St Francis Magazine Vol 6, No 5 | October 2010
CHRIST AND CAESAR ... AND ISLAM By Bill Rhea1 A number of scholars have recently launched a project to reinterpret the New Testament—in particular Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus—in light of their Roman imperial context. This ‘political turn’ in New Testament studies is now one of the major issues in the field, as significant as the ‘third quest for the historical Jesus’ or the ‘new perspective on Paul.’ To date, however, the conclusions of political interpreters have largely been applied to ecclesiology and contemporary political action, and then almost exclusively to the support of liberal-progressive causes. Wherever the chips may fall in ecclesiology and ethics, there remains the larger issue that the political turn has yet to be applied in the field of missiology. Research in this area and new and critical discussion of the issue have not found pride of place in the academy. As such, this essay will not seek to definitively outline a model of political missiology. This essay seeks merely to pose the question: If the political turn is good biblical scholarship, how might it be applied to the theological sub-field of missiology? Yet despite the general nature, we will look at one particular target of mission: the civilization of Islam. The reasons for focusing on Islam will become apparent below. For the moment, we will outline the political turn as it has developed in contemporary scholarship. Beginning with Adolf Deissmann, many New Testament scholars have discerned counter or even anti-imperial meanings throughout the letters of Paul, and have followed with political
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Bill Rhea holds a B.A. in political studies from Messiah College and is pursuing a masters degree at Concordia Seminary, an institution of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. He spent the winter and spring of 2010 on pilgrimage through the Mediterranean Middle East and southern Europe. St Francis Magazine is published by Interserve and Arab Vision
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readings of Matthew, Mark, Q, Luke-Acts, and especially Revelation. Today, scholars as diverse as John Dominic Crossan, Neil Elliott, N.T. Wright, Dieter Georgi, and especially Richard Horsley have subscribed to the political turn in one way or another. Others, in particular Seyoon Kim in his book Christ and Caesar, have attempted to moderate the radicalism of these interpretations. Nevertheless, the old (western) picture of Christianity as a religion rising up in the private sphere, largely unrelated to the public sphere of the Roman imperial system and the Greek polis, has been laid aside. The western liberal understandings of ‘private religion’ and ‘public politics’ cannot be imposed on the world of the first century (nor the twenty-first). Religion in the empire was profoundly public; and socioeconomic and sociopolitical structures entered into the very fabric of home and hearth. The Roman emperor ruled not only as imperator or princeps but also as pontifex maximus. The appellative Augustus, applied first to Octavian Caesar and then to the whole of the Julio-Claudian line, denoted veneration and connoted a quasi-divine status; the Greek translation, Sebastios, brought the implication of divine worship into the foreground of semantic meaning. As is now well known, a cult of emperor worship spread throughout the Roman world, especially in the Hellenistic east where shrines were erected to the Julio-Claudian emperors at local instigation. In the Roman west, which had no tradition of ruler worship (as the Hellenists had under the Ptolomies, Seleucids and others), the imperial cult was often imposed from above; the east developed an imperial cultus on the local level both due to popular acclaim and to magistrates eager to ingratiate themselves with the Caesars. Consequently, the imperial cult developed more rapidly in the lands through which Paul would later sojourn. First Thessalonians, one of Paul’s earliest extant letters, draws heavily on this imperial environment. The language of Paul in 1 St Francis Magazine is published by Interserve and Arab Vision
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Thessalonians closely parallels the official political terminology employed by the empire. Let us first observe the word ‘gospel,’ from the Greek euangelion or ‘good news.’ As a term, euangelion may mean any number of positive announcements; however, as an inscription at Priene and numerous textual references show, euangelion had a specific political meaning in the first century: the good news of Caesar’s birthday, or a new Caesar’s ascension, or the victory of Caesar in battle. The gospel of the Roman Empire was the gospel of Roman Empire. Naturally, the birth or ascension or victory of a Caesar was good news indeed. After all, the first century C.E. looked back in fear on the civil wars and thuggish warlordism of the first century B.C.E. The victory of Octavian Caesar at Actium over Mark Antony ended nearly a century of internal conflict. The peoples of the empire, including those of the Greek east who erected shrines of imperial worship, had good reason to celebrate the ascension of Caesar Augustus as good news. And, it seems, Paul uses this expressly political turn to highlight the superior quality of the good news of the crucifixion—political torture-execution as a traitor to Caesar—of Jesus Christ. Another key term used by Paul is ‘Son of God.’ This term has an even more express political meaning for, unlike euangelion which may mean any number of glad tidings, huios theou, ‘son of a god’ or ‘Son of God,’ is a specific term of honor for the Roman emperor. Following the assassination of Julius Caesar, his adoptive son Octavian had his apotheosis declared, making Gaius Julius a god and Octavian, de facto, the son of a god. It then became tradition for the deification of emperors to be declared upon their deaths, making huios theou a standard term of divine honor for the reigning imperator. Paul could not have missed the parallel. Similarly, the phrase ‘lord and savior’ can be found throughout the epigraphic and textual record as a title of the Caesars. Kyrios kai soter, a phrase that appears both as a unit and as separate titles St Francis Magazine is published by Interserve and Arab Vision
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for Jesus throughout Paul, was a recognizable title for Caesar. When Paul calls Jesus of Nazareth ‘Lord,’ ‘Savior,’ and ‘Son of God,’ and proclaims his ‘gospel,’ he is using terms that were fundamentally Roman political terms for the emperor. They represented the emperor in all his facets of power, which in turn bespoke the wider political ideology—and political theology—of Roman imperial rule. Before continuing, it must be noted that while many of the aforementioned scholars have emphasized that these terms contrast sharply with their Greco-Roman context, it is equally true that the titles lord, savior, and son of (a) god are equally biblical and Jewish in origin. Lord, in Greek kyrios, a common translation of the Hebrew Yahweh and adonai, has equally specific political meanings in terms of the kingship of Yahweh over creation; Yahweh or the Messiah (and often both) are depicted as a savior throughout the prophets; and Son of God draws on a whole history of biblical and intertestamental references. Recent Pauline scholarship has been steadily uncovering the Jewish milieu and roots of Paul’s thought. It would be a mistake, then, to suppose that Paul drew these terms primarily from his Roman context in order to illustrate an anti-imperial theology, which just so happened to coincide with Jewish language. It is far more likely that Paul drew on his own Jewish tradition, rooted in the law and the prophets and fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah, and used the rhetoric of the kingdom of God therein to illuminate a counter-imperial theology. The difference here is between a model of early Christianity as an anti-imperial movement of subversion and an early church setting up alternate communities that viewed the empire as flawed and insufficient, but with no intention of working for the overthrow of civilization. Any overthrow of Roman civilization would come with the overthrow of all civilization at the Second Advent of Christ.
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This last phrase leads to another key term in understanding Pauline counter-imperial rhetoric: parousia. This term, often used in the New Testament, has its parallel in the arrival of the Roman emperor at a city. Moreover, whether the parousia was a visit of beneficence or judgment depended largely on the apantesis of the city, the official meeting of the emperor by a delegation prior to his arrival at the city. The loyal city would be expected to meet the emperor with an apantesis and open gates. First Thessalonians 4:17 depicts this pattern of parousia and apantesis with the faithful going out to meet the him in the air. The parallel in light of that is the burial of the dead outside ancient cities, who were thus the first to greet the arriving emperor or his envoy. Paul uses this as his controlling image for describing the coming of the Lord; he clearly seems to have thought that theology could be effectively done on the basis of imperial parallels. Parallels may be further sketched, but these are sufficient to understand the controlling context of early Christian theology. Many scholars working in this field—not least among them Horsley and Eliot—have drawn political-ethical conclusions about the nature of early Christianity. Their subsequent characterizations of the Pauline mission as a subversive movement committed to the destruction of the prevailing Roman order in favor of alternatively structured communities may be in excess; yet the data upon which they make these conclusions is not less valid for their mistaken approach. Whatever may be said of early Christian theology and the political relationship of the Christian movements to Rome, this much is clear: first, Paul’s theology, if not anti-imperial or even counter-imperial, drew on the imperial experience; and second, Paul drew on this imperial experience to further his missionary enterprise. How did Paul feel, or come to feel, that this use of imperial language was both appropriate and beneficial to his overarching goal of proclaiming the gospel to the nations, and St Francis Magazine is published by Interserve and Arab Vision
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goal of proclaiming the gospel to the nations, and how does that play into our evangelizing task today? It seems that we can only understand Paul’s use of imperial language if Paul believed himself to be in a situation paralleling the imperial experience. To stand in such a situation would mean a strong sense of continuity between the expectations of covenant national renewal and imperial expansion engendered by Jewish apocalypticism and the reworking of this theme in Jesus’ own language regarding the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God, the organization of the people of God under the administration of the renewed covenant, is a parallel to the empire of Caesar, even if it does not directly oppose Caesar, as Horsley and others would have us believe. Preaching Christ crucified, and proclaiming the good news of the righteousness of God (more likely his fidelity to the covenant rather than either the Reformation’s imputed righteousness or the political interpreters’s social justice), are particularly ironic given both the Jewish expectations and imperial realities among which Paul worked. For the Jews, a messiah does not get crucified and God has not yet been proven true to his promise of renewal; for the imperial authorities, the cross is specifically an instrument of Roman cosmic and eschatological victory, not the cosmic and eschatological victory of the crucified, and the true loyalty that binds together the reality of the world is the mutual pledge between Caesar and subject. It is a stumbling block to Jewish expectations and sheer absurdity to the subjects of the empire (cf. 1 Cor 1:23). It would be most wrong at this point to suggest that this indicates that the essence of Christianity is paradox, the reversal of expectations, or the irony of veiled victory. We cannot be Bultmannians, for Paul was no Bultmannian. For Paul, it was not paradox, but the paradox of the historical event of the crucified Christ that inaugurated the new covenant and new creation; for Paul, it was St Francis Magazine is published by Interserve and Arab Vision
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not the reversal of expectations, but the reversal of the zealotry’s expectations for national victory through military conquest in favor of cosmic victory through the surrender of a particular person to torture-murder on a symbol of political oppression that revealed the loving nature of God; for Paul, it was not the irony of veiled victory, but the reality of that victory that changed everything. And for Paul, the concrete, historical reality of that victory meant using the language not of philosophy, but of empire in order to express his thoughts and proclaim the good news. This rich understanding of Paul’s missiology, standing as it did between the history of God’s covenant project of cosmic renewal and the sociopolitical situation of the day, has profound implications for how the church carries out authentically Pauline—and therefore authentically biblical—missions in the world today. To take but one example: this understanding challenges models of conversation by persuasion or religious altar call-style challenges, however useful in certain individual situations, as the standard model for Christian evangelization. Rather, evangelization, the spread of the ‘good news’ of Jesus Christ, is a proclamation not of a religious appeal, but of a cosmic reality. It does not ask whether one would like Jesus to be your Lord; it boldly announces that Jesus is Lord. The challenge of other religions, contrary to the eschatological witness of the people of God to the end of history come in history, may be faced head on. And in history, there has been no greater challenge to the definitive victory of the foolish cross than from that other great imperial ideology, Islam. Traditional religious taxonomies have proffered the ideas that either all religions are essentially manifestations of the same moral impulse, or that religions can be comfortably fitted into the categories ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western.’ A typical Christian variation on the first idea is that all religions are essentially the same, except for Christianity, which is not a religion in the proper sense at St Francis Magazine is published by Interserve and Arab Vision
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all. A typical secular humanist or radical atheist modification on the first has been that all religions are essentially the same in that they are universally untrue and harmful. None of these models is particularly helpful for Christian missionaries, nor can they stand up to a thorough analysis of the world’s religions. Christianity and Islam are religious systems like any others. Like other religious systems they are a particular sort of cosmic worldview. Christianity, believers say, is more than a cosmic worldview or a religious system, but it is not less than that. And to discover precisely what Christianity is as an historical and sociological phenomenon, it is helpful to set it against other religious systematics and worldviews, cosmic or particular. The same is true of Islam. Islam is in many ways more similar to the Roman Empire than to Christianity although, in comparing it to the Roman Empire, its shared features with Christianity come into relief like never before. Indeed, comparing Christianity and Islam in light of the Roman Empire shows ways in which Christianity was similar to the Roman worldview that allowed the Roman Empire to remain distinctively Roman, and Christianity to remain distinctively Christian, while one adopted the other, and both in a manner that Islam could never tolerate. Islam is a totalizing ideology, in a way that Christianity is not as a religion, and in ways that the Roman imperial system was not as a worldview. On the one hand, Islam has always had a set of legal and political doctrines derived from the Qur’an and hadith, and enshrined in sunna and sharia, that have not only sought to influence or subvert but to control the public sphere in a way Christianity never imagined. On the other hand, as the world’s most fiercely monotheistic religion, the cultural pluralism of Christianity and the religious pluralism of the Roman Empire have never been on the ideological horizon of Islam.
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Much of this has been discussed extensively in political contexts where the confrontation between western political norms and Islamic radicalism has generated a host of literature on the difference between the Islamic worldview and the western system of sovereign nation-states and constitutional liberalism. The response to this by Christians has often taken the form of treatises on the ethics of war and peace, such as those by George Weigel, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Darrell Cole, and others. These are necessary responses, but the political response of Christians to the challenge of Islam can only be one side of the coin, for the challenge of Islam is that it makes no distinction between theology and politics. When Christians respond as evangelists and missionaries to Islam, then, it must be in awareness of the political-theological realities of Islamic thought. Foremost among these are not the purely theological issues of the oneness of God, or the nature of the Qur’an, or the path to eternal life, or any of the issues that more obviously conflict with the core of Christian theology. To deal with Islam on its own terms means to place the center of the Islamic worldview—and not just the Islamic religious system— squarely in mind. This means, more than anything, understanding that the duality of the dar al-Islam and the dar al-harb are as much issues for Christian missionaries as they are for just war theorists or foreign policymakers. In Islam, as readers will well know, the world is fundamentally divided, exceptions and alternative offerings notwithstanding, into the Abode of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the Abode of War (dar al-harb). The dar al-Islam is the realm of peace or submission wherein Islamic rule reigns; the people of this abode, whether believers in Islam or not, submit to its rule, and thus there is peace. The dar al-harb is opposed to this rule, and thus the submission and peace that it brings, and Muslims must therefore oppose this war against God’s laws through persuasion where able, and by violence where necessary. St Francis Magazine is published by Interserve and Arab Vision
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In many ways the dar al-Islam parallels the Imperium Romanum. Indeed, throughout Islamic history there have arisen curious relationships between the Roman legacy and the Islamic empires. For instance, if the dar al-Islam has been established in an area by the submission of the population to sharia law, that area is forever properly part of the dar al-Islam; reversion of that area to the dar al-harb is something like corporate legal apostasy, and such a geographical area is always subject to violent assault to bring it back into the Abode of Islam. This seems to be a direct inheritance from Roman imperial law which viewed lands under Roman law as properly and forever Roman, and if lost to the barbarians outside the realm of submission to Caesar, then subject to attack and recapture. Within this framework one can understand why, conceptually, the political turn offers many resources to be mined by Christian theologians, scholars of comparative religions, and missionaries working in Muslim cultures. The relationship between early Pauline Christianity and early imperial Rome was of gospel and counter-gospel—with claims to social order as well as cosmic claims to divine patronage—a fortiori with Islam. This cannot involve crass transference, however, for there is no equivalent to Caesar in contemporary Islam, and the historic caliphate was but a pale shade of the political authority and religious audacity of the Caesars. A more consonant parallel—and one already explored by Christian missionaries and students of Islam—to the gospel that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not is the gospel that Jesus of Nazareth is the Logos and the Qur’an is not. This is as much a political statement involving claims to authority, ala Paul’s counterclaim against Caesarian lordship, as it is a theological disputation over the transcendence and incarnation of God. The authority of the Logos of God, after all, is a claim about the cosmic source of all political and religious authority.
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A final parallel between Christianity’s confrontation with Rome and her engagement with Islam brings the point home most starkly. The gospel of Caesar was the obliteration of barbaric threats to the empire and the pax Romana that resulted from the crucifixion of rebels; the gospel preached by Paul and the early Christians was the crucifixion—the political torture-murder of brigands and traitors—of Jesus Christ as the definitive victory over sin, death and evil. The Qur’an and Islamic kalam evidence again and again that the crucifixion of God incarnate, or even the Messiah, was as much foolishness to the seventh century world as it was to the first century world—and as much as it remains to the twenty-first century world. The cosmic victory of the crucifixion challenges all models of expansion of the dar al-Islam through militant jihad against the dar al-harb as surely as it challenged pax Romana and its campaigns against the barbarians. Inasmuch as the parallels exist, the first three centuries from Jesus and Paul to Constantine and Eusebius provide the contemporary church with a truly working model for the subversion of imperial ideology to the end of eventual absorption of the empire in question. Christian missionary efforts have long concentrated on the Islamic periphery, since black African Muslims and South Asian Muslims live in cultures exposed to greater religious pluralism and therefore fit models of evangelism hatched in Europe or America. Yet if Christians are going to reach into the Arab hinterland of Islam, the best evangelistic schemes are not drawn from the completely alien culture of the post-Christian North Atlantic. Rather, to be authentically biblical as well as pragmatically savvy, it is best to rethink our strategies—and perhaps our Christianity— in the light of the pre-Christian Mediterranean.
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