God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now

In this book Crossan broadens his focus beyond Jesus to the whole surrounding Roman world, and the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation. And in comparing all this, he exposes a vast gulf between totally different visions for the world, which now compete to decide our future. On one hand he explores the vision of peace through victory over all enemies, which was the Roman imperial dream, and the dream of all empires including that of America. But as Crossan shows, this dream of ultimate victory is also repeatedly expressed in the Bible. Against this we have a vision of peace through converting people to justice, which was the dream of Jesus and many other prophets or apostles in the Bible. And last we have a vision of peace through death and destruction, in which both sinners and the sinful world are destroyed in a paroxysm of divine vengeance. And even this dream is expressed in the Bible, both in the flood of Noah and the Apocalypse of Revelation. Or, as Crossan quotes Charles Jones, "Some day we may blow ourselves up with all the bombs .... But I still believe God's going to be in control. ... If he chooses to use nuclear war, then who am I to argue with that?". Crossan deals with questions that have grown urgent for the world's survival. These visions of a final solution -- of either exterminating evil or converting sinners to justice, "... are never reconciled anywhere in the biblical tradition. They are together from one end of the book to the other. Indeed, they often coexist in the same book or even the same chapter. So again, are we to take them both and worship a God of both violence and nonviolence, or must we choose between them ...?"

Briefly, this is a must read for those who wonder what the present literal/metaphorical Christian fuss is about. It's about violent Christianity versus non-violent Christianity. Ironically, non-violence is at the core of many moral codifications, Christianity being one of them. Crossan explores the challenge and asks the question. We get to answer it or not. The First Axial Age, circa 500 BCE, saw the concurrent formation of Socratic philosophy, Judaism (leading to Christianity), Buddhism and Confucianism. This period has been briefly examined by Karl Jaspers in The Way to Wisdom and extensively by Karen Armstrong in The Great Transformation. Crossan's question as to how we can move from the violence of empire to the non-violence of god may be today's critical question. This is what Bob Funk called The Second Axial Age which is an improvement over the first because it includes everyone, even women and slaves, who were left out the last time. I have read God and Empire twice with different insights both times. I am about to read it again.

In his latest reconsideration of the relations between Judaism and Christianity on the one hand and Roman Imperialism on the other, Dr Crossan treats us to a fascinating account of the parallels as well as the contrasts between the two systems. Did you imagine, for example, that "Son of God" and "Savior of the World" were titles unique to Christian thought? Not a bit of it! Both were given to the Emperor Augustus before Jesus of Nazareth was even born! That is just one example, says Crossan, of the way in which the two competing systems, Roman Peace by Domination and Judaeo-Christian Peace by (Distributive) Justice sometimes found themselves using the same language. The danger has always been that in using the language of earthly success, Judaeo-Christianity would stray into the sphere of power politics ... and so it has - all too often. This book is a must-read for anyone who is sick of political domination by fear and greed and longs for justice and peace through non-violent action. Doesn't that mean you and me?

John Dominic Crossan believes that the Kingdom of God is here, present, that what he terms the "Divine Clean-up," (what others call "The Second Coming") is now and does not await some future cataclysm at the sword of an avenging, returning Jesus. He furthermore compares "God's radicality" to "civilization's normalcy." The latter is comprised of empire after empire promising Peace through Victory, with violence being the normalcy to which civilization accustoms us. God's radicality, on the other hand is the clear and present Kingdom brought by the Jesus who lived 2000 years ago. The Kingdom is a three-pronged program based on mutuality among all people. It is manifested in healing the sick, dining with those you heal, and announcing that the Kingdom is present in that mutuality. There are no divisions, classes, genders, no basis whatsoever to assign superiority and inferiority. Crossan delivers his own credo on p. 198 when he reveals the content of his Bin of Disbelief, the main reasons he decries Christian fundamentalism and "Left Behind-ish" Apocalyptic theology. "What I reject," says the scholar, is "discrimination and oppression, homophobia and patriarchy, injustice and violence, force and empire." That's a lot of rejecting. And Crossan is making the case that Jesus' message is right there with him, if only we can parse it out of the Bible. Trouble is, the Bible, including the New Testament, doesn't always seem to contain the same items in its Bin of Disbelief. This is where Crossan will lose a lot of readers. What he posits is that you must choose which parts of the New Testament to take seriously as bonafide Jesus talk (God's radicality) and which parts are later slippages back to civilization's normalcy. He actually groups the Letters of St. Paul into three categories. The first group, definitely written by Paul, present the radical Paul who believes in the same Christianity as Crossan; the second group of letters are of suspect authorship and reveal the liberal Paul, a middle of the roader. The third bunch of letters are just plain phony, and here we find the conservative Paul, a sexist, anti-Semitic homophobe. The Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles are likewise infected with the backsliding to civilization's normalcy, while the earlier Gospel of Mark is a far better record of what really issued from Jesus' lips. Worst of all is the Book of Revelation, today enjoying wide renown as the primary basis of the hugely popular "Left Behind" books about the end of the world. Crossan examines Revelation and determines that its author simply presents an untenable Jesus, one utterly different from the Jesus of history. Almost wistfully, Crossan cites Martin Luther King's reference to Revelation (p. 150), made a week before his murder, and concludes rightly that King interpreted the Book as referring to Jesus' First, not Second Coming. Scholarly integrity bars Crossan from such an easy out. He acknowledges that Revelation presents a very vio

Crossan's new book GOD AND EMPIRE cannot be properly reviewed as a standalone beacon. There is a historical momentum in Crossan's vision of God and "this world." Rodney Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion, in 1996 published a history THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY:How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the World in a Few Centuries. How? By nonviolence! "But perhaps all else, Christianity brought a new concept of humanity to a world saturated with capricious crulty and viscarious love of death." I believe Rodney Stark's book set fire under biblical scholars to investigate the historical living conditions that Jesus emerged from as well as the Jesus Movement. In October 1999, Crossan took part in a Jesus Seminar lecture series (I was there in the audience) about "A Future for Christian Faith?" His full text was published in the book THE ONCE AND FUTURE JESUS. He explained: "What I am trying to imagine is what Christianity must do clearly and honestly to distinquish itself from fantasy." "In 1999 I never imagined...the speed with which faith-based thinking would morph into fantasy-based dreaming...." In 2001 Crossan and Reed issued their first collaborative book EXCAVATING JESUS: The key Discoveries for understanding Jesus in His World. This book combined analysis of text conjoined with archaeological discoveries. "Jesus and his Kingdom were a threat to Roman law and order, and his Jewish God was a threat to the Roman God." This summation vibrates through the whole book. In 2004 Crossan and Reed issued their second collaborative book IN SEARCH OF PAUL: How Jesus's Apostle opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom. Again this book combine text conjoined with archaeological discoveries. "...Paul's radical horizontal Christian equality clashed forcibly with Roman society's normal vertical hierarchy." What was the clash? "In Christ...inside Christianity, a Christian Jew was not superior to a pagan, free Christian to an enslaved Christian, or male Christian to a female Christian. Paul took it for granted, therefore, that, within Christianity, women just as well as men could receive the same gifts, offer the same services and perform the same activities." All this "withinness-horizontal-equality" clashed with Rome's violent vision for peace. In 2007 Crossan solo's his conclusions in GOD AND EMPIRE:Jesus against Rome,then and now. This percolated in 1999, 2001 and 2004. This book uses the past to confront the present and future of the American Empire and American Christianity. There is a two track solution to the normalcy of violence in human nature lived out in American Empire and American Religion. The fantasy of fundmentalism (the final solution toward human violence)is in God's Second Coming. It is all about the angry God slaughtering human beings with the exception for the God fearers.The members of this theology try to enable the Second Coming by supporting violence, here and now, that wil