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Week Thirty-Seven: From
Domination to Communion |
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The Empire’s Power |
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Brian
McLaren reflects on the different understandings of power held by the early
Jesus movement and the Roman Empire: The historical reality of Christian empire,
like Christian anti-Semitism, is bathed in irony. Jesus was an oppressed
brown Palestinian Jew, living in a Middle Eastern nation that was occupied by
a European empire centered in Rome. Jesus challenged the empire of Rome by
proclaiming an alternative empire, the empire of God. The similarity of the
terms highlighted the radical contrasts between the two empires: Rome’s empire was violent. God’s empire was
nonviolent. Rome’s empire was characterized by
domination. God’s empire was characterized by service and liberation. Rome’s empire was preoccupied with money.
God’s empire was preoccupied with generosity and was deeply suspicious of
money. Rome’s empire was fueled by the love of
power. God’s empire was fueled by the power of love. Rome’s empire created a domination pyramid
that put a powerful and violent man on the top, with chains of command and
submission that put everyone else in their place beneath the supreme leader.
God’s empire created a network of solidarity and mutuality that turned
conventional pyramids upside down and gave “the last, the least, and the
lost” the honored place at the table. Not surprisingly, the Roman Empire saw Jesus
and his nonviolent movement as a threat to their violent regime, so they had
him tortured and publicly executed as a matter of standard procedure. By
pinning a naked human being to wood … the empire showed its own absolute
dominance and its victim’s absolute defeat. The message was clear: Jesus’
message of truth and love meant nothing in the face of the empire’s crushing
power and domination…. Echoing its founder’s nonviolence, the
Christian faith initially grew as a nonviolent spiritual movement of
counter-imperial values. It promoted love, not war. Its primal creed elevated
solidarity, not oppression and exclusion: “For in Christ Jesus you are all
children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ
have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there
is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of
you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26–28). The early Christians
elevated the equality of friendship rather than the supremacy of hierarchy
(John 15:15; 3 John 14, 15). Because of their counter-imperial posture,
including their refusal to be soldiers in the Roman army or to participate in
the imperial cult that proclaimed the divinity of the emperor, they were
often mocked, distrusted as unpatriotic, and persecuted. McLaren confronts what Christianity has lost
in its embrace of the power of empire: Since Constantine, Christianity has
repeatedly claimed a legitimate right to do violence to its members [and
others] to protect its interests and conserve its supremacy. It has sought
far-reaching and sometimes almost limitless control over the behavior and
minds of its subjects. At times, it has behaved like a totalitarian power,
suppressing dissent and claiming divine and absolute authority, capable of
absolute corruption. |
