The book is now 10 years old, but I finally got around to the theological and ethical masterpiece that has been recommended to me by many different people,
"Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire." The book is a work of historical fiction, the story of a wealthy Roman citizen who is considering giving her life to Christ, which causes her to grapple with the differences between the Caesar's Kingdom (the Roman Empire, which has secured a good life for her) and the Kingdom of Jesus. While comparing the differences of the two kingdoms, the book works through Paul's letter to the church at Colossi.
Here are some of the notes I took from the book. Enjoy.
Pg. 31, Empires are built on systemic centralizations of power and secured by
structures of socioeconomic and military control. They are religiously legitimated by powerful
myths that are rooted in foundational assumptions, and they are sustained by a
proliferation of imperial images that captivate the imagination of the
population.
Pg. 33, Another way to look at this is to say that in a world of imperial
control, in a world that is suffused with the rhetoric, symbolism and images of
empire, we need to have appeal to a power, a sovereignty greater than the
empire, if we are to have any hope.
Richard Berger anticipated the commodification of belief in a radically
pluralistic society in
The Sacred Canopy:
Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. He argued that once culture recognizes the
constructed character of reality, religious traditions can no longer be imposed
(so say nothing of “assumed”); they must be marketed. Religion “must be ‘sold’ to a clientele that
is no longer constrained to ‘buy.’ The
pluralist situation is, above all, a
market
situation. In it, the religious
institutions become marketing agencies and the religious traditions become
consumer commodities.”
So captivated by the consumerist imagination of the empire, and so immersed in
the empire’s self-justifying mythology and rhetoric, we find ourselves unable
to fathom the depths of the crisis in which we now live.
Pg. 51, an imaginary conversation between a Christian and a wealthy Roman
citizen considering following Christ
“Why, if someone unsympathetic heard you they might think you were suggesting
that Caesar isn’t our lord and savior.
They might think you didn’t appreciate the peace and prosperity that
Rome brought. Don’t you see the kind of
trouble you could get into with this way of thinking?”
“But that’s the point,” she said, “I don’t
believe
that Caesar is our savior. I
don’t believe that he has brought peace
and prosperity. And I
don’t believe that Caesar is our savior. I
don’t
believe that he has brought peace and prosperity. And I
don’t
worship him or any of the other gods, any more.”
“And has Caesar given them peace? No.
Only death and destruction, demolishing their cities, enslaving the
inhabitants, demanding taxes that drive the small landowners to slavery and
revolt…. This is peace by the blood of the sword… This peace is good for
you. And it has been good for me,
too. But it isn’t good for everyone. This peace divides – it makes the peasants
hopeless and the wealthy even wealthier.
But the peace of Jesus is different. The
peace of Jesus isn’t imposed by violence.”
“You see, what Lydia was telling me was nothing less than treasonous, a threat
to the empire.
I was disturbed. Lydia had offered a
challenge to my faith in the empire. I
knew that her story and mine couldn’t both be true. Either Caesar had brought forgiveness of our
sings, fruitfulness and peace through the great victories he had wrought, or
Jesus had brought forgiveness of our sins, fruitfulness and peace through his
paradoxical victory on a Roman cross.
But this seemed impossible, unimaginable!
It was also clear that Lydia’s story of Jesus could not be happily accommodated
by the imperial regime. Devotion to
Jesus was not like the devotion to Isis or Apollo. These gods and their cults were no threat to
the empire. Actually, such private
devotion, it was believed, made one a better citizen and enhanced one’s public
duty to the empire. Jesus, however,
created a problem. His lordship clearly
precluded Caesar’s, and the guarded privacy of my conversation with Lydia
notwithstanding, it was clear that following Jesus could not be a private
matter but would have to be a public faith, transforming public life.”
Pg. 58, In chapter one we stated that empires are 1) built on systemic
centralization of power, 2) secured by structures of socioeconomic and military
control, 3) religiously legitimized by powerful myths and 4) sustained by a
proliferation of imperial images that captive the imagination of the
population.
Thus, it is no surprise that for every dollar that is sent in foreign aid to
Africa, four are returned in the form of debt-servicing.
Pg. 67, When Israel enters the Promised Land, it faces its greatest challenge
not to become like the empire it left behind.
As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that such an empire is very
seductive.
It is the prophets who most tellingly deconstruct the imperial distortions of
Israel. The covenant people do not care
for aliens, widows and orphans, or the weak and injured (Is. 1:23; 10:2; Jer.
5:27-29; 7:5-7; 22:3-6; Ezek 22:7, 34:1-6, Zech 7:8-14; Mal 3:5). Failing to practice mercy and justice (Is
5:7; Jer 22:13-17; Hos 12:7-8; Amos 5:7; 6:12; Mic 6:1-12), Israel grinds down
the poor and needy (Is 3:14-15; 10:2; 32:7; 58:3, Jer 2:34; Ezek 22:29; Amos
2:6-7; 4:1; 5:11; 8:4-8; cf. Job 24:9-14; Ps 37:14; 109:16). The people have been engaged in the
consumptive practices of empire, filling their land with silver and gold,
horses and chariots buying up neighbors’ fields until nothing is left but
industrial farms-as-business that kills community (Is 2:7; 5:8). Moreover, they consistently engage in
business deals that exploit the poor (Amos 8:5-6).
Pg. 68, This is a call to be God’s people by bringing shalom and healing on
places of brokenness and despair. And
what could be more broken and more in need of healing than the place of
oppression, the heart of the empire?
Under the oppressive rule of Babylon and Assyria, the Israelites are still
called to build a faithful community and to live subject to a different kind of
rule and kingship, one where imperial might and power is used for feeding the
hunger of the people and binding up their wounds.
Pg. 70, As Luke tells the story, almost everything Jesus did or said was an
implicit challenge to the empire and its way of working in the world…. This is
a kingdom where the ruler is enthroned on a cross – the Roman Empire’s
instrument of torture – and in such an enthronement winds freedom and life for
its people.
Pg. 74, As the parallel passage in Matthew shows, reconciliation is the fruit
of this kingdom (Mt. 5:25-26). This is
an ethic in which the generosity of God overcomes the violence and economic
exploitation of the empire. And once
they are so overcome and undermined, the empire begins to crumble.
Pg. 75, Paul tells the Colossians that the gospel of Jesus bears a fruit in
their lives that is fundamentally different from the fruit of the empire. The fruit of this gospel is rooted not in
military might and economic oppression but in the practice of justice and
sacrificial faithfulness. This is a
gospel that bears fruit “in every good work” of forgiving generosity and
therefore undermines the hoarding abundance touted by the empire.
Pg. 90, [On Colossians 1:15-20] So what does Paul do with these cultural
myths? He turns them on their head and
replaces Zeus, Caesar, Rome and any other pretender to sovereignty with Christ. Then he takes it a step further and replaces
the body – whether it be the cosmos or the empire – with the church.
And the main use of “powers” is not in reference to spiritual beings but to
what Walter Wink calls the “legimitations, sanctions, and permissions that
undergird the everyday exercise of power.”
So it isn’t a stretch to say that in the Roman empire, “thrones, dominions,
rulers and powers” referred to Rome – to its “ruler” Caesar, on the “throne”
established by the gods, to his “dominion” over all the known world,
established and maintained by the “power” and might of the empire… It would be
impossible for his listeners to hear this list – thrones, dominions, rulers,
powers and not have thought of imperial thrones, imperial rule, the emperor and
his court, and imperial sanctions and legitimations.
That spiritual dimension has to do with whether these structures of our life
are directed by an idolatrous spirit of empire or the Spirit of God in Christ,
who created all of these structures of life and before whom they are subject.
You see, when the Christian community abandons discussion of oppressive social
structures, there are consequences. In
the first instance, if the Christian voice is absent, then the discussion
necessarily goes on without a Christian perspective. It is not surprising that other worldviews
and categories of analysis fill in the void.
And if Christians don’t like those worldviews – whether they be Marxist,
anarchist, “green” or whatever – then they really have no right to
complain. After all, these same upset
Christians have left the world of oppressive social structures for someone else
to worry about.
A lack of attention to the temporal structures of oppression is devastating for
the community that follows Jesus. Berry
describes a dualistic church in an imperial context:
“The church has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy
has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty, divided and plundered its
human communities and households. It has
flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire. It has assumed with the economists that
‘economic forces’ automatically work for good and has assumed with the
industrialists and militarists that technology determines history. It has
assumed with almost everybody that ‘progress’ is good, that it is good to be
modern and up with the times. It has
admired Caesar and comforted him in his depredations and defaults. But in its de facto alliance with Caesar,
Christianity connives directed with the murder of Creation.”
For Paul, rather than “flying the flag of empire,” the church is a community in
refusal of the empire which bears the image of another Lord in its daily life.
A split-vision worldview that divides faith from life, church from culture,
theology from economics, prayer from politics and worship from everyday work
will always render Christian faith irrelevant to broad sociocultural
forces. And that is exactly what the
empire wants – a robust, piously engaging private faith that will never
transgress the public square. Allow
religion to shape private imagination, but leave the rest of life, the public
and dominant imagination, to the empire.
Only as we break through this dualism can the poem (Colossians 1:15-20)
be given be given enough space in our lives to liberate our imagination.
Pg. 96, It is quite another thing to hold a faith that is seditions to the
empire. How do you go about confessing
Christ as Lord when everything all around you – all the power structures, the
images that dominate your daily life and even the very temporal rhythms of that
life – declare the sovereignty, lordship, honor and glory of the empire and its
emperor?
This was as vexing a problem for first-century Christians as it is for
twenty-first century Christians.
Pg. 110, Again, the foundation of this kingdom is not in the self-righteous
exclusion but in the inclusion of forgiveness… But if the rulers and
authorities, regimes and empires that so oppress us are to be defeated, they
must be defeated not by further violence but by sacrificial love.
“The cross was not the defeat of Christ at the hands of the powers; it was the
defeat of the powers at the hands – yes, the bleeding hands – of Christ.” – NT
Wright
Turning the empire on its head, the cross becomes the site of the victory march
of the victim.
Pg. 114, Only the nonideological, embracing, forgiving and shalom-filled life
of a dynamic Christian community formed by the story of Jesus will prove the
gospel to be true and render the idolatrous alternatives fundamentally
implausible.
Pg. 115, Empire loves to have a monopoly on truth.
Pg. 130, Remember, from a biblical perspective truth is not a correspondence
between ideas and facts. Truth is
embodied in a person.
Pg. 138, And Jesus takes precisely the principalities and powers that placed
him on the cross – the idols of militarism, nationalism, racism, technicism,
economism – and on that very cross disarms, dethrones, conquers and makes
public example of them. In this power
struggle, sacrificial love is victorious precisely by being poured out on a
cross, a symbol of imperial violence and control.
Pg. 150, Everyone, we contend, lives out of a metanarrative, everyone meets
their life in a grounding worldview that directs their praxis and serves to
legitimate that praxis… Pg. 156 We don’t allow the empire to captivate our
imagination and set the final term of our praxis in the world, because we can
see a kingdom that is an alternative to the empire.
Pg. 155 (Col 3:17) Seeking that which is above is a matter not of becoming
heavenly minded but of allowing the liberating rule of Christ to transform
every dimension of your life.
Pg. 166 In his 1994 annual report, the president of Campbell’s Soup Company
wrote “As I look forward to the future, I shiver with business excitement. That’s because Campbell’s Soup Company is
engaged in a global consumer crusade.
This is a crusade to capture both consumer taste and culinary
practice. There is nothing that
Campbell’s would like better than to have more markets of people who will
forget how to make soup for themselves and will become dependent on a can. Or consider this moment of enlightened
business ethics from David Glass, CEO and president of Wal-Mart, “Our
priorities are that we want to dominate North America first, then South
America, and then Asia and then Europe.”
Business development is couched in the language of domination. This, we contend, is the abusive language of
our time. When “free trade” means
corporate sovereignity, “fiscal responsibility” means that the poorest in our
society have to put up with even less, “quality of life” means quantity of
consumption and the “liberation” of Iraq means the expansion of the Pax
Americana, then our language has been debased and deformed into a discourse of
deceit that justifies violence…. Pg. 167, Rather, the real abusive language is
in the often sanitized ways of talking and thinking that serve to make this
culture of death appear normal and acceptable.
Indeed, when the church’s language, in all of its piety, serves to give
an air of normality to an idolatrously constructed culture, thereby functioning
as a polite cover-up for a comfortable life in the empire, then that language
is also abusive.
Pg. 168, The ethical crisis of Christianity at
the turn of the millennium is that Christians, by and large accept the empire
as normal. Here is Wendall Berry’s
prophetic appraisal of the church:
“Despite protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly
the religion of the state and economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated
to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much
earthly villainy. It has, for the most
part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world,
destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human
communities and households. It has flown
the flag and chanted the slogans of empire.
It has assumed with the economists that “economic forces” automatically
work for good and has assumed with the industrialists and militarists that
technology determines history. It has
assumed with almost everybody that “progress is good… It has admired Caesar and
comforted him in his depredations and faults.
But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly
in the murder of Creation.”
Pg. 170, As long as we lack the courage to take a stand and remain unrooted in
a narrative that would be subversive to the principalities and powers, the
empire can remain secure. Kall Lasn puts it this way: “American culture is no
longer created by the people… a free, authentic life is no longer possible in
America ™ today. We are being
manipulated in the most insidious way.
Our emotions, personalities and core values are under siege from media
and cultural forces too complex to decode.
A continuous product message has woven itself into the very fabric of
our existence. Most North Americans now
live designer lives – sleep, eat, sit in a car, work, shop, watch TV, sleep
again. I doubt there’s more than a
handful of free, spontaneous minutes anywhere in that cycle. We ourselves have been branded.”
Lasn likens life in what he calls America ™ to a life in a cult in which “we
have been recruited into roles and behavior patterns that we did not
consciously choose… When a whole population dreams the same dream, empire is
triumphant… In the face of the ensnaring sovereignty of the empire, we must
submit to a subversively liberating sovereignty. Our lives must be animated by an alternative
narrative, sovereignty and hope.
Pg. 172, Paul’s response is to offer his readers a kingdom in contrast with an
empire. If the problem with empire was
idolatry (3:5), then the alternative of the kingdom is the renewal in the image
of God (3:10)… In Christ we are restored to our full humanity as God’s stewards
of creation and shapers of culture.
Pg. 174, Paul calls for the community members to “clothe themselves” with
certain virtues. They are called, if you
will, to drape themselves, surround themselves, present themselves with and
embody the character traits of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness,
patience, forgiveness and love. They are
called to be a people rooted in and dedicated to peace, living lives
characterized by gratitude, wisdom and worship… In Paul’s vision this community
not only abandons the discourse of violence and exclusion that characterizes
the empire; it manifests an ethos that embraces the pain of the world, a
‘compassion’, a shared passion, that pays attention to the deepest brokenness
of its human and nonhuman neighbors.
This is an ethic of compassion, because the God of Israel revealed in
Jesus is a God of compassion who hears his people’s cry and knows their
suffering (Ex. 3:7). Jesus calls his
followers to be compassionate just as their Father is compassionate (see Lk
6:36).
Pg. 175, Now Paul says that in this community the ‘peace’ of Christ rules. In radical contrast to the violent, imperial
rule of the Pax Romana, or the economically motivated violence of the Pax
Americana (in which people will be ‘liberated’ by military force if the
economic well-being of America is threatened), Paul subverts what the empire
calls peace by appealing to a peace achieved through a victim of the empire:
allow that all-pervasive, cross-shaped peace to rule your life as a communal
body.
Pg. 176, We have argued throughout this book that the primary way any imperial
culture claims our lives is through the captivity of our imaginations. Take an average of twenty-six hours of television
a week, thousands of brand-name logos a day, an educational system structured
to produce law-abiding consumers who always crave more, and dress it all up
with a mythology of divine right to world rule, and it is not surprising that
the dominant worldview is so deeply internalized in the population – including
the church – that it is simply taken to be the only viable, normal and
commonsensical way of life. In the face
of such a deeply ingrained worldview, Paul says, “let the word of Christ dwell in
you richly” (Col 3:16).
Pg. 179, Love cannot remain an abstract idea; it must take on flesh in the
embodied life of the Christian community in particular places and at particular
times.
Pg. 180, What would a political vision shaped by compassion, kindness,
humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, love and peace look like? How could we envision a politics of
‘compassion’ that insists on standing with the most vulnerable members of our
society? Would this be a politics of
greed that is preoccupied with tax cuts for the richest members of our society
and international trade policies that aim for economic growth for its own
sake? Or is the community renewed in the
image of God committed to a politics for the “least of these” (Mt 25:40) – for
aboriginal peoples, drug addicts, gays, the homeless and the poorest of the
poor?
Further, this is a servant politics that is characterized by humility because
it seeks to serve the humble, not the haughty.
Rather than enacting policy that makes our nation “great or our town a
“world-class city,” this politics serves “the least of these.” Perhaps this will mean shifting the agenda
away from amassing economic power to addressing the scandal of child poverty,
or away from focusing on national security to forming refugee and immigration
policies suffused with hospitality.
Pg. 181, In a politics that is addicted to the quick fix, it would seem that
patience is not a political virtue. But
it is a Christian one. Christians can be
patient about righting the world’s wrongs (though still passionate about
justice!) because we know that the establishment of the just society – what the
book of Revelation calls the New Jerusalem – and the healing of the earth are
not finally in our hands but God’s. We
long to see Christ revealed, and we live our political lives anticipating his
kingdom, but we can do so with patience.
Ours is a political vision for the long haul, not preoccupied with power
or the quick fix.
Pg. 182, What all of this is about is love.
A politics rooted in love is not the sentimentality of warm feelings in
the political arena. Rather, love takes
on political shape in justice. Justice
as the political face of love is never impartial but is always biased. In the kind of biblical faith that occasions
Paul’s understanding of love, justice is always suspicious of the powerful and
biased toward the powerless. Justice is first and foremost directed toward the
orphan, widow and stranger precisely because these people lack the economic and
political power to defend themselves.
Love shapes the very content of Justice.
God’s love takes sides with the most vulnerable, the most
oppressed. Therefore a Christian
political praxis of love seeks justice for those who are the most marginalized,
the most oppressed and downtrodden.
While an idolatrous culture of greed is always willing to allow the
powerless to be oppressed by the powerful and will always tolerate
homelessness, disease and violence amongst the disfranchised, and an ever-growing
income gap between the rich and the poor, a Christian community of love will
strive to bring justice to those at the bottom of society. Love, Paul says, “binds everything together
in perfect harmony” (Col 3:14). Love
unifies and love heals. In a society
that has gaping wounds in its social fabric, the Christian community, through
its example and its societal and political witness, is called to be an agent of
reconciliation and justice.
Pg. 182, A war-mongering empire should find no support from a community that
worships the Prince of Peace. Stanley
Hauerwas reminds us that “a nation at war has no time for the poor, no space to
worry about the extraordinary inequities that constitute this society or about
those parts of the world ravaged by hunger and genocide. Everything – civil liberties, due process,
the protection of the law – must be subordinated to the one great moral
enterprise of winning the unending war against terrorism. Not if the peace of Christ rules in your
hearts! Then everything – whatever we do
in word or deed – is directed to a politics of peacemaking. ‘Everything!’
Whether it be protesting the war, refusing to serve, withholding taxes,
going to the enemy country to stand as a witness for peace, engaging in civil
disobedience, supporting the victims or boycotting the corporate players in the
military industrial complex, everything a Christian community does in a time of
imperial war should be directed to peace.
Pg. 183, What was the Roman empire up to when it provided legitimation of its
regime by means of the imperial cult?
And what other role do civic events such as Independence Day, the State
of the Union Address and Remembrance Day, together with reciting the Pledge of
Allegiance, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “God Bless America”
(these are ‘hymns,’ remember!) have but to provide a moment of ritual that
gives religious legitimation to the American empire? But these are not the worship events of the
Christian community! In our worship we
tell and retell another story than that of the republic, hear another word
proclaimed, eat an alternative meal of remembrance, pledge allegiance to
another sovereign, and sing hymns, psalms and spiritual songs that set our
imaginations free for another way of life, another politics… In a context in
which patriotism has become an idolatry of nation, yes, we are saying that
Christians are not called to patriotism.
The Bible never calls us to be patriotic to the empire.
Pg. 185, (in reference to Romans 13) Public officials who misuse their
authority must face up to that misuse in public. Paul honors those magistrates precisely by
calling them to task. And because he
believes that their authority is not ultimately rooted in the authority of the
emperor but instituted by God, Paul demands that they exercise their authority
in a way that demonstrates that they really are servants of God.
Now we suggest that this sheds some light on the matter of subjection to
political and legal authorities. Rather
than read this text as providing carte blanche legitimation for any regime,
regardless of how idolatrous and oppressive it might be, we suggest that Paul
is actually limiting the authority of the state. The state is a servant of God for our
good. It has no legitimacy or authority
in and of itself, apart from subjection to the rule of God. And when the state clearly abrogates its
responsibility to do good, when it acts against the will of God, then the
Christian community has a responsibility to call it back to its rightful duty
and even to engage in civil disobedience (see Acts 12:6-23). The state has no authority to do evil….
Pg. 185, In the first place, we need to take seriously the context in which
Romans 13:1-7 occurs. This teaching
can’t be isolated from what Paul is saying in the surrounding passage. It is preceded by a radical call against
conformity to this age (12:1-2), within a context of persecution at the hands
of the empire in 12:9-21. It is followed
by a call to “owe no one anything, except to love one another (13:8). In the midst of this clear context of
nonconformity, persecution and call to love not only the community but also
one’s enemies, Paul’s comments about the state have ambiguous overtones. It was, after all, the state that had
persecuted the Roman believers and caused their suffering.
In the second place, the violent nature of the state is underlined by
references to “fear” and to the state’s bearing of the sword. Paul emphasizes that the state should be
obeyed because of the fear of wrath (13:5), a fear that is underlined in 13:7:
“Pay to all what is due them – taxes to whom taxes are due” (our translation). Note that we have translated the greek word
“phobos” as ‘fear’ to show that this is the same word that is used in verses
3-4. The use of the language of fear in
relation to the state, along with the mention of the sword, heightens the
ambiguity of the passage. On the one
hand Paul is echoing Jewish sources such as Philo who use the language of fear
in describing both the brutality of rulers and the need to be obedient out of
expediency; on the other, he is using language that is “quite out of place with
the contemporary propaganda of the empire” that touted Nero as a ruler who
engaged in no bloodshed and no wielding of the sword.
As Neil Elliot puts it; “’Honor’ may be due the authorities - at least some of them - but so, given the reality of the Roman
sword, is fear… Given the reality of Roman rule, one may ‘do good’ and hope for
the best (13:2); but under the circumstances, open resistance cannot be
contemplated, so long as the authorities wield the sword (13:4).” What sounds
to our ears like a completely straightforward call to obey governing
authorities, especially when read out of the context in which this instruction
was given, has overtones of persecution, fear and bloodshed for the community
reading this letter. Romans 13:1-7 is
not a call to blind obedience to the state but to prudent action; its very
vocabulary hints that this particular authority is not living up to its
God-given calling. In a nutshell, Paul
is saying, “Be careful.”
Pg. 186, When the state functions as an empire, when it bears an uncanny
resemblance to Babylon, then “seeking the welfare” of the state requires
shaping an alternative community that practices an alternative politics (Jer
29:7). Our discussion of Colossians 3
was an attempt to broadly sketch out what that kind of politics might look like
in our present context. If the empire is
war-mongering, then the Christian community is called to be a witness for
peace. If there is racial oppression in the empire, then a community that
believes there is neither Jew nor Arab, black or white, Hispanic or Asian,
because Christ is all and in all, will lay down its life for the sake of racial
justice. If women and racial minorities
receive unfair treatment in the marketplace and the public square, then the
church calls for, and demonstrates, equal opportunity. If homelessness and hunger are on the rise in
our society, then a community suffused with kindness builds housing, feeds the
hungry and then gets busy addressing the root causes of that homelessness and
hunger. If the empire enacts social
policy that leaves the poor destitute, establishes trade policy that
legitimates unfair trade practices, and passes environmental law that allows
global warming to go unchecked, species to go extinct at alarming rates, and
our waterways to become chemical sewage dumps, then a Christian politics of
compassion, kindness and meekness both lobbies for alternative policies and
attempts to live in a way that is consistent with these foundational Christian
virtues.
Pg. 188, So we need to think long and hard about our investments. Perhaps a credit union or a local bank with
social conscience will provide a viable alternative to large charter banks...
we tend to think the ration should be at least two to one: for every dollar we
invest in retirement savings, two dollars should be given away to an agency
that will serve the poor… Maybe we need to reconsider the local supermarket as
the source of our food…. Our point is that food is deeply political, and we
need to pay attention to where our food comes from and what is in it… There are
also community-supported agriculture programs, in which urban folk make a
contract to buy the produce of a particular farmer, who then delivers the
produce throughout the season as crops come ripe.
Pg. 196, Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid
economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid
blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into His face, as if they were of no
worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
Pg. 199, We can probably tell as much about the real spirituality and the real
spirituality and the real worldview of a people by looking at the cars they
drive, the food they consume, the gadgets that fill their homes and the garbage
they throw out as we can by listening to the songs they sing and the prayers
they pray… An otherworldy spirituality that is preoccupied with “me and Jesus,”
and escaping from this world into heavenly bliss, will never engender the kind
of ecological ethos we are here suggesting.
Moreover, an individualistic spirituality will inevitably legimate an
ecologically disastrous lifestyle.
Paul would not recognize such worship as having anything do with the gospel
that he proclaimed. Indeed, in light of
our discussions of Paul’s rhetorical attack on the “ensnaring philosophy” of
Colossians 2, we could easily imagine him addressing contemporary evangelical
spirituality in the same tone. If your
worship serves to give you an ecstatic experience of personal relationship with
Jesus without challenging you to see more deeply the way Jesus comes to
reconcile all things in creation – including your ecological practices – then
Paul would have a hard time recognizing it as a response to the gospel that he
proclaimed “to EVERY creature under heaven” (Col 1:23).
Pg. 200, Paul’s ethic in the third chapter of Colossians is rooted in the
narrative of Christ – died, buried, risen ascended and coming again. This is not a narrative that imposes a series
of absolutes to oppress us; it is a story of liberation from an empire that
would take captive our imagination while it rapes and plunders the earth. This is not a violent, metanarrative of
exploitation of the earth. This is a
story of restored relationships, a love story that calls forth an alternative
community characterized by compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience,
forgiveness, love, peace, gratitude and wisdom.
This is a story of creational restoration, a renewal to full humanness,
in the image of the Creator. This is a
community in which the word of Christ dwells richly. This is a community that is shaped as a
countercultural force through the subversive worship of a subversive Lord.
Pg. 206, In this letter, Paul appeals not primarily to the ancient philosophers,
nor to the edicts of the emperor, but to the ancient stories of Israel. Those stories describe how, in the shadow of
the empire, Israel was called to form an alternative covenant community rooted
in the Torah of a God who freed the slave, loves the refugee and cares for the
widow and the orphan. As that community
was called to be holy, so we are called saints, the holy ones.
The Kingdom of Jesus is just such a covenant community… In our Scriptures,
forgiveness of sin and redemption from slavery are always at the heart of God’s
dealing with the covenant people. In the
community of God called together to bear his image, such forgiveness and
redemption were to be most obviously evident in the forgiving of debt and freeing
from slavery.
Pg. 209, For those who do not have ears to hear, for those who do not know the
story, either of Israel or of Jesus, this advice seems innocent enough. It appears to uphold the status quo while
advising tolerance. But for those who
know the story, the clues are there, the allusions are made, and the hidden
meaning is understood. For those with
ears to hear, the message is clear: this is a God who proclaims a different
kingdom from the ensnaring oppression of the empire, a God who frees slaves and
calls for his followers to do likewise.
Pg. 212, Sure looks like slavery to us.
What names would we name? Well,
just take a look at the tag in the clothing that you are wearing. If that article of clothing was produced in
what was just called an Economic Processing Zone, then the odds are pretty good
that you can name the brand of clothing you are wearing, as a slave
trader. And all of us who purchase these
goods are thereby complicit in slavery.
But that’s just the point. They are
slaves. Every time we step into a
Wal-Mart or Niketown or Gap or Winners and exclaim over the great deal we can
get on an article of clothing or how trendy we now look, we’ve made sweatshop
workers our slaves. Every time we buy
coffee that isn’t shade grown and fairly traded, we’ve made those coffee
producers and their children into our slaves.
Every time we have purchased a product – any product – that says Made in
China, or Indonesia, or the Philippines, or Sri Lanka, it is pretty likely that
we have made someone our slave.
But we have no choice about buying products made in these places. Some things can be bought only from these
companies! Buying some of these products
is inevitable.
The language of inevitability is the language of empire. Whenever we hear, “We have no choice,” our
ears should perk up. It is precisely the
strategy of the empire to take our imagination captive so that we think we have
no choice. When a certain lifestyle
seems to be inescapable, you need to realize that you are imprisoned.
Pg. 214, But maybe you can’t afford to pay more for clothes that are locally or
fairly made. Perhaps you will simply
decide to have fewer clothes as a result.
Or perhaps you will decide that if you are going to end up wearing
sweatshop-produced clothing, then at least you will do it in a way that will
serve the poor locally by making your purchases at secondhand shops. That way, a local charity benefits from your
purchase.
Our point is that when there are options available – whether various consumer
choices or lobbying – to decide not to do anything at all is itself a
choice. The Gospels call it the wide and
easy path. But we can choose another
path. There are ways to proclaim and
enact Paul’s word of release to slaves, women and children.
Pg. 217, Rather than instilling in them [our children] a desire to get to the
top, to move up, we want to encourage our children to develop a sense of
calling and service, including an awareness that this may require a process of
downward mobility, a decision not to strive for the top but to care for those
who are on the bottom… We hope that our children will not need to secede from
the empire, because they were never captive to it.
Pg. 218, To be wise is to be able to make connections between the food you eat,
the store where it was purchased, the transportation systems that brought that
food, the land where it was produced and the people who produced it.
Pg. 224, [a fictional trial of the lady mentioned above, Nympha, a wealthy
woman who converted to Christianity and renounced the empire, she is accused
based upon the finding of the poem of Colossians 1:15-20)” Caesar has brought
peace? Let’s look at the peace brought by
your Caesar. Let’s take as an example
Galilee, the homeland of Jesus. All the
Jewish people want to do is live in peace in their own land, free to follow
their ancestral laws, with a king from their own people and a high priest from
the priestly line. And the Romans
continually beat them down, imposing rulers who oppress them and impoverish them. When they rebel they are ruthlessly cut down,
their cities burned and their children enslaved. This is how Rome keeps peace by military
might and violent force. They make a
desolation and call it peace.
“Their favorite symbol for peace is the cross, on which they condemn those who
resist their rule to an excruciating death.
This is the peace they bring.
This is the peace that killed Jesus.”
There was a shocked silence, “You don’t mean to tell me,” said Trolius, “that
this Jesus you worship was killed as a political rebel!”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “And though that
death, by taking the evil of Rome and the evil of the universe upon himself, he
exhausted it and brought a peace and a reconciliation deeper than any peace
Caesar can even dream of. By emptying
himself in love, he reconciled all things, in heaven, on earth, everything in
the Roman empire and beyond, between all of creation and all of you and
God. That is the kind of peace Jesus
brought through the blood of a Roman cross.”
“Enough!” It was Lucius again. “I say that not only have we heard enough
from this woman’s own mouth to condemn her; we have also seen how the actions
of her household and community fundamentally challenge the empire and all it
stands for. There is now no doubt in my
mind that she stands guilty as charged, and all those who confess Jesus with
her.”
Pg. 226, Bringing the cosmic claims about Christ to bear on the lives of the
Colossian community, in their struggles and their stories, Paul personalizes
and localizes the “and he” of the poem by writing, “And you who were once
estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he was now reconciled”
(1:21-22). The counterimperial vision of
cosmic reconciliation in Christ is the vision that has transformed this
community into a subversive body politic, counter to the empire. This metanarrative of creational
reconciliation through the blood of a Roman cross – a story that radically
contests the imperial metanarrative of violence and oppression – reshapes and
reconstitutes this community as citizens of the kingdom rather than subjects of
the empire.
Pg. 229, If, as Paul asserts throughout his letters, we are called to share in
the sufferings of Christ, and if such suffering is for the sake of the body of
Christ, where does that leave a Christian community that seems to avoid any
sort of suffering? Where does it leave
those of us whose lives seem to be blessed by the empire rather than threatened
by it? Where does it leave those of us
whose blessings seem to actually be dependent on the oppression of our brothers
and sisters elsewhere?
The hope of glory therefore is a hope in which the Colossian Christians will
once again be full image-bearers of God.
The mystery the Messiah reveals is that this full image-bearing of God,
this glory, will be found among both Gentiles and Jews, breaking down the
ethnic divisions that have led to one people’s continued oppression of another.
Pg. 232, Perhaps we need to overhear Paul’s admonition to Archippus and apply
it to ourselves as Christians living at home in the imperial realities of the
Pax Americana. We are called to proclaim
and embody the gospel of a crucified Messiah.
This gospel challenges the principalities and powers of our own age. This gospel proclaims that reconciliation and
peace come not through the power of unilateral military force but through the
blood of the cross. And such a
reconciliation is manifest in a community that is renewed in the image of
Jesus, a community that shares in the suffering of Jesus in its attempts to
bring peace to the social, economic, political, racial and ethnic divisions
that sin has caused in the world. In
proclaiming and living that gospel, this community will begin to take on the
suffering of those who have been oppressed throughout the ages at the hands of
the empire. In taking on that suffering,
the Christian community will truly enact peace by sharing in Christ’s
afflictions. This is the call and the
challenge with which Paul ends Colossians.
And the letter of Colossians does not function as Scripture in the life
of the church if this call is not heard and responded to by the church today.
Pg. 29, “Wait a minute,” someone is bound to say,
“Capitalism is about capital, it’s about money.
Religion is about faith.” Well,
we’re not so sure that capitalism isn’t ultimately a matter of faith.
Pg. 34 You see, the danger of wanting a god, without being
willing to allow this god to speak in a voice that is radically other to our own voice, is that the god
we end up with is like any other consumer product we take off the shelf. We would never be accountable before such a
god, precisely because we never allow this god a voice that would actually call
us to account… Rather, it would be an idol.
And before idols like this the empire has nothing to fear, because
ultimately such idols – such gods – are
in the service of the empire.
Pg. 35, The tragic events of September 11 cannot be fully
understood apart from the dynamics of empire….
So what happened on September 11?
In a stroke of perverse, conteremperial genius, America was attacked at
the site of its socioeconomic and military control. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon were,
of course, the perfect targets. This
attack went to the systemic center of American culture – its economic control
and military power. But just as
important, these were targets of profound symbolic significance. These institutions are at the heart of the
powerful myth that legitimates the empire identified with America. As Benjamin Barber puts it, this was an
“astonishing assault on the temple of free enterprise in New York City and the
cathedral of American military might in Washington, DC.
Pgs. 71, Again and again the two are linked;
fertility and fruitfulness in the land on one hand, and peace the other, and
peace and security on the other, are rooted in rejection of the militaristic
consumerism of the empire and the social and economic practices that support
it.
Pg. 94, Because we have been so preoccupied with “incanting
anemic souls into heaven” as Wendell Berry puts it, we have missed the fact
that this poem envisions nothing less than the reconciliation of all
creation. If “all things” are created
in, through and for Christ – even the thrones, dominions, rulers an d powers –
and “all things” are reconciled through the blood of the cross, then the power
of this good news must permeate all of life.
Pg. 99, Worldviews-turned-ideologies present their view of
the world as simply the way the world is
They are world “views” that function so well that it is forgotten that
they are “views.”
Pg. 108, In this story Israel is called to be a “priestly
kingdom and a hold nation” (Ex. 19:6) not so it could be a regime of truth that
exists for the exclusion of others but in order to play a role in the
restoration of the whole human race… If this drama has the redemption of all
creation as its focus, then any violent, ideological, self-justifying ownership
of the story – either by nationalistic Jews or by sectarian and self-righteous
Christians – brings the story to a dramatic dead end that has missed the
creationally redemptive point.
Pg. 154, Praxis has everything to do with
‘sovereignty.’ What or who is sovereign
in life? What is it that matters the
most? What provides both a bedrock for
our life – a sense of ultimacy – and an orientation?
Months. I’ve been
meaning to write this blog post for months.
We’ve been back in Kansas City since mid-December, living one block
north of Independence Avenue and just around the corner from Grace Church of the
Nazarene. I’ve written this blog post
many times in my head and even twice on paper but it’s past time to actually
post this update. I’ll give an update on
a few different areas to show what life has been like since moving back to
Kansas City, USA.
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