semper reformanda

All Over the Shop

2008-05-26T13:16:00.004-05:00

To those of you who were/are involved in the dialogue on the James Cone thread, On White Man's Religion, I apologize for the big delay in my response. I'm sure most of you have lost interest by now, but I'll be attempting a comprehensive response within the next few days.

In the meantime, I've been engaged about my Romans 13 paper by some members of Corpus Paulinum. Loren Rossen and I have been debating how "anti-imperial" Paul's program really was. Loren has been influenced by John Barclay's critique of Wright and the "Paul and Empire Coalition," while I am in substantial agreement with Wright's (2nd half of audio file) and Jewett's responses to Barclay.

I am about to reply to Richard Fellows's suggestion that we combine the best insights of Bruce Winter (benefaction convention) and Mark Nanos (synagogue authorities) with the hidden transcript approach I take up.

Meanwhile, my friend Zack Exley, a.k.a. the Garbage Man, has been over on Jim Wallis's God's Politics blog, challenging us not to let the empire capture our imaginations by limiting our political engagements to local levels. Zack, a political organizer and "recovering political consultant," wants to show that tackling structural issues and moving toward systemic revolution makes us more, not less, faithful to the original Jesus movement. What do you think?

The Function of Church Unity

2008-05-17T08:32:00.011-05:00

The internal unity of a Christian church can be attained or maintained today only by minimizing and playing down the radical historical oppositions that divide its members. In other words, one must pass over in silence such matters as color, social class, political ideology, the national situation, and the place of the country in the international market. At the same time one must stress the values that are presumably shared by all the members of the Church in question. In short, the Church must pay a high price for unity. It must say that the issues of suffering, violence, injustice, famine, and death are less critical and decisive than religious formulas and rites.

At this point someone might complain, with some reason, that I am erring by going to the opposite extreme; that I am wrong in placing only religious rites and formulas over against things that are historically decisive. After all, one might object, don't the shared features go beyond mere formulas and rites? Don't they include a deep faith and general conceptions about God and the importance of eternal life?

If I do not place these latter issues in the balance scale, it is precisely because they are shared in common by all. One person pictures a God who allows dehumanization whereas another person rejects such a God and believes only in a God who unceasingly fights against such things. Now those two gods cannot be the same one. So a common faith does not exist within the Church. The only thing shared in common is the formula used to express the faith. And since the formula does not really identify anything, are we not justified in calling it a hollow formula vis-a-vis the decisive options of history?

It would seem that the Church cannot arrogate to itself the divine right of choosing between the oppressors and the oppressed precisely because of this overevaluation of Christian unity.

Juan Luis Segundo
The Liberation of Theology, Orbis: 1976, pp. 42-3.

Romans 13: Index

2008-05-13T17:45:00.002-05:00

Romans 13:1-7: A Charter for Political Activism!

By Thom Stark

R13/23: Coda

2008-05-13T17:30:00.000-05:00

A CODA ON HIDDEN TRANSCRIPTS AND THE SCIENCE OF EXEGESIS

One of the obvious difficulties with using James C. Scott’s categories of public and hidden transcripts for reading ancient texts is that it is not always clear, given our distance from the social location, exactly where the hidden transcript is surfacing. This is displayed in the numerous different possibilities presented by those who have sought to apply Scott’s categories to Romans 13. Though most of these possibilities are complementary, surely they cannot all have been in the mind of Paul at once! But what is clear is that after the work of James C. Scott, those who want to take the texts seriously, whether religiously, historically, or both together, are not going to be able to do so without paying attention to the discourse dynamics Scott has observed to be in one way or another common to all environments in which asymmetrical power relations obtain. Using Scott’s categories is not “playing fast and loose with the text,” as it may appear to some; on the contrary, it is a practice we must adopt if we are going to treat these texts with the respect they deserve as products of real, historical, and human struggle.

Although the fact remains that all of the problems of Romans 13 may never be resolved exegetically, that is all right, because the problems of Romans 13 were not originally exegetical problems at all, but political ones. Or rather, the problem is that too many scholars persist in denial of the fact that exegesis all too frequently has been just one more bureaucratic function of power politics. Only as more scholars determine consciously to inhabit the political sphere and stand, and live, in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed will the floodgates open up for them, bursting with new multidimensional exegetical possibilities, not for commentaries, but for communities, who are gathered around the text desperate to find the strength and the wisdom necessary to resist conformity to this present evil age.

R13/22: Charter for Political Activism

2008-05-13T00:00:00.002-05:00

It should be clear by now that in Romans 13:1-7, Paul is saying relatively little about government qua government. Paul’s concern is not to demarcate the differences between just and unjust governments, because Paul is writing to a people who obviously are and have been the subjects of systemic Roman injustice for some time. Rather than constituting a treatise on the state, Romans 12-13 taken together is meant to contrast the Roman order against the body of Christ in order to show how the two stand in opposition to one another. In doing this, Paul is also concerned to display how the body of Christ the crucified one is to wrestle with that very real opposition in the very real world of domination and subordination. The strategies Paul suggests, much like the strategies suggested by Jesus of Nazareth (Matt. 5:38-42), are liberating practices which would, if their adoption became pervasive, effectively undermine the very structures of a Roman society built along lines of class, race, and gender difference. Isaak is correct when he notes that

while Paul is expressing a prodemocracy worldview, no longer valued by most westerners, the hermeneutical gap can still be bridged by exercising imaginative appropriation. The moral vision that Paul tapped into calls Christians to choose voluntarily to comply with and to engage the basic political/social structures of the society within which the they live without giving up their primary allegiance, which is reserved for God’s rule/reign. In this way, the Christian political responsibility involves subverting the political system from within and inviting all creation to join in God’s ongoing mission to bring life and wholeness to all. (2003: 45)

Although many have read Romans 13:1-7 as a charter for conservative, political quietism, it is now clear from a three-dimensional engagement with the text that Paul is in fact calling for strategic, grassroots political activism. With this in view, it is no wonder at all that just a few years after the writing of this letter, Nero would deem it necessary, for the sake of Roman order, to unsheathe that decorative sword of his and cut off Paul’s seditious head.

R13/21: The Text in Context

2008-05-12T00:00:00.005-05:00

Paul’s letter to the Romans has been seen as, among other things, a systematic theological treatise on salvation by faith alone, a missionary support letter, an apology defending the righteousness/justice of God in his dealings with humanity, an apology to the Jews defending Paul’s gospel of Gentile inclusion, an apology to the Gentiles defending Israel’s continuing role in the story of salvation, and a pastoral letter seeking to reconcile divisions along Jew/Gentile lines within the Roman congregations (Dunn 1993: 839-41). The fact that so many different approaches have been characterized as representing the “central issue” driving the epistle demonstrates, or should demonstrate, that there is not in fact one central concern streamlining throughout Romans (840), but a plurality of concerns that converge upon one another. There may be a unifying theme in their convergence, however, which until recently has gone almost entirely unnoticed by interpreters. The predominant readings, captivated as they have been by constantinian sensibilities, have failed to see the myriad ways Paul utilizes key words from the vocabulary of the Roman imperial propagandists in order to tell the story of Jesus of Nazareth.

Noting the problem of imperial persecution that lurks in the background of Romans—evident in the historical records as well as in the text itself (e.g. Rom. 8:35-38; 12:14-21), Sylvia Keesmaat has shown how from the very outset of the letter, Paul’s language represents a “direct challenge to the empire” (2007: 142). Indeed, the central terms Paul uses in his programmatic declaration in 1:16-17 “are all terms weighted with symbolic and mythic import in the empire” (143). Paul speaks of gospel (euangelion), salvation (sôterion), faithfulness (pistis) and righteousness/justice (dikaiosynê). “In the face of the imperial assertion that Caesar was the one who brought ‘good news,’ the gospel of imperial victory over enemies, Paul describes his own message in terms of a different gospel.”

From the beginning, Paul sets about redefining the very vocabulary the empire has put to work in self-legitimation. Although the Caesars are described in the Roman gospel as the “sons of gods,” a royal appellation in the ancient world, Paul proclaims a “gospel of God” (euangelion theou) centered around a different “son of God,” the one having been raised from the dead after his execution in the name of Pax Romana, and thus named the “son of God in power” (dynamei). Furthermore, “to the Romans, at the heart of an empire that lauded fides (the Latin equivalent of the Greek pistis, faith or faithfulness) as an appropriate response to the salvation of Caesar, Paul asserts in 1:16 that this gospel is the power of salvation to everyone who has faith.” Thus it is clear that Paul is “deliberately weaving together the central terms of the empire and replacing them with the story of salvation by a different gospel, another faithfulness, and a different justice” (143).[1]

Paul has set up his gospel in contrast to the euangelion of Rome, and these currents run throughout the letter, displaying the superiority of salvation by faith/loyalty to Jesus the Messiah to the salvation of the “New Age” promised by Augustus, and now again by Nero (144). In chs. 1-2 Paul presents the scope of the problem, showing that even those who profess to have wrought salvation for the whole world are subjected to a world still thoroughly in need of salvation. This is because the world has rejected God’s justice, and instead has embraced false gods that appeal to the human appetite for power and privilege. In chs. 3-8 Paul displays the scope of God’s salvation, wrought through the suffering of his “son” (royalty language) at the hands of the powers that be. Moreover, in the midst of a pervasively anti-Semitic empire, Paul proclaims a salvation that is “for the Jew first, but also for the Greek,” a salvation which in chs. 9-11 Paul argues, contrary to the salvation proclaimed by the Roman propagandists, is truly universal in scope. In Christ God has brought together into one harmonious body politic both Jew and Gentile, a feat no Roman Peacemaker (Caesar) had ever accomplished.

It is at this point, “at the end of a very detailed argument in which Paul outlines his hopes for salvation for both Jew and Gentile, [that] we find these chapters that flesh out the shape of a new community in Christ” (Keesmaat 2007: 143). Indeed, we are not even able “to grasp the fullness of his soteriological argument until chapters 12 and 13” (Stubbs 2004: 189). Now Paul is ready to bring this “salvation of God” to bear on the real world and describe what this new Jew-Gentile body politic looks like in practice. Paul achieves this by contrasting the Christian body politic (12:1-21 and 13:8-14) with the Roman body politic (13:1-7), bringing the discontinuity between the two into austere relief. Finally, chs. 14-15 continue to flesh out the attitudes and practices necessary for the new body politic to sustain itself in an evil and hostile age.

Now that we have situated our pericope within the broader scope of the letter as a whole, we will take a moment to examine 13:1-7 more closely within its immediate context, from the beginning of chapter 12 to the end of chapter 13.

In 12:1, Paul appeals to the Roman congregations, not to offer sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem, not to offer sacrifices to the Roman gods or to the imperial cult, but to offer their own bodies as living sacrifices, which is a true spirituality, in contrast to the spiritualities of the world that produce only systemic injustice and sexual exploitation. This true spirituality, of course, turns out to be embodied in a communal life marked by justice, nonviolence, and love, as we will see.

In 12:2, Paul admonishes the Christian body not to be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world. “This world,” as Stubbs has adeptly displayed, is a system of injustices perpetrated in the name of peace through an ideological construct in which the Roman order is simply the way things are. But the salvation Paul proclaimed in chs. 3-8—far from being an otherworldly hope—goes to work exactly here, by making possible a renewal of the mind capable of transforming the new body politic from enslavement to the categories and social stratifications of the Roman order, to the embodiment of God’s will in the habituation of new and just social formations.

In 12:3-8, these social formations are explicitly marked off from those of “the world.” The new and just social formations of the body (politic) of Christ are embodied in humility (in contrast to honor), mutual subordination or equality (in contrast to hierarchical relationships), and unity in diversity (in contrast to unity through conformity).

In 12:9-13, the body of Christ is further contrasted from the body of Caesar, in that the Christians are to be motivated to good works not by compulsion or by the pursuit of personal honor, but through genuine love for the other. Rather than outdoing one another in gaining honor, as in the Roman order, Christians are to compete to see who can give the most honor. More significantly, the ones to whom most honor is due are not those capable of reciprocity, but the poor, the lowly—those who demonstrate a need for hospitality.

Considering that the Jews who were expelled in 49 C.E. by the Edict of Claudius had only recently returned to Rome, it is likely that Paul had them in mind as those in need of hospitality. This is further supported by the fact that Paul here refers to those in need as “the saints” (tôn hagiôn), a word he later uses twice (15:25, 31) specifically to refer to Jewish Christians. For those in the church who were Roman citizens, or for those who wished to advance themselves, there was nothing to be gained (in Roman terms) from honoring Semites with hospitality and affection. But those who are “aglow with the Spirit, [they] serve the Lord” (12:11), which is to say, the Jewish Lord, not the Roman one.

Yet in 12:14, Paul reminds the new body politic that honoring the despised ones, in many cases the Jews, does not entail taking sides with them against their persecutors. On the contrary, the new body politic is marked not by any of the parochial in-group loyalties that comprise the Roman order; rather, the new body politic is marked by love even of enemy.

Of course, as vv. 15-16 display, this love of enemy is not to replace care for and solidarity with the enemy’s victims. The two are to remain in balance, or else the new body politic descends into conformity to the old. The Gentiles are to “associate with the lowly,” to “live in harmony” with the Jews, to mourn with them, and to rejoice with them. They are not to be separate peoples, but one body. It is in this unity that the strength is found, together, to love their now common enemy. In a very significant way, Paul is encouraging the Gentile Christians to make enemies. By identifying themselves with the oppressed, the Gentile Christians are effectively relinquishing their status as good Roman citizens, and are compelled (by love) to undergo a process of conversion through which their most basic loyalties are reinterpreted and renounced. They learn to look upon their very homeland as upon foreign soil.

In 12:17-18, Paul acknowledges that they will continue to be the victims of violent aggression, and that peace between them and their enemies is not ultimately up to them. The Romans will continue to perpetuate violence and hostility—that is, they will continue to tax, stabilize, and make peace (cf. John 10:10). But in contrast, the new body politic does not perpetuate cycles of violence. On the contrary, as 12:19-21 displays, the new body politic is liberated and empowered to disrupt the cycle of violence by extending to their oppressors the same love and care they have (with difficulty) learned to show to one another, even, especially, the lowliest among them.

In 13:1 Paul takes up the public transcript as he moves to make the contrast between the two body politics explicit. According to “this world,” to which the Roman Christians had formerly subjected themselves, and by which they continue to be subjected, Rome’s dominion over its people has been given to it by God (i.e. fortune not violence). If Rome were not divinely instituted, then why is Rome in power? Thus, Roman hegemony is divinely instituted. It is the most natural thing in the world. To challenge this order is to challenge nature itself. Those who challenge the order incur “God’s wrath,” usually administered via crucifixion, as it was with Jesus of Nazareth and tens of thousands of others who wrongly preached any gospel other than Caesar’s. Clearly, these governors are in the right—they would never crucify a good man. Only those who oppose God by opposing Rome deserve to be punished. For who in their right mind would oppose God? But you have nothing to fear from Rome if you do good things—like heal the sick, cast out demons, restore the outcast, give everything you have to the poor, speak out against religious exploitation, castigate extortionists and offer alternative economic systems of mutuality and solidarity. Do good things like that and Rome will commend you publicly. Rome will treat you like royalty. After all, God put Rome here not to be served, but to serve—to serve the interests of the people. But if you break Rome’s law, look out! If you undermine Rome’s authority, beware! Nero may love clemency, but he’ll sign your death warrant, for the stability of the region, if you force his hand. He may detest drawing his sword, but it’s certainly not there for decoration. He’ll use it in a heartbeat if peace is at stake. He’ll regret having to have done it, but he is a servant of God. He has no choice but to bring down God’s wrath, on God’s behalf, upon any and all enemies of the state. Therefore, you might want to consider just giving him a little bow as he passes by, not just to avoid his wrath—which he hates to exercise, by the way—but because it’s a matter of conscience. What possible reason could you have not to want to wholly devote yourself to such an honorable servant-leader? It’s a matter of conscience. That’s also why you pay your taxes. It’s helpful to think about your friendly neighborhood tax collectors like priests. Just think how devoted they are to what they do. They’ve devoted their lives to ensuring that each and every individual soul has the opportunity to give thanks to Nero. After all, we owe him big for saving us from our own barbarisms. That’s why we give everybody what we owe them. Tribute to the tribute collectors. Custom taxes to the guys with swords in the living room. Fear to the good guys. Honor to those who deserve honor.

The significant thing is that, even though the rationale Paul provides for voluntary subordination is obviously bogus, Paul still means to give the instructions that come through in the performance of the public transcript. Like Philo, Paul is promoting “caution” over “absolute frankness of speech.” Paul knows that despite the propaganda about Nero’s temperance, Rome’s wrath will be unleashed swiftly and devastatingly upon any rebellion. Thus, although Paul is using irony to expose the fraudulence of the official transcript, subordination is still the prudent policy.

But in 13:8-10, Paul offers the real explanation for the new body politic’s subservience to the old, securing vv. 1-7 within an inclusio on love for enemy/love for the other (ton heteron). In the new body politic, enemies are not reviled but humanized. The new body politic, through the mutual love its members have learned to share with one another, is empowered in turn to love the wholly other, to give to all human beings more than is their due. The payment of taxes, the offering of honor, these are no longer offered on the terms imposed by the domination system. They are offered willingly, and freely, not because those “above them,” by virtue of their very status, are naturally owed such things, but because the new body politic must learn to respect the God-given dignity of all people. To deny it in the enemy is to deny it in oneself. Thus, the “enemy” of 12:14-21 has become the “neighbor” in 13:8-10. Rather than perpetuate enmity by opposing Rome, or by continuing to conform to subjection on terms of the official transcript, the new body politic is called to engage the enemy with “transforming initiatives,” such as, for instance, offering food and drink in lieu of curses and bloodshed (cf. 2 Kings 6:8-23, esp. vv. 22-23). Such a strategy takes the initiative away from the oppressor and puts the initiative in the hands of the oppressed. The powerless are empowered to resist, not the enemy, but enmity itself.

In 13:11-14 Paul concludes the section begun in 12:1 by alluding to the day of the Lord’s coming, the day of salvation in which the people of God are finally delivered from the domination of ruthless, godless powerholders. This is the day in which “God’s vengeance” (12:19) comes to bear on their oppressors. Many have suggested that 12:19 is fulfilled in 13:4, as if Paul is saying that the Roman order, not the individual, is the proper executor of God’s vengeance. But the reality is that the Roman order is only a parody of that role. By ascribing to themselves the role of divine avenger, the Roman kings have only sealed their doom. For ultimately, if they persist in it, they will become the victims of their own violence.

Yet although this deliverance is held up in the Christian community as a future hope, the undoing of their oppressors is not their concern. They are not to brood in the night wishing violence upon their enemies. They are not to be marked by any of the behavior typical of Roman emperors and elites (drunkenness, orgies, jealousies). These are the deeds of a bygone age. But the day is dawning, and God’s new world order is already breaking in, whenever and wherever the people of God wear their “armor of light,” militating a subversive program of uninhibited love, radical mutuality, and tangible peace.

Click Here To View The Bibliography.

[1] For more on the counter-imperial character of Paul’s gospel, see Wright (2000: 160-83, esp. pp. 170-73); also Elliott (2000). For more on reading Romans in particular in an imperial context, see, for instance, Jewett (2004); but especially Elliott (2007).

R13/20: Further Exegesis

2008-05-11T00:00:00.002-05:00

There are at least two points of exegetical interest that remain. The first concerns the translation of v. 6, specifically, locating the referent of auto touto (this very thing), which the NIV claims refers to “governing.” The second involves the meaning of anthistemi (resist) in v. 2.

Auto touto. The NIV translates 13:6 to read:

This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing.

There are multiple problems with this translation, the first of which is that the translators have gratuitously added two English words—“authorities” and “governing” are nowhere to be found in the Greek—effectively solidifying their interpretation of the text by embedding it in the translation. The Greek actually reads: dia touto gar kai phorous teleite. leitourgoi gar theou eisin eis auto touto proskarterountes.

A literal translation would read:

For this also is why you pay taxes. For God’s priests [or God’s ministers] are constantly occupying themselves with this very thing.

The NIV has gratuitously inserted the word “authorities” as the subject of the clause, when in fact leitourgoi (ministers/priests) is in the nominative case, clearly the subject. The participle, proskarterountes, functions grammatically as the object of the subject’s action: For God’s priests (leitourgoi gar theou) are (eisin) constantly occupying themselves (proskarterountes) with this very thing (eis auto touto). The NIV has given the participle its own special clause (who give their full time to governing), but they have done so without any exegetical warrant.The other gratuitous addition is the word “governing.” This is not in the Greek. The Greek says “eis auto touto” (to this very thing), and the referent is actually ambiguous. But the NIV has anachronistically projected modern taxation ideals back onto the Roman taxation system, by suggesting that Paul is arguing that taxes are necessary because they help the state to govern well. But as many have shown (e.g. Keesmaat 2007: 151), the vast majority of ancient tax dollars did not go to governing, but to military expansion and to the aggrandizement of the imperial cult. While auto touto could be a reference to governing, the only mention Paul has made remotely related to governing is in v. 4, which speaks of the terror of the sword. If this “governing” is the “very thing” Paul had in mind to support by encouraging to pay their taxes those in the church who had just been displaced en masse at sword point, his reasoning would hardly have been satisfactory to his hearers.

There is an alternative reading. Grammatically, it is possible that the leitourgoi theou are not members of the Roman bureaucracy at all, but the Christians themselves. This line would read, “This is also why you pay taxes, for God’s priests (i.e. all Christians) are constantly busying themselves with (paying taxes).” But this reading is highly unlikely, especially if we take the chiastic structure of the text to be at all determinative (see above, p. 18).

Ultimately, Herzog’s reading (1994: 358) is the most likely, in which “this very thing,” the thing with which the “ministers of God” are constantly busying themselves, is the collection of taxes itself. Besides being grammatically preferable, it also has the virtue of corresponding rather cogently to the historical situation.

Anthistemi. In 13:2, Paul uses the word anthesteken (resist), a cognate of anthistemi. This is significant because it is the same word used in Matthew 5:39, usually translated, “Do not resist one who is evil.”[1] Wink has shown decisively that “resist” in Matthew 5:39 indicates armed, militant resistance, as in the formation of a militia. Here I quote Wink at length:

Resistance implies “counteractive aggression,” a response to hostilities initiated by someone else. Liddell-Scott defines anthistemi as to “set against esp. in battle, withstand.” Ephesians 6:13 is exemplary of its military usage: “Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand [antistenai, literally, to draw up battle ranks against the enemy] in the evil day, and having done all, to stand [stenai, literally, to close ranks and continue to fight].” The term is used in the LXX primarily for armed resistance in military encounters (44 out of 71 times). Josephus uses anthistemi for violent struggle 15 out of 17 times, Philo 4 out of 10. Jesus’ answer is set against the backdrop of the burning question of forcible resistance to Rome. In that context, “resistance” could have only one meaning: lethal violence. Stasis, the noun form of stenai, means “a stand,” in the military sense of facing off against an enemy. By extension it came to mean a “party formed for insurrection” (so also Luke 23:19, 25), in Acts 19:40 as “rioting,” and in Acts 23:10 as “violent dissension.”

In short, antistenai means more in Matt. 5:39a than simply to “stand against” or “resist.” It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an insurrection. Jesus is not encouraging submission to evil; that would run counter to everything he did and said. He is, rather, warning against responding to evil in kind by letting the oppressor set the terms of our opposition. Perhaps most importantly, he cautions us against being made over into the very evil we oppose by adopting its methods and spirit. He is saying, in effect, Do not mirror evil; do not become the very thing you hate. (1992b: 199)

As we have seen, such an understanding of anthistemi quite neatly fits the historical and literary context of Romans 13, and helps to explain the significance of the terror of “the sword” in 13:4. The machaira (sword), was a symbol of authority donned by Roman police-soldiers, but was also used by special police units in putting down violent resistance movements (Yoder 1972: 206, esp. n.14). If Paul is using anthistemi here as it is used most frequently in the NT and in the LXX, it is clear he has in view the possibility of violent resistance. As Borg has shown (1972: 208-11), militant Jewish uprisings in Rome were by no means unheard of. A reading closely following that of Stubbs, above, would cohere with Wink’s remarks. Here we can see the continuity between Paul and the Jesus tradition precisely in the way they instruct God’s people to resist the enemy. In both cases it is Rome that is in view as the enemy. In both cases militant resistance is denounced. In neither case is political quietism promoted. In both cases, what Stassen has called “transforming initiatives” (2003) and what Scott would call the “weapons of the weak” (1985) are offered as a means of conciliatory resistance to the imperial order.

Moreover, if we take Herzog’s persuasive argument about Jesus’ negative attitude toward Roman taxation as determinative, there is the further possibility of agreement between Jesus and Paul on the question of the tribute. Herzog (2004) argues that Jesus stood firmly opposed to the tribute, but that his response when cornered on the issue in public (Mark 12:13-17) was a virtuoso performance of dissembling discourse in which Jesus alludes to a hidden transcript in the midst of his performance of the public transcript, and in doing so radically reinterprets the payment of the tribute as an exercise in ritual cleansing. The coins Caesar wants back in tribute contain idolatrous inscriptions in the first place. Since no good Jew should possess idolatrous images, the natural thing to do is to return the blasphemous coins back from whence they came.[2] Although Jesus stood in hard opposition to the economic devastation Roman taxation helped to perpetuate in Palestine, his response (Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s) is the perfect example of the “politics of disguise and anonymity” which is the intersection at which the offstage and onstage transcripts collide. If Herzog’s reading of Mark 12 is even close to the mark, and I think it is, then the reading of Stubbs and others—which sees Romans 13:8 (the hidden transcript) as a subversion of 13:7 (the public transcript)—would put Paul firmly in continuity with Jesus on yet another point. Both effectively reinterpret what it means for the people of God to participate in what would ordinarily be oppressive rituals of subordination, subverting rituals of subordination into acts of liberation.

Click Here To View The Bibliography.

[1]But see Stassen (2003: 280-82), who argues persuasively in favor of the translation, “Do not resist by evil means.”

[2] Similarly, Witherington (1997: 155): “Thus it is very likely that when Jesus said, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,’ he was saying, ‘Give back to Caesar his worthless coins, and give to God your wholehearted and undivided allegiance.’ . . . Jesus’ view then would amount neither to open cooperation with Caesar or violent revolution against him, but recognizing only God’s lordship and relativizing Caesar’s claims.” See also Horsley (1987: 308-14).

R13/19: Hidden Transcripts: Stubbs

2008-05-10T00:00:00.003-05:00

Finally, Monya Stubbs (2004) also seeks to bring the categories of public and hidden transcripts to bear on our text, but takes up an approach quite different than that of the prior three samples, with innovative but complementary results. Stubbs argues that taking 13:1-7 in isolation from its surrounding context produces one-dimensional readings which focus primarily on the “subjection” aspect of the text. If instead we look at 13:1-7 in light of the surrounding context (12:1-13:14), the emphasis is shifted from “subjection as a single hermeneutical frame,” and the frame is expanded “to include subjection-reflection-resistance as a three-dimensional process that Paul espouses for empowering those who may feel powerless in their relationship with governing authorities” (172).[1]

The first part of the hermeneutical frame is subjection, which is the “first step in the three-dimensional process of empowerment” (173). In order to identify how Paul understands subjection (hypotassesthô), Stubbs traces Paul’s use of the word throughout the letter.

The first instance is in 8:7, which reads: “For the mind belonging to flesh is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, indeed it lacks the power.”[2] The mind that is not subject to God is by implication subject to flesh. What is significant here is that “the refusal by those whose minds are set on ‘this world’ to ‘subject’ to the will of God moves beyond the matter of one’s personal will. Paul raises the question of ability.” Humanity, subjected to the flesh (the “flesh” being shorthand for the unjust structures that sustain a rebellious world), “lacks the power to free itself when confronted by the law of God” (176). Thus, although humanity has voluntarily subjected itself to flesh, it is now subjected by flesh.

The second use of subjection is in Romans 8:20: “For the creation was subjected to futility not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it.” Of course, the one who subjected the creation to futility was God himself, and he did it, as the rest of the verse says, “in hope,” that is, in hope that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (v. 21). But what is pertinent for Stubbs is not why the creation was subjected, but that it was subjected by an exterior entity, and “not of its own will.” She calls this “subjection as a consequence of coercion” (176).

Thus, Stubbs establishes that subjection in Romans can be “both an act of volition and imposition,” and sometimes (as in 8:7) both at once. Turning to 13:1, Stubbs asks of the text, “Why do people tolerate subjection?” According to Stubbs, “Paul suggests that people willingly tolerate and perpetuate their subjection because they lack the ability to recognize or resist the influence of power” (177). This raises the question of how to translate 13:1. Pasa psyche exousiais hyperechousais hypotassesthô can be translated in either the imperative middle or the imperative passive. The imperative middle would read, “Let every soul subject itself to the governing authorities.” But if we were to take the dative case of exousiais hyperechousais as the dative of means, the imperative passive would read, “Be every soul subjected by the governing authorities.” Stubbs observes that the former reading treats subjection as a volitional matter, and indicates that Paul’s hearers possess “the power to socially situate themselves within the order of their environment.”

On the other hand, the latter reading would indicate that the governing authority “is a structure in which the Christian is placed or already exists and it acts upon the Christian existence. The Christian cannot but live within a preexisting social system” that by its very structure imposes limitations upon the Christian’s ability to communicate his or her faith through intentional social formations. In other words, for Stubbs, being “subjected by the governing authorities” means accepting the imposed structures of society (typically built along lines of race, class, and gender) as limitations upon an individual’s or a group’s ability to allow their most basic convictions to transform the structures of their social relationships.

But Stubbs contends that the potency of Paul’s logic rests in the both/and, not in the either/or, of these two translations (177). Paul intends to suggest that Christians both act as agents in their subjection and are acted upon by it. “The combined reading takes seriously the enormity of the social and religious ideological weight placed on the lives of individuals within given communities” (179). Significantly, this means that Paul is not so much commanding subjection or prohibiting rebellion as much as he is pressing the Roman Christians “to acknowledge the social reality of their relation to the Roman state” (178). Paul is making explicit the “unspoken/unwritten values that underpin Roman social life,” forcing them to see it as an “ideological construct.” Ideology is a “representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”[3] Or rather, “ideology is that which is self-evident. Yet, that which is self-evident is a construct, is created through the imagination,” and the construct “is the way in which human beings conceive of their relationship” with the structure of society and with other human beings (179).

Thus Paul forces his hearers to face the consequences of their subjection within the terms of the ideological construct. “Every soul be subjected by and to governing authorities for there is no authority if not by God and the existing ones have been appointed by God. So that the ones [who] resist the authority resist what God has ordained, and those who resist shall themselves receive judgment” (vv. 1-2). Here Paul has represented a reality constructed by the ideological construct, that is, “by the social acceptance of the people’s perceived relation to governing authority.” Within terms of this construct, “to resist the system is to resist God and live in a state of alienation from God. Alienation from God is manifested in misfortunes within the system of authority” (180). Therefore, “if you do evil, fear, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain” (v. 4).

Extrapolating on Stubbs’s reading, we might add that within the construct, of course, “evil” is whatever disrupts or controverts the established social order. For instance, in patriarchal orders such as Rome was, any group encouraging female leadership, or coequal leadership, is seen as “evil” and is immediately suspected of every seditious crime from anarchy to zealotry. Or we might take as a more current example McCarthyism as an order, and communism as an “evil,” which is damnable in a democratic cosmos fashioned after self-evident, divinely instituted principles, such as the inalienable right to pursue capital, or the right to privatize and commoditize natural resources.

The “world” Paul urges Christians not to conform to (12:2), the world that is passing away, is the ideological construct, or the public transcript, an artifice the powerholders have created in order to preserve their power. God is co-opted and re-created as the creator of the world, the order, so that what serves the interests of the ruling elites is what is natural, what is divinely instituted. Disobedience to the order is disobedience to God and alienation from God. To be alienated from God is to be crushed beneath the weight of the world of his design. Perhaps it was the weight of precisely such a world that caused a crucified Jewish rebel to wonder whether his God had forsaken him. Was Rome’s god God after all?

According to Stubbs, this is the kind of question Paul intends to incite from his hearers in the first step in his three-dimensional process of empowerment. Because “subjection alone is an oppressive posture and mere submission forces one to remain in a powerless state,” the capacity to acknowledge one’s subjection by the authority is the first step toward empowerment to resist. But Paul’s next step, according to Stubbs, is “to reflect upon the situation in which they live.” Paul is challenging the Christians in Rome “to engage in the process of careful examination that leads to the conviction that God dwells both in and beyond their ‘subjection by governing authorities’” (181). Paul wants them to come to this conviction through reflection on the nature of their relationship to the ideologically constructed world to and by which they are subjected.

Stubbs points out, as we have already noted, that “Paul has already advised the Christian community against accepting as absolute the apparent order of ‘this world’” (181). “Do not be conformed,” Paul writes, “to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God—the good and acceptable and perfect will of God” (12:2). Stubbs finds Enrique Dussel instructive here. Dussel observes that in the scriptures, “this world, is a ‘practical’ totality (a totality constituted and characterized by relationship of praxis), a system or structure of prevailing, dominant social actions and relationships, under hegemony of evil” (1988: 29). “This world” refers to empire, to Babylon, to Egypt, not merely as nations, but as “systems of practices” which confront and engage God’s people. It is “self-totalizing,” lifting itself “as an absolute system of authority which is opposed to the will of God.” This also, Stubbs suggests, is how Paul uses “this world.” It is shorthand for a system of social formations and relations which itself resists the will of God. (2004: 181).

It is to “this world” that Christians are called not to conform, this world as a set of social formations. Instead, Christians are to accurately identify what are “the prevailing norms of the society in which they live,” so that they can understand how to build more just polities, which is what the ecclesiai represent. This capacity to recognize and name the prevailing norms is made possible by what Paul calls the “renewal of the mind,” the transformation of paradigm effected by the Christian’s participation in the body and work of Christ. “The renewing of the mind is evidenced by one’s rational discrimination,” by a person or group’s ability to make the predominant ideology explicit and recognize it precisely as ideology. Thus, “reflection is a process of discernment” (182). Wink reminds us that “discernment does not entail esoteric knowledge, but rather the gift of seeing reality as it really is. Nothing is more rare, or more truly revolutionary, than an accurate description of reality” (1992a: 89). Reflection is a process of discernment that infuses those subjected by the “illusionary relationship of subjection to the ‘governing authorities’ with the ability to discern that subjection to ‘worldly’ authority is not absolute” (Stubbs: 2004: 182). This liberates the subjected ones to reflect on the potential for God’s will, rather than the prevailing societal norms (derived from Roman values, Jewish law or some other ostensibly unassailable source), to shape their social formations.

It is in fact the transformation of the mind from the old patterns of prescribed norms which permits the subjected ones to know God’s will. “The significance of reflection, however, is not to end the subjection. Instead reflection prevents the Christians at Rome from making absolute the Roman political authority.” Or as Wink frames the matter, “the seer’s gift is not to be immune to invasion by the empire’s spirituality, but to be able to discern the internalized spirituality, name it, and externalize it” (1992a: 89). As a result, Stubbs perceives, the humanity of Romans 12:2 “in a state of reflection stands in direct opposition to the state of humanity described in Romans 1:21: ‘for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened’” (2004: 182).

Thus, through the first two steps in Paul’s three-dimensional process of empowerment, namely—through the acknowledgment of the fact of one’s subjection and through the discerning reflection that identifies the ideological nature of this subjection—the gospel of salvation Paul has been proclaiming has finally been brought to bear on the real world.

Whereas reflection makes obvious the subjection, and allows one to envision other possibilities of God’s reality beyond subjection, resistance represents the state of transformation: It represents those acts that a person or a community makes, based on reflection, which places both their minds and bodies beyond the given subjection. Resistance is about acting and speaking in such a way that reflects commitment against conformity both to and by this world. (185)

It is at this point that Stubbs moves into her discussion of the hidden transcript embedded in Romans 13. Having just summarized Herzog’s reading of 13:1-7, Stubbs does not deny the presence of the hidden transcript within those verses. Nevertheless, on her reading, 13:1-7 as a whole functions as the “public transcript” or the “subjection.” The entire pericope is used by Paul to force the Roman Christians to “acknowledge it as the ideological system in which they live.” Paul does this because, “by not recognizing the system, they are not only subjected by it, but they also subject themselves to it” (186). Consequently, for Stubbs, the hidden transcript in the text is not seen in vv. 1-7 (although there are certainly interpretive possibilities there), but comes crashing to the surface in vv. 8-10:

Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for whoever loves the other has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this saying: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Thus love fulfills the law. (translation mine)

The “debts” of custom taxes, tributes, fear and honor are debts imposed upon the subjects of Roman domination. This kind of “debt” comes from what Lenski calls “the proprietary theory of the state” common among agrarian rulers (1966: 214-19). Herzog explains that this means “agrarian rulers view their conquered domains as their estate to exploit and dispose of as they choose. Because they rule, they can demand from their subjects whatever they require to maintain their rule. Tribute is but one expression of this right.” This concept of the proprietary “right” was absolutely essential in order for the administration to be able to pursue its political goals. “Rulers of aristocratic empires require enormous amounts of wealth, and they can accumulate that wealth from only two sources, internal tribute through exploitation or external booty through conquest” (1994: 349). That the Neronian administration was, as we have seen, abstracting tribute even from the inhabitants of Rome proper at the time of the writing of Paul’s letter is incredibly instructive. While the public transcript of the Roman empire dictates that “giving all (military and financial bureaucrats) their expected dues is a service to both humanity and God,” Paul tells a different story in v. 8. “Herein lies Paul’s resistance language, where the hidden transcript imposes itself upon the public transcript” (Stubbs 2004: 186). Paul counsels the Roman Christians to “owe no one any debt, except the debt to love.” This is Paul’s call to resistance. Paul “employs the language most indicative of Roman social, political, and economic structure to describe how Christians ought not engage in relationship with each other” (187). While the Roman order characterizes human relationships asymmetrically, along the standard patron-client pattern, so that the term “debt” naturally belongs to asymmetrical relationships of domination and subordination, Paul radically alters the meaning of “debt” by bonding it to love. The two words are now conjoined in such a way that the one effectively redefines the other (188). By transforming debt into the commitment to love “the other” (ton heteron), Paul has undermined the empire’s claim to proprietary rights and has effectively leveled the playing fields. Now “the enemy” (12:20) has become “the neighbor” (13:9).

Thus, Paul’s revolutionary concept of debt as the duty to love is a charter for resistance, discreetly appearing “onstage” in the midst of Paul’s ostensibly loyal performance of the public transcript. Just as significantly, Paul’s allusion to the hidden transcript carries with it a scathing critique of the Roman order by “suggesting that true servants or ministers of God occupy themselves with addressing the physical and spiritual needs of the citizens, not in exacting burdensome taxes and forced military might to maintain control of the masses of people for the benefit of the governing elite.” By juxtaposing debt and love, Paul has called into question the absolute authority of Roman order and has offered “debt of love as an alternative system of authority, as a measuring stick which gauges the actions and intentions of both individuals and governing institutions” (188).

Click Here To View The Bibliography.

[1] While Stubbs is rightly concerned to bring the text to bear on our own present-day subjection to the dis-order of the free market economy, for our purposes we will focus exclusively on her treatment of Romans 13.

[2] This is the translation of Stubbs.

[3] Quoting Althusser (1984: 36).

Comments Needed

2008-05-09T04:11:00.003-05:00

I need your comments here. Please indulge me.

R13/18: Hidden Transcripts: Herzog

2008-05-09T00:00:00.003-05:00

William Herzog (1994), noting the frustration of many that Paul did not choose to more carefully circumscribe just what constitutes a just and an unjust government, suggests that a reading of the text against Scott’s matrix of the public and hidden transcripts immediately resolves this dilemma. “If Paul were dissembling, then this widely acknowledged omission is part of his coded speech. The very imbalance of his argument is part of his disguise” (354). With this possibility held up in plain view, Herzog begins his analysis.

Drawing our attention to the historical conditions that lie beneath Paul’s opening claim (his claim that the existing authorities have been instituted by God), Herzog[1] observes that the “rulers of agrarian societies and aristocratic empires value traditional forms of legitimation.” In order to procure and sustain the legitimation of the local religion, the lords seek to “coopt the temples, priests and sacred texts of their societies” (354-55). Thus Rome installed their own high priestly regime, manufactured their own “king of the Jews,” and accepted the High Priest’s annual sacrifice on the emperor’s behalf.[2] Indeed, “most temples,” as with the one in Jerusalem, “support the ruler’s claim to a mandate from heaven and are handsomely rewarded for their efforts.” Thus, for Herzog, Paul’s opening remarks about the divine constitution of Roman power indicate that Paul recognizes “the reality of how politics works in his world” (355). Paul is simply rehearsing the official transcript, not because he agrees with it, but in order to situate his hearers firmly within the grim reality of their subordination. The official transcript must be established before it can be subverted.

Paul continues in this vein by identifying the three groups around which “the entire exhortation is built,” namely, the authorities, their subjects, and the rebels (355). Paul immediately isolates the rebels and warns them off of violent resistance. “Whoever resists (antitassomenos) authority resists (anthesteken) what God has appointed.” Herzog observes that anthesteken is “more confrontational” than antitassomenos and “refers to useless resistance.” Following Hobsbawm (1959; 2000), Herzog repeats the “truism that there were no revolutions in the ancient world, only rebellions that were crushed” (1994: 355). Thus, v. 2 reiterates another “political fact of life; political rebellion was folly and inevitably came to a bad end.” Of course, Paul does not say this in so many words; he speaks “from a loyalist point of view.”[3]

But v. 4a “comes like a surgical strike,” when Paul finally begins to relativize the imperial pretentions he has been loyally reinforcing until now. These archontes (rulers) are diakonoi (menial servants). “Up to this point, the semantic fields separating rulers, ruled and rebels has been clear, but the introduction of the ruler as diakonos changes the equation.” In the Roman architecture, “ruling and serving were antithetical functions and unrelated semantic fields.” Thus, “in the midst of reiterating the public transcript, Paul introduces a coded message from the hidden transcript” (356), thus relativizing the grandiose claims Roman rulers regularly made about themselves, without overtly denying such claims.

The ascription of diakonos to the ruler is quickly and prudently pursued by the reiteration of the ruler’s “divine right” to brandish his sword about. But, Herzog detects, “even this rhetoric has a ‘hidden’ implication because it specifies that the military be used solely to suppress anarchy and wrong behavior. That the use of the military was hardly ever limited to these purposes was obvious. The ‘sword’ thus provided the means of intimidation and brutality that ensured the subjected populations would quietly endure the so-called Pax Romana” (356). Paul’s legitimation of Roman power thus takes up the line of the official transcript, while exposing the official transcript’s lack of correspondence to reality. “If one lived in such a state, one would obey ‘because of conscience’ not just out of fear of its wrath. Unfortunately, such a state does not exist” (357), so subservience remains an unhappy obligation (anangkê).

While the military’s function was to compel subordination internally and to create new subordinates externally, and were “the primary functionaries in the police state,” no less important to Roman dominion were “the bureaucrats responsible for the collection of direct tribute and indirect taxes.” The tributes and customs were essential to Rome’s ability to maintain control of its vast empire. Herzog sees Paul’s language to be adeptly on point here. Paul reminds the Roman Christians that the leitourgoi theou are “constantly busying themselves with this very thing” (13:6), namely, money-grabbing. It is “an apt description,” Herzog writes, “of the bureaucrats who devoted their lives to providing the revenue stream required by the emperor to maintain and expand his political agenda.” These collectors were expert extortionists, “extracting from the population everything but the barest subsistence” (358).

As such, for the same reason that the slave and poor classes are compelled to be subservient, it is necessary to pay tributes and customs. The reason? “Resistance is foolhardy. Rome holds all the cards. Just as the military devotes itself to physical control, the financial bureaucrats devote themselves to economic control. It is useless to fight them.” The most that can be done in this situation is to “give back” (apodote) what belongs to them. Herzog notes here that apodote is the same verb used in Mark 12:17. According to Herzog, Paul’s point is “to give them their due, but no more. This implies resistance to conceding to the finance ministers more than is their due. Give no more than absolutely necessary” (358).[4]

Paul continues to rehearse the public transcript, exhorting the subordinates to render reverence and honor to those to whom it is due. While reverence (phobos) can easily be translated as “fear,” as it is in 13:4, what are we to make of the admonition to render “honor”? To whom is honor owed? Some have suggested that fear and honor are owed only to God, and thus Paul is carefully inserting into the equation criteria for ethical discrimination, effectively relativizing his prior, more absolute claims about the authorities.[5] While this is a possibility, it is exegetically unlikely, especially if we accept, following Nanos, the chiastic structure of the pericope, in which phobon corresponds to archontes, and timen to exousiais hyperechousais. Others have suggested that we read honor sarcastically, inside quotation marks (Walsh 2008). This could be a more promising reading, based on the irreverent attitude Paul displays toward timocratic mores elsewhere in his corpus.[6] We have already noted a third possibility: Neil Elliott has shown how the aphorism was used by the early Christians, specifically the Christian martyrs of the second century. There the offering of honor to Caesar functioned as a sort of “apologetic of the persecuted” (2006: 225-26), which effectively served to throw the emperor’s villainy into stark relief.

But Herzog argues that Paul is merely counseling the vulnerable Christian community to display the routine “public deference that the oppressed show their masters” (1994: 359). Herzog refers us back to Scott, who observed that “the linguistic deference and gestures of subordination” are not merely “abstracted by power” but “serve also as a barrier and a veil that the dominant find difficult or impossible to penetrate” (1990: 32). In many cases subordinated groups rehearse their acts of conformity offstage, and the skills requisite for theatrical duplicity are instilled in the young by instruction and example. This is why “conformity is too lame a word for the active manipulation of rituals of subordination,” manipulation which transforms the rituals of subordination into security measures that sequester an emancipated space for the dominated to inhabit. Thus, it is not mere conformity, but “an art form in which one can take some pride at having successfully misrepresented oneself” (33).

Certainly one of the things the Jews of the diaspora shared was a long tradition of living under domination. As such, they had grown especially adept in the conforming arts, and Paul, Herzog contends, was no exception. Handing down his expertise, “Paul advises the Romans to practice the arts of resistance but in ways that will not threaten the community lodged near the heart of the Roman system of domination. He has managed to sound obedient and loyal,” but the loyalty Paul offers is to “an empire that does not exist.” Thus Paul has conceded nothing to “the actual empire, and his apparent advice about loyalty is coded language for how to survive in an authoritarian environment” (1994: 359).

Click Here To View The Bibliography.

[1] Following Kautsky (1982: 99-159) and Lenski (1966: 214-19).

[2] As noted in n.38, this fact threatens to undermine Jewett’s contention (2007: 789-90; also Wright 2000: 172) that the identification of the Hebrew God as the arbiter of Roman authority would have appeared threatening to the Roman authorities. The flipside to the coin, however, that Jews and Christians would have understood it as a threat to the Roman authorities, continues to obtain.

[3] So too Kaylor (1988: 204): “On first reading, this passage sounds as though it could have been written by the emperor himself!”

[4] I find this particular reading rather unlikely, considering Paul has just encouraged the Roman Christians to give their enemies significantly more than is their due (12:17-21). Thus the Christian gives back (apodidomi), whereas God pays back (antapodidomi).

[5] E.g. Yoder (1978: 2): “The most careful interpretation indicates that Paul is giving us a line of discrimination according to which ‘taxes and tribute’ are Caesar’s to ask and ‘fear and honor’ are not.”

[6] E.g. Rom. 12:10; 1 Cor. 4:10; 12:23-25; Phil. 2:6-11. Cf. Elliott (2004a); also Heen (2004).

On White Man's Religion

2008-05-08T13:51:00.004-05:00

It is unthinkable that the oppressors could identify with oppressed existence and thus say something relevant about God's liberation of the oppressed. In order to be Christian theology, white theology must cease being white theology and become black theology by denying whiteness as an acceptable form of human existence and affirming blackness as God's intention for humanity. (James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Orbis: 2006, p. 9.)

Julie Clawson, on her blog One Hand Clapping, has written eloquently on this difficult truth. She writes in response to those of us who argue that Christians today owe no apologies for injustices committed by Christians yesterday. Many of us attempt to evade culpability for our predecessor's sins by denying the authenticity of their religion, or by appealing to some principle of individual responsibility. But Julie Clawson incisively displays the ignorance underwriting the belief that we do not share in the guilt of the Crusaders.

Beyond the fact that just the act of denying responsibility for Christianity’s evils appears as self-centered toxic Christianity to many, most Christians today are living the benefits of Christendom - benefits that came at the expense of others. American Christians are living with the wealth and resources of “Christian” operations like Manifest Destiny and attempts to “Christianize and civilize” other nations (mostly as an excuse to rape their land of it’s resources). The denominations and doctrines we bicker about exist because they were the ones willing to slaughter and torture dissenting viewpoints. Ministries and churches are built (and get rich) on messages of hatred - give money to help Israel kill those Palestinians, or to make sure our students don’t know gay people exist, or to support the IRA, or even fund corrupt dictators and conflict diamond schemes in Africa. It’s hard to be an American Christian and not be connected to some group involved in such things. So even if you have never Bible-bashed, manipulated someone to say a prayer, or burned someone at the stake, most Christians are receiving the benefits of toxic Christianity. There is no out of sight out of mind excuse than can work. The connection to wrongdoing is there and if we have compassion at all for those we have hurt, we will take responsibility to apologize if not make amends.

Read the whole story here.