople sought to kill him when they realized that his message of the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy meant mercy to Israel’s enemies. As his ministry gained traction, Jesus regularly began to run up against opposition from defenders of the status quo who angrily schemed against him (Luke 6:11).
Creating a counterculture
In face of the resistance to his message, Jesus created a more formal community of resistance. He realized that his teachings and actions alone would not bring genuine transformation. He knew that if he himself were removed from the scene, his message would end with him. So, he had to create social structures that would continue and that would provide a critical mass to embody and sustain the message of Jubilee that he proclaimed and embodied.
In Jesus’s proclamation, at the center of his key statements captured by Luke (e.g., the opening proclamation in his hometown, the Lord’s Prayer, and his “sermon on the plain” in 6:17-49) we find a focus on debt as the core expression of structural evil in his world. In response to this evil, Jesus spoke of God’s boundless love that canceled debts in true Jubilee fashion. This love replaced debt bondage with forgiveness. Jesus spelled out this message to the community he called into being—both to his disciples (the “sermon on the plain”) and to the broader listening crowd (see 7:1). He structured his social ethic around the call to imitate God’s expansive love (Luke 6:35-36). He insisted: Break free from the conventional “commonsense” ethics of mainstream society (“what credit is that to you? Even sinners…,” Luke 6:32-34). His transformative ethic flowed from a conviction that the promised age of the Spirit indeed had begun in this community. This community founded on voluntary commitment would provide the resources needed to stand strong in face of the inevitable opposition of the powers that be in the broader society.
Jesus’s message met with ever more hostility; the likelihood of opposition loomed ever larger. So, he prepared his followers for such consequences. He formed them into a community to embody a way of life that would practice Jubilee and overcome bondage to the debt-centered culture of which it was a part. This community would also cultivate the inner and outer resources that would empower them to face the likelihood of the hostility from the powers-that-be, even to the point of a Roman execution by crucifixion on a cross. In his teaching about a willingness to “take up the cross” as a prerequisite for sharing in his Spirit-endowed community of healing, Jesus conveyed a clear message. To follow him meant, without qualification, a willingness to share his fate—the fate of one labeled an enemy of the Empire and an enemy of the Temple hierarchy. To follow Jesus meant to accept the (accurate) designation of a social radical.
Jesus established a community of disciples intending to transform his social world. This community self-consciously organized itself with a clear mission. Those who joined understood and accepted the expectations and likely consequences of their participation. They accepted expectations for a defined set of practices that set them apart from their wider society. These distinct practices did not stem from a simple desire to be different for the sake of being different, but rather from the profoundly humane characteristics of their social ethics. These distinctives overtly set the community of Jesus’ followers over against the values and practices of the powers that be. They created an alternative consciousness and social context for political life.
To take up the cross
With his counter-cultural community emerging with increased self-awareness of his messianic agenda (that is, his “kingly” agenda), Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem and entered the final phase of his ministry. Luke tells of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of the final week of his life. He met with adulation, then headed to the Temple where he successfully challenged the standard operating procedures. By driving the money changers out, he heightened the sense of conflict with the guardians of the social order.
Some around Jesus, it appears, had retained a hope that this social change agent would violently overthrow the present political and religious order. For them, things seemed to be coming to a head. Jesus clearly did have a political agenda. He had organized a vanguard movement, calling his followers to clarity about their willingness to make the effort and bear the consequences of revolution. Of course, Jesus had not overtly prepared his community for a violent takeover, but with his own power and close connection with God, he would seemingly not require overwhelming human firepower to overturn Rome. A final step where he would pull together the crowds and wield the sword of the Lord in a coup d’etat is precisely, however, the step Jesus refuses. Only later did his followers figure out that his agenda was never a violent revolution but rather a different kind of revolution, though no less social and political.
Luke 19:47–22:2 tells of the confrontation Jesus initiates with the existing social system. The obvious example is when Jesus is challenged over the payment of taxes to Rome (20:20-25). He poses two alternatives, give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. He did not propose a two-kingdom theory where life is compartmentalized between the sacred and the secular, though. Rather, he emphasized that in real life these two “kings” demand loyalty in ways that demand a choice, one or the other. When Jesus’s authority is challenged (20:1-8), when he tells the parable of the unfaithful vineyard-keepers (20:9-18), when Luke alludes to the Messiah as David’s son (19:41-44), when Jesus speaks of rich scribes in contrast with poor widows (20:45–21:4), and when Jesus alludes to tribulation and triumph (21:5-36), the heightening conflict between these two mutually exclusive social orders is made clear.
The night after Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the temple and received a warning that the religious leaders planned to do him in, he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane that God would “take this cup” from him. Such a prayer, in this context, only makes sense as one final temptation on Jesus’s part to consider a violent overthrow. Satan tempted him with violence in the wilderness at the beginning (“worship me and we can overthrow the Romans”). Peter tempted Jesus with violence after confessing Jesus as Messiah (see Mark 8:32-3 when Peter rebukes Jesus for teaching about his death; Jesus vehemently rebukes Peter and calls him “Satan,” linking with the earlier temptation). The crowds tempted Jesus with violence after he miraculously fed them. The crowds again tempted him with this when he entered Jerusalem to their acclaim. Such a temptation had been fundamental throughout Jesus’ ministry because, indeed, it was close to his calling. He did have the vocation to head a political revolution, to bring about a transformation in relation to Roman hegemony and the Temple hierarchy.
Near the end, in the Garden of Gethsemane, as the forces aligned against Jesus close in, he faces one more time the option of channeling his divine power toward violence, to use the sword of “justice” forcibly to overthrow the oppressors of his people and set the prisoners free. In the power of the Spirit, Jesus resists that temptation. He resists even when Peter draws his sword in an act that could have set the conflagration off. Matthew, in his version of the story, imagines that at this point God could indeed have set upon the Temple police and, perhaps also the Romans, the angelic hosts and the crowds. These legions of angels could have cleansed the land and restored the Davidic kingdom. Jesus says no, not because he was apolitical and only interested in escaping from history into heaven. Jesus says no because the true enemy of the kingdom of God, the social order God called Jesus to inaugurate, is the sword itself, not the national identity of the sword-wielder.
So, Jesus accepts his arrest. He goes first before the religious leaders then to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. The story makes clear that it was indeed thinkable that Jesus would be seen as a genuine threat to the Roman Empire. Throughout the story of Jesus’s final hours, the charge that he set himself up as “king” rings clearly. The story the gospels tell of Jesus’s public ministry makes apparent the bases for such a charge: Jesus did pose a political threat. Rome did execute Jesus. He died a revolutionary’s death. Rome made an example of him. He met his end labeled “king of the Jews.” This label followed the affirmation of the religious leaders (mentioned in John’s gospel) that they recognized no king but Caesar. Such a public, painful, and decisive death awaits all who set themselves over against Rome.
Jesus’s followers had been prepared for his arrest. However, when the events unfolded, they proved not quite ready. Many continued to the bitter end to hope for a David redux who would bring in the kingdom with violence. Hence, a few days after Jesus’s death, several of his followers recount the tragic events to a stranger they met on the road to Emmaus. “We had hoped that he was the one who would redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). They expected a violent revolution to drive out the foreign empire and its collaborators. To their shock, these disciples discover that their companion turns out to be Jesus himself. Jesus confronts them, not because they had hoped Jesus would “redeem Israel” (that is, not because they had been looking for a new kingdom). Rather, Jesus confronts them because they had not grasped the meaning of his life and teaching. When he rejected the violent revolution option even while directly challenging the status quo, this new kingdom was indeed present. His messianic identity was real, not in spite of his nonviolence but precisely because of it.
Because Jesus’s cross was a direct consequence of his confrontation with the social status quo, it actually in a genuine sense reflected the presence of the kingdom of God. Jesus loved his enemies, embodied a justice greater than the scribes and Pharisees, identified directly with the poor and oppressed, and forgave even his killers. In doing so, he displayed the core values of this new social and political order he had been commissioned to bring into being.
Jesus as model
The social ethics of the New Testament have at their heart a call to follow the way of Jesus. This motif of imitation, though, focuses on specific aspects of Jesus’s life and teaching, not a general sense of seeing him as a model in all areas of life. The specific point of imitation has to do with the aspects of Jesus’s ministry that led him into conflict with the powers that be. The New Testament presents Jesus’s cross as the norm for his followers. This cross is understood in its historical concreteness as the consequence of standing against the status quo of power politics and social hierarchicalism. Jesus’s cross represents his social nonconformity, his countercultural sensibility, how he renounced noninvolvement in the needed social transformation, and his refusal to take up the sword even for seemingly legitimate purposes.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus was not truly tempted to withdraw and stay in the wilderness. He understood from the start that he had been called to engage his culture directly and confrontationally. He was not truly tempted to side with the religious powers, the temple establishment and its sense of conservative social responsibility. This path was too strongly implicated in the social injustice Jesus stood decisively against. Jesus faced only one genuine social-political temptation. The actual temptation had to do with the lure of transformative social responsibility exercised through the sword, through the use of the means of “justifiable” violence for the sake of a valuable end.
Jesus proclaimed a message of the presence of God’s kingdom. As the metaphor “kingdom” makes clear, his concern centered on political and not purely religious or spiritual elements. When Jesus disavowed Peter’s attempt to defend him with the sword at the time of his arrest, he did so not because Peter got in the way of Jesus’s non-ethical vocation to be a perfect sacrifice for sin. Rather, Jesus rejected Peter’s efforts because he understood his calling as the Son of God to include turning from the use of the sword in order to further “legitimate” ends.
When God raised Jesus from the dead, the story emphasizes, God thereby vindicated Jesus’s message and his identity. His political strategy reflects God’s will for humanity. Following Jesus’s resurrection, he reinstituted his community as the vanguard of the coming kingdom of God. At that point, his followers looked back at the whole of his ministry, death, and resurrection, and confessed him to be the unique manifestation of God in history. Language of incarnation, divinity, and Trinity later emerged to name Jesus’s actual identity as God-in-flesh. Confessing Jesus as God Incarnate speaks to God entering history and defining authentic humanness in terms of this exemplary, Spirit-filled life. Confessing Jesus as the “second person” of the Trinity speaks to the unity of all manifestations of God as harmonious with the life and teaching of this person confessed as God among us.
Jesus did not (mistakenly) proclaim the end of historical existence. His message of the jubilee-made-present centered on an actual embodiment in time of structured communal life that would shape historical existence. Jesus’s message was not that history was soon to end; he spoke to why history continues. He proclaimed and embodied a way that embraced real life and transformed how it is lived. The kingdom of God, for Jesus, had to do with visible social life, not invisible “spirituality.” Shaped by Jubilee, he confronted injustice, bondage, and oppression. Empowered by the presence of God’s Spirit, Jesus proclaimed the actual Kingdom of God to be present and shows those who become its citizens why life in time matters,
At the heart of Jesus’s message, we find clarity that people in power do not represent the divinely endorsed definition of what it means to be “political.” The actual Jesus of the gospel story utterly contradicts the assumptions of mainstream ethics that relegate his concerns to the non-political realm of otherworldly religion. Jesus’s message about politics is clear. Those in power misunderstand the true meaning of politics. If we understand “politics” to have to do, most fundamentally, with how human beings order their social lives, Jesus presented a clear alternative to politics as domination. The politics of domination is a perversion of the intention of God for how we are called to be human beings socially.
Thinking Pacifism 
Hi. An interesting post with significant insights — the description of Jesus’ creation of a ‘counter-cultural community’ that rejects violence and does not seek the power to control government is very significant.
At the same time, I think the basic category/overarching framing being suggested here is problematic. The NT does not represent a ‘political PHILOSOPHY’ but rather a call to discipleship. These two ideas move in opposite directions, it seems to me. A ‘philosophical’ orientation leads to systematization, abstraction, and a move away from the ‘Biblical story’ you’re trying to describe. Discipleship, on the other hand, is a fundamentally interpretive HERMENEUTICAL stance that builds on and reinterprets the biblical tradition in certain ways (which you seem to be trying to articulate).
Put another way, the centre of NT concern is NOT ‘pacifism’ — and neither has this been the centre of the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition. The CENTRE is a commitment to discipleship, with ‘pacifism’ a by-product of this conviction (that peace is derivative does not make it less important, but keeps the focus on discipleship). To use an analogy, the tree is ‘discipleship’ with roots in biblical hermeneutics, while ‘pacifism’ is a fruit of this tree… (Portraying either a ‘political philosophy’ or ‘pacifism’ as the tree trunk may be intellectually satisfying or more easily understandable in a given contemporary context, but isn’t biblically accurate or historically the case in the historic Anabaptist tradition.) Maintaining the focus on discipleship keeps the focus on both the biblical tradition, understood and passed on by an interpretive community. Neither of these is essential for a ‘philosophical system.’
Thank you for taking the time to comment, Derek. I’m glad to hear from you again. It’s been awhile. I’m writing this quick reply right away because I want to commit myself to offering a more thorough response soon.
Just one thought now. I don’t actually disagree much with what you say. The key is how we define “political philosophy” (I certainly don’t mean “a philosophical system”) and “pacifism”—not to mention “discipleship.” My intent is to use both of the terms I do (along with the term “politics” as well) in line with what I understand Jesus’s message to be, not in line with modern academic use. For me to do so might be too idiosyncratic to be helpful, but I definitely don’t think it is the case that I am doing anything that goes “in the opposite direction” of the NT’s portrayal of discipleship.
I appreciate the clarification. In my context there seems to be a pretty pronounced shift towards claiming ‘Peace’ as the centre of Anabaptism, with much of the rest being secondary — and seemingly even dispensable at times (esp. among more ‘liberal progressive’ Mennonites, for lack of a better term). I think the basic clarification of ‘discipleship’ as the central category wouldn’t really change your argument, but would not contribute to/step into that basic misunderstanding and its attendant problems.
Something I just wrote this morning in a response to a question from a local pastor seems pretty relevant (re: a totally different issue, but from someone struggling with congregants who have little interaction with the Bible, let alone a sense of hermeneutics):
“This is why, as far as I’m concerned, one of the most important counter-cultural things we can do as Christians is to commit ourselves to repeated, ongoing, and intentional biblical engagement. If we don’t we will have little defense vs. different cultural, and even theological, winds that are blowing through at any given moment… (the rise of White Christian Nationalism in the US is a stark, cautionary example I think).”
I think we’re largely on the same page here – I just wanted to signal how your opening paragraphs could (would?) be read by such folks.
Thanks for such a deep and thoughtful article, Ted. I’ve read it carefully and at least somewhat thoughtfully. If I had time, there are several points I’d like to respond to. Overall, I’m in close agreement and applaud your efforts in putting out this kind of perspective and “call”, if you will.
I’ll take time for just a couple points and one referral: We are sadly hampered in being able to follow what Jesus’ original disciple group did… how they really operated, in Jerusalem or elsewhere… by the long gap till things were recorded. (If there were other writings, perhaps a “sayings gospel” such as hypothetical Q, or other “letters” closer to 27-30 CE, they didn’t survive from the first 40 or so years… Paul’s letters, of course, beginning perhaps 20-25 years post-crucifixion, are the sole early “exception”.)
Given what went on in that period, this gap is critical… especially in terms of what Jesus followers were thinking and doing re. the very dynamics you speak about, in terms of social order and understandings of the Kingdom of God, and the many who were “agitators” for it (referenced obliquely a few times in the Gospels and Acts). Our NT records confuse things in a number of ways… just one being the distortion of what went on between John the Baptist and Jesus and their respective followings (John’s did not simply transfer fully, if even mostly, over to Jesus as the Gospels, esp. John, try to imply… cf. Josephus on John and on Jesus; also Acts 19, etc.).
It’s also, unfortunately, quite opaque as to what the Jerusalem-based JEWISH, temple-worshipping Jesus-followers were saying and doing as to Roman resistance (or lack thereof) in the years leading up to the revolt of 66-70. (Acts is of relatively little help, and incredibly slanted as a work of apologetics, not genuine history.)
The clues in the Gospels remain murky to me, after extensive study, although I’ve come to be pretty settled that the apocalyptic pronouncements (couched as prophecies, but definitely referencing the fall of the Temple and Jerusalem as historical events) were put INTO the mouth of Jesus, almost certainly not coming out of his mouth. In turn, this raises the massive “historical criticism” conundrum, which is one that cannot simply be swept under the rug, as you well realize. However, the vast majority of Christians fail to grapple adequately with the last 250 or so years of such study, ALL ALONG the traditional-to-progressive spectrum.
Just yesterday I discovered a good article that’s quite pertinent to your points in relation to a recent-decades American (mainly) dynamic… the posture/thinking of the largest “block” (an inaccurate description as to variation within it) of Christians — Evangelicals.
It is the lead article on “Apolitical Evangelicalism…” at the website of Jon Huckins (.net). A short read, well worth the time!