Theological Journal – March 7

More on Empire

Joy is the chief mark of Christian existence in the world. It can be emotional response to pleasant occasions or the expectation of God’s deliverance or rescue from oppression or distress. It is also an affection, disposition that determines the tone and tenor of our lives in good times as well as bad. This latter joy is not an emotion or feeling though it may involve them in particular circumstances. It is based on the conviction that Jesus is Lord and has triumphed over the powers that seek to divert and undo our following Jesus.

Chief among these powers is the overarching reality that forms the environment in which we live. For God’s people throughout most of its history that overarching reality has been empire. Empire is a spirit, a way of doing things, a pretention to know how and have the power to order human life in the most fulfilling way possible. Empire (seeks to) shape the whole of our lives and make us over into its image. Such empire is a good thing. A necessary thing. God created a world in which every aspect was designed to work together to create an environment, an ecology, that nurtured and support humans in living life aligned with the Creator and his purposes. The Bible calls this Shalom (or “peace”). Or God’s Empire (Kingdom).

Once humanity went it own way in sin and rebellion that divine ecology got all of whack. No longer conducive to human alignment with God’s purposes, the environment we inhabited was rife with conflicting and competing drives and desires that both promote and respond to our desire for self-aggrandizement and our need to find security and establish our own significance. Or create our own joy. Empire became our project to find and promote our version of joy. The strongest of us, of course, prevailed in setting up and imposing our version of joy on others and it became the environment in which all within our control lived. Empires, of course, have a “shelf life.” They come and go with the passage of time. For the early church in the 1^st century a.d. the Roman Empire was that environment and ecology in which they lived.

Craig Keen gives this helpful summary of life in this environment:

“The Empire was vast. For centuries Rome pervaded very nearly every region into which the church moved. It was in the air and the water, underfoot, in hearth and home. Rome was “tolerant.” It left room for local customs and was pleased when its subjects grew strong to keep the “peace.” It was convinced that it was carrying out a kind of cosmic mandate, a manifest destiny, to bring the world into conformity with the ways of God. Cosmic law extended to the laws of social interaction, which in turn extended to the laws of the Empire, which extended finally to the office of the Emperor. To follow the Emperor was to follow a godly man, embodying a godly order. Of course, Pax Romana was a delicate balance and had to be maintained sometimes by extreme measures. Though lining the Appian Way with bodies bleeding and suffocating on crosses was for Rome a rare form of peacekeeping, the threat of violence was not; indeed, it was as omnipresent as Rome itself. And unless it had not only the machines of death but also the will to use them, a threat could not be sustained. The more its displays of violence took place out in the open before crowds of onlookers the more effective they were. It is not that Rome was sadistic. Such measures were simply an efficient way to secure the conditions favorable for the property rights Roman practicality made proper to its private citizens. Its functionaries, themselves under threat, were charged with keeping the enemies of the Roman peace under surveillance. When it was time for Rome to make its might manifest, those under close watch would be hauled off to arenas to die for the good of all. It is a logic all too easily understood.” (Craig Keen, After Crucifixion, Kindle Edition: 5537)

The drives the fueled the Roman Empire were common to all Empires though the particular shape and form it took were specific to its time and place. Bergman and Montgomery, in their book Joyful Militancy, sketch these drives:

-try to make everything controllable and predictable (9)

-is in conflict with other forms of life

-absorbs and isolates those under its reign; “The self-enclosed individual is a fiction of Empire, just like the State. ‘I’ am already a crowd, enmeshed in others.”

-backed up by violence (no matter how subtle and pacific it may appear)

-discrimination lies behind expressions of inclusion and control

-seeks to crush autonomy and inculcate dependence (even while extolling independence and free expression)

-steals curiosity

-control identities, desires, relationships (10)

-maintains its hold through morality and toxic relationships (18)

-generates a “sadness” (philosopher Baruch Spinoza):  this is not an emotion according to Spinoza but rather a reduced capacity to affect and be affected, stagnation, rigidity, depletion, loss of collective power (16) 

Faith is always and necessarily in conflict with this environment. Joy is the great threat to it because Joy contests its basic driver: that it is the sole authoritative determiner of who we are, what we care about, and how we relate to others. As long as we allow this environment to determine these things for our public life, we may (or may not) be free to allow faith to have a say in our private lives. But even there aspects of the environment, like Spinoza’s “sadness,” have a powerful corrupting impact on the practice of faith.

Once God’s Joy takes root in us, though, we can no longer accept these impacts on our practice of faith or its relegation to our private lives. Thus the shape of our conflict with our environment takes shape. If this is Empire and how it works, how does Joy impact our life in it? And in particular what kind of militancy does such Joy engender and practice? That’s next up on our agenda.