Ted Grimsrud—October 21, 2025
Amidst its diversity, we may discern in the Bible a specific political sensibility. God has called into being a community to know God’s love and to embody that love so as to bless all the families of the earth. Torah provides a social framework for this blessing that includes mutual aid, welcome to the vulnerable, justice for all in the community, no social stratification, and a recognition that God’s blessings can be resisted and will be revoked when the community turns from the core teachings of Torah. Jesus then reinforces this Torah-based framework.
So, what happened to Christianity? My Christianity in the early 1970s little resembled the ideals of the Bible. Christians have tended more to be complicit with empire than oppose it. How did this happen that Christianity accommodated to empire? We have two reasons to repudiate such accommodation. First, to make it easier to recover the truths of the biblical story. Second, to help us find ways to break uncritical nationalism and American warism. We need self-awareness about the problematic of Christianity and empire in order to discern a new healing path.
Struggles with Rome
Early Christians did to some extent embody the way of Jesus, but always with difficulty. The picture presented in the seven messages to congregations in Asia in Revelation 2–3 applies to the first several generations of the Christian movement. In Revelation we meet a few churches that adhered closely to Jesus’s teaching and example and faced persecution. These tended to be small and poor. Others found more prosperity and comfort—but too easily collaborated with the surrounding culture. They risked losing their connection with Jesus and his message.
The Bible does not tell of a golden age when the community got everything right but of an ongoing struggle that continues to characterize Christianity. Those who embody Torah’s and Jesus’s message will always be at odds with their wider culture and tempted to compromise that message. The earliest Christians come from the margins of society. In time, the communities attract more people of higher social status and their antipathy toward the Empire lessens. Persecution of Christians continued as empire elites found that to scapegoat this fringe religious minority helped strengthen their hold on power. By the end of the third century CE, however, many in the churches looked for more accommodation with the Empire.
Thinking Pacifism 