Church: A Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement

It is my contention that across the board in whatever form we find God’s people, that is a people fleeing Egypt, wandering nomads, a united and divided monarchy, a people in exile in Babylon, and a people exiled in their own land under foreign rule, they are to be a Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement (SCRM). Jesus of Nazareth entered the story of his people under the last-mentioned condition. They are to be God’s SCRM because this world is not as it was meant to be.

Instead of a world lathered and luxuriating in God’s presence and the abundance of life on this planet in its full flourishing, humanity turned its back on God in the cruelest of ingratitude. Breaking relationship with God unraveled the good order of his creation. We could no longer live with ourselves, each other, or the creation.

God, however, never acquiesced in this fallen state of his creatures or creation. Immediately, he began a reclamation and restoration project. God called Abraham and Sarah from out of the pagan rebellious world to be the parents of a new people. They received a threefold promise in their calling:

-God would make from them a great nation,

-God would bless and protect this people, and

-God would use this people to spread his blessings throughout the world.

As the instrument of divine blessing to the world, this people, Israel, was to declare and demonstrate God’s will and way for his errant and erring creation. This entailed a subversive and counter-revolutionary existence for Israel.

-Subversive because they had to contest the distortions in thought, attitude, and action now inscribed into life and world by human rebellion. And they were to do this from below, as it were. Not by ceasing control of the world and imposing solutions top-down but from a patient and persevering practice of the life God intended for all humanity.

-Counter-Revolutionary because the church acts in the interest of God’s purposes. These purposes will not be fully established until the End. Therefore, the church counters the revolution of humanity into sin and death not by a return to a previously established state of affairs (the Garden of Eden) because that state was only the beginning of the journey toward the End, which is a city encompassing a garden. The Church heralds a count-revolution then that is forward looking, ever-provisional, and perpetually self-critical.  

In his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension Jesus subverted and countered human sin and its effects in a climactic and decisive way. He

-brought Israel’s exile to an end,

-reconstituted it as God’s Abrahamic people, and

-equipped them to go into the world discipling all nations.

 Jesus embodied and enacted the ethos and ethics of this “subversive counter-revolutionary movement” and enjoined them on the new people of God centered on him.

After Pentecost the church no longer takes or need the form of a nation-state. Now it’s spread into every nook and cranny of the globe as a transnational community with no boundaries, many tongues and ethnicities, male and female, children and adults, rich and poor, the lowly and the well-placed, and so on across every division that separates us from each other.

Though the church is a community of the Spirit, it is not a “spiritual” community in the sense we so often take it in North America, as an invisible, inward relation to God and Jesus through the Spirit that has nothing to do with the material, physical, political, economic, or social aspects of our lives. The church is, in the Spirit, a political body. It is a public community, committed to a way of life that directs us to live in certain ways rather than others that can be observed by other people and groups in the world.

As noted earlier, because we live in a world hostile to and running from God, to live in God’s way will mean we run into opposition. Opposition that wants to either shut us down or convert us to its way of living and relating. And we learn in the New Testament that this opposition and hostility is ultimately rooted in cosmic powers created by God but which unfathomably and inexplicably rebelled against God and sought to seize control of the world for themselves. And human empires are a chief way they exercise their illicit rule.

Jesus defeated this rebellious cosmic cohort at the cross and by his resurrection rules over them and the whole world. He is rehabilitating those powers that can be rehabilitated and defanged those that cannot. The latter continue to foment trouble for God’s people with their lies and illusions. They cannot make us do their bidding; they can only lie and deceive. It’s only our capitulation to these falsehoods that gives them any ongoing power over us.

But Jesus has equipped us to resist and deflect this demonic assault. In fact, God intends to use his New Testament people to manifest his varied wisdom to these still hostile-though-defeated-powers announcing that Jesus is Victor, their power is gone and reign of terror over, and destruction awaits them.

The dynamic of God’s SCRM is maintained by two sets of practices. First, perpetual reminders of to whom they belong, who they are, and what they are to be about in God’s world. Worship, the Sacraments, and Word are central here. This involves both extolling The triune God and critiquing and rejecting the imperial ideology, the chief mark of human rebellion against God, that continually seeks to seduce us. Second, practices of “healing and restoring that which the empire has crushed and destroyed, acts of both resistance to the imperial powers and of solidarity with those the empire has turned into victims” (Robert J. Arner, “Resisting the Empire,” https://preachingpeace.org/resisting-the-empire-fidelity-to-the-gospel-of-life/).

I know this does not sound much like church to many in this country. That it doesn’t is a measure of our distance from the gospel. We need a thorough rethink of the nature and purpose of the church from the ground up. We have entered a new epoch in the history and culture of the West, “the world come of age” as Bonhoeffer called it. And as Bonhoeffer saw, a new form of church is required for this new age. But this new form of church, whatever and however various it may turn out to be, must always bear the character of God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement. Arner provides a splendid summary statement:

“The ekklesia (church) organized itself as an alternative form of political identity based not upon the power of the sword, but on the kenotic law of love. By offering a vision and organization for an alternative form of social interaction, the movement challenged the perception that Rome was the desirable, rightful, invincible ruling power. It rejected the empire's totalizing claims and version of social reality that brought benefits to a few and hardships to many. By contextualizing the empire in God's greater purposes, the Christians demystified it, relativized its power, exposed its shortcomings, burst its illusions, revealed its lies, and numbered its days....They exposed the empire's vulnerability by displaying the limits of its claims to human allegiance.”