In Liberating Christianity I identified homosexuality as the defining issue in Christianity today. I called it the defining issue because the issue of homosexuality leads immediately to the more fundamental question of the nature of the Bible and of biblical authority, an issue that largely defines the difference between progressive Christianity and conservative, evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. I continue to believe that homosexuality is a defining issue in American Christianity today. Christianity’s attitude toward God’s gay and lesbian people is first of all a justice issue, one in which most of Christianity is still on the wrong side. Beyond that, the traditional Christian understanding that homosexuality is per se sinful can be maintained today only by clinging uncritically to a Biblicism that makes an ancient cultural understanding the ethical norm, indeed, by making an ancient anthropology the word and will of God. In what I am about to say I do not intend to diminish the importance of homosexuality as a defining issue for Christianity today. A Christian’s, or a Christian church’s, understanding of the Bible and their willingness to let God speak a new word on an issue that appears in the Bible can easily be gauged by their attitude toward homosexuality.
That being said, in recent times I have begun to think that perhaps homosexuality is not the defining issue in American Christianity today. I want here to consider the possibility that another issue is in some ways more decisive for our contemporary faith. That issue is our relationship to the Kingdom of God, and it has two major components: What is the proper Christian attitude toward the question of poverty, and what is the proper Christian attitude toward the question of violence. These questions more than any others go to the heart of what it means be a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Despite the Christian tradition’s long insistence that the Christian faith is about how we are saved from sin, about how our souls are saved from damnation and granted a blissful eternity in heaven, it is beyond serious doubt that what Jesus preached was not the eternal salvation of our souls but the Kingdom of God; and it is beyond serious doubt that the Kingdom of God as Jesus preached it was primarily about two things: distributive justice for the poor and nonviolence. The historical Christian focus on the afterlife and the eternal fate of human souls is at best a distortion of Jesus’ message. It is a distortion of that message because it diverts our attention from the things Jesus taught us and leads us to focus on something about which he had little or nothing to say. (I am of course aware that the Gospel of John can be read as being about the eternal salvation of our souls, although I don’t think that’s really what John is about. I take it as given, however, that John reflects theological thinking from the end of the first century CE and that it tells us little or nothing about what Jesus of Nazareth actually said or did. The Synoptic Gospels are also theological tracts from the last third of the first century, but they come significantly closer to preserving what Jesus actually said and did than does John.) The church's distortion of Christ’s message by focusing on the afterlife is part of a larger refocusing of the faith that occurred when Christianity accommodated itself to the interests of empire after it became the official faith of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE. I am becoming convinced that what distinguishes true followers of Christ from others who claim the name Christian is our attitude toward the Kingdom of God, that is, toward the distributive justice for the poor and the nonviolence that Jesus actually taught.
Jesus proclaimed God's dream of universal distributive justice for the poor, and I am convinced that one cannot be authentically Christian and at the same time support social, political, economic, and environmental policies and systems that create and perpetuate poverty, that depend on the existence of a large number of poor people as our current economic system does. Christians can be very good about giving to charity to help the poor. That is a good thing as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Dom Helder Camara, the late Roman Catholic Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil, famously said “When I feed the poor they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry they call me a Communist.” It is precisely other Christians who called him a Communist when he raised the question about structures and systems that create and perpetuate poverty; but the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached isn’t just about giving alms, although giving alms is a good thing. It is about a transformed world, a world freed from the ways of empire, a world in which hunger and poverty do not exist because resources are shared and not hoarded, because none insist on having so much that others must necessarily not have enough.
The way of empire, the way of extreme inequality in the distribution of resources in which the extravagant wealth of a few is supported by the poverty of many, is the way of the United States today. It is our way domestically, where more and more wealth is being accumulated in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population and social safety nets for the poor and vulnerable are being shredded so that the wealthy don’t have to pay more taxes and we can continue to spend obscene and unjustifiable amounts on the military. It is our way internationally, where we as a nation, being something like two percent of the world’s population, consume fully one quarter of the world’s resources. That reality is intolerable for authentic Christians, people who follow Jesus’ way of inclusion and justice for the poor and the marginalized. Yet we Christians tolerate it. More than that, we support and perpetuate it. Many of us vote for politicians whose policies benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Many of us vote to repeal taxes every chance we get. We buy into the falsehood perpetuated by those who advocate the interests of the wealthy that government is necessarily and always a bad thing and that income redistribution through progressive tax policy is an inherent evil. Then we go to church on Sunday and convince ourselves that we are faithful followers of Jesus Christ, a delusion that the church only too eagerly reinforces lest anyone be offended or, worse, withhold their pledge dollars.
The situation is no better when it comes to that other pillar of the Kingdom of God, nonviolence. John Dominic Crossan is absolutely right when he says that the way of empire is
religion (or ideology)→war→victory→peace
while the way of Jesus is
religion→nonviolence→justice→peace.
Peace through violence and victory is the way of empire. Peace through nonviolence and justice is the way of Jesus. It is the way of God. It must be the way of the Christian, yet ever since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE Christians have capitulated to the way of empire and engaged in warfare. The capitulation began with the formulation of just war theory, which justified the Christian use of violence in rather narrowly defined circumstances. Over the centuries Christians abandoned even the fig leaf of just war theory and put the Christian faith at the uncritical service of empires and nations. The Roman Emperor Constantine claimed to have a vision before a battle of the cross and the words “In this sign conquer,” and the church never told him how un-Christian that vision was. During the Crusades in the early centuries of the second Christian millennium European armies marched into battle at the behest of the church with crosses lifted high and emblazoned on their shields. With the rise of nation states in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the church had no qualms about blessing the military adventures of those states. The church sent clerics and missionaries with the armies of the European colonial powers to bless their violence and convert the supposed heathens against whom that violence was directed. In the first half of the seventeenth century wars between Christians devastated western Europe. In the modern era soldiers on all sides of the wars that ravaged Europe from the Napoleonic wars to the World Wars of the twentieth century were sure that God was on their side and blessed their killing and maiming of other people, most of whom were also Christians. There were from time to time isolated voices that reminded the church of the teachings of Jesus. The churches we know as the historic peace churches—Mennonites, Brethren, Quakers, etc.—are especially important in this regard. Yet on the whole Christianity turned its back on the teaching about violence of the one it continued to proclaim as Lord and Savior, the one Christians convinced themselves they were really following.
Today it never occurs to most Christians that their support of the military activities of their nation is inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus, but of course it is. We come up with all kinds of justifications for Christians participating in violence. Just war theory was the beginning, but today we usually resort to more supposedly pragmatic considerations to justify violence. Violence is necessary, we say. War will bring peace we say, never mind that it never really has. We have a right to use violence to defend ourselves, we say, never mind that Jesus specifically forbade his disciples to use violence to defend him. Violence works and nonviolence doesn’t, we say, never mind that as Walter Wink points out we don’t know that nonviolence doesn’t work because we’ve never really tried it universally and consistently and there is good evidence to suggest that in fact it does work in the few situations where it has been tried. Ever since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire Christians have been immensely creative in formulating justifications for rejecting the teaching of Jesus on nonviolence.
None of which changes the fact that violence is un-Christian. Always. That’s what Jesus taught, or rather he taught that violence was un-God-like. Violence is not God’s way. Ever. Yet we want both to be violent and to convince ourselves that we are faithful disciples of Christ and that God is on our side. So we fabricate justifications and reject Christ’s teaching. We go to church, pray, feel righteous, and then march off to battle or cheer those who do. The eighth century BCE prophets said again and again that God despises our worship when it is not combined with justice for the poor and vulnerable. They would say that today as well, but we must add that God despises our worship also when we follow it with war or support for war.
If we would be true to our Lord and Savior we Christians must be people of peace. We must work for an end to war and to all manifestations of violence in the world, violence between nations, violence between people, violence against God’s creation. Our ideal, our goal, must be a world without violence, a world without armies, a world without weapons, a world without war. We must strive always to beat the swords into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks. We will never see that vision realized. The powers of the world, fallen as they are to use Walter Wink’s imagery, are too powerful. They aren’t going to go away or be redeemed any time soon, but that is no reason for us to capitulate to them, to give in to them. Nonviolence is the way of the Christian. Nonviolence is the call of the Christian.
So what is the decisive issue in Christianity today? It is the issue of how we relate to the Kingdom of God that Jesus taught and lived. It is therefore the issue of how we relate to the issues of poverty and violence. Are we committed to using nonviolent means to bring an end to violence and an end to distributive injustice? If we would claim the name of Christ we must answer that question yes.
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