God & Empire - 2

This is the second installment in my ongoing discussion of the new book God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, by John Dominic Crossan. God & Empire - 1 is here.

Chapter 1 - Empire and the Barbarism of Civilization
In the first part of this chapter, Crossan gives an amazingly concise history of the rise of imperial power in ancient Rome. (As a brief aside, I was pleased to find that I was rather well acquainted with this history due to my faithful viewing of HBOs, Rome, for the past two seasons. Unfortunately, this series has come to an untimely end - just like Julius, I suppose. I hate to admit it but I guess I'm in the "everything-I know-about-Roman-history-I-learned-on-HBO" camp).

Crossan quotes Michael Mann, professor of Sociology at UC Berkley, and author of the four-volume, Sources of Social Power and then summarizes those sources:

1. Military power: the monopoly or control of force and violence
2. Economic power: the monopoly or control of labor and production
3. Political power: the monopoly or control of organization and institution
4. Ideological power: the monopoly or control of interpretation and meaning.

Crossan goes on to identify how Rome embodied each of these, with a special focus on ideological power as "Roman Imperial Theology." By now many of us are familiar with this theology which taught that Caesar was Lord and the Son of God, but here Crossan really makes the argument from archeology and history without losing track of the fact that he is not writing to a group of Biblical historians and ANE archaeologists. It's great to have this argument so nicely laid out in a few pages. He concludes this section with a question that highlights the tension that Jesus stepped into:

Imagine this question. There was a human being in the first century who was called "Divine," "Son of God," "God," and "God from God," whose titles were "Lord," "Redeemer," "Liberator," and "Savior of the World." Who was that person?

The amazing truth, Crossan tells us, is that "before Jesus ever existed, all those terms belonged to Caesar Augustus. To proclaim them of Jesus the Christ was thereby to deny them of Caesar the Augustus."

The rest of this chapter concerns two questions:

First, "are all empires, past and present, but deeper manifestations of what we call 'civilization'?" This questions harks back to his axiom, "the normalcy of civilization's violence." So, the question he address next is, are all empires necessarily civilizations of violence characterized by the sequence "first victory, then peace," or "peace through victory?" The answer he gives, seven pages later is, "Yes!" Civilization is, by definition a violent trap.

Second, "Is the normal imperialism of human civilization simply an inevitable manifestation of human nature? Is our addictive and escalatory violence not just something we made but something we are? Is the human race, in other words, as doomed as the saber-toothed tiger?" His short answer to this one is, "No!" the violence of civilization is not inevitable. There have been alternatives in history. For evidence he points to the monastery as an alternative lifestyle as a "semicommunal or fully communal life witnessing that violence is not the inevitability of human nature but only the normalcy of human civilization."

In the next chapter we turn to one of the great resources of this book - an clearly articulated Biblical account of violence in the Bible, highlighting the "ambiguity of power" and violence in the history of God.

For now, as we think about our new American Empire, can you see the "normalcy of human civilization?" I leave you with this one chilling quote which Crossan shares from The Nuremberg Diary, quoting the words of Reichsmarchal Herman Goring:

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

And that was written in 1947!

Comments

[Doug Morgan]

Crossan does a magnificent job of drawing the reader into seeing the significance of the titles that the NT ascribes to Jesus. Desire to praise and worship Him as "Savior", "Redeemer", "Son of God" and so forth, would, it seems to me, make us eager to take on board the historical & political content of those titles. How could we sing praises using those titles while ignoring their meaning?

Many thanks for the posts, Ryan. They allow me the luxury of skimming here and there, and still be confident of not missing the overall picture or the most important passages.

[Ryan Bell]

Doug, you just opened my mind to an amazing possibility in worship. What would it mean, in worship, to acknowledge these political realities? It's really about idolatries or misplaced trust, isn't it? If Jesus is Lord and I'm singing about that every week in church, what is it that ISN'T Lord. What are the powers that wish to be Lord in my life that's I'm saying "No" to. What is the implied "No" in my "Yes" to Jesus.

"Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God." - Psalm 20:7