Where We Are

Posted on Jan 04, 2010 - 12:21 PM

Selections from Joerg Rieger, “Christian Theology and Empires,” Chapter 1 of Empire and the Christian Tradition: New Readings of Classical Theologians, ed. Don H. Compier, Kwok Pui-lan, and Joerg Rieger (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), pp. 1-4, 7-8, 12-13.

Copyright © 2007 Fortress Press, an imprint of Augsburg Fortress,  http://www.augsburgfortress.org .  All rights reserved.

Christianity can hardly be understood apart from empire. The Roman Empire was the context of the earliest beginnings of Christianity, and most of the subsequent major developments of Christian theology and the church are located somewhere within the force fields of empire as well. Unfortunately, theologians have rarely reflected on the connections and tensions between Christian traditions and empire. These connections were either taken for granted or simply overlooked. What was lost in the process was not only a clearer understanding of how the forces of empire affect us all, consciously or unconsciously, but also a sense of how Christianity can never quite be absorbed by empire altogether and which of its resources push beyond empire. One of the key purposes of the study of Christian theology in the context of empire has to do with a search for that which cannot be co-opted by empire, and which thus inspires alternatives to empire, based on what I have called a “theological surplus.“l But these alternatives can only be seen in light of a clearer awareness of the impact of empire on theology, an awareness that points beyond the current situation where empire is either taken for granted or blended out.

Those who took the connections of Christianity and empire as a given often identified Christianity with empire in one of two ways: some welcomed this identification and assumed that it was positive, not least because it seemed to underscore and reinforce the grearness and the power of Christianity; others saw these connections of Christianity and empire as proof that Christianity was nothing but an epiphenomenon of a more powerful reality, namely empire, and thus mostly a sellout. That both attitudes are deeply embedded in popular perceptions points to their pervasiveness. There is a widespread assumption among churchgoers that the Roman Empire was mostly beneficial for Christianity, because it reduced official persecution and because it supported the spread of Christianity through its infrastructures, like the roads on which missionaries such as the Apostle Paul traveled in order to spread the gospel. It is part of this assumption that Christianity was naturally poised to become the official religion of the powers that be. The same groups often also tend to see contemporary empire—when they see it at all—as beneficial for Christianity and its values, especially in its embodiment in the United States of America.

On the other hand, there is a widespread suspicion that the church’s progress owed so much to the politics of empire and was so inextricably related to it that Christianity became simply another function of empire. Supporters of this position cite as evidence the Constantinian turn, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and prominent historical events like the Crusades in the Middle Ages and the Spanish Conquest of early modernity. To be sure, this position is held not only by well-known critics of Christianity but also by Christians (present and past, including for instance the Protestant Reformers of sixteenth-century Europe), some of whom would be quick to point out that there were other embodiments of Christianity that refused to give in to the lure of empire.

Unfortunately, however, both of these positions assume fairly straightforward relations between church and empire, an assumption that has prevented deeper investigations. The chapters in this book investigate the complex relations of church and empire, questioning whether there might be a theological surplus even in the theologies that shaped up under the conditions of empire, and whether there are traces of empire even in those theologies that consider themselves resistant to or independent of empire.

There are, of course, also those people who tend to overlook or blend out the relations between Christianity and empire. Some assume that Christianity and empire are totally incompatible because they are located in completely different conceptual realms; in modern times, this attitude has often been tied to the popular assumption that “religion and politics don’t mix,” or a pervasive and deep conviction that religion and politics have nothing to do with each other. Similar assumptions are embedded in the disciplinary divisions of modern universities, which study religion and politics in separate departments that rarely cross into each other’s territories. Working along these lines, theologians have sought, for instance, to isolate what is political and what is religious in historical figures like the emperor Constantine or in historical events like the Council of Nicaea, which Constantine convened and chaired; the assumption is still prevalent that only if something can be classified as nonpolitical can it be seen as legitimately religious.

Others assume that empire and real Christianity are incompatible because they embody completely different realities and different ways of life. In this view, those who practiced real Christianity are free to carve out their own spaces and live authentic Christian lives; monastic communities or other intentional communities such as the Amish in the contemporary United States are often referenced as examples. Unfortunately, the representatives of all of these positions assume fairly straightforward separations and distinctions between Christianity and empire that cannot be sustained. When Constantine put his entire political fate and the future of the Roman Empire in the hands of the Christian God, was this a political or a religious decision? The separation of religion and empire, or more generally of religion and politics, does not make much sense in such a situation, and even clear-cut conventional disciplinary distinctions of the two categories must be called into question in light of this example. Likewise, when Amish farmers in the United States who reject many of the amenities that come with empire, such as electricity and motorized vehicles, then plow the fields that they own with five horses, how would the peasants of the world, past and present, who do not own their fields and who plow using their milking cows (who then produce less milk) or who push their own plows, judge their presumed independence from the benefits of empire?

What is new in this context is that we are beginning to understand that the relations of Christianity and empire are more complex than has been acknowledged to date. Christianity does not easily escape empire—understood as massive concentrations of power which permeate all aspects of life and which cannot be controlled by any one actor alone.2 This is one of the basic marks of empire throughout history. Empire seeks to extend its control as far as possible, beyond the commonly recognized geographical, political, and economic spheres, to include the intellectual, emotional, psychological, spiritual, cultural, and religious arenas. The problem with empire is, therefore, that no one can escape its force field completely. Nevertheless, the good news is that at the same time empire is never quite able to extend its control absolutely. Whatever the extent of its influence, no empire has ever managed to co-opt Christianity entirely. Mindful of this fact, we embark on a search for theological surplus in the Christian tradition that resists empire and provides alternatives.3

There is much work to be done. Major representatives of the Christian traditions, and up until recently even Jesus himself, have hardly ever been considered in light of their deeper connections with the empires of their times. Assuming a strict separation of religion and politics, it has long been taken for granted that Jesus and Paul, for example, are religious characters who could not possibly have been concerned about politics. That Jesus did not engage in armed struggles of resistance like the Zealots of his time has commonly been interpreted as proof that he was not concerned about resisting the Roman Empire, as if armed struggle were the only form of resistance. That Paul preached the message of the cross was interpreted in similar fashion, as if the symbol of the cross in those days could have been separated from the fact that it was a colonial tool of execution for political rebels from the lower classes. That Anselm’s notion of satisfaction presupposed the world of the Norman conquerors of England was (if it was noted at all) played down as if Anselm’s references to feudalism were harmless sermon illustrations. Even if other theologians, for instance Bartolomé de Las Casas, were seen as opponents of empire, their resistance was often seen as an ethical choice, the deeper theological connections and motivations of which were rarely investigated. I could give many more examples, but it should already be clear that we must not continue with theology as usual.

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AMBIVALENCE

We deal with empire and its metamorphoses in this book because we are convinced that in the midst of the various pressures of empire, Christian theology has the potential to make a difference. Not only can theology help us analyze what is going on, especially where empire assimilates concepts of the ultimate, theology can also point us in new directions and give us new hope. Nevertheless, such analysis and redirection always take place in the midst of ambivalence. Throughout its history, theology has often been employed in the support of empire and sometimes in the critique of it, and often there is only a thin line between the two. Nevertheless, the existence of ambivalence is itself a witness to the limits of empire. Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha notes how this ambivalence is disturbing to colonial discourse and how it “poses an immanent [sic] threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers.“9 The challenge, he argues, is a “double vision, which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.“10 Ambivalence is thus a welcome companion in the resistance against empire. At the same time, in this project more direct forms of resistance are investigated as well.

Enveloped in the multiple and complex relationships of theology and empire, the notion of ambivalence will be a helpful concept to keep in mind when reading the following chapters because many of the theologians presented in this volume did not directly oppose issues of empire and colonialism; more often than not, these issues were not even addressed. Of course, some theologians did pursue more direct challenges of empire, including the Apostle Paul, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but these theologians often felt the repercussions of empire and had to bear the consequences of their critique: Bonhoeffer, and most likely Paul as well, were put to death for it. Those who remembered Jesus’ injunction that “no one can serve two masters” (Matt. 6:24) stand out from the crowd as the ones who remained faithful to Jesus’ own resistance to the Powers that be in an extraordinary way, following him all the way into death. At the same time, the notion of ambivalence helps to remind us that the empire never managed to suppress completely even the work of some of those theologians who do not openly resist empire, which is the majority of theologians discussed in this volume. Though we can identify differing levels of ambiguity in the various theological models, there seems to be a residual spirit of resistance in many of them, so that theology is never altogether assimilated by the powers that be.
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CONCLUSION

As we find ourselves at the intersection of theology and empire, we face two tasks: one is analytical and the other constructive. The analysis of how empire shapes theology not only consciously but especially at the deeper layers of our theological unconscious is no longer optional. If the power of empire is as widely dispersed as I have argued and if these powers are expanding not only geographically but also on many other levels—including those that shape our intellectual endeavors and our deepest personal identities—we need to investigate these powers if we want to understand ourselves and our own theological presuppositions and productions.

The constructive task depends on the analytical one. Without understanding how we are shaped by empire all the way into our deepest desires, we cannot properly identify the theological surplus, those intuitions and insights that point us beyond the horizons of empire. In other words, the purpose of the analytical task is not to assign blame (or to “foul one’s own nest”—“Nestbeschmutzer ” was a derogatory expression used in Germany for people who sought to remember the atrocities of Nazi Germany). Without the analytical exploration of theology and empire we will not be able to identify what is really path-breaking in theology, what it is that has the potential to shape truly fresh and constructive thinking about God and the world.

FURTHER READING

Cobb, John B., Jr., David Ray Griffin, Richard A. Falk, and Catherine Keller. The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God: A Political, Economic, Religious Statement. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2006.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.

Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Horsley, Richard. Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Rieger, Joerg. Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Empire of Capital. New York: Verso Books, 2003.

ENDNOTES

1. Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2007); the conceptual background of the term “surplus” is discussed in the book’s introduction.

2. This definition is developed in my book Christ and Empire.

3. To be sure, this is no rehash of vulgar embodiments of the “base vs. superstructure” discussion, according to which either material and economic conditions or the world of ideas determine the course of events. Empire is located not just in material and economic conditions: it promotes its own world of ideas. Likewise, a “theological surplus” is not just an invention of the world of ideas but is tied to alternative ways of life and production.

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9. For the notion of ambivalence, see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86. Bhabha connects this term with his more famous notion of “mimicry”: “the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence” (emphasis in original). By repeating colonial images with a slight difference, rather than representing them accurately, mimicry establishes a challenge to the colonial narcissism and fiction of self-identity (Location, 88).

10. Bhabha, Location, 88. While Bhabha sees this ambivalence of mimicry as a surface effect and does not want to see this as too closely related to the Freudian notion of the “return of the repressed,” I do not think that these matters are mutually exclusive. For an effort to read Bhabha’s work in relation to the notion of repression see my essay, “Liberating God-Talk: Postcolonialism and the Challenge of the Margins,” in Postcolonialism and Theology, ed. Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera (St. Louis, Mo.: Chalice Press, 2004).

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