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BOOK DISCUSSION & REFLECTION

William T. Ca v a n a u gh , M igra t ion s of t h e Holy : G od, S t a t e, a n d th e Political Me a n in g of t h e Ch u rc h ( G ra n d Ra pids & Cambridge: Willia m B. E e rdm a n s P u blis h in g Com pa n y, 2 0 1 1 ) ; Pau l W. Kahn, P olit ic a l Th e ology : Fou r Ne w Ch a pt e rs on t h e C o ncept of S overe ign t y ( Ne w York : Colu m bia Un iv e rs it y P re s s , 2 0 1 1 ) ; M ich ae l P a re n t i, Th e Fa c e of I mpe ria lis m ( Bou lder & L on don : P aradigm P u blis h in g, 2 0 1 1 ) . Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not? But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax. They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription? Caesars, they replied. Then he said to them, Give to Caesar what is Caesars, and to God what is Gods. When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away. (NIV Matt 22:17-22)
POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF CAESAR - W HAT I S G OI NG ON H E R E ?

To even begin to comprehend what is on Jesus mind when he says: Give to Caesar what is Caesars, and to God what is Gods one must rst understand the context. In contrast to what St, Augustine described as the splitting of the civitas terrena and the civitas dei, the City of Man and the City of God, the Romans had created an imperial order, an empire that encompassed the entire civilized world that absorbed the sacred into an omnipotent and omnipresent state of order called Pax Romana.1 Essentially, the Roman occupiers divinized their political authority, transferring the sovereignty of God to the sovereign state of Rome.2 In what we think of as religion, the Romans had subsumed into a civil religion of the state. Only the state had sovereignty to decide how the subjects of Rome, those communities, like Palestine where Jesus is speaking in the Temple to the Pharisees and Herodians, were to live and to die.
Imperialist, meaning territorial conquest, administrative control, collection of taxes, commercial monopolies or appropriation of foreign policy. See Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall on an Ancient Civilization (New York & London: Viking Penguin, 2010), 76.
1

William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids & Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), 105.
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YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the Jews, had absolutely no providential power in the mindset of the sovereign god of Rome. Why the Pharisees and Herodians were amazed was what Jesus uttered, in public mind you, was no less than what would have been considered at the time the most outrageous and treasonous truth claim: that the god of Rome was not the real sovereign, that the real, true sovereign was YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Essentially, Jesus was challenging the Roman thought police to lock him up or more likely to cast him into to the outer darkness which was into the uncivilized world beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. By speaking out loud the Scriptural understanding of the sovereignty and providence of the God of the Torah, Jesus was directly challenging the sovereignty of the Roman occupiers. Jesus crossed the boundary of allowable opinion.3 What the imperium of Rome was involved in as they carved out their empire, was not only the paving of roads,4 the imposition of law and citizens rights, and the support of commerce and common coinage, but also, the pillage of the wealth of occupied lands and the killing of large numbers of people of the colonized area. The Roman empire was enormously protable for the elites of Roman society but enormously costly to the people of the colonized community.5 Essentially, the gains of empire owed into the hands of the very few, while the costs were extracted from the masses of subjugated peoples, of which the rst century Jews of Palestine were one of many. To make things really explicit, the Romans imbued their emperors (Caesars) as earthly personications of the sovereignty of Rome - they were gods! For example, in Pauls epistles, the empire that Paul formed ekklesia as a counter to was the Roman Empire: Pax Romana (peace and security) was the ofcial theology and propaganda motto of the Roman world after the establishment of the Principate, that is, after Augustus miraculous termination of

Michael Parenti, The Face of Imperialism (Boulder & London: Paradigm Publishing, 2011), 3.
3

One of the rst orders of business for the Roman occupiers was to construct a network of roads connecting the newly conquered land to other regions, along which a large scale movement of populations from their traditional homes to new territories under the control of Rome occurred (Miles, 158-9).
4 5

Parenti, 8.
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the civil war and his establishment of universal peace and economy supported, to a large extent, by the slave labor of conquered peoples. The Principate was a political theology6 that assumed that the Roman empire contained the chosen people of the gods and was the divine vehicle to defeat the forces of chaos in the world and to restore heavenly order in the form of a return to the garden of the former Republic.7 In this theopolitical realm, the emperor was the paterfamilias of all the people (called Father), deied and became the sole ruler of a universe where taxis (order) was the primary aim of social and political structures achieved through a culture of meritocracy based on paideia (concept of heroic engagement and sacrice for the good of the state), competition, and nomos (the law) imposed through coercion and force. Justice (iustitia) was rst and foremost dened as that which was benecial to Rome and its citizens. All this is documented in the Acts of Augustus written in Greek on the walls of the numerous temples to Augustus, recounting the salvic power of the gospel of Caesar. This was a gospel that singled out the elite individual set apart by success--allegedly for the benet of the whole society. For example, Following the violent death of Claudius, the senate decreed his consecratio i.e. not only his life after death but also his assumption and apotheosis (the elevation or exaltation of a person to the rank of a god). In Pauls letters, he challenges the soteria (salvation from the forces of chaos) represented by Caesar and his empire by claiming that pistis (Gods loyalty/faithfulness) is universal and democratic, that it applies to all people regardless of their class, race, gender, wealth or accomplishments and status in the world and this is expressed in Gods dikaiosyne (solidarity and justice) with the entire human race, not just the elite. Paul describes how those who claim to be superior or privileged, instead of making the world
Political theology as the proper framework to understand Romes political ambitions with empire in that the identication of the enemy is not grounded merely in terms of economic policy, but in the perception of an existential threat where Romes reliance on violence and sacrice is understood as the defense of the sovereign existence of Rome. See Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, 11.
6

On the Recovery of Eden myth, see Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden (New York & London: Routledge, 2004).
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better, just cause more chaos and bring on catastrophe [echoes of the snake in Gen 2-3 that offers superior wisdom that leads only to disaster]. Instead, Paul offers Jesus as the exemplar of an archetypal human/divine being who, through his faith of God, signies what real peace and security looks like - not a hegemony or authority of domination and oppression, but the prototype of a community pledged to life. Paul goes on to describe this community pledged to life, the ekklesia, an exemplary community of those who are set free from the false precepts of empiric power where, instead, identity is shaped by a radical democracy of justice, difference, freedom, equality, and solidarity that set the ethical conditions; where the critical events for the fate of the universe does not come to pass in heaven with God or among the gods. It does not involve force or violence or even the Law. It takes place within and through a community held together by faith, love, and hope. 8 For Paul, The kingdom of heaven [God] was a standard religious code phrase meaning an inbreaking of the divine realm into the realm of Caesar, Herod Antipas, Pilate, etc. - olam-ha-bah (the world to come). This vision relies on the view that the world we live in can be repaired (tikkun olam); that a better world is possible through communal action.9 Thus, the kingdom of heaven is not, for the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, a piece of real estate that can be bought by the coinage of Rome for the single saved soul; it is a communal vision of what could be and what should be. It is a vision of a time when all debts are forgiven, when we stop judging others, when we not only wear our traditions on our sleeve, but also hold them in our hearts and minds and enact them with all our strength. It is the good news that the Torah can

See Dieter Georgi, Theocracy: In Pauls Praxis and Theology, trans., David E. Green (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 28, 34, 45, 59, 66, 67, 68, 71, 76, 86, 97, 99 from Lyle Brecht, The God Who Sacrices His Desire and Gives Hope to all Creation: An Exegesis of Genesis 2:4b-3:24 (March 2008) available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/10062312/
8

The essence of Ubuntu theology: The reason two antelopes walk together is so that one may blow the dust from the others eyes. Ubuntu is more about participation in the process of becoming lovable persons within community. This love is impartial, unconditional, and objective. See Michael Battle, Ubuntu: I in You and You in Me (New York: Seabury Books, 2009), 21, 37, 98.
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be discussed and debated, when the Sabbath is truly honored and kept holy, when love of enemies replaces the tendency toward striking back.10 What Paul was full cognizant of is that Jesus did not die because he taught that the poor would have an easier time getting into heaven than the rich; he did not die because he rejected Torah; he did not die because he preached love of God and love of neighbor. He died because... in Roman-occupied Jerusalem [he was making a political statement that the established order did not appreciate].... He died under the criminal charge of sedition: Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews - as a political dissenter.11 So, in Matthews Gospel account of Jesus words to the Pharisees and Herodians, Matthew is picking up on the prophetic tradition of Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel of speaking truth to power. In both ancient and contemporary settings of rst century Judaism, the interface between empire and divine purpose is carried by poetic, prophetic voices that arise from and are nurtured by local tradition of faith. As in the ancient world, Jesuss words abrade between imperial ideology and poetic alternative and is a contentious one, with the poetic alternative being fragile and mostly unauthorized and unrecognized. 12 Throughout the New Testament, the message of Jesus reiterates Gods values of hesed (steadfast love) 13, mispat (justice), and sedaqah (righteousness) through par-

Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 51-2.
10 11 12 13

Levine, 222. Walter Bruggemann, Out of Babylon (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), 18.

Hesed (the goodness and favor that God reserves for his faithful) was a particularly useful word for speaking of Gods relationship to his people because it held together in a single expression an emphasis on divine freedom on the one hand and divine commitment on the other, an emphasis on human need and weakness on the one hand and human responsibility to trust in God alone on the other. By a stretching of the secular usage for delivering and protective action and concern to embrace even forgiveness, the term came to express the uniqueness of gods hesed as the basis for a relationship stronger than any human bond. See Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, The Meaning of Hesed in the Hebrew Bible: A New Inquiry, HMS 17 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978), 149-50 quoted in Joseph Jensen, O.S.B., Ethical Dimensions of the Prophets (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 97-8.
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ables and example that the ideology of scarcity has been broken, overwhelmed by the divine gift of abundance.14 But of what kind of abundance? Could the call be to awaken to the abundance of not only Gods unearned and unmerited grace, but of voice? To gain a voice means to come into the truth of ones history corporately and individually, to recover ones life, to acquire moral agency by naming ones world. The voice brings from the depth of silence the creative power, energy, and wholeness of a person or a people in the midst of its world.15 TA K I NG LEAV E OF E MP I RE A ND I TS V OI CE S OF D E NI A L The departure from empire is liturgical, that is, it is a symbolic, bodily performance of what leaving is like.... The liturgy invites participants to recognize that we do not belong to empire and need not obey empire.16 This act of leaving empire for the kingdom of God and the embracement of Gods values of hesed (steadfast love), mispat (justice), and sedaqah (righteousness) is enacted at each Eucharist. We, drawn into communion, into participation with God through the mutual giving of Jesus and his Father have become part of a fellowship initiated and sustained by gift, and to abide in this fellowship is to learn how we can give, to each other and to God. That we can give at all rests on what we have been given.If we can even begin to give in this way, it is only because of the depth of the assurance implied in the gift given us on Calvary. 17 But, the reiterated practice of liturgical departure [from empire] has at its intent a psychological transformation.18 Ones Christianity goes disastrously and dangerously wrong when Jesus is worshipped but not followed. To follow the way of the cross is to enter into a relationship of treIn contrast to Solomons values of wealth, might, and wisdom, exemplifying the highest aspects of secular humankind. See Brueggemann, Journey to the Common Good, 2010, 34, 60, 62.
14

Kathleen M. OConnor, Lamentations & The Tears of the World (Maryknowll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 83.
15 16 17

Brueggemann, Out of Babylon, 106.

See Rowan Williams, Eucharistic Sacrice The Roots of a Metaphor (Liturgical Study #31; Nottingham: Grove Books, 1982), 29.
18

Brueggemann, Out of Babylon, 106.

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mendous power and strength of action. the good news proclaimed by Jesus was about liberation, and this good news was to be embodied in a new community, the Kingdom of God, a new age of relationships. It was good news of transformation, of reversal of fortunes, a message not about a private salvation of soul, but about corporate righteousness. To be a Christian is to be part of this new community a community which is committed to the pursuit of righteousness. 19 When the liturgical performance and the practice of self recognition in the narrative of [Scripture] take hold, one can imagine that the departure from the empire is fundamentally an economic one, a refusal to participate corporately in the pursuit of growth at all costs and individually in the practice of indiscriminate and conspicuous consumption.20 This is the ancient wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers who voluntarily renounced the values of empire of their day to live prayerful, simple lives in the desert. The objective of these early desert adventurers for God was no less transformation of the heat through mindfulness - attention to every detail of their lives as they believed that how a person lls his or her life inuences what he or she is becoming; that giving attention to unnecessary distractions or desires can blind a person to Gods presence; and that being awake and watching for the movement of God is the only way to learn to live with the slow and deliberate pace of being transformed.21 Thus, stillness, prayer, self-denial, lack of attachment, and meditation are all means to open the heart of the seeker to a sense of wonder and nearness to God.22 The desert fathers and mothers were clear that the whole being of the person, all their actions, thoughts and desires, were involved in the path to transformation and were ultimately a sacred gift involved in his or her path to holiness. This is both a sacramental and incarnational understanding of the

See Kenneth Leech, We Preach Christ Crucied (Cambridge: Cowley, 1994), 53, 54, 57.
19 20 21

Brueggemann, Out of Babylon, 107.

David G.R. Keller, Oasis of Wisdom: The Worlds of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005), 102.
22

David Keller, 84.

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bodys place in the path toward transformation and ultimately sanctication (union with God).23 From the cross the Self is now dened with particularity and contingency, with plurality and ambiguity in this newly created space were humans act along with and under the direction of God. 24 What that means in practice is that as a member of the community of the faithful we become dedicated to what Jesus was dedicated to in his relations with other people as the primary form of relationality. Thus, this form of grace-full being-in-the-world becomes the practice for living in Christian community and models for the surrounding, non-confessing community what Christian solidarity with the Other actually looks like on-the-ground. 25

23 24

David Keller, 85.

David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 61. Kathryn Tanner, Trinity in Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 331.
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