Despite the
popularity of Reza Aslan’s current book (soon to be a major motion picture),
Jesus wasn’t a Zealot. (Zealots were the insurrectionist movement that
instigated the failed armed uprising against Rome in 66 CE). That idea has been
trotted out ever so often since it was first espoused by the German Deist Hermann
Samuel Reimarus in 1774, The last serious argument for it was S. G. F. Brandon,
Jesus And The Zealots (1967) It is
always drubbed into the dust by credible New Testament scholars. For a partial
recap of the history of this half-baked idea, see
A rebel yes. A
revolutionary. Yes, albeit a radically different kind of “revolutionary” than
what we usually mean by that word. But a 1st Century nationalistic
insurrectionist -- no. I won’t make the case here other than to note that there
is almost no evidence either in the New Testament or other 1st
Century writings to support the Reimarus/Brandon/Aslan hypothesis, virtually
every word of the New Testament repudiates it, and respectable New Testament
scholars along the continuum from conservative (Wright) to moderate (Wink/
Vermes) to liberal (Borg) all portray a very different Jesus.
I wouldn’t be
kicking this dead horse that will probably have the good grace to lie back down
before the movie goes on Netflix. But here’s the thing: It actually matters. It
matters because Jesus’ mission of ushering in the Kingdom of God is about both
the process and the outcome. There is no way to God’s Peaceable Kingdom except
through God’s Peaceable Process. Methodist scholar Walter Wink’s seminal
trilogy on non-violence in the Gospels (The
Powers That Be, Unmasking The Powers, Engaging The Powers) and our own
Episcopal lawyer-theologian William Stringfellow (Conscience and Obedience) expounded the process Jesus taught and
saints like Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu and Nelson
Mandela implemented in modern times. Jesus’ way was far more revolutionary than
the violence of any first century jihadist.
His way was what we need now and is quite the opposite of pitting the
violence of dominating power against the counter violence of someone else’s
dominating power.
Today, in the
United States, the necessity of a different process to produce a different
social structure is more critical than ever before. The reason is simple: the
kind of change we desperately need cannot be forced through the usual model of
power. It takes a totally different kind of power to accomplish what we must
accomplish for the sake of God and all God’s people.
Let’s start by examining
(albeit briefly) our context. One of the best summaries is by the late
University of Chicago political philosopher, Jean Bethke Elshtain in Democracy On Trial (1995). She wrote
that a democratic society depends on laws, constitutions, and institutions, but
also on “democratic dispositions”:
These
include a preparedness to work with those different
from oneself
toward shared ends; a combination of strong
convictions
with a readiness to compromise . . . . ; and a sense
of
individuality and commitment to civic goods that are not
the
possession of one person or one small group alone. But
what do we
see . . . ? We see deepening cynicism, a corrosive
isolation,
boredom, and despair; the weakening . . . of that world
known as
democratic civil society, a world of groups, associations
and ties
that bind.
A few years ago, we all learned the African adage, “It takes
a village to raise a child.” Well, it takes a village to accomplish much of
anything. People using that adage were proposing getting our villages engaged
in various worthy projects. But our basic problem is the disintegration of our
villages themselves. There ain’t no village. Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
American Community (2000), demonstrated with devastatingly hard numbers the
decline of participation in civic organizations in recent decades. All kinds of
voluntary associations for a shared goal – ranging from bowling to collective
bargaining to breaking down racial barriers to teaching kids agricultural
skills – have declined dramatically. The Church is in good company. Parker
Palmer, in Healing the Heart of Democracy:
The Courage To Create A Politics Worthy Of The Human Spirit (2011), draws the inevitable conclusion that
we are not learning the “democratic
dispositions” (Christians would call them “virtues” – perhaps “civic
virtues”) that are essential to our functioning as a democratic society. In the
absence of those civic organizations, we are not forming the social capital
(trust and camaraderie) without which neither business nor government can
function smoothly. We are desperately low on oil in our social crankcase.
Sociologists,
since the conservative theorist, Robert Nisbet, in the 1960s, have called these
voluntary civic associations (churches, book clubs, Shriners, labor unions, etc.)
“intermediate institutions” because they occupy a social space between the
small social unit of the family and the large units of the state and the market.
Functionally, they support families in two ways: 1. They buffer the family from
pressures coming from the state and the market (like advertising directed at
children); and 2. They reinforce the values and norms that sustain family life.
During the decades in which the state and the market have grown, intermediate
institutions have withered. So it is not surprising that the first victim of
the decline of civil society is the family. We do not need to recite the
sociological data on the decline of family stability. It has increased markedly
over the past two decades since Elshtain noted the dangers posed to children
who do not have the protection of a stable family.
The
strongest predictors of domestic situations in which
which
children are likely to be physically abused are stressed
out
single-parent households with a teenaged mother,
often of
several children, and households consisting
of a
biological mother and her children living with a man
who is not
related to those children or who does not accept
legal
responsibility for their well being.
70% of juveniles in reform institutions came from families
with a severe parental deficit. 79% of children whose parents were unmarried
did not finish high school. On the other side of the equation, where the
parents were married, had finished high school, and did not have children
before the age of 20, such children had only an 8% chance of ending up in
poverty. Numbers like these led Elshstain to conclude:
(S)temming
the tide of family collapse is the best protection
we can offer
a child against becoming either the victim or
the
perpetrator of violence – or, as it turns out, of poverty.
But, since Elshtain wrote those words, we have not stemmed
that tide – not yet. Quite the opposite.
In this context,
the Church sets out to overturn the world’s ways with God’s ways, to open the
door to the Peaceable Kingdom. That takes the assertion of a lot of power – but
not the power of political force. We can’t form civil society by force. We
can’t instill democratic dispositions by the imposition of undemocratic force.
The Zealot response to a broken world doesn’t heal it. History has proved that
all too well. The French Revolution overturned the bumbling old monarchy only
to replace it with the Reign of Terror. The Russian Revolution overthrew the
totalitarian Tsar only to replace him with the totalitarian Bolsheviks and then
Stalin. The Apostles taught “Do not confront evil with evil.” 1 Peter 3: 9; Roman
12: 17. Their actual words were a military metaphor: the tactic of one army
matching the strategy of the other with mirror formations. Jesus said, “Don’t
do that. It doesn’t work. Don’t use thuggery to replace one gang of thugs with
another.“ (paraphrase)
Religious efforts
to use political force to reshape the culture along religious lines either have
turned out horrifically oppressive as in Iran or utterly ineffectual as in the
United States. Think of the failed efforts of the Moral Majority and the
Christian Coalition who have succeeded mostly in alienating a whole generation
from faith. In To Change The World: The
Irony, Possibility And Tragedy of Christianity In The Late Modern World (2011), James Davison Hunter parses out why,
as a matter of sociology and political science, the efforts of the Christian
right and the Christian left are equally ineffectual because cultural change
cannot be forced. The Zealots engage in an exercise in futility.
The important changes, the deep changes,
happen through relationships, through personal engagement. If you strip the
word of its connotations of sentimentality, you might call it “love.” The
Church cannot change the world through force, bluster, or intimidation. We
don’t have enough tanks or missiles. Besides tanks and missiles don’t overthrow
the world’s ways with God’s ways. It takes kindness, compassion, truth telling,
and mutual support to do that.
Ironically, it
does not take “moral stances” and “prophetic voices” shouting at the culture
from either stage left or stage right to “shape up or ship out.” It takes what
Hunter calls “faithful engagement,” participating in the culture while
remaining distinctively and explicitly Christian – not insisting that others be
Christian but refusing to be anything other or less than Christian ourselves. Many
voices in the Church today propose adapting to recent social trends by
replacing congregations with de-institutionalized casual gatherings of the
spiritual but not religious for interested but not committed relationships.
That would be conceding the battle. It would be the Church taking on the
world’s ways rather than presenting a hopeful alternative to “corrosive
isolation, boredom, and despair.”
But the first
step in our efforts “to change the world” must be “to change ourselves.” The
first step is to take the plank out of our own eye. Matthew 7: 5. The Church
doesn’t have its act together in such a way that we can say to secular society,
“look at us and do what we do.” Our capacity for civility is, if anything,
worse than that of secular institutions, worse even than government, almost as
bad as business. The big controversies of past decades, though unavoidable if
we were to move forward, have not presented us to the world as models of
diversity living together in appreciation and curiosity. We have been as Fox
News vs. MSNBC as anyone. We have been as apt to say “my way or the highway” as
the political parties. But those big controversies are not half so destructive
to our mission as our inability to negotiate smaller differences in day-to-day
Church life. In Gilbert Rendle’s Behavioral
Covenants In Congregations (1999), he traces the modern history of how
congregations have lost the capacity for civil discourse. He says this
disintegration is part of a recurring cycle in history and that it will be
turning eventually. Our job is to be on the cutting edge of that change, not
dragging along behind, if Christianity is to have any credibility whatsoever in
the eyes of the next generation.
So, what was and
is Jesus’ project and what does that tell us about our mission and how to go
about it? Jesus was overturning the ways of the world with the ways of God.
Oppression and insurrection are both ways of the world. He showed us something
quite different – something of grace and wonder, something of healing and
reconciliation, something of mercy and compassion. He showed us how to conquer
death by going through it into life, how to conquer sin by forgiving it. Jesus’
way was and is paradoxical, full of serendipity and surprise. It is far more
subversive than reflexively resorting to violence to combat violence, “fighting
for peace.”
Jesus’ way is
much bigger than social utility. The Kingdom is much bigger than a civil
society that makes democracy possible. It’s cosmic. But it breaks into our 21st
Century post Cold War context just as Jesus began his mission the 1st
Century Roman Empire context. He meets us where we are, in the mix and muddle
of our present situation, which for us is the socially disintegrated era of
cynical division and isolation. Being cosmic and eternal doesn’t make the
Kingdom Mission irrelevant to life here and now. Quite the opposite. The
challenges of life today cannot be addressed by force or coercion. They call
for grace mediated through gracious people. That makes it urgently incumbent on
Christians to grow in grace so that we may become gracious to each other and
the suffering world.
