Category: idolatry

The tragic American Empire story in light of the gospel

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Ted Grimsrud—October 24, 2025

I recognize my upbringing as a proud citizen in the world’s most powerful empire to be part of my identity. As I described previously, I experienced an eventful meeting between two world-defining stories—the American Empire met Jesus’s gospel of peace. American Christians tend to see faith and nation as fully compatible, even mutually reinforcing. In contrast, for me their meeting was a collision that forced me to make a choice. It had to be one story or the other.

I chose the Jesus story to be my defining story—and chose against the American Empire. That choice led me to affirm Christian pacifism and turn from the uncritical nationalism central the Empire story. I started to interpret the story of the American Empire without blinders. At the same time, I found the Bible to be a key source for a peace-oriented, anti-empire defining story. My fundamentalist Christian teachers had asserted a high view of the Bible as direct revelation from God. However, such an assertion had not protected them from uncritical nationalism. Rather than rejecting the Bible when I rejected fundamentalism, I started reading the Bible in a different way. I no longer ignored Jesus’s peace teaching as I had been taught; I made it central.

The basis for stepping away from uncritical nationalism

When I began to read the Bible for peace, I noticed its critique of uncritical nationalism. I noticed the Bible did not teach the submit-to-the-government message as Americans assumed. If the Bible be central, I would choose Jesus’s gospel of peace instead of uncritical nationalism. The Old Testament provides a template, in Torah, that critiques all human territorial kingdoms. Torah pointed to a new kind of kingdom committed to justice and the wellbeing of all its people. The Old Testament kingdom, though, in practice evolved ever more toward injustice, militarism, economic stratification, and corruption. The brokenness grew to a point where the prophets saw the kingdom’s leaders not as agents of God but as enemies of the original vision of a just society.

Eventually, those who retained a commitment to Torah made sustaining those convictions more important than remaining loyal to any kind of territorial kingdom. The story continues with Jesus’s ministry. He announced the presence of God’s kingdom as a non-territorial communal expression of the ways of Torah. Echoing Genesis 12, Jesus’s kingdom message meant to bless all the families of the earth. This blessing would not come through a close connection with territorial kingdoms (or nation-states). Rather, the blessing would come through the witness of countercultural communities that put convictions about the ways of Torah at the center.

Does this story have relevance for our contemporary world? Let me identify four biblical themes that speak to life amidst the world’s empires. (1) The practice of justice should define the aspirations of societies that seek to be healthy. This justice will center on care for the vulnerable of the community since a society cannot be healthy without the good health of those most easily exploited and discarded. (2) People in power should always be treated with skepticism. Power tends to corrupt. People in power tend to be deluded by their commitments to sustain that power at all costs. Such people should be pushed to guide the society toward justice with an expectation that they will likely tend toward serving their own interests and not those of the vulnerable in society. (3) The “horses and chariots” problem tends to define territorial kingdoms and leads to the proclivity to prepare for and engage in warfare (warism). The accumulation of weapons of war favors society’s wealthy and powerful and leads to devastating conflicts. (4) Throughout human history (and in the Bible’s stories), territorial kingdoms and nation-states have provided some of the central rivals to God as the objects of human trust. This type of idolatry, as Israel’s prophets show, leads directly to injustice.

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The Bible’s suspicion of the empires

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 4 Comments

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.

Continue reading “The Bible’s suspicion of the empires” →

It is hard to imagine the United States finding healing

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Ted Grimsrud—April 28, 2025

In the fifty plus years that I have been paying attention, I have felt that most Americans have been shielded from much of the brokenness of our society. Domestically, the people who suffer the most have generally been separated from the general population and shunted to unnoticed pockets of poverty and imprisonment. And throughout my lifetime, few Americans have been much aware of the brokenness we have visited on foreign lands through our wars and other interventions.

Now it seems that our political system has been degraded enough that the nation has put into power an administration that does not actually care that much to keep the brokenness hidden. And the future looks troubling for as far ahead as one can imagine. One could say that in light of our long history of causing harm around the world, we have a kind of grim justice being visited upon an ever-wider swath of Americans. However, you can be sure that the people at the top of our social pyramid (the ones most responsible for the suffering of the vulnerable at home and abroad) will themselves manage okay until the entire system collapses.

American delusions of goodness

I read something the other day that underscored my perception of the trouble we are in. David Brooks is a well-known columnist for the New York Times and author of numerous bestselling books on politics and social trends. He wrote an article in the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic called “I should have seen it coming” that various of my Facebook friends have linked to. Brooks is a kind of never-Trump Republican, so it is not surprising that his article focuses on how disastrous the second Trump presidency is for the US. He makes some good points, in criticizing Trump, but it was a different aspect of the article that troubled me more (not that I am not also troubled about Trump).

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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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Guardians of God’s shalom: The Old Testament prophets (Peace and the Bible #10)

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Ted Grimsrud—December 15, 2023

The Old Testament tells us that God provides salvation for God’s people as a gift—given out of God’s healing love, unearned, even unmerited by the people. The story presents two institutions linked with salvation, Torah and sacrifice. Both initially served as responses to the gift. First, the people received God’s acts of deliverance, then came gratitude. Such gratitude led to responses of obedience to God’s will for social life. These found expression in Torah and in ritualized expressions of commitment to God via sacrifice.

As the Hebrews’ political structures expanded and became centralized under the office of the king, their religious structures also became centralized around the Temple. With this, the original purposes of the Law and sacrifices were mostly forgotten. Torah originated as the framework for the Hebrews to concretize their liberation. Torah arranges for the economic viability of each household, resisting social stratification. Torah’s inheritance legislation, Sabbath year laws, and the ideal of the Year of Jubilee all pushed in the direction of widespread participation in economic wellbeing. The Law also placed special emphasis on the community tending to the welfare of vulnerable people—widows, orphans, and aliens (“for you too were aliens in Egypt before God delivered you,” Leviticus 19).

The idea of what we could call “God’s preferential option for the poor” in many ways defines what ancient Israel said about God. It arose as a core part of the understanding from the very beginning. The sacrificial practices, above all else, were intended to be linked with the faithful responses of the people, in gratitude, to God’s liberating work.

Problems with law and sacrifices

Torah meant neither the Law nor the sacrifices to be means to salvation but rather responses to the saving works of God. Torah meant for the Law and sacrifices to enhance justice in the community. Once they were established, though, the danger inevitably arose that either or both would be separated from their grounding in God’s merciful liberating works. As memory of the intent of the Law faded, the story tells of the community’s tendency to focus on external expressions, easily enforced and susceptible to becoming tools of people in power. These tendencies led to legalism and, eventually, in the prophets’ views, to removing the Law from its living heart of liberation from slavery and concern for the wellbeing of vulnerable people.

Continue reading “Guardians of God’s shalom: The Old Testament prophets (Peace and the Bible #10)” →

The meaning of “no other gods before me” [Peace and the Bible #7]

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Ted Grimsrud—December 4, 2023

The Christian Bible gives us quite a bit of material about what are human problems. It presents idolatry as perhaps the most fundamental human problem, the root of many other problems. But what is idolatry? I’m not sure the Bible is totally clear about that. But this is what I think: Idolatry is giving ultimate loyalty to things other than God. When things become idols, even if they are generally good things, they tend to become too important, too demanding, and too likely to push people to hurt other people and to hurt nature.

That leads to another question, though, what does it mean to be called to give loyalty to God above everything else? Is this call about believing in a certain doctrine? Belonging to a certain religion? Having some kind of mystical connection? Or is it something else? I will opt for the “something else” in this blog post by reflecting on one of the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). What might that command mean for us today?

What kind of God?

The first issue might be to reflect on what we have in mind when we say “God” as the object of our trust. Typically, Christians view God as a transcendent “person,” a being who exists outside of time and outside of our physical space. This God is understood to be the one and only God. However, these notions of God are not all that apparent in the Bible. They owe more to post-biblical creeds, confessions, and other doctrines.

Continue reading “The meaning of “no other gods before me” [Peace and the Bible #7]” →

What are Christians saved from? [Questioning faith #11]

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Ted Grimsrud—December 15, 2022

“Salvation” is one of those Christian words that we use a great deal but aren’t always clear about what we mean by it. In my recent posts, I have focused on how we might find salvation without really addressing what it is. One way to work at understanding what salvation is is to reflect on what we are saved from. Other words in the Bible that seem to be rough synonyms with salvation include “liberation,” “redemption,” and “ransom.” All of these seem to have in mind being delivered or freed from something. What are we saved from?

The old story

My first encounter with Christianity came when I joined a Baptist church when I was 17 years old. The main message about salvation I heard was that, in reality, we are saved from God. More specifically, we are saved from God’s judgment, God’s punitive justice, God’s wrath. Or, we could say, we are saved from hell, from eternal torment in separation from God. The means to gain this salvation was very narrow and particular. We must accept Jesus as our personal savior, which means to believe in the efficacy of his sacrificial crucifixion on my behalf, a death he took upon himself in order to receive, as our substitute, the punishment that we deserve.

Because I did not grow up with this theology and had a much more positive sense of my place in the world, that salvation story did not scare me in the way that it has so many other people. I didn’t have the deep-seated anxiety about whether I was okay or not that many lifelong Christians seem to have. Despite not feeling that anxiety, I did try to believe that story—though I was always uneasy about it—until a few years into my journey when I began to learn of another way to read and apply the story.

I won’t go into all the problems here with the kind of atonement theology I was taught. I’ll just note that from the beginning I sensed that the story of Jesus and his love was not fully compatible with belief in an angry and punitive God. Though I don’t remember thinking of the issue in these terms, I would say now that part of my problem with what I was taught was that my sense of the human problem was not that God was displeased with us so much as that too many human beings gave allegiance to oppressive and hurtful ideologies and institutions.

In retrospect, I think it is important to remember that the period in my life that I became a Christian, left home for college, and initially worked out my theology coincided with the final years of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that drove President Richard Nixon from office. I became much more interested in social issues during this time and discovered and embraced Christian pacifism. I was eager for a theology that would help me make sense of the world I was living in and that would empower peaceable social ethics. I realized the salvation story I had been told wasn’t doing that. The key for me came when I realized that Jesus himself talked about his cross as a model for his followers, not as a necessary sacrifice to satisfy God’s punitive justice. How do we best understand salvation in light of Jesus’s cross as a model?

Continue reading “What are Christians saved from? [Questioning faith #11]” →

How empires go bad: A peaceable reading of Romans (part 2; 1:16-32) [Peaceable Romans #9]

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Ted Grimsrud—March 7, 2022

More than a treatise on doctrine or a discussion preoccupied with the Christian religion and the Jewish religion, the book of Romans is a presentation focused on faithful living. And for Paul, faithful living meant embodying the way of Jesus. As I discussed in the first of this long series of posts working through the teaching of Romans, Paul begins Romans by setting up a contrast between the gospel of God as presented by Jesus and what we could call the “gospel” of the Roman Empire.

In the second half of chapter 1 of the book of Romans, Paul provides an analysis of the domination dynamics of the great nations of the world, which are the dynamics of idolatry that refuses to express gratitude to the Creator but instead puts trust in human creations (including empires and emperors). In trusting in creatures rather than the Creator, human societies inevitably ground their priorities in exploitation rather than gratitude and evolve toward injustice and violence. Without stating it explicitly, Paul seems clearly to evoke the awareness his readers in Rome would have of the particular injustices and violence of their city’s leadership class.

The gospel of God vs. the gospel of Caesar

As we continue to the following chapters of Romans, we will see that Paul’s focus in the book as a whole is not on a critique of Empire but on developing his alternative gospel. If the Empire’s gospel is a one of death, what does a gospel of life look like? If the Empire’s way of life leads to injustice, what is an alternative way of life that leads to justice?

Continue reading “How empires go bad: A peaceable reading of Romans (part 2; 1:16-32) [Peaceable Romans #9]” →

Paul’s critique of idolatry, part 2 – The religious temptation [Peaceable Romans #4]

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Ted Grimsrud—January 24, 2022

One of the ways that the Bible is most helpful for peacemakers is in its critique of idolatry. The Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans especially offers an analysis of the dynamics where lack of gratitude to the Creator leads to trusting in created things rather than in the Creator —things such as human political and human religious structures. Such trust feeds a spiral of injustice and violence as seen in the social world of the Roman Empire—and other empires since. We also see a legacy of injustice and violence in religious communities.

In the first of three blog posts, “Paul’s critique of idolatry, part 1 – The political temptation,” I looked at Paul’s critique of the Empire’s idolatrous ways in Romans 1, suggesting that this critique has an on-going validity. However, the first chapter of Romans needs to be read in conjunction with Romans 2, where Paul offers an analysis and critique of a more subtle kind of idolatry—idols probably closer to home for his readers then and now.

Idolatry II: Religious boundary maintenance

Paul’s critique of Empire-idolatry has its own validity and importance. However, it should not be read in isolation from what follows in Romans. Paul combines his Empire-idolatry critique with a critique of the way people in the covenant community embrace a different kind of idolatry. Following pioneering Pauline scholar James Dunn, I will use the term “works of the law” for what Paul criticizes—in distinction from the law understood as the original revelation of Torah through Moses, something that Paul embraces. Paul’s lack of precision in his use of the term “law” makes it difficult to perceive the nuances of his argument.

Dunn sees Paul’s use of the term “works of the law” in Galatians 2:16 (“We know that a person is justified, not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ”) as helpful for helping us distinguish between Paul’s critique of how the law was being understood among his opponents in the churches and Paul’s strong affirmation of the continuing validity of the law (Romans 13:8-10: “The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’”).

In his groundbreaking essay from the early 1980s, “The new perspective on Paul,” Dunn summarizes his core point: “Paul’s objection is not to ritual law, but to exclusivist or particularist attitudes which came to expression in and are reinforced by certain rituals. Not the rituals as such, but the attitude behind them, expressed typically as a ‘boasting’ in works of the law (Rom 2:17-23; 3:27ff).” Behind Paul’s critique here is his own earlier use of works of the law as boundary markers. He protected the “true faith” with extreme violence. Paul as Saul the Pharisee, before he met Jesus, had made an idol of works of the law in a way that made him guilty of the same kind of death-dealing injustice as the leaders of the Roman Empire in his harsh persecution of Jesus’s followers.

Continue reading “Paul’s critique of idolatry, part 2 – The religious temptation [Peaceable Romans #4]” →

Paul’s critique of idolatry, part 1 – The political temptation [Peaceable Romans #3]

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Ted Grimsrud—January 17, 2022

I believe that one of the ways the stories and teachings of the Bible speak to our world today is in how they criticize the dynamics of idolatry. The biblical stories often portray violence and injustice having roots in idolatry. Trusting in things other than the creator God who made all human beings in the divine image leads to a diminishment of the value of some human beings—a prerequisite for injustice and violence. Torah, the prophets, and Jesus all emphasize the centrality of loving the neighbor as part of what it means to love God above all else.

I think that the writings of Paul the apostle are also an important part of the critique of idolatry and the envisioning of peaceable life. This is the first of a three-part series of posts on Paul’s critique of idolatry. Especially the book of Romans emphasizes idolatry and how to overcome it. Noting the importance of idolatry in Paul’s thought helps us recognize how closely connected Paul was with Jesus and the Old Testament prophets. All too often, Christian theology has tended to see more discontinuity between Paul and his predecessors than is warranted—or helpful.

The struggle against idols characterizes the biblical story from the concern with “graven images” in the Ten Commandments down to the blasphemies of the Beast in Revelation. Certainly, at times the battle against idols itself crosses the line into violence and injustice. However, for my purposes here I will assume that those accounts stand over against the overall biblical story. When anti-idolatry takes the form of violence, a new idolatry has taken its place. Our challenge is to seek to overcome evil without becoming evil ourselves.

The critique of idolatry

We find in the biblical critique of idolatry perspectives that are important, even essential for responding to the problems of violence in our world today. 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 Christ. It could well be that forces that underwrite violence today—loyalty to warring nations, labeling those outside our religious or ethnic circle as less than fully human, placing a higher priority on gathering wealth than on community wellbeing—are contemporary versions of the idolatrous dynamics that biblical prophets condemn.

Continue reading “Paul’s critique of idolatry, part 1 – The political temptation [Peaceable Romans #3]” →