God and Empire ~ by John Dominic Crossan, 2007

Excerpts:

(p. 46) The monastery presents an alternative lifestyle that implicitly criticizes the greed,
injustice, and oppression of our everyday world.

(p. 50-51) I look at four major parables:

on the primacy of distributive justice in Genesis 1;

on the responsibility of human morality in Genesis 2-3;

on the tragedy of inaugural fratricide in Genesis 4; and

on the divine punishment of the flood-destruction and the divine promise of "never again" in
Genesis 6-9.

These four parables recounted as the Bible begins its story must be read as stages in an
ongoi9ng narrative where the failure of divine violence by the end of Genesis 1-11 demands a
new and nonviolent start in Genesis 12.

(p. 51) The creation story in Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a is not from ancient Sumerian traditions but
emphatically and uniquely from Israel's priestly concerns. Those authors had no intention of
writing about the origin of the world -- about which they knew they knew nothing -- but about the
meaning of the world, about which they thought they knew a lot. And they did.

(p. 51) Look at the figure on the next page and notice that the repeated inaugural sequence of
"God said, let..." (that is, let something be created) appears eight times but must be doubled for
the third and sixth days if eight chunks of divine creation are to fit into six days of divine work.
Why? So that God could rest on the seventh day, not the ninth day. In other words, in creating
the universe, not even God could skip the Sabbath. Put yet another way: in creating the
universe, God crowned it with the Sabbath.

(p. 52)

Day 1:

(1) Then God said,

"Let [LIGHT be]."

And there was

And God saw that it was good.

And there was evening and

there was morning,

the first day.

Day 2:

(2) And God said,

"Let [FIRMAMENT be]."

And it was so.

And God saw that it was good.

And there was evening and

there was morning,

the second day.

Day 3:

(3) And God said,

"Let [SEA/LAND be]."

And it was so.

And God saw that it was good.

(4) Then God said,

"Let [PLANTS/TREES be]."

And it was so.

And God saw that it was good.

And there was evening and

there was morning,

the third day.

Day 4:

(5) And God said,

"Let [SUN/MOON be]."

And it was so.

And God saw that it was good.

And there was evening and

there was morning,

the fourth day.

Day 5:

(6) And God said,

"Let [BIRDS/FISHES be]."

And God saw that it was good.

And there was evening and

there was morning,

the fifth day.

Day 6:

(7) And God said,

"Let [ANIMALS be]."

And it was so.

And God saw that it was good.

(8) Then God said,

"Let [Humans be]."

And it was so.

And God saw everything

was very good.

And there was evening and

there was morning,

the sixth day.

(p. 54) The Sabbath Day was not rest for worship but rest as worship. It was a day of equal rest
for all -- animals, slaves, children, and adults -- a pause that reduced all to equality both
symbolically and regularly. The Sabbath Day was about the just distribution of basic rest-from-
labor as symbol and reality of God's own distributive justice.

(p. 55) The parable of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2:3b - 3:24 is about the human choice of moral
knowledge over eternal life.

Examine the text to see if "eternal life" is meant, or simply "life."

(p. 86) That opening phrase, "in days to come," expresses the unspecified time of the future
eschatological moment. At that time, all peoples and nations will convert to the God of
nonviolence in a world without weapons and to the God of justice in a world without empires.

(pp. 91-91) Josephus groups all types of Roman resistance under the rubric of a "fourth
philosophy," thereby ignoring any distinction between / nonviolent and violent action but also
quarantining resistance safely from the three philosophies or ideologies of the Essenes, the
Pharisees, and the Sadducees. Those Jewish philosophical options, he hints, are just like the
Roman philosophical options of, respectively, Phythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans.

(p. 94) Thus, Judas, not Jesus, was the first Galilean to proclaim nonviolent resistance to violent
injustice in the first quarter of the first century CE.
(pp. 94-95) The ambiguity of divine power suffuses the Christian Bible in both its Testaments
and therefore presses this question for us Christians: how do we reconcile the ambiguity of our
Bible's violent and/or nonviolent God? My proposal is that the Christian Bible presents the
radicality of a just and nonviolent God repeatedly and relentlessly confronting the normalcy of
an unjust and violent civilization. Again and again throughout the biblical tradition, God's radical
vision for nonviolent justice is offered, and again and again we manage to mute it back into the
normalcy of violent injustice.

The Christian Bible records the ongoing struggle between the normalcy of civilization's program
of religion, war, victory, peace (or more succinctly, peace through victory), seen in chapter 1,
and the radicality of God's alternative program of religion, nonviolence, justice, peace (or more
succinctly, peace through justice), seen here in chapter 2. But that struggle is depicted inside
the Bible itself. That is its integrity and its authority. If the Bible were only about peace through
victory, we would not need it. If it were only about peace through justice, we would not believe it.

The Christian Bible forces us to witness the struggle of these two transcendental visions within
its own pages and to ask ourselves as Christians how we decide between them. My answer is
that we / are bound to whichever of these visions was incarnated by and in the historical Jesus.
It is not the violent but the nonviolent God who is revealed to Chrstian faith in Jesus of Nazareth
and announced to Christian faith by Paul of Tarsus. ... The person, not the book, and the life,
not the text, are decisive and constitutive for us.

(p. 117) The Kingdom of God ... is about the transformation of this world into holiness, not the
evacuation of this world into heaven.

(p. 122) The [Sea of Galilee] boat represents what Antipas's Romanization by urbanization for
commercialization did to the ordinary peasant -- fishers who used the lake before Tiberias was
built.

(pp. 122-123) Jesus spent his time on and beside the lake because it was precisely and
specifically by the shores of the Sea of Galilee that the / redicality of Israel's God confronted the
normalcy of Rome's civilization under Herod Antipas in the 20s of the first century CE.
NOTE: (pp. 124-125) "son of man" means a truly human New World Order (Daniel 7:13-14)
replaces the bestial (or beastly) Old World Order (Daniel 7:1-8). About the struggle in Daniel:

(p. 125) None of this is imagined as a simple political or military or even religious conflict. It is a
transcendental struggle between heaven and earth over control of the world here below. It is a
struggle between the holy angels of God and the imperial powers of earth. This anti-imperial
vision so affronts the violent normalcy of civilization's brutality that it requires a heavenly
engendered alternative. Notice especially that God's Kingdom comes from heaven down to
earth and not -- or ever -- from earth up to heaven. It is always about the holiness of this earth
as God's creation.

(p. 127) God has given the Kingdom to Jesus, and all are invited to enter it -- but that involves
following Jesus through death into resurrection and a life here below absolutely opposite to the
way of the world's imperial normalcy.

(p. 131) Mark insists that Jesus knew in very specific detail what was going to happen to him --
read Mark 10:33-34, for example -- but that is simply Mark's way of insisting that all was
accepted by both God and Jesus. Accepted, be it noted, but not willed, wanted, needed, or
demanded.

(pp. 131-132) Jesus went to jerusalem that one (or last) time because it was a capital city where
religion and violence -- conservative religion and imperial oppression -- had become serenely
complicit. ... Jesus went to Jerusalem because that was where his deliberate double
demonstration against both imperial injustice and religious / collaboration had to be made. ... It
was a protest from the legal and prophetic heart of Judaism against Jewish religious
cooperation with roman imperial control. It was, at least for Christian followers of Jesus, then or
now, a permanently valid protest demonstration against any capital city's collusion between
conservative religion and imperial violence at any time and in any place.

(p. 140) Blood sacrifice should never be confused with or collapsed into either suffering or
substitution, let alone substitutionary suffering.
(p. 140) Jesus died because of our sins, or from our sins, but that should never be misread as
for our sins.

(p. 140-141) Jesus's execution asks us to face the truth that, across human evolution, injustice
has been created and maintained by violence / while justice has been opposed and avoided by
violence.

(p. 151) We meet here a major Lukan theme in the Acts: it is Jewish jealousy, not Pauline
teaching that constantly creates trouble.

(p. 190) How, then, does the biblical tradition in general, and the Pauline tradition in particular,
hold together justice and love?

. . . . My proposal is that justice and love are a dialectic -- like two sides of a coin that can be
distinguished but not separated. We think of ourselves as composed of body and soul, or flesh
and spirit. When they are separated, we have a physical corpse. Similarly with distributive
justice and communal love. Justice is the body of love, love is the soul of justice. Justice is the
flesh of love, love is the spirit of justice. When they are separated, we have a moral corpse.
Justice without love is brutality. Love without justice is banality.

(p. 228) God's Kingdom ... I repeat, it had already started here below with and in Jesus of
Nazareth as the radicality of God's justice climatically opposing the normalcy of civilizations
injustice.

(p. 229) ... that terribly violent ethnic cleansing ...

(p. 230) In conclusion, therefore, the Book of Revelation is the Christian Bible's last and thus far
most successful attempt to subsume the radicality of God's nonviolence into the normalcy of
civilization's violence.

(p. 230) ... waiting for God to act violently while God is waiting for us to act nonviolently.
(p. 231) The Second Coming of Christ is what will happen when we Christians finally accept that
the First Coming was the Only Coming and start to cooperate with its divine presence.

(p. 234) To turn Jesus into a divine warrior allows once again ... the normalcy of human
civilization's violent injustice to subsume the radicality of God's nonviolent justice.

(p. 235) Once again, as always, the fundamental question is whether we Christians imagine our
God as violent or nonviolent.

(p. 237) Three questions

... How is it possible to be a faithful Christian in the American Empire?

... How is it possible to be a nonviolent Christian within a violent Christianity based on a violent
Christian Bible?

... How is it possible to be a faithful Christian in an American Empire facilitated by a violent

Christian Bible?

(p. 238) John of Patmos deradicalizes the nonviolent Jesus on the donkey [on Palm Sunday] by
transforming him into the violent Jesus on the battle stallion.

(p. 241) This book is ... a witness in religious responsibility.

Posted by Bonnie Jacobs at 4/28/2008

Labels: author ~ John Dominic Crossan, history ~ God and Empire, religion ~ God and Empire

http://notesquotesandquestions.blogspot.com/2008/04/god-and-empire-by-john-dominic-
crossan.html