Barmen and Empire.

                                                   

Jesus Christ,

as he is attested in Holy Scripture,

is the One Word of God

which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey

in life and in death.

We reject the false doctrine,

as though the church could and would have to acknowledge

as a source of its proclamation,

apart from and besides this one Word of God,

still other events and powers, figures and truths,

as God’s revelation.

These words, composed by Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, constitute the first thesis of the Theological Declaration of Barmen.  The leaders of a minority of Christians in Germany drafted the Declaration in 1934, in response Hitler taking power.  The new Nazi government tried to do what governments in Europe had generally done for centuries: control the national, state-funded, church.  That's Christendom.  Barmen stands as the first real statement of the Christian Church in opposition to the religious nationalism that is a central component of fascism. 

For over a century, fascism has loomed as a constant liability and attraction in the Modern world.  As liberalism increasingly fails to deliver what it promised, as our institutions continue their disintegration, as the climate crisis intensifies, and as human migration swells, nationalistic, xenophobic far-right ideologies and conspiracy theories gain more traction.  Their effect is to maintain, strengthen, and institutionalize the ignorance, paranoia, bigotry, and division on which they thrive.  Fascism is a conscious attempt to "return" to an imagined simpler, more ordered, unified, and positive past, a time when we were "great" which we want to have back "again."  But to get there requires us to intensify the autocracy, bigotry, and violence already permeating the system.   

I use the term "empire" to talk about the political/economic regime that has dominated the West since the adoption of agriculture.  Its identifying characteristics include militarism, plutocratic oligarchy, expansionism, resource extraction, patriarchy, social and political stratification, and subservient religious institutions.  Empire is all prejudice and violence.  The economy of empire is designed to increase the wealth and power of those who already have it, mainly by exploiting human labor and the natural world.  This describes the dominant regime in the West from the time of ancient Egypt, to the Assyrians and Babylonians, to the Greeks and the Romans, to the Feudal order in the Middle Ages, to its manifestation in our present era: Modernity.

We who have grown up under its influence have been taught to think of Modernity as an evolved advance beyond this imperial regime.  The spirit of Modernity is supposedly all about good things like freedom, democracy, equality, and progress.  America, we hear, is a democracy, not an empire.  But, while it always exuded such self-serving propaganda, beginning by calling itself "Enlightenment," and proclaiming faith in "reason," "science," and "humanism," in reality Modernity exhibited all the characteristics of empire, albeit in different and sometimes more subtle and hidden ways.  The bourgeoisie or merchant-class -- the owners -- simply replaced the previous hereditary nobility, then justified itself with claims to be a rational meritocracy.  But all we got was just a different mode of privilege and entitlement (still largely hereditary).  Remember that among the groups that loudly called for "freedom" were slave owners and capitalists.  Freedom was always a limited commodity. 

Modernity is empire perfected; it is empire with a vengeance; it is barbarism with a happy face mask.  Indeed, no preceding system has had Modernity's catastrophic, even existential, effects on people and planet.  Its ideology of techno-materialist, individualist secularism may have felt liberating to its protagonists and beneficiaries.  But Modernity's actual expression in colonialism, slavery, capitalism, industrialism, racism, misogyny, genocide, and constant and increasingly technologically sophisticated and deadly warfare belies this rosy assessment.  It preaches "democracy," but the political economy of Modernity failed to follow democratic values when it came to what really mattered to it: money.  Corporations and businesses are generally not in the least democratic; rather they are ruled by some combination of oligarchy (rule by a few), plutocracy (rule by the rich), and monarchy (rule by a single owner or family).  When it does manage to include more people, it usually happens because it has found others elsewhere to exploit or more efficient technology.  When politicians say they want to run the government "like a business," they mean applying more autocracy, like a sole proprietorship; they mean staying fixated on profit not service, what is gained not what is given, extraction not contribution.  The truest political expression of capitalism is therefore fascism.  Under capitalism, that is where politics inevitably wants to go.  What passes for democracy is mere window-dressing and public relations schemes designed to hide and make palatable a system based on greed, inequality, and violence.  

Empire also always utilizes religion.  Over the centuries, much of Christianity was neutered and domesticated, reformed into a religious institution subservient to empire, the arrangement which Kierkegaard named as "Christendom."  Christendom rendered Jesus Christ little more than a quaint and empty logo, a useful mascot defined, projected, and managed by the owner class in their interests, or an embarrassing ancestor whose crazy ideas we may safely dismiss and ignore, even as we piously keep his picture on our wall -- invariably an ethereal white man with perfect hair.  We reduced him to a nice, patriotic, Anglo, middle-class, ineffectual, inoffensive, and fairly irrelevant, man of the past, someone to remember and revere, but under no circumstances actually follow.  His core message, announcing the establishment of God's Kingdom on earth, was diluted into an empty promise of a better afterlife in heaven or some hope only realized at the end of time. 

Maintaining the social, political, economic, and moral order of empire became the main thing for Christendom, with its rationalizations, explanations, and defenses of all manner of cruelty, injustice, and violence.  When Christian leaders offer reasoned apologies for slavery, or encourage mass murder in war, or justify rapacious capitalism, or promote lynching and other types of cruelty towards the weak, or exclude and vilify gender non-conforming people, or wield the flag in nationalistic militarism, or provide religious cover for colonialism, or applaud the round-up and incarceration of people in detention centers, they do not follow the Jesus Christ to whom Scripture attests.  Nothing undercuts the mission of the Church more effectively than the obscene spectacle of Christian leaders spouting the nationalist, militarist, patriarchal, white-supremacist line, and participating in, and benefiting from, the inhuman atrocities it spawns. 

Under Christendom, the empire seduced, bought out, and domesticated the Church, claiming the role of Christianity's defender, patron, advocate, and agent, keeping and managing the public image of Jesus Christ, while putting other state-approved "events and powers, figures and truths," in Jesus' place, even within the gathering of disciples.

In many countries, the nation-state, as the local jurisdiction of Empire, directly supported and controlled the Church.  In America this happened more subtly and indirectly.  Under the influence of Modernity, churches willingly put themselves under the control of "the people..." which sounds democratic and reasonable.  It even has some precedent in Christian history.  But Modern citizens always gravitated towards a  primary loyalty to the state and its economy from which they benefitted.  They tended to shape a faith subservient to the state.  (To demonstrate this allegiance, we systematically injected a national flag -- often topped by a golden, imperial eagle no less -- into Christian worship spaces.  One historian confided to me that one of the biggest donors of flags to churches in the 1920's was the Ku Klux Klan, an explicitly fascist organization.  And once a flag has materialized in an American church extracting it can be very difficult, even today.)  

The perpetual projection and amplification in Modernity of "other events and powers, figures and truths" to supplant and distract from the One Word of God, Jesus Christ, makes this apparent.  Modernity operates by imposing on people completely manufactured categories like nation, race, gender, borders, and class, generating the divisive enmity, fear, and anger on which it feeds.  It projects for the population twisted and spun versions of "history" that favor and glorify the owner class, while ignoring, vilifying, or subjugating everyone else, especially minorities and women. 

The disgraceful spectacle of "Christian" nations regularly making war on each other culminated in the wanton, disgusting, but very profitable, industrialized slaughter of the 20th century.  When the Church succumbs to the "other events and powers, figures and truths" projected by empire, rather than "Jesus Christ as attested in Holy Scripture," or even pretends that the scriptural Jesus underwrites all these "traditional values," the Church forfeits its identity as the community gathered in the Spirit of Jesus Christ and takes on the role of hood ornament on empire's armored bulldozer.

This is what Barth saw in 1914, as his teachers, the guardians and proponents of Liberal Theology, fell into line supporting the German war effort.  Two decades later, as Germany descended into fascism, he drafted the Barmen Declaration.  Fascism is where Liberal Theology ultimately if unintentionally leads.  Barmen insists against Liberal Theology that the Church, as the gathering of people who trust and follow the Jesus Christ attested in Scripture, must always see everything we do through the lens and in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.  From creation, to the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures, to its ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ, the liberating, saving, healing, redeeming Word of the Creator has always given us the antidote to empire.  This applies as well to Modernity as empire's latest and most virulent expression.

Not everyone agrees that Barmen is a suitable starting point for this work.  Barth himself later recognized and confessed that the Declaration does not directly and explicitly address the racism, anti-semitism, and militarism which were at the core of the Nazi movement.  But I suggest that Barmen addressed what must be affirmed before all else, grounding all other social/political/economic commitments, without which they quickly drift off course.  If we do not first settle the question of who lives at the core and center of our life, if we do not decide who and whose we are, everything that follows will suffer from ambiguity, egocentricity, and compromise.  Particular issues and policies are necessarily downstream from this basic affirmation.  The declaration states the Source of our life and identity, and it declares the Church's allegiance to him alone, and therefore its independence from the secular state.  If this is not laid and affirmed as the only foundation, to be reaffirmed and returned to constantly as a defining Presence and destination, whatever political/economic/social initiatives we take will be fatally corrupted by both ego and empire.  This is why Barth himself had such a powerful allergy to what was then called "natural theology."  If we start basing our faith on extraneous elements picked up from the culture, dreamed up in imaginations conditioned by empire, made apparently "necessary" by the economy, or demanded by political expedience or the state, the Church ceases to be the Church, and becomes just a tool of the demonic powers loose in the world.  But if we do exert care to maintain this foundational commitment to Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture, we may participate in and express the love and destiny offered by the Creator for all the world.  

In Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture we see the Way of love revealed, in compassion, gentleness, confession, simplicity, humility, nonviolence, forgiveness, healing, inclusion, thanksgiving, justice, hope, joy, and advocacy for and solidarity with the poor, powerless, and marginalized.  People who actually live according to this Way, therefore, inherently and necessarily fall out of synch with empire and therefore with its expression in Modernity.  Empire will always see such behavior as a threat to its power, and deal with it accordingly.  

From time to time, though, especially when Christianity veers off course, the Holy Spirit leads some Christians to hear anew the Scriptural witness and calls the Church back to discipleship.  Thankfully, in spite of attempts to dilute or adulterate it, the Church so far has always had the Scriptures in which we may rehear its unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ.  Barmen says nothing new in the sense that every authentic movement of renewal in the church must find its grounding in "Jesus Christ, as attested in Holy Scripture."

Decolonizing Jesus, Part Two

 2.  The "Historical Jesus" Is a Project and Product of Empire.

We clearly see Protestantism's subservience to empire in the way many Christians get lured away from the Jesus Christ attested in their own Scriptures to follow alternative versions invented and pushed by the powers dominating the Western political economy.  

First we have the false "Jesus" pressed into service as empire's mascot.  Forms of this "Jesus" have been developed by secular powers for 1500 years.  Where centuries ago Jesus supposedly favored the divine right of kings, under Modernity, he is a cartoon who preaches, justifies, and enforces its dominant ideologies: nationalism, capitalism, colonialism, militarism, patriarchy, and racism, while enforcing the restrictive personal/sexual and social morality demanded by the overseers of the political and economic establishment.  Here is a "Jesus" engineered mainly to promote the preservation of the status quo.  He represents an imaginary past where everyone knew their place and gladly did what the wise rulers told them to do.  He is the "Jesus" that conservatives take on the duty to defend (implying that he can't do so himself) and try to impose on the rest of society.  He is no more than a hood ornament on their limos and bulldozers.  I sometimes refer to him as the fascist "Jesus."  

The advocates of this "Jesus" may claim to be all "Bible believing" and "Full-gospel," "orthodox," and "traditional."  Sometimes their Savior comes blatantly wrapped in a flag and packing an AR-15.  But he is more likely to look gentle, meek, and mild, a sentimental blue-eyed and blonde cypher needing the protection of realists who have the guts to do what needs to be done.  And the people he apparently needs defending against are the usual Gay, Trans, liberal, Muslim, Commie, immigrant, atheist, feminist, poor, Black suspects.  Anyone the economic and political establishment wants you to hate, the "Jesus" does too.  

Their white nationalist "Jesus" contradicts the biblical Jesus so obviously and thoroughly that he doesn't withstand even the most perfunctory scrutiny.  A reader taking the New Testament at all seriously has to dismiss him as a ridiculous caricature.  Yet he remains the "Jesus" a lot of Christians were taught to follow, and many still either accept him or reject him as the only "Jesus" they know.  In seminary I met a guy who had been to his family's evangelical church twice a week for his whole life, but when we read the Sermon on the Mount in class he said he had never heard it before.  

Alternatively, we have various versions of a "historical Jesus" manufactured by secular scholars.  During the Enlightenment, in an attempt to reduce all things human to left-brained, "objective" categories that made sense to the new scientific outlook, those advocating for these new ways of thinking set up the arbitrary and extraneous standard of "historicity" by which to measure truth.  Eventually this set of methods became generally accepted as the only way to establish the "truth" of anything, placing in question the reliability of the narratives about Jesus in the Christian scriptures.  This meant that they stopped listening to the Biblical text as a whole or respecting it as holy or sacred.  Indeed, under Modernity "sacred" no longer functioned as a meaningful category.  They replaced the organic historical community of disciples with objective, secular scholars who applied their own methods to produce their historical "Jesus" and present him to Western culture as the real one. Extracting the Bible from its context in community and tradition, they addressed it with the same cold and calculating approach Modernity took to everything else: as a dead object.  The text became something for experts (or anyone else) to poke at, speculate about, disassemble, and either dismiss altogether or reconfigure into something more suitable to them.  They proceeded to drill their way into the gospels, seeking to extract from within them a "historical Jesus" they could put forward as verifiable, tossing everything else into the trash as "later additions."  They continue to congratulate themselves that they function freely, without "dogma," even though their entire project is determined by the rigid scientific doctrines, criteria, and procedures which have characterized Modernity. 

For some historical Jesus critics, this was almost an apologetic exercise.  They wanted to use scientific tools to prove that Jesus really did exist in history and some words and actions could be attributed to him.  They wanted to save at least something of Jesus from being relegated to fiction after immersion in the acid-bath of historical method.  This new "Jesus" would seem to be validated by science, making him more credible to Modern people, supposedly giving them a way to stay Christian.  Their intent was to invent a new and better "Jesus" as an alternative to the one propounded by conservatives.  What they did not realize is that their methodologies themselves are the empire.  Thus they inevitably ended up with a "Jesus" no less acceptable to the empire.  If anything, their new "Jesus" was simply a cheerleader for different elements in Modernity's ruling class, namely those academics, intellectuals, professionals, and others who felt the strict, judgmental, moralizing, establishment "Jesus" wasn't meeting their needs.   

The "historical Jesus" is thus a product of Modernity and its violent, extractive methodologies.  And since he is presented as the only alternative to the reactionary  "Jesus," he is in many ways more dangerous because his followers seem to feel like they are bravely resisting empire when in reality they are participating in and profiting from it.  The "historical Jesus" is at least as unthreatening to Modernity as is the "Jesus" of the establishment.  The basic powers of Modernity are not questioned, let alone threatened.  At most they want to project a marginally kinder and gentler Modernity.  The manufactured and commodified "historical Jesus" signals a performative resistance to empire which nevertheless fails to identify, let alone jeopardize, empire's deeper roots.  He only makes empire more entrenched.

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Both the fascist and the historical Jesuses are really ways this empire would have us avoid the far more challenging and critical canonical Jesus.  All Modern Jesuses are built on the same foundation and assumptions: they are focused on the individual self that Modernity has decided now takes the place of God.  Modernity is fine with Christians arguing over which of these "Jesuses" is better, as long as everyone continues to assume this foundational idolatry.  

The canonical Jesus, conversely, has never been acceptable to empire.  This is especially true for Modernity because the canonical Jesus preaches both the relinquishment of the ego-centric self, with its fears and desires, and an alternative to empire he calls the Kingdom of God, a commonwealth of equity.  He displaces the ego from its throne in our souls, which renders his followers essentially uncontrollable and thus subversive and intolerable to all earthly empires.  If Modernity was going to exert control over the Church, as several empires had done before, it had to jettison the canonical Jesus. 

Modernity's whole consumer ethos encourages individuals to evaluate Jesus like any other product for sale in the marketplace.  They may lift up the parts of Jesus' story they agree with or that support their views, and they reject or critique what they don't like.  Customers should have the Jesus they want.  Following the example of Thomas Jefferson, individuals with at best only a tangential relationship to the community of people called to follow Jesus take it upon themselves to go through the gospels and assess what they do and don't agree with, removing, changing, and adding things that improve the story for them, and go from there, until we are lost in waves of speculative bullshit.  (At the same time, they get indignant at evidence that the  Church has altered scriptural passages... even though these stories belong to the Church!) 

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Decolonizing Jesus.

1.  Modernity Is Our Empire. 

To profess faith in Jesus of Nazareth is in no uncertain terms the denunciation of the so-called Jesus of the American Empire, and all empires for that matter.  We have either pledged our lives to the lamb and his Kingdom of self-giving sacrificial love, or to the empire of the beast with its gods of conquest, war, famine, and death.

--Ryan Cagle

The Western world has been dominated by a succession of empires since the Egyptians.  Empire's most recent iteration is the hegemony of Western European nations that began to congeal around the 16th century and then metastasized across Europe and colonial North America, finally overshadowing almost all of the world.  It's called Modernity.  

Modernity has done far more comprehensive damage to the earth and humanity than all previous empires combined.  From the intensifying climate catastrophe now beginning to disrupt ecosystems and civilization, to the related savaging of the land, poisoning the air and water, depletion of natural habitats, and igniting mass-extinction, this empire has done uncountable damage to the planet.  It spawned slavery, colonialism, nationalism, militarism, racism, and fascism, ravaging most of the human population as well.  Even the arguably positive benefits it produced have been tainted.  Its vaunted science and technology have been dedicated mainly to war and producing profit for the few, and brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  Its aspiration to human rights is overshadowed by the demolition of traditional cultures and the painstaking, haltingly slow inclusion of people who are not straight, male, white, and rich.  It throws up sprawling, ugly commercial wastelands, and poisons the human psyche with corrosive ideas and images.  We suffer epidemics of depression, anxiety, suicide, heart disease, and cancer.  Modernity destroys families, communities, and traditions.  Its lofty dreams of equality are regularly stifled by its enforcement of class inequality and racial hatred.  Its capitalistic economics generates wide inequality between the rich and everyone else, rewards exploitation, and elevates the worst individuals to positions of influence and power.  It's supposed commitment to democracy has not only always been selective, controlled by money and the slick, misleading propaganda it buys.  And so on, and none of these are accidental and unintended consequences; they are built into Modernity's nihilistic design from the beginning.  

Modernity is also itself disintegrating and morphing into something else, which generates the uncertainty and chaos surrounding our historical.  Something will eventually replace it, which many fantasized as a new golden age of Aquarius... but the previews are not so good.  We are looking at a new empire which will be a totalitarian AI hellscape on a barely livable planet, with people driven by manufactured lies into gated enclaves, and a world swamped by tsunamis of desperate refugees.

Modernity's main and definitive move was to replace God with the human ego at the center of life and reality.  Man became the measure and disposer of all things.   Reality was reduced to a flat linear/temporal/material plane.  (I use "man" deliberately because Modernity is almost exclusively a project of, by, and for white men; women remain relatively powerless.)  With no authority other than human ego and power, embodied in their supposedly "objective" science, every traditional deadly sin was elevated into a virtue to be striven for and rewarded.  People are now to dedicate themselves to the acquisition of three things: wealth, attention, and power.  Whoever procures  more of these rules those with less. Dostoyevsky's dictum that if there is no God all things are permitted, has come bitterly true.  And we have seen that there is no bottom to what is now permitted.

Francis Bacon, one of the early proponents of the Enlightenment, would wax eloquent about the new regime of science and reason, using the image of nature as a woman strapped on a rack and having her secrets tortured out of her.  Bacon's description remains nauseating and deplorable... and sharply accurate.  As it turned out, vivisection is the perfect metaphor for Modernity's approach to... everything.  Nothing is sacred, nothing holy, nothing redemptive except man and his murderous tools.  Modernity is the systematic demolition of beauty, transcendence, and wholeness in the name of progress.  That is our empire.  Think of a beautiful mountain in West Virginia, which a coal company blows apart in order to extract something within it arbitrarily deemed valuable.  That is our planet and everything in it under Modernity.  A beautiful creation demolished to increase the comfort and power of a handful of rich, white men.

In an unwitting regime of collective suicide, the Church has routinely compromised with and capitulated to this empire.  We do this when we set aside or radically reinterpret the standards of our own stories, rituals, and traditions, and adopt instead those of Modernity, even though they are usually in existential conflict.  We even allowed and embraced the extractive and colonizing methodologies of Modernity in our own life.  We put our Scriptures under the knife, selling it as courageous self-criticism in the service of truth, freeing our story from our own communities, deriding them as corrupt and corrupting institutions.  Thus we placed our own egocentric and biased methodologies above God as arbiter of truth.

Protestantism in particular, while it appeared as a resistance movement to the prior empire run by monarchs, hierarchies, and bishops, soon identified itself with the urban class of businessmen then becoming prominent.  It became the religion of Modernity, steadfastly defending the interests and adventures of that class even when they ran afoul of the gospel in atrocities like slavery, war, genocide, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialism.  Modernity became the widest-spread and richest empire in history; Protestantism mostly went along for the ride.

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