Ted Grimsrud—October 7, 2025
In the years from 1987 through 1996, I preached several hundred sermons. Almost all had to do with biblical bases for peace theology. Then I began college teaching and most of my classes were relevant for how Christian pacifist convictions could inform living in the American Empire. In what follows, I will present the message of the Bible that relates to peace theology. This message provides the grounding for an unblinkered look at the American Empire from the perspective of Christian pacifism—something I offer in the series’ final posts. The story I have told in my previous posts describes how I got to my commitment to peace theology. Now, I will turn to the story of where that commitment has led me, first theologically and then politically.
Holding the Bible loosely, but with respect
I view the Bible as a conversation partner. The big picture that comes from all its stories read together gives me a perspective from which to engage the world. To me, it is not a source of normative, explicit commands nor a miraculously accurate source of information about the past of God’s people. Yet, it is not simply ancient writings from a distant time. I see it as a fascinating collection of various kinds of literature. It reflects various human perspectives that hang together, loosely, to guide and inspire. The authors’ moral commitments give the Bible its coherence.
When read in light of Jesus’s message that centers on the call to love neighbors, the Bible serves that call. It presents a worldview shaped by love. Jesus does not originate this worldview but echoes and reinforces the Old Testament message of Torah and the prophets. The Bible tells a “Big Story” where all its parts hang together and convey a vision for life shaped by God’s love.
I discovered the Bible’s Big Story through my struggle with American warism. I found a way out of my embedded warist view of the world through an encounter with the story of Jesus. That encounter shaped how I have read the Bible ever since. In asking questions of the Bible about war, justice, and social transformation, I discovered that the Bible truly cares about politics and social transformation. It provides a powerful framework for interpreting the world.
Where does Jesus’s political sensibility come from?
What I first learned about Jesus focused on his death as a sacrifice to make my salvation possible. Jesus lived his life without sin in order for him to be a pure sacrifice. To that extent, his life had importance. We thought, in effect, that Jesus dropped into history from the outside and then after his short life went away. The actual story, I learned, told of something quite different. The gospels tell of Jesus as a political radical who subverted the Roman Empire and the religious hierarchy. He rejected violence and domination. He practiced a politics of love, of overcoming evil with good, and of generosity and inclusivity. And, he did all of to fulfill Torah. Jesus, contrary to how most Christians came to see him, saw himself as fully within Israel’s story.
Jesus tells how he created a path for his community to live in an imperial context, as his forebears had done. Jesus’s message of love God and neighbor continued the Old Testament’s accounts of Torah and the prophets. His call to love summarized Torah’s call, given in order to empower the people to create a counter to their enslavement in the Egyptian Empire.
The pacifist sensibility that warism contradicts God’s will relies on separating God from one’s territorial kingdom. The Bible calls for such a separation. The basic problem in the Bible is that of idolatry, trusting in things that demand loyalty that belongs to God. The most devastating objects of idolatrous trust in the Bible are empires, territorial kingdoms, and nation-states—both “outside” powers such as Egypt, Babylon, and Rome, and the Israeli territorial entity itself.
Meet the Egyptian Empire
The Bible’s first great empire, Egypt, enters the scene in the last part of Genesis as the source of life-saving food for Abraham’s descendants during a great famine. In the book of Exodus, though, we see the Egyptian Empire in a more ominous light. The Hebrews had been enslaved by Egypt’s leader, the Pharaoh, and suffer bitterly. Typical story of the world’s regular cycle of empires’ ways. However, something new enters the picture with the Hebrews. They cry out, Yahweh hears the cries, and “remembered the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” and “took notice” of the suffering and enslaved Hebrew people (Ex 2:24). Yahweh intervenes to begin a new story in the world of empires. This new story leads to Jesus, a direct line from the liberation from enslavement in Egypt. God listens to the enslaved, a model for Jesus’s ministry.
Pharaoh fights to retain his place of dominance and the refuses to recognize the humanity of the enslaved Hebrews. Pharaoh represents all empires in this. God ultimately does liberate the people through a creative intervention. God then gives them Torah, a blueprint for sustaining their freedom. Torah (or “instruction”) shows the people how to be a counterculture to empire. This blueprint emerged from the experience of enslavement. The heartbeat of Torah, the Sabbath, provided for a day of rest and rejuvenation that contrasted with the relentless forced labor of the Empire. Torah included provisions that limited top-down power in the community, required care for vulnerable people, restricted concentrations of wealth, and otherwise empowered self-determination. That is, Torah’s vision turned imperial ways of life upside-down.
Israel’s own turn toward empire
After their liberation from Egypt, the Hebrews moved on to the land of Canaan in the hope of finding a homeland where they might embody the counter-empire vision for social life they had been given with Torah. As it turned out, they did not successfully turn away from the ways of empire but instead took empire into the promised land with them. I will focus on this tragedy and the lessons the Big Story draw from it in more depth in my next post. However, let’s also think a bit about this theme here in the discussion of the empires.
The people’s existence in the land depended on their faithfulness to Torah. Failure in this project lurked whenever the people thought their presence in the land could be taken for granted and not be linked with the moral quality of their common life: “If you transgress the covenant of the Lord your God … the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and you shall perish quickly from the good land that he has given you” (Joshua 23:16)—one of many such warnings. The requirement for faithfulness would prevent reversion to the ways of empire. The community exists to bless all the families of the earth by providing a genuine alternative to the ways of empire. The importance of the call to follow Torah means that the on-going critiques of the failure to do so always carried with them critiques of empire as a way of life.
Successive imperial superpowers
A second great power in the Old Testament, the Assyrian Empire, enters and leaves the scene much more quickly than Egypt. The ruthless power of Assyria, as recounted in 2 Kings 17:5-23, destroyed the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel and moved on to attack the southern kingdom of Judah. Jerusalem ultimately staved off Assyrian conquest. Isaiah portrayed this failed attempt to conquer Judah along with Israel as evidence of Yahweh’s power over the brutal superpower. Hebrew political leaders for once listened to the prophets.
Many in Israel hated Assyria. We see this in the prophecy of Nahum, who joyfully proclaims the impending doom of Nineveh, capital of Assyria. A much different expression of this hatred comes later in the book of Jonah. Nineveh plays a rhetorical role, standing as the last place on earth that the Hebrews would ever want God’s mercy to be expressed.
During the 7th century BCE, Assyria fell to the Babylonian Empire. Babylon conquered Judah and destroyed the temple and much of the rest of Jerusalem and took the Jewish ruling class who survived into exile. It played the role in Israel’s consciousness of the paradigmatic example of political authoritarianism. We see this in the use of “Babylon” in symbolic ways in the tradition down through the writings of the New Testament. Most famously, the book of Revelation has “Babylon” symbolize the brutalities and blasphemies of the Roman Empire.
The general portrayal of the great powers in the Old Testament sets the ways of empire in opposition to the ways of God’s chosen people. The faith community, at its origins and at its most faithful, sees itself as a contrast society in relation to empire. Through a long and tumultuous journey, the foundational ideals expressed in the Mosaic revolution survived—waiting for a new embodiment amidst the greatest empire of them all.
The greatest empire of them all
The Bible’s final great empire, Rome, acted ruthlessly and in completely self-interested ways in dealing with its Palestinian outpost, where Jesus lived. The New Testament portrays Rome as a rival to God for the ultimate loyalty of people of faith. Jesus critiqued the dominant forces that oppressed and exploited from outside of Israel’s religious structures—that is, the Roman Empire. From the start, language about Jesus (lord, savior, messiah/king, kingdom, etc.) signaled a collision of claims. For his followers, Jesus, in contrast to Caesar, is lord and savior (these were terms used of Caesar Augustus). For Jesus to say that God’s kingdom is at hand implied the lack of ultimacy of Caesar’s kingdom. Every time Jesus referred this kingdom and its priority in the lives of his followers he displaced the Roman Empire as the ultimate Reality.
Jesus challenged empire—and the empire struck back. Jesus died from being crucified—the manner of execution used by the Roman Empire on political offenders. The empire used crucifixion to say, loudly and clearly: We run this place. As a piece of our property, you will accept that we can do as we like with you. When God raised Jesus from the dead, God made the ultimate counter-empire statement. God provides the strongest possible message that those who judged Jesus guilty prove themselves to be the threats to genuine peace. Jesus’s resurrection thus witnesses definitively to the falseness of the politics of empire.
No blank check nationalism
Let me return briefly to the story of my rejection of blank check nationalism back in the 1970s. The first step in my developing a rationale for a new disposition toward the land of my birth followed from realizing that according to the Bible, empires are inherently idolatrous. My new awareness of the character of the American intervention in Vietnam made it clear that the Bible’s presentation of the problems of empire applied directly to the United States.
Throughout the Bible, from Egypt to Rome, empires oppose God and God’s people. The post-biblical accommodation Christians made with empires contradicted the teaching of the Bible. Empires have always violated the ways of Torah and Jesus. They have done so through overt oppression of God’s people. And they have done so more covertly by successfully tempting ancient Israel’s leaders (and later Christian leaders) to practice forms of empire-politics themselves within communities of faith.
My commitment to Jesus loosened the hold of my uncritical nationalism and freed me to see the empire for what it is. I recognized that the empire I gave my loyalty to offered a radically different life orienting story than Jesus and the Big Story of the Bible did. The Bible’s critique of empire helped open my eyes to the need to turn from deriving my identity from the empire’s story. More than this critique, though, the significance of the Bible’s Big Story lies in its presenting a counter sense of identity. That story focuses most of all on the politics internal to the Bible’s faith communities. We will turn to that focus in the next three posts.
[This is the 11th of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The 10th post in the series, “Trying to figure out peace theology,” may be found by clicking on this link. The 12th post, “Breaking the hold of territorial kingdoms” may be found by clicking on this link.]
Thinking Pacifism 
I like the manner in which you personify the Bible, Ted. In my experience too, the Bible is kind of like an actual Somebody, a person who leads and inspires, as well as Someone with whom I can debate, quibble, and brainstorm.
I like this clear explanation of Empire and its application to today. I see the Body of Christ (committed followers joined to live and work together) as our expression of the Kingdom of God
One thing that is striking about Jesus’ life and teaching, however accurately they’re relayed by the NT texts, is that he DEFIED and rejected the widespread expectations of many (likely most) Jews of the time. That was for an overtly political savior (king/messiah).
The other main faction probably further from Jesus than the Pharisees was the Roman-collaborating Saducees.
Within 35 or so years of Jesus’ crucifixion, enough Jews opted for warism as the preferred way of dealing with Roman oppression that they fomented a revolution doomed to failure (despite some surprising early success). The horrible result was the destruction, in 70, which set up 2 millennia of struggle we STILL are in the midst of. (This summary, of course, is oversimplified.)